Instrumentalization of the Border Zone. Environment and Ideology in the Educational Films Made between 1955 and 1989 by the Hungarian Ministry of Interior’s Film Studio

Analysing the output of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior’s own film studio, which produced educational films between 1955 and 1989, this essay investigates the modes in which the border zone was represented during the decades of state socialism. Considering the vicinity of the border as an area, where ideological confrontations are battled out, the article argues that there is a significant difference between the films produced in the 1950-60s, and those from the mid-1960s onwards. The earlier pieces depict an emotionally charged border zone the defence of which is a social-political duty: father-type superiors teach rookie soldiers about this obligation in coming-of-age stories. However, from the mid-1960s onwards, the films seem to confine themselves to an instrumental mode of persuasion, which presents border protection as a merely technical question. The article briefly ties these shifts to the changing modes in official discourses during the decades of state socialist Hungary.

Development as an Ideology for Empire

This chapter discusses how colonial administrators started to use the active verb “develop” and to speak of developing peoples in the 1920s. In the view of the internationalists and philanthropists of the early twentieth century, development was a civilizing mission. Conceiving imperialism as having a pedagogical side meant that advanced societies were required to take colonized peoples by the hand and teach them the rules of a modernity they had been excluded from. This was a change: at the end of the nineteenth century, there were peoples who were thought to be unready for civilization, principally in Africa. However, colonial expansion meant taking responsibility. Indeed, colonization was described as a political duty: the superior races had duties toward inferior ones, particularly in the promotion of science and progress. Humanitarianism was a special element that started with abolishing slavery in all forms and limiting the excesses of colonialism. The struggle against slavery and slave practices was often used as a justification for intervention, as was the goal of undermining the influence of rival powers. In the United States, civilization was perceived as an element that bound Europe and the United States together in a global project. History was considered a movement from fragmentation to unity, and progress meant evolving toward a system of powerful nations that used a few rich and precise languages that everyone could understand.

Mary Wollstonecraft on Motherhood and Political Participation: An Overlooked Insight into Women's Subordination

Scholars consider Mary Wollstonecraft an early feminist political theorist for two reasons: (1) her explicit commitment to educational equality, and (2) her implicit suggestion that the private‐sphere role of motherhood holds political import. My reading of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman uses Wollstonecraft's works and draws upon recent claims made by Sandrine Bergès in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft to connect these points: educated women are better at performing motherly duties and, therefore, of greater benefit to society. Although many scholars have read Wollstonecraft's arguments for educational equality as a starting point for greater equality, Bergès does not. In this article, I further Bergès's claims and argue that Wollstonecraft's project is limited and likely to reinforce inequality between the sexes. Specifically, I show that Wollstonecraft's educational reforms incentivize women to become nothing more than highly educated housewives. In the process of fulfilling their social and political duty to instill public spirit and private virtue in future citizens, women are re‐entrenched in domestic affairs instead of being freed for public pursuits. This realization, I contend, should cause us to be wary of panaceas for women's subordination that rest on increasing their education.

Disaster and Debate

Faced with a national tragedy, citizens respond in different ways. Some will initiate debate about the possible connections between this tragedy and broader moral and political issues. But others often complain that this is too early, that it is inappropriate to debate such larger issues while ‘the bodies are still warm.’ This paper critically examines the grounds for such a complaint. We consider different interpretations of the complaint—cynical, epistemic, and ethical—and argue that it can be resisted on all of these readings. Debate shortly after a national disaster is therefore permissible. We then set out a political argument in favor of early debate based on the value of broad political participation in liberal democracies and sketch a stronger argument, based on the duty to support just institutions, that would support a political duty to engage in debate shortly after tragedies have occurred.

In the Dark

The artist’s duty is to “reflect the times,” said Nina Simone. Poets too, have this political duty. As a queer Black woman, I share my lived experience(s) as a political form of engagement and resistance, both in writing and onstage. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s (1984) text Sister Outsider, this piece of personal performance poetry explores Della Pollock’s notion that performative writing is citational. Blending references to white poets such Emily Dickinson with allusions to writers, artists, and theorists of color, this piece makes space for black culture in the academy and recounts my return home after a period of self-imposed exile. It surveys the liminal space between the dark of writing and the light of performance and also critiques the hierarchal academic structures that subjugate knowledge, people, and spoken word poetry. It was originally written and performed in a show entitled Greyscale: Performing Across Difference, in the Marion Kleinau Theatre, in March 2017.

Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being

In Year 2 of the Revolution (1794) Robespierre, seeking to establish a new deist national morality created the Festival of the Supreme Being celebrated on 20 Prairial Year 2 (8 June 1794). This book begins by tracing the progress in the development of Robespierre’s thinking on the importance of the problem which the lack of any acceptable national moral system through the early years of the Revolution had created, his vision of a new attitude towards religion and morality, and why he chose a Revolutionary Festival to launch his idea. It focusses on the importance of the Festival by showing that it was not only a major event in Paris, with a huge man-made mountain on the Champ de Mars; it was also celebrated in great depth in almost every city, town and village throughout France. It seeks to redefine the importance of the Festival in the history of the Revolution, not, as historians have traditionally dismissed it, merely as the performance of a sterile and compulsory political duty, but on the contrary, as a massively popular national event. The author uses source material from national and local archives describing the celebrations as well as the reaction to the event and its importance by contemporary commentators. This is the first book since the 1980s and the only work in English to focus on this Festival and to redefine its importance in the development of the Revolution.

Striking the balance in industrial relations in China? An analysis of court decisions of 897 strike cases (2008–2015)

Labour legislation in China does not clearly stipulate the legality of strikes. The prevalent view amongst scholars is that strikes are legitimate because ‘everything which is not prohibited is allowed’. However, our analysis of court rulings on 897 strike cases between 2008 and 2015 indicates otherwise. The converse principle, ‘everything which is not allowed is prohibited’, seems to prevail. Of the two established doctrines (per se violation and rule of reason), the former appears to be preferred. The majority of court decisions routinely uphold the employer’s decision to dismiss strikers, on the grounds that the strikers violated work rules against work stoppages, and that the strike is illegitimate. Only a small number of decisions take into account the context of employees’ demands and the reasonableness of their conduct, and determine that they are engaged not in work stoppages but in ‘negotiations’. The disproportionate adoption of the principle of per se violation in collective action cases indicates a dominance of a formalist approach to legal reasoning, which is underpinned by the courts’ professional conservatism and political duty in the current Chinese politico-economic environment.