bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Contemporary Theories of International Migration
Authors: Massey Douglas S , Arango Joaquín , Hugo Graeme , Kouaouci Ali , Pellegrino Adela , Taylor J Edward
Published: October 2023

At present, there is no single theory widely accepted by social scientists to account for the emergence and perpetuation of international migration throughout the world, only a fragmented set of theories that have developed largely in isolation from one another, sometimes but not always segmented by disciplinary boundaries. Current patterns and trends in international migration suggest, however, that a full understanding of contemporary migratory processes will not be achieved by relying on the tools of one discipline alone, or by focusing on a single level of analysis or one conceptual model. Rather, their complex, multifaceted nature requires a sophisticated theory that incorporates a variety of perspectives, levels, and assumptions.
Dimensions Of Sexuality Among Nigerian Men: Implications For Fertility And Reproductive Health
Authors: Orobaton Nosa
Published: October 2023

Recent studies of sexuality in Africa have tended to focus on women: their knowledge, attitudes, and contraceptive practices. Of late, with the spread of HIV/AIDS, more attention has turned to men, but with particular emphasis on their roles in, and knowledge of, sexually transmitted diseases. These studies typically confine their scope to measurable attributes such as the knowledge of respondents, medical risk factors, frequency of sexual intercourse, and number of children. These measures are useful proxies for describing general parameters of sexuality, but the conditions that surround their production frequently remain obscure. Researchers are paying increasing attention, for example, to young men’s quests for sexual gratification, especially in the era of AIDS. However, the factors and motives that shape the numerical measures reported in demographic studies often remain obscure. In the new domain of male fertility, qualitative studies may be of particular use. This is particularly important in the area of sexuality, where the influences of social and cultural factors are difficult to quantify. It is especially important with respect to married and/or mature men’s motives, wherein there is a tendency to assume that reproduction represents the chief, if not exclusive, goal of male sexuality.
Demographic Patterns of Motherhood and Fatherhood in France
Authors: Toulemon Laurent , Lapierre-Adamcyk Évelyne
Published: October 2023

There have been dramatic changes in family patterns throughout the industrialized world during the last third of the twentieth century. Whereas the previous century or so was characterized as a period of declining fertility within marriage, with little change in marital behaviour beyond a very slow, longterm increase in divorce, the recent half century has seen changes in the very fabric of the family.
Bolivia’s Tin and Natural Gas Crises, 1985-89
Authors: Morales Juan Antonio
Published: October 2023

This chapter is concerned with the negative price shock that affected Bolivia’s two main exports, tin and natural gas, in the second half of the 1980s, and with its effects throughout the economy. The shock started shortly after a drastic stabilisation programme that the government had launched to tame a devastating hyperinflation (unrelated to the trade shock). The interaction of the shock with the anti-inflationary policies gives distinctive features to the Bolivian case. An additional element that distinguishes the Bolivian experience from others is that an ample liberalisation of markets accompanied the stabilisation programme.
Temporary Shocks, Consumption Smoothing and Economic Adjustment: Sri Lanka, 1973-76
Authors: Jayasuriya Sisira
Published: October 2023

The large trade shocks experienced by both developed and developing countries during the 1970s and early 1980s associated with oil (and other commodity) price shocks and the discovery of new resource stocks led to the development of the now familiar Dutch Disease literature.1 This pro vided a framework for the analysis of the general equilibrium effects of a shock by decomposing its effects into a relative price effect (‘the resource movement effect’) and an income effect (‘spending effect’). An increase in the price of an exportable, for example, alters its relative price and thereby its relative profitability; this ‘booming sector’ then attracts resources from other sectors and expands.
Class and Gender in Rural Pakistan: Differentials in Economic Activity
Authors: Sathar Zeba , Desai Sonalde
Published: October 2023

Despite substantial gains in per capita income in the last few decades, Pakistan continues to experience sharp inequalities in income. Regional inequalities in income are pronounced and, as Table 7.1 shows, pockets of poverty are concentrated in rural areas (Gazdar, Howes, and Zaidi 1994). While regional inequalities are the subject of continuous concern (Hasan and Pasha 1986; Malik 1991) gender-based inequalities in wealth, control over resources, opportunities for economic activity, and earnings by gender have rarely been addressed.
Taxation and Public Expenditure
Authors: Grafe Clemens , Richter Kaspar
Published: October 2023

