3. The Chosen People

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Beller
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Political Force ◽  
Radical Transformation

In the century before antisemitism emerged as a powerful political movement in the early 1880s, European Jewry had been through a radical transformation. ‘The Chosen People’ looks at developments around that time to help explain the path antisemitism took. Modernization of the European economy, society, and political systems from the mid-17th century onwards added to radical changes in thought and attitudes towards Jews. They needed to be integrated into society, and how to do this became known as the ‘Jewish Question’. Attempts to solve the ‘Jewish Question’ were more successful in Western Europe than in Russia and Central Europe. But Jewish difference persisted, partially explaining the political force of antisemitism.

scholarly journals Civil Law in Forced Unions. The Austrian Civil Code and its Significance for the Development of Civil Law in Central Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-301
Author(s):  
Kamila Staudigl-Ciechowicz
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Civil Code ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polish Law

The current Austrian Civil Code goes back to 1811, after more than 200 years it still is in force in Austria –though with many amendments. Its origin and development is connected to the political history of the Austrian Empire, later the Dual Monarchy and its successor states in the 20th century. The paper analyses the significance of the Austrian Civil Code on the development of civil law in Central Europe on the verge of the collapse of the old empires and the emergence of the new political systems. Especially the question of the influence of the Austrian Civil Code on Polish law and inversely the influence of Polish lawyers on the development of the Austrian Civil Code is addressed. Due to the character of the inclusion of the Polish parts into the Austrian Empire in the 18th century the paper raises the question of the role of civil law in forced unions.

Political Transformations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The French Revolution

Beginning with the French Revolution and the Enlightenment and their effects on the political life and systems of Europe, this chapter discusses the broader impact of the collapse of the political systems in Germany, the modernization of the regimes, as well as the attempts at restoration after the defeat of Napoleon. The author examines conservative and neo-confessional movements, as well as the increasing secularization of societies in Western Europe. Following the increasing success of nationalism in the Austrian, Russian, and Turkish Empires and in the Italian peninsula, the chapter traces its impact on the development of ultramontanism. Responses by Christian thinkers to political transformations are grouped under the three headings of accommodation, reaction, and escape. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the growing autonomy of both the political and ecclesial systems provided the background for the increasing irrelevance of the churches in the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Right-Wing Populism and Religion in Europe and the USA

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 490
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Haynes
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Political Purpose ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Right Wing Populism ◽  
And Behavior

The aim of this paper is to examine comparatively the growth and political effectiveness of right-wing populism in Western Europe, Central Europe, and the USA since 9/11. The focus is on such politicians’ vilification of Islam as a faith and Muslims as a people. The paper examines the following research question: how and why do right-wing populists in the USA and Europe use an ideological form of “Christianity”, known variously as “Christianism” or “Christian civilizationism”, to vilify Muslims and Islam? The political purpose seems obvious: to influence public perceptions and to win votes by questioning the desirability of Muslims in both the USA and Europe, claiming that Muslims’ religious and cultural attributes make them unacceptable as neighbors. As Muslims are not capable, so the argument goes, of assimilating to European or American norms, values, and behavior, then they must be excluded or strongly controlled for the benefit of nativist communities. Right-wing populists in both the USA and Europe pursue this strategy because they see it as chiming well with public opinion at a time of great uncertainty, instability, and insecurity.

Do Differences in Climate Change Policy Reflect Different Cultures and Vice Versa?

1998 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-423
Author(s):  
Eberhard Jochem
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Modelling ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
Scientific Results

The Pre-Kyoto period and the outcome of the Kyoto conference demonstrated significant differences between the climate change policy in the United States and that in Western Europe. Although scientific methods and knowledge are universal and globally available, the scientific results on climate change are taken up differently by the political systems on each side of the Atlantic. Different preferences for the results of economic modelling may be due to differences in the expectations of the average American/European of the government's responsibility, different reactions in cases of uncertainty, in the political system, the openness of public controversial discussions, and in the lobbyist intensity of interest groups. Both industrialized regions, however, face the problem of the short-term orientation of market economies and of the voters of representative national democracies versus the very long-term necessities of climate change policy. The different views and traditions on each side of the Atlantic could be used for a very fruitful process of global climate change policy.

