A Thousand Years of History

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Stephen Wall
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
European Community ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Political Life ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
World War ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
National Institutions ◽  
Second World

Joining the European Community would, in the words of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, be ‘the end of a thousand years of history’. Britain, as an island, was set apart from continental Europe both geographically, politically, and psychologically. It had fought off invasion and fought continental wars to prevent the formation of too-dominant continental alliances. But Britain’s economic and political life was inextricably bound up with that of the continent and its own monarchical dynasties were sometimes more foreign than domestic in origin. The English Reformation was a key definer of national identity and resistance to continental encroachment. The Second World War entrenched British confidence in the UK’s national institutions, which had stood against tyranny, by comparison with those on the continent that had been disgraced or destroyed. After the Second World War, Winston Churchill played a key role in the vision that became the European Community but he wanted to be ‘with’ it, not ‘of’ it.

scholarly journals Britishness and otherness: Representing and constructing identity in BBC’s Land Girls

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-105
Author(s):  
Bonnie White
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World

This article situates Land Girls (BBC, 2009–2011) in dialogue with the Second World War and its legacy. Although the series ostensibly deals with the experience of British Land Girls during the war in a melodramatic way, Land Girls is best understood as an anxious commentary on the place of Britain and its cultural institutions following the war. The series uses national, racial and economic others in order to de-romanticise notions of a collective national identity, while simultaneously using those others to help articulate an idealised sense of Britishness for a 21st-century audience.

The Wider Subjectivities of Men in Reserved Occupations in Wartime Glasgow and Clydeside

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Chand
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
National Level ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Social Activities ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Everyday Living

This chapter analyses the narratives of men who worked in reserved occupations in Clydeside to explore wider aspects of their individual subjectivities other than gender. Areas of subjectivity examined include national identity (picking up from the discussion in Chapter 3 and looking at men of non-British or Scottish nationality), class consciousness and political identity, religion and social activities. This chapter widens the picture of how men in reserved occupations experienced the war, arguing that male reserved workers were aware of ‘imagined’ collective subjectivity on a national level, and that important similarities existed between the subjectivities of men who worked in different regions of Britain, particularly those with higher proportions of men working in reserved occupations. The chapter re-enforces the notion that the subjectivities of such men existed on different levels and reflected to varying degrees the concepts of ‘imagination’ and ‘living’, making clear that the subjectivities of male civilian workers in wartime Clydeside comprised different national, ethnic, religious, class and political attributes, all integral and important to reserved men before, during and after the Second World War. Arguably, however, men were often aware of these integral aspects of their subjectivities on an ‘imagined’ level, and many aspects of them were superseded by a pre-occupation with everyday living, also continuous and fundamentally unchanged by wartime. In arguing for the continuity of different ‘imagined’ and ‘lived’ forms of subjectivity among men in reserved occupations in wartime Clydeside, this chapter re-enforces the notion that, although integral to masculinity, temporary wartime ideals did not fundamentally change the masculine subjectivities of male civilian workers.

Food, the Emergency and the lower-class Irish body, c.1939–45

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryce Evans
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Export Market ◽  
World War ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Market Disruption ◽  
Irish Government ◽  
Trade War ◽  
Second World

The ending of the Anglo-Irish Economic War (1932-8) is often represented as a watershed in British-Irish relations. However, it was soon followed by renewed trade hostility. Between 1940 and 1945, Winston Churchill subjected Ireland to an economic squeeze: the price of Irish neutrality in the Second World War. While the length of this trade war has generally been overlooked by historians, the effect of this ‘long’ Economic War on Irish public health has been similarly disregarded. This contribution argues that the Anglo-Irish economic war resulted in the mass slaughter of Irish herds due to the removal of the British export market. Market disruption had a significant knock-on effect on Irish public health, particularly in the countryside. Similarly, the British economic squeeze of the Second World War ensured that Ireland’s agricultural economy was denied fertilisers, feed, chemicals and tractors; modern productive aids that are essential to food production. The Irish government infamously introduced the ‘black loaf’ as wheat production wheat stalled, causing fears of a second Famine. Aggravated by a belatedly introduced rationing system, public health suffered.

Meglio di ieri

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90
Author(s):  
Anne Bruch
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
Public Information ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Italian Government ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Educational Films ◽  
Second World

This article examines a series of educational films and documentaries produced between 1948 and 1968 that document the activities of the Italian state. These films, which record the dedicated and arduous work of the Italian government and administration, had two functions. First, they informed students and the general public about the democratic structures, institutions and aims of the new republic, promoting a fresh and convincing vision of national identity. Second, they served to obscure and rewrite the collective national memory of Fascism and Italian involvement in the Second World War. These films thus reveal the fine line between public information, political propaganda, and civic education.

The Clear and Present Danger

Worldview ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
J. W. Fulbright
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Clear And Present Danger ◽  
Second World

It is one of the perversities of human nature that people have a far greater capacity for enduring disasters than for preventing them, even when the danger is plain and imminent. Winston Churchill, for all his prescience and eloquence, was powerless to prevent the Second World War: He wrote in 1936 of an England “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” The question for us today is whether, we can succeed where Churchill failed—a tall order Indeed— by preventing disaster so as not to have to endure it.

‘The sweet tang of rape’: Torture, survival and masculinity in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Adams
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Literary Meaning ◽  
Second World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism.

scholarly journals Introduction

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey Heatherington
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
European Community ◽  
Agricultural Policy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
European Collaboration ◽  
The World ◽  
Treaty Of Rome ◽  
The Common ◽  
Second World

The management of agriculture has long played a key role in efforts to remake European borders, landscapes and identities. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been a centerpiece of European collaboration and debate since the first steps were taken to establish the European Community after the Second World War. Launched by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, it was first designed to regulate the agricultural market and protect food security across the original six member states of France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. With successive European enlargements and ongoing transformations in the world agricultural markets, the CAP has been in continual negotiation.

The Womanpower Problem in Britain during the Second World War

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 925-945 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Women Studies ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
The Status ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Government ◽  
Second World ◽  
Status Of Women

At the national women's conference convened by the government in September 1943 Winston Churchill assured the women delegates that the contribution to the war effort by British women had ‘definitely altered those social and sex balances which years of convention had established’. His belief that the war had brought about profound changes in the status of women was shared by contemporary authors attempting to evaluate the effect of the war on British women. Studies written near the end of the war by Margaret Goldsmith and Gertrude Williams refer to a wartime ‘revolution’ in the position of women. Both authors defined this revolution primarily in terms of the changed position of women workers.

scholarly journals CSDP: A Balancing Strategy against the United States?

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 128
Author(s):  
Yingqin Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
European Community ◽  
Economic Performance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
New Wave ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Eu

<em>In the aftermath of the Second World War, European integration progressed rapidly. Despite economic performance, the European community is far from playing a major role in security and defense. The catalyst for a European defense policy is the war in Yugoslavia, which shows that Europeans are dependent on Americans. Thus, the EU has the CSDP and has conducted many military and civilian operations. Yet a new wave of academic studies, launched by proponents of American neorealism, argues that the EU is engaged in an attempt to “balance” the US by exploiting the CSDP. By studying European history in terms of security, we find that the balancing theory can not be justified.</em>

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