This chapter examines fiscal aspects of Russia’s trans1t1011 up to 1997, taking into account political and institutional factors1 affecting the fiscal system. Section 2 describes the conditions underlying Russia’s formation as a Federation. Progress in fiscal reforms was subject to political constraints, among them the substantial autonomy of Russian regions. Section 3 discusses conceptual problems of estimating the boundaries of the Russian public sector, and clarifies the choice of our data set. It then considers the changes in the size of the general government sector since the beginning of transition,2 comparing it with other countries. Section 4 describes the reduction of the budget deficit. This chapter refrains from an analysis of the implications of the budget deficit and its financing for monetary policy and the stabilization. These issues are covered in depth in Brigitte Granville’s chapter in this volume. Fiscal consolidation came about despite a continuous decline in government revenues.
Regional Income Differences
Authors: Son Philip Han
Published: October 2023

Along with a decline in Russia’s GDP and increased inequality of incomes, the fortunes of Russia’s regions have diverged substantially. At one end of the scale, Moscow city has a booming economy and in the third quarter of 1997 recorded average incomes 9.0 times the locally costed ‘subsistence minimum’ (prozhitochnyi minimum).1 Real income levels in Moscow are probably higher now than they have ever been before. At the other end of the scale, in Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Tyva, average incomes are reported to be below the subsistence level.
Poverty
Authors: Klugman Jeni , Marnie Sheila
Published: October 2023

Poverty in Russia is not a phenomenon which arrived with transition, but the economic reforms have been associated with steep rises in the levels and severity of poverty, and changes in the profile of poverty. This chapter reviews available evidence of these changes. We also look at evidence of increasing inequality, using available data on per capital income levels, and at growing inter-regional inequality in the country. We examine the main determinants of poverty in the 1990s, and look at the sections of the population most at risk. The impact of various social transfers on the incidence of poverty among different groups is also examined. The analysis draws together available official data together with the published and unpublished research on the topic that has pro liferated since the transition began.
Multiculturalism and Political Integration in Europe*
Authors: Rex John
Published: October 2023

Western European countries have become increasingly conscious of multiculturalism as a major structural problem as a result of the presence in these countries of immigrants and of children who in some degree share their parents’ culture. Their models of the dynamics of democratic societies had been developed by liberals and social democrats to deal with the question of social class. They had seen society as developing, either in accordance with the needs of free markets in labour as well as other commodities, or as being based upon a plurality of conflicting class interests reconciled through the mechanism of the welfare state. The problem, however, was that of the integration of new collectivities and new political actors whose motivation and forms of organization did not seem to fit easily into this model.
Intergenerational Transfers and the Economic Life Cycle: A Cross-cultural Perspective
Authors: Lee Ronald D
Published: October 2023

Reallocations of resources across age and time take place in many ways and for many reasons. Positive interest rates encourage people to defer consumption. This incentive is reinforced by a biocultural-institutional-behavioural need to provide for consumption in old age when productivity falls or retirement occurs, by a desire to leave bequests for children, and by a desire to hedge against future risk. Furthermore, in some settings parents may be able to capture the surplus production of their young children, or their adult children may support them in old age. All these factors tend to make labour earnings exceed consumption at younger ages and for consumption to exceed earnings at older ages, which requires a net upward reallocation of income from younger to older ages. At the same time, however, impatience and uncertainty about survival encourage consumption in advance of earnings. This tendency is reinforced by the costs of rearing children and perhaps by the receipt of bequests. These factors tend to make consumption exceed labour earnings at younger ages, and the reverse at older ages, requiring a downward reallocation of income from older to younger ages.
Eliminators, Marginalists, and the Politics of Disarmament
Authors: Freedman Lawrence
Published: October 2023