Strangers No More

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Alba ◽  
Nancy Foner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Residential Segregation ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Immigrant Religion

This book compares immigrant integration across key Western countries. Focusing on low-status newcomers and their children, it examines how they are making their way in four critical European countries—France, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands—and, across the Atlantic, in the United States and Canada. This comparison reveals their progress and the barriers they face in an array of institutions—from labor markets and neighborhoods to educational and political systems—and considers the controversial questions of religion, race, identity, and intermarriage. The book sheds new light on questions at the heart of concerns about immigration. They analyze why immigrant religion is a more significant divide in Western Europe than in the United States, where race is a more severe obstacle. They look at why, despite fears in Europe about the rise of immigrant ghettoes, residential segregation is much less of a problem for immigrant minorities there than in the United States. They explore why everywhere, growing economic inequality and the proliferation of precarious, low-wage jobs pose dilemmas for the second generation. They also evaluate perspectives often proposed to explain the success of immigrant integration in certain countries, including nationally specific models, the political economy, and the histories of Canada and the United States as settler societies. This book delves into issues of pivotal importance for the present and future of Western societies, where immigrants and their children form ever-larger shares of the population.

Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio. By Paul Apostolidis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 273p. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 470-471
Author(s):  
Laura R. Olson
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Christian Right ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Political Force ◽  
The Past ◽  
Stations Of The Cross ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Conservative Protestants

By now most readers have a good deal of familiarity with the Christian Right, the political movement of conservative Protestants that began in the late 1970s and continues to thrive today. The movement has undergone significant changes over the past two decades. Interest groups have risen and fallen, and presidential candidacies (namely, that of Pat Robertson in 1988) have failed. Yet, the Christian Right is still seen by scholars, pundits, and electioneers alike as a political force with which to be reckoned.

scholarly journals Identity and memory in Eastern and Central Europe: tracing Czesław Miłosz and Milan Kundera

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-89
Author(s):  
Leonidas Donskis
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Milan Kundera ◽  
The Political ◽  
Politics And Literature ◽  
Central European ◽  
Czeslaw Milosz ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mental Map ◽  
Point Of Departure

Identity and memory are two indispensable keywords of society and culture when we deal with Eastern and Central Europe in terms of their modernity and its predicaments. Put in the context of politics and literature, they allow a point of departure in a study of yet another Europe, that is, Eastern Europe on the mental map of Western Europe. They serve as an important trajectory in the history of consciousness of a significant part of Europe that has yet to be tackled, grasped, and appreciated by the political, academic, and educational mainstream of Western Europe with its innumerable clichés and stereotypes over Eastern and Central Europe. No theoretical or empirical analysis would match the depths and originality of exploration of this issue which we encounter in the essayistic writings and fiction of two major Central European writers – namely, Czesław Miłosz and Milan Kundera. This study in the history of consciousness and also in politics and literature offers an interpretive framework for a European scholarly debate on Eastern and Central European sensibilities.

Policing the Subject: Confessional Absolutism and Communal Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Austria

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Regina Pörtner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship

If proverbial wisdom predicts longevity to the falsely proclaimed dead, then the paradigm of absolutism and its confessional variant must surely be considered a prime example. Having drawn intense fire from scholars of Western Europe over the past two decades, the concept of absolutism has recently been given a fresh lease of life by research, exploring and, to some extent, vindicating its applicability in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe. Given the evolutionary nature of the making of the early modern Austrian-Habsburg monarchy, the complexity of its constitutional, religious, and ethnic makeup, and the waywardness of some of its governing personnel, it seems doubtful if future research will ever be able to satisfactorily clarify the relationship between the political aspirations of individual Austrian rulers, among whom Ferdinand II arguably made the most serious bid for absolute rule, and the practice of negotiated power that characterized the normal state of relations between the Crown and the monarchy's estates.

Ritual, Religion, and German Home Towns

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 496-504
Author(s):  
David M. Luebke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Almost All ◽  
National Systems

German Home Townsis a very forward-looking book. I say that not because it proved so influential—although it certainly had a profound impact on my generation of historians. My point is more prosaic, namely thatGerman Home Townsoccupies a set point in time and social milieu, the inaugural moment of an attenuated phase of stability for a peculiar type of human community in central Europe. That moment, of course, is 1648; the milieu is that of walled and privileged towns—large and differentiated enough for self-sufficiency in most economic functions, but not so large or so differentiated as to generate the degrees of stratification and anonymity that characterized larger commercial or manufacturing cities. In contrast to metropolitan centers, “home towns” embraced all inhabitants in a web of face-to-face relations, at once integrating, enabling, and controlling all inhabitants through guilds and the political systems built around them. Usually, almost all hometown inhabitants were citizens, too—again in contrast to larger cities, with their substrates of noncitizen residents. From the vantage of 1648, and within the stream of early modern German history,German Home Townspeers into a future of confrontation with “movers and doers”—those vanguards of the “general estate,” as Walker called them, who trampled idiosyncrasy, leveled difference, and, with some help from Napoleon, replaced both local corporatism and the imperial “incubator” with provincial and national systems of general, liberal delegation.

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