Italy: reformers without reforms?

At the end of 2009, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that 2010 would be the year of reforms in Italy (Il Sole 24 Ore, 26 December 2009). Indeed Mr Berlusconi and the question of institutional reforms have been the crucial elements of Italian political discourse and debate in recent years. However, while much has been said and written about the former, a number of key questions still beg to be answered about the latter. First of all, what reforms are we talking about? Are these a specific package of institutional engineering or are they, rather, an eye-catching and consensus-building yet still diffused set of aspirations? In either case, what vision of twenty-first-century Italy do they reflect or propose? Is there consensus enough – within and across parliamentary coalitions – on what the priorities ought to be and how they should be tackled?

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The Prime Minister

10.1093/owc/9780199587193.001.0001 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

Anthony Trollope

Keyword(s):

Prime Minister ◽

First Century ◽

Political Life ◽

British Society ◽

Early Twenty ◽

The World ◽

Twenty First Century

‘Though a great many men and not a few women knew Ferdinand Lopez very well, none of them knew whence he had come.’ Despite his mysterious antecedents, Ferdinand Lopez aspires to join the ranks of British society. An unscrupulous financial speculator, he determines to marry into respectability and wealth, much against the wishes of his prospective father-in-law. One of the nineteenth century’s most memorable outsiders, Lopez’s story is set against that of the ultimate insider, Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium. Omnium reluctantly accepts the highest office of state; now, at last, he is ‘the greatest man in the greatest country in the world’. But his government is a fragile coalition and his wife’s enthusiastic assumption of the role of political hostess becomes a source of embarrassment. Their troubled relationship and that of Lopez and Emily Wharton is a conjunction that generates one of Trollope’s most complex and substantial novels. Part of the Palliser series, The Prime Minister’s tale of personal and political life in the 1870s has acquired a new topicality in the early twenty-first century.

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On Taking India into the Twenty-First Century (New Economic Policy in India)

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x00013780 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

pp. 209-231 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

I. G. Patel

Keyword(s):

Economic Policy ◽

Western Europe ◽

Prime Minister ◽

First Century ◽

Indian Society ◽

New Economic Policy ◽

Very Old ◽

National Leadership ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Large Sections

On one of his many visits to India Kingsley Martin was once asked how he saw the prospects for Western Europe. His reply was that he was very optimistic as most of the leaders of Western Europe then were very old. If the transition from age to youth in national leadership is a sufficient basis for hope, we certainly have much to be grateful for in India. And our young Prime Minister has already struck a very responsive chord among large sections of Indian society by his promise of change. His mother had won the 1980 election on the promise of a ‘Government that works’. Mr Gandhi promised in 1984 a ‘Government that works faster’—thus heralding a promise of greater efficiency in general. When asked about the objective of his new Government, he used the now famous phrase that his objective was to take India into the twenty-first century. Taken at its face value, this was a rather vacuous phrase. It is not necessary for anyone to carry India, Atlas-like, into the twenty-first century. It would arrive at our doorstep in due course, as it will at everyone else's, and most probably without even a whimper.

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‘Signs of churning’: Muslim Personal Law and public contestation in twenty-first century India

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x09990114 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 44 (1) ◽

pp. 175-200 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

JUSTIN JONES

Keyword(s):

Religious Identity ◽

Islamic Law ◽

Public Debate ◽

First Century ◽

Consensus Building ◽

Muslim Society ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

A Site ◽

Personal Law

AbstractFor many Muslims, the preservation of Muslim Personal Law has become the touchstone of their capacity to defend their religious identity in modern India. This paper examines public debate over Muslim Personal Law, not as a site of consensus within the community, but rather as an arena in which a varied array of Muslim individuals, schools and organisations have sought to assert their own distinctiveness. This is done by discussing the evolution of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, the most influential organisation to speak on such matters since the 1970s, with particular focus on its recent disintegration at the hands of a number of alternative legal councils formed by feminist, clerical and other groups. These organisations have justified their existence through criticism of the organisation's alleged attempts to standardise Islamic law, and its perceived dominance by the Deobandi school of thought. In truth, however, this process of fragmentation results from a complex array of embryonic and interlinked personal, political and ideological competitions, indicative of the increasingly fraught process of consensus-building in contemporary Indian Muslim society.

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Introduction

Gaming Sexism ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479838523.003.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-22

Author(s):

Amanda C. Cote

Keyword(s):

Video Games ◽

First Century ◽

Video Gaming ◽

Mobile Games ◽

Theoretical Concepts ◽

Early Twenty ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

The One ◽

Opening Up ◽

Key Questions

Video games in the early twenty-first century face a deep contradiction. On the one hand, the spread of casual, social, and mobile games has led researchers, journalists, and players to believe that video gaming is opening up to previously marginalized audiences, especially women. At the same time, game culture has seen significant incidents of sexism and misogyny. The introduction outlines this contradiction and lays out the book’s key questions. First, how and why do these contradictory narratives coexist? Second, what impact does this have on marginalized game audiences, specifically women, as they try to enter game culture and spaces? And finally, what are the impacts of this struggle, and what can be learned from women’s strategies for managing their presence in a masculinized, often exclusionary space? The chapter also addresses the main theoretical concepts that undergird the book’s argument, including gender, hegemony, and feminism/postfeminism.

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Thinking the Unthinkable

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474450140.003.0003 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 36-55

Author(s):

Ian Ward

Keyword(s):

War On Terror ◽

Prime Minister ◽

War Crimes ◽

First Century ◽

Political Issues ◽

Tony Blair ◽

The Public ◽

High Profile ◽

History Of ◽

Twenty First Century

This chapter concentrates on the legal and political issues that arose during the so-called ‘war on terror’ in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Issues that were addressed, very directly, in a series of ‘verbatim’ plays written and produced in that moment. Amongst the most renowned were the so-called ‘Tribunal’ plays written by Richard Norton-Taylor. The genre, as the nomenclature suggests, sought to re-present various high-profile cases and judicial inquiries on the public stage. Whilst the chapter considers a number of different ‘verbatim’ plays, it focusses more closely on Norton-Taylor’s Called to Account. This play is unusual in that it presents a ‘virtual’ history of a fictitious trial, on war crimes charges, of the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. In so doing, it challenges the defining pretence of the ‘verbatim’ genre; that the simple presentation of legal and quasi-legal transcript confirms the veracity of the text.

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The Irish Constitution: A Discussion of its Theoretical Aspects

The Review of Politics ◽

10.1017/s0034670500005258 ◽

1940 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 145-166 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

W. Bromage ◽

Mary C. Bromage

Keyword(s):

Prime Minister ◽

First Century ◽

Irish People ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

To Come ◽

As If

WHEN a new constitution was promised to the Irish people a few years ago, Eamon de Valera, then President of Saorstat Eireann and now Prime Minister of Eire, told his people that it would be written as if England were a million miles away. Apart from the passing phases of Anglo-Irish relations, he wished to remove his constitutional plans from the limitations of contemporary events, to unshackle his mind from the here and the now. How far he succeeded in this effort will be known only in the twenty-first century or the twenty-second. Then, if the new Bunreacht na hEireannhas withstood the slings and arrows of Irish fortunes, de Valera and his advisers will be found to have written not only for their own time but for times to come as they intended.

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