Appeals for international disarmament have a long and largely unsuccessful history. They have suffered from four core problems. First, the link between the incidence and intensity of conflict and the availability of weaponry remains uncertain in practice, whatever might be asserted in rhetoric. There are no iron laws at work here. Second, by necessity these appeals must convince political leaders convinced of the honour of their own intentions and the unthreatening nature of their own arsenals. Third, they must reassure these same leaders that attempts at general restraint, however noble in conception, will not provide golden opportunities to miscreant states who have the greatest interest in, and capacity for, cheating. Fourth, such appeals tend to be stronger when it comes to describing the ultimate destination than the mode of travel. It is easier to depict the putative benefits of a disarmed world, and its superiority to all alternatives, than to demonstrate how the processes of disarmament, with all their potential technical and political distractions, will achieve the desired result.
What Determined the Onset of Modern Progress in the Standard of Living?
Authors: Simon Julian L
Published: October 2023

The idealized graphs in Figures 1.1 and 1.2 depict the central elements in material human welfare through the ages in two different contexts. What was the root cause of the sharp break that occurred in the rich countries starting about 1750, departing from the mortality rates, household consumption levels, speeds of travel and communication, literacy rates, and other aspects of the standard of living of the previous centuries and millennia?
Structural Factors Affecting the Short-Term Positive Check in Croatia, Slavonia, and Srem in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Authors: Hammel E A , Galloway Patrick R
Published: October 2023

We will examine the effects of structural changes on the Malthusian short-term positive check in Croatia during a period characterized by significant intermittent military activity and dramatic shifts in social structure.
Price Fluctuations, Family Structure, and Mortality in Two Rural Chinese Populations: Household Responses to Economic Stress in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Liaoning
Authors: Campbell Cameron D , Lee James Z
Published: October 2023

Household organization influenced demographic behaviour in late imperial China (see Lee and Campbell 1997; Campbell and Lee 1996). It was within the household that the resources necessary to marry, have children, and remain healthy were allocated. Even though heads had nominal control over household resources and the labour of members, in practice processes of resource allocation were negotiated, and outcomes were shaped by the configuration of kin involved. Thus, in recent empirical work we have demonstrated that household context and aspects of individual social status were important determinants of fertility, nuptiality, and mortality. Fertility and nuptiality, both of which depended directly on allocations of household resources, varied according to household size, structure, relationship, birth order, and occupation. Access to resources and the nature of household roles affected exposure to infection and resistance to disease; even death rates varied according to whether specific kin, for example parents, spouses, or children, were present.
The Fall of the Taisho Economic System
Authors: Teranishi Juro
Published: October 2023

Japan’s postwar high-growth era economic system is well known for its intense government-private sector interaction and its strong group orientation. The history of the developmental state in the early Meiji period, aimed at strengthening military power and promoting new industries, is also well articulated with the names of two early leaders of development state, Toshimichi Okubo and Shigenobu Okuma. However, it is less known that between these two periods, during Japan’s Taisho era, there prevailed another economic system characterized by free competition, unfettered maximizing behaviour, and smaller, not to say weaker, government.
Credit Ratings and Spreads in the Samurai Bond Market
Authors: Packer Franklin
Published: October 2023

In the postwar era, banks performed the principal role of assessing and pricing the credit risk of large companies in Japan. Credit analysis was often concentrated in commercial and long-term credit banks with share holding and managerial ties to the company (the ‘main bank system’). These banks generally incurred additional costs when an affiliated firm ran into financial distress. They usually took larger write-offs in the case of a financial restructuring, and bought up the outstanding bonds of the company in the case of default (Sheard 1994; Campbell and Hamao 1994). A drawback to this system was that the capabilities for credit risk analysis in the investment community at large remained undeveloped.
Rethinking Administrative Guidance
Authors: Mark Ramseyer J
Published: October 2023

Yet another essay on ‘administrative guidance’? Along with wabi-sabi, girininjo, keiretsu, and consensus, administrative guidance surely comes near the top of any ranking of Japanological topics by their pages:ideas ratio. But the case for another essay on the subject is simple: much of what we read about administrative guidance is wrong, both conceptually and factually.Although many observers characterize administrative guidance as idio-syncratically Japanese, it is not. Instead, the phenomenon follows straight-forward principal-agent theory. Although many observers argue that Japanese courts cannot review the guidance, the courts can. When government employees use administrative guidance in ways that challenge the preferences of the ruling party, they review it brutally.
R&D Consortia, News, and Japanese High-Technology Policy: Optoelectronics in Japan
Authors: Saxonhouse Gary R
Published: October 2023

