scholarly journals Resistance to Anti-Discrimination Law in Central and Eastern Europe–a Post-Communist Legacy?

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 627-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Havelková
Keyword(s):  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Substantive Equality ◽  
Antidiscrimination Law ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk

AbstractPost-communist Central and Eastern European ('CEE') legislators and judges have been resistant to equality and antidiscrimination law. This Article argues that these negative attitudes can be explained in part by the specific trajectory that EAL has taken in CEE during and after state socialism, which has differed from Western Europe. In the UK/EU, the formal guarantees of equal treatment and prohibitions of discrimination of the 1960s and 1970s were complemented by a more substantive understanding of equality in the 1990s and 2000s. This development was reversed in CEE—substantive equality, of a certain kind, preceded rather than followed formal equality and antidiscrimination guarantees.The State Socialist concern with equality was real, and yet the project was incomplete in several significant ways. It saw only socio-economic, but not socio-cultural inequalities (relating to dignity, identity or diversity). It was transformative with regards to class, but not other discrimination grounds, especially not gender. While equality was a constitutionally enshrined principle, there was an absence of any corresponding enforceable antidiscrimination right. Finally, the emphasis on the “natural” differences between the sexes meant that sex/gender discrimination was not recognized as conflicting with women's constitutional equality guarantees.

Concrete Monsters of the Welfare State: Discussions of Brutalist Architecture on Social Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 120633122110193
Author(s):  
Max Holleran
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Municipal Governments ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Welfare State

Brutalist architecture is an object of fascination on social media that has taken on new popularity in recent years. This article, drawing on 3,000 social media posts in Russian and English, argues that the buildings stand out for their arresting scale and their association with the expanding state in the 1960s and 1970s. In both North Atlantic and Eastern European contexts, the aesthetic was employed in publicly financed urban planning projects, creating imposing concrete structures for universities, libraries, and government offices. While some online social media users associate the style with the overreach of both socialist and capitalist governments, others are more nostalgic. They use Brutalist buildings as a means to start conversations about welfare state goals of social housing, free university, and other services. They also lament that many municipal governments no longer have the capacity or vision to take on large-scale projects of reworking the built environment to meet contemporary challenges.

Resisting Closures and Winning Wages in the 1960s and 1970s

2019 ◽  
pp. 197-228
Author(s):  
Jim Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Mining Communities ◽  
Scottish Parliament ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk

The 1984-85 miners’ strike in defence of collieries, jobs and communities was an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the change in economic direction driven in the UK by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments. The government was committed to removing workforce voice from the industry. Its struggle against the miners was a war against the working class more generally. Mining communities were grievously affected in economic terms by the strike and its aftermath, but in the longer run emerged with renewed solidarity. Gender relations, evolving from the 1960s as employment opportunities for women increased, changed in further progressive ways. This strengthened the longer-term cohesion of mining communities. The strike had a more general and lasting political impact in Scotland. The narrative of a distinct Scottish national commitment to social justice, attacked by a UK government without democratic mandate, drew decisive moral force from the anti-Thatcherite resistance of men and women in the coalfields. This renewed the campaign for a Scottish Parliament, which came to successful fruition in 1999.

The Pluralist Interpretation of Chinese Marxist Aesthetics in Contemporary European Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Qilin Fu ◽  
Shubo Gao
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Variation Theory ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Universal Applicability

In Europe there have appeared several important collections on Marxist literary theory, such as Francis Mulhern’s Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992) and Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996). However, Chinese voices are not included at all in these volumes. Maybe this lacuna results from a lack of awareness of Chinese Marxist aesthetics on the part of most European literary historians and critics. In this article, we seek to discuss the circumstances of European scholars’ contacts with Chinese Marxist aesthetics, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. Starting from the variation theory perspective proposed by Shunqing Cao we will discuss how European scholars read and misread what they perceived as the meaning and universal applicability of what was happening in China at the time. The discussion is divided into three parts: the utopian interpretation of the Chinese theory of revolution in France, the critical reception by Eastern European Marxists, and the sympathetic interpretation by sinologists such as the Dutch diplomat and literary scholar Douwe Fokkema.

Localising the Social: The Rediscovery of Urban Poverty in Western European ‘Affluent Societies’

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTIANE REINECKE
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Urban Problem ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractConcentrating on the production of knowledge of poverty and homelessness, this article discusses how particular spatial settings influenced the construction of social problems in the 1960s and 1970s. Exploring the practices of three kinds of knowledge producers – social scientists in academic circles, ‘practitionerscumactivists’ engaging in advocacy research and experts in governmental committees – the analysis focuses on the early stages of a rediscovery of poverty in Western Europe as it was debated in international fora as well as in West Germany and France. It shows that the way in which poverty was represented as a new challenge to Western ‘affluent societies’ was in many respects an urban story, as the ongoing housing crisis and newly defined problem areas served as major points of reference for the revived interest in social deprivation. Moreover, urban actors – locally active NGOs and municipal authorities – played a preeminent role in launching debates on the apparent paradox of poverty in affluence. With their own work often grounded in particular urban problem zones, many contemporary observers tended to spatialise poverty. For them, poverty was bound to particular places; it was an exceptional sphere that helped generate a particular behaviour that made it difficult for ‘the poor’ to rise. While a growing part of the population had access to housing of a standard previously reserved to the middle class and had become able to choose where to live, life in peripheral shantytowns or dilapidated inner cities became the ultimate signifier of a social position beyond the established class structure.