In December 1993, in the waning days of the Uruguay Round, the Clinton administration initiated what appeared to be a major change in US policy as to how R&D subsidies should be treated in the new Subsidies Code then being negotiated. Up until December 1993, US trade negotiators had worked strenuously to subject R&D subsidies to the strictest GATT disciplines. At many points during the negotiations US officials took the position, if only for tactical purposes, that any government subsidies for applied research and development should be actionable (i.e. subject to a countervailing duty) under GATT. American negotiators even clung to the position that a part of government subsidies for basic industrial research might also be subjected to countervailing duties. After the seeming revival of a European aircraft industry on the basis of massive R&D subsidies, it was a major goal of US trade policy to prevent such a recurrence in another industry. Uppermost in the minds of American trade negotiators was the knowledge that under the Subsidies Code adopted for GATT during the Tokyo Round there had never been a successful challenge to an R&D subsidy.
Women’s Empowerment, Marriage Postponement, and Gender Relations in Japan: An Intergenerational Perspective
Authors: Tsuya Noriko O
Published: October 2023

This study seeks to explain why young Japanese, especially young women, postpone marriage from the viewpoints of intergenerational taste formation and women’s empowerment. Comparing the demographic, socio-economic, and psychological situations of two generational groups, the young never married and the married middle-aged, it argues that young unmarried women are empowered, and that empowerment enables them to choose when and even whether they marry. In the face of weakening social and economic pres urc to marry, and witnessing unequal gender relations in their parents’ home that they may anticipate for themselves, young women may shy away from marriage and continue to enjoy the material and emotional advantages of co residence with their parents.
The Netherlands Still the Politics of Accommodation?
Authors: Timmermans Arco , Andeweg Rudy B
Published: October 2023

In the summer of 1994, three parties negotiating the formation of a new Dutch government agreed to draft legislation that would introduce a referendum at national and local level. This intention was included in the coalition agreement, the policy package that was approved by the PvdA (Social Democrats), the VVD (Liberals), and the Liberal Democrats (D66) and that was to form the programmatic basis of the ensuing three-party government. The issue was raised by D66, a party that has always advocated institutional and electoral reforms.
Luxembourg Stable Coalitions in a Pivotal Party System
Authors: Dumont Patrick , Winter Lieven De
Published: October 2023

Coalition formation in Luxembourg, usually following general elections when a legislature has lasted its full term, is a well-structured process. The Grand-Duke straight away asks the leader of the largest party to form a new government (an information mission is exceptional). This party’s main decision making body then asks its formateur to start talks with a particular party, usually a
France Forming and Maintaining Government Coalitions in the Fifth Republic
Authors: Thiébault Jean-Louis
Published: October 2023

The French parliamentary party system has undergone important changes under the Fifth Republic, with equally significant consequences for the way the country is governed. The aim of this section is to identify the factors imposed by the French parliamentary party system in which government coalitions have been formed. The two factors that most decisively determine a party’s bargaining power are its share of parliamentary seats and its spatial location vis-a-vis the other parliamentary parties.
International Trade and Sustainable Forestry
Authors: Barbier Edward B
Published: October 2023

This chapter is concerned with examining the linkages between the global trade in forest products and efforts to promote more sustainable forestry. Although this term has been defined in many ways in the literature, perhaps the most relevant interpretation is the general definition and criteria of sustainable forest management adopted by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO): “Sustainable forest management is the process of managing permanent forest land to achieve one or more clearly specified objectives of management with regard to production of a continuous flow of desired forest products and services without undue reduction in its inherent values and future productivity and without undue undesirable effects on the physical and social environment.”
Issues in the Taxation of Income from Foreign Portfolio and Direct Investment
Authors: Devereux Michael P
Published: October 2023

Since the Neumark Committee reported in 1963, there has been an unresolved debate about harmonizing the taxation of corporate income in what is now the European Union (EU). A central issue has been the importance of, and the perceived need for harmonization of, the statutory corporation tax rate and the definition of the corporation tax base. Closely related to this is the relationship between taxation at the level of the company and at the level of the shareholder, especially where the company and the shareholder are resident in different countries. This chapter aims to shed light on these issues, both for the collective welfare of a group of countries such as the EU and for the welfare of an individual country. The main theme of the chapter is that, in identifying the ‘optimal1 taxation of international investment flows, using corporate and personal taxes, it is useful to make a distinction between portfolio and direct investment. The definition of these two forms of investment is usually in terms of the degree of control maintained by the investor over the investment activity. In this chapter, however, I assume that, in practice, this definition can be mirrored by the distinction between individual investors (or financial intermediaries) who undertake portfolio investment and are subject to personal taxes, and companies funded by such investors that undertake direct investment and are subject to corporation taxes.
Knowing the cycle
Authors: Harding Don , Pagan Adrian
Published: October 2023

Judged by the number of papers being published today with ‘the business cycle’ somewhere in their title, we should be starting to have a good understanding of what accounts for that phenomenon. Yet, to paraphrase Christiano and Fitzgerald (1998), the business cycle remains a puzzle. Moreover, if one surveyed policy-makers whose concerns are with the business cycle, it seems unlikely that many would agree that this explosion of academic articles has been of much use to them in their decisions.
Crossing the Literary Modernist Divide at Century’s End: The Turn to Translation and the Invention of Identity in America’S Story of Origins
Authors: Minda Gary
Published: October 2023

James Baldwin, one of America’s most famous black writers, was an outsider living in Paris for a substantial period of his career. In one of his essays, Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin credits Henry James for having discovered something that has been central to much of Baldwin’s writing about America—namely, that ‘[i]t is a complex fate to be an American’. For Baldwin, the complexity of American identity was rendered even more complex by the fact that he was an American writer living in Paris. Baldwin tells the reader that he [Baldwin] ‘left America because [he] doubted [his] ability to survive the fury of the color problem [there]’.
Is literature more ethical than law? Fitzjames stephen and literary responses to the advent of full legal representation for felons
Authors: Schramm Jan-Melissa
Published: October 2023

There comes a moment towards the end of Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1862) when the leading defence lawyer Thomas Furnival awaits the jury’s verdict on a charge of perjury which his client, Lady Mason, was alleged to have committed over twenty years ago. Although convinced of her guilt, he has defended her with positive and personal assertions of her innocence and she is duly acquitted. The reader, privy to Lady Mason’s explicit confession of culpability, knows this to be an inaccurate verdict generated at least in part by the rhetorical excesses of counsel.
Art Crimes
Authors: Julius Anthony
Published: October 2023

‘When Benvenuto Cellini crucified a living man to study the play of muscles in his death agony’, remarked Oscar Wilde, ‘a pope was right to grant him absolution. What is the death of a vague individual if it enables an immortal work to blossom and to create, in Keats’s words, an eternal source of ecstasy?’ Few would concur with such a statement, and if pressed to explain why, some such principle as ‘aesthetic ends do not justify criminal means’ would probably be offered. This principle seems intuitively right and hardly demands amplification, let alone more formal defence. But let me take Wilde seriously, which entails treating his observation as a provocation rather than as a proposition demanding immediate, unqualified assent.
Reading Blasphemy: The Necessity for Literary Analysis in Legal Scholarship
Authors: Bradney Anthony
Published: October 2023

For such work very large claims can be made. Both forms of law and literature have the potential to bring powerful new insights into fundamental and far-reaching aspects of legal scholarship. This essay, however, is concerned with a third form of ‘law and literature’: the use of literary analysis when investigating both the content and efficacy of individual legal rules. The essay will argue that, in some areas of law, by ignoring literary analysis, as has hitherto largely been the case, legal scholars have done substantial damage to the quality of their work. Unlike the first two forms of law and literature the scope for this type of law and literature is relatively limited. It applies only to those instances where literary works are themselves the subject of legal rules. However, within the areas where this type of law and literature can be used its use is vital; a failure to use it distorts and damages all other forms of argument.
The Guernsey Witchcraft Trials of 1617: The Case of Collete Becquet
Authors: McGuinness Matthew
Published: October 2023