scholarly journals ‘Heading up a blind alley’? Scottish psychiatric hospitals in the era of deinstitutionalization

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicky Long
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Care ◽  
Psychiatric Hospitals ◽  
Blind Alley ◽  
Department Of Health ◽  
Institutional Services ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City

This article examines Scottish provision of psychiatric care in the 1960s and 1970s. It demonstrates that institutional services did not rapidly disappear across the UK following the Ministry of Health’s decision to shut down psychiatric hospitals in 1961, and highlights Scotland’s distinctive trajectory. Furthermore, it contends that psychiatric hospitals developed new approaches to assist patients in this era, thereby contributing towards the transformation of post-war psychiatric practice. Connecting a discussion of policy with an analysis of provision, it examines the Department of Health for Scotland’s cautious response to the Ministry’s embrace of deinstitutionalization, before analysing Glasgow’s psychiatric provision in the 1970s. At this point the city boasted virtually no community-based services, and relied heavily on its under-resourced and overburdened hospitals. Closer analysis dispels any impression of stagnation, revealing how ideologies of deinstitutionalization transformed institutional care.

scholarly journals Re-orienting the ‘West’? The Transnational Debate on the Status of the ‘West’ in the Debates among Islamist Intellectuals and Students from the 1970s to the Present

2009 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
Farish A. Noor
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Developmental Model ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Status ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The 1960S

This paper will look at the process of transnational transfer of ideas, beliefs and value-systems, with a special emphasis on the transfer of Islamist ideas and ideals through the vector of student movements and organisations that were set up in Western Europe and North America as well as the rise of a new generation of Islamist intellectuals in Malaysia in the late 1960s for whom the idea of the ‘West’ was turned on its head and re-cast in negative terms. It begins by looking at how the ‘West’ was initially cast in positive terms as the ideal developmental model by the first generation of post-colonial elites in Malaysia, and how – as a result of the crisis of governance and the gradual decline in popularity of the ruling political coalition – the ‘West’ was subsequently re-cast in negative terms by the Islamists of the 1960s and 1970s who sought instead to turn Malaysia into an Islamic society from below. As a consequence of this dialectical confrontation between the ruling statist elite and the nascent Islamist opposition in Malaysia, the idea of the ‘West’ has remained as the central constitutive Other to Islam and Muslim identity, and this would suggest that the Islamist project of the1970s to the present remains locked in a mode of oppositional dialectics that nonetheless requires the presence of the ‘West’ as its constitutive Other, be it in positive or negative terms.

FRATERNAL FRIENDS: SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNISTS AND CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1945–89

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-239
Author(s):  
Tom Lodge ◽  
Milan Oralek
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Key Skills ◽  
Democratic Revolution ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
African Nationalism

AbstractCzechoslovak ‘people's democracy’ supplied a model for the development of a South African notion of a ‘national democratic’ revolution as well as providing key skills and resources. Czechoslovak support for this project in the 1960s and 1970s was both a source of confidence and fragility for South African Communists, boosting morale but confirming their subordinate status in their partnership with African nationalism. Drawing upon Czech archival materials as well as memoirs and interviews, this paper explores encounters and connections between South African Communists and the Czechs against the backdrop of the broader strategic concerns that shaped Soviet and Eastern European support for South African liberatory politics.

Breaking Out from Lock-In

2011 ◽  
pp. 713-726
Author(s):  
Gert-Jan Hospers
Keyword(s):  
Structural Change ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Industrial Area ◽  
Regional Innovation ◽  
Environmental Technology ◽  
Industrial Areas ◽  
Innovation Strategies ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Lock In

This chapter discusses strategies aimed at regional-economic structural change in the German Ruhrgebiet. The Ruhrgebiet used to be the largest industrial area in Western-Europe. After the crisis in the coal and steel industry the region pursued re-industrialisation policies in the 1960s and 1970s. These attempts were largely unsuccesful. Therefore, since the 1980s the involved actors gradually adopted regional innovation strategies. Thus, they were able to break out from the region’s lock-in situation. The re-orientation of the Ruhrgebiet towards innovation based on the industries’ expertise and past (e.g. environmental technology, energy and industrial tourism) is more successful than its earlier re-industrialisation attempts. Also for other old industrial areas in Europe this kind of place-based renewal might be the future.

Hate crime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Gilligan
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Hate Crime ◽  
Prison Population ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Crime Policy ◽  
The Usa ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk ◽  
State Protection

This chapter examines ‘race hate crime’ policy as an expression of the decline of the emancipatory dynamic of the anti-racism of the 1960s and 1970s. The author makes the case for treating hate crimes as an example of authoritarian multicultural anti-racism that is concerned with social control, rather than human emancipation. The chapter highlights ways in which hate crime policy treats racialised minorities as victims who need state protection. The author argues that hate crime policy is part of the broader erosion of civil liberties that has seen the rise of the prison population in the USA and the creation of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and other forms of preventative policing in the UK.

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