The primary source for the study of early modern witch trials in Guernsey is a series of Royal Court registers relating to criminal trials of all kinds, known as ‘Livre en Crime’. Le Patourel explains that trials were registered in this series by virtue of the nature of the alleged act, rather than by virtue of having come all from a single division of the court dedicated to criminal law. It does not apparently follow, however, that all acts of the same kind are to be found in the same set of registers. There are thirty-seven cases of witchcraft registered in the volumes known as ‘Jugements et Ordonnances’
The Hidden Truth of Autopoiesis
Authors: Witteveen Willem J
Published: October 2023

In interpretations of the ‘postmodern condition’, it is often stated that there are in our time sharply differentiated and irreducible rationalities that complicate human communications and interactions. Economic rationality, legal rationality, political rationality, and technical rationality are all indispensable for functioning social systems but they each employ a different ‘logic’, they speak different languages, and their central terms and categories are mutually untranslatable. As a result, human actors functioning in social systems are forced to speak just one of these languages and exclusively to follow the dictates of its rationality—to view a problem only in economic terms, or as a matter of law, or as a political issue, or as a technical problem. Alternatively, they are forced to switch rationalities as the situation demands and are then left with irresolvable problems of translation and integration—the economic factors do not fit into legal categories, political considerations have no exact counterpart in technical expertise. There is no common standard that can be used to compare relevance across rationalities.
What Frederick Douglass Says to Kant, With Help from Einstein
Authors: Dimock Wai Chee
Published: October 2023

What sort of things are rights? Are they the bedrock ingredients of our humanity, a class of objects coming into being with the birth of every life? And are they so basic, so much the cornerstone of our moral fabric, as to be ontologically prior to all other features of human association, all measures that we might take to give definition to our being? Ronald Dworkin, making a case for just this sort of ontological priority, has put forward what he calls a ‘deep theory’ of rights. Rights, he says, ‘are not simply the product of deliberate legislation or explicit social custom, but are independent grounds for judging legislation and custom’. Rights come before any social and political arrangements we might see fit to devise. They inhere in the fact of being human, and, as a prior fact, they come ready-made, they owe nothing to human hands. They are foundational in the sense that they are not derived, not negotiable, not a part of the shifting currents of human affairs. They are a given rather than an effect.
Singular and Aggregate Voices: Audiences and Authority in Law & Literature and in Law & Feminism
Authors: Resnik Judith
Published: October 2023

This essay is written for a segment devoted to ‘Theory’ in a ‘Law and Literature Colloquium’. Such a title is an invitation to be self-conscious, but self-conscious about what? The concept of ‘Law & Literature’ could be understood as either marvellously capacious or vacuous. A central issue internally is whether ‘Law & Literature’ merits acceptance as a field of study or instead refers to an analytically disparate set of interests, temporarily sharing a moniker but not having much in common. The question externally is whether anyone, save those inside, cares. ‘Anyone’ is a large category; as a member of a law faculty in the United States, I focus on how, if at all, Law & Literature has fared over the past decades in law. At issue is whether sets of ideas grouped under ‘Law & Literature’ have had much effect other than on those affiliated with these labels.
Legal Consequences Of The Single Currency
Authors: Vicuña Antonio Sdinz De
Published: October 2023

The Treaty on European Union marks ‘a new stage in the process of creating an 8.01 ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. The Union’s task is ‘to organise relations between the Member States and between their peoples’ and its objective, ‘the creation of an area without internal frontiers’.

The Community has the purposes, inter alia, of achieving an ‘internal market 8.02 characterised by the abolition of obstacles to the free movement of services and capital’ and of approximating ‘the laws of Member States to the extent required for the functioning of the common market’.
Representation Of The Ec In The Imf
Authors: Dented’ Erik
Published: October 2023

The final stage of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) that created in 11.01 1999 a single monetary jurisdiction within the European Union (EU) may be considered a milestone in international economic relations. EMU introduced the Euro, a single currency that replaces domestic currencies, to be used as the sole legal tender by the 11 countries that jointly comprise the Eurozone (hereinafter also referred to as ‘EMU participants’). The establishment of EMU has created a formidable new player in the international monetary system which consequently pertains to the IMF as ‘a permanent institution which provides the machinery for consultation and collaboration on international monetary problems’.
Money And Arbitration
Authors: Carreau Dominique G
Published: October 2023

When addressing monetary law issues, arbitrators are in a position not markedly 26.01 different from that of domestic judges. In particular, they have to give effect to the monetary choices of contracting parties regarding the currency in which they plan to conduct their transactions (the currency of payment) and the possible linkage of that currency with other currencies through various value clauses (ie use of a third currency for accounting purposes or of a unit of value such as the former ECU of the European Communities or the Special Drawing Rights of the IMF). In so doing, and actually by validating the monetary choices of contracting parties, arbitrators in fact enjoy greater discretion than domestic judges since they are not bound by a forum of their own.
Discoveries
Authors: Hargittai István
Published: October 2023

When we discuss the importance of research projects and discoveries in the context of Nobel awards, we imply that Nobel recognition is given for the most important discoveries. This is probably so, at least in principle, although other considerations also play a role: for example, whether the important discovery can be assigned unambiguously to one or a few persons. In any case, bona find research is aimed at discoveries rather than prizes. The nature of scientific discovery is an intriguing subject. Johannes Kepler left behind a comprehensive description of all his inner workings in the discovery process. Four hundred years ago he analyzed and described in great detail his thoughts and changes of mood, his exuberance and anguish, during the process of discovering the planetary model.
Overcoming adversity
Authors: Hargittai István
Published: October 2023

In American academia, an ideal career starts with having an academic or professional family, being educated in a fine liberal arts college, doing graduate studies at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, or suchlike, and then doing postdoctoral work at a similar institution. This helps to build up a network and self-confidence. Then there is a job at a top research university with a large start-up package, followed by major grants. In other countries there are corresponding paths, but this kind of background is not typical among the sampled Nobel laureates.
The Nostalgia Film
Authors: Powrie Phil
Published: October 2023

ONE of the most successful types of film in the 1980s in the UK was the quality costume drama, labelled heritage film by Andrew Higson. This trend was inaugurated early in the decade by the TV series Brideshead Revisited (1981), and the film Chariots of Fire (1981). Subsequent years saw a series of such films, often based on novels by E. M. Forster, doing extremely well at the box office (Another Country, 1984; A Passage to India, 1985; A Room with a View, 1986; Maurice, 1987; A Handful of Dust, 1987; Little Dorrit, 1987; Where Angels Fear to Tread, 1991; Howard’s End, 1992). In France, a similar type of film did well at the box office during the same period, sometimes extremely well, although its manifestations were arguably more diverse than the costume dramas in the British tradition; indeed, not all the films about to be mentioned are necessarily nostalgia films as I would like to define them. The prevalence of such films during the 1980s in France is due to much the same reasons as their prevalence in the UK. The 1980s saw, as in the UK, the end of period of economic boom, initiated by the oil crisis in 1974, combined with increasing unemployment, and a change of government in 1981 with which the French became rapidly disillusioned.
Un amour de Swann: Nostalgia and Sexuality
Authors: Powrie Phil
Published: October 2023

A LA recherche du temps perdu is a manual of self-discovery (it is also, of course, an acute social analysis). It is a many-stranded narrative; it is indeed a stranded narrative, losing itself/myself purposefully so as to (perhaps) find itself/myself. Un amour de Swann, on the other hand, is relentlessly literal, reinforcing dominant narrative by its typically voyeuristic, narcissistic hero, with whom I, the male spectator, am supposed partially to identify, or at least partially to empathize. Moreover, Un amour de Swann unsubtly caricatures what it clearly represents as ‘deviant’ sexuality-homosexuality, male and female-upholding a brutalist heterosexuality and punishing dominant women characters for the reckless expression of independence. I shall start with the most obviously, indeed crudely, visible: (explicit) eroticism, which paradoxically draws a veil over ‘deviant’ desire. Some reviews comment on what is clearly seen as an admirable/admirably faithful eroticism in the film: The film’s episode showing Swann making futile, fatal attempts to lay bare Odette’s past as he undresses her establishes a motif to which the novel constantly devotes half-appalled, half-ironic attention. Repeatedly ruffled by fears of infidelity, these scenes are steadily faithful to Proust’s work¬ which they accurately reflect, too, in being tinged with an eroticism that stems from the tension between passion and protocol
Give with the Other
Authors: Powrie Phil
Published: October 2023

CRITICS saluted Truffaut’s Vivement dimanche! as a lightweight but fitting conclusion to his career: lightweight because it is a pastiche of film noir, fitting because it pays homage not only to film noir, but also, by its many references, to Truffaut’s mentor Hitchcock, as well as to Truffaut’s own films. To dwell principally on the film as a patchwork of references, however, obscures one of the main problems raised by it, namely that the film is riven apart not so much by a multiplicity of intertextual references as by a substantial fracture (of which intertextuality forms only a part), not untypical of film noir: that between the dominant male narrative style of the genre and the attempt to place the Fanny Ardant/ Barbara character into the dominant narrative position. Curiously, though, the fracturing is ambivalent. The dominance given to Fanny Ardant/Barbara is undermined by a variety of narrative and stylistic devices which reimpose a patriarchal framework, thus denying or minimizing her dominance.
A Fistful of Polars: Chronicles of Discomfiture
Authors: Powrie Phil
Published: October 2023

TRUFFAUT’s final film was a polar, an affectionate retrospective and regressive gesture to a popular genre refracted through an auteurist lens. In 1985, two other auteurs also made polars. Godard’s Detective opened in May 1985, with the curious combination of Nathalie Baye and the pop singer Johnny Hallyday. A few months later, Pialat, whose 1983 film A nos amours (1983) is considered one of the key films of the 1980s, released the starkly titled Police (September 1985), starring Depardieu and the then teen idol Sophie Marceau. I shall also be considering in this chapter a more commercial and, to use Hayward’s term, ultra-codified polar by Bob Swaim, whose brashly American and immensely popular La Balance (1982) also starred a miscast Nathalie Baye as a prostitute and Philippe Leotard.
The Comic Film
Authors: Powrie Phil
Published: October 2023

IT’ s no exaggeration to say that comic films are the most popular French genre. Of the six best-selling films of the 1980s overall, five were comedies, with Coline Serreau’s Trois hommes et un couffin (1985) the best-selling film of the decade with some IO million spectators in France, previously outdone only by two other comedies in the 1960s, both starring the then very popular pair of comedians Bourvil and Louis de Funes, and both directed by Gerard Oury, La Grande Vadrouille (1966, 17,226,000 spectators) and Le Corniaud (1965, n,724,000 spectators). These two films are good examples of the more traditional type of comic film, usually called vaudeville or boulevard, because of its roots in theatre and music hall (theatres in Paris were found on the Grands Boulevards). Grounded in situation comedy, mainstream comic film of the vaudeville type could be said to have no substantial psychological or moral pretensions.
La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille: Falien Angels and Men Overboard
Authors: Powrie Phil
Published: October 2023

ONE of the more curious aspects of the success of La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille is the contradictory critical discourses which surrounded it on its release. The film was praised both for its realism, and for its caricatural elements. My argument in the first part of this chapter will be that this contradiction is essential because it allows a consensual positioning of the spectator, reinforced by elements of nostalgia inherent in the narrative. The effect of this nostalgic consensuality is to deny any political force to the derision intended by Chatiliez and his co-scriptwriter Quentin. However, in the second part of the chapter I shall be arguing that it is not so much the derision applied to social distinctions which makes the film interesting and indeed provocative, as the fixation on sex and its impact on gender relations.
Belgium
Authors: Jack Belinda
Published: October 2023

Belgium is as artificial a country as any, made up of three distinct areas. Two of the three, Wallonia and Flanders, were united in 1830, with Brussels as the capital. In 1920 the German-speaking cantons in the east were also added. A monarchy, a parliament, and a constitution were adopted. Most areas of Belgium are at least bilingual. In the north, Flemish and Dutch are spoken; in the east, French and German. In Brussels all three languages are spoken and a dialect-in which a written literature also exists-la brusselaire. The practical difficulties of Belgian multilingualism have allowed for the increasing use of English, particularly in international organizations and businesses.
Mauritius
Authors: Jack Belinda
Published: October 2023

The Mascareignes are a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, most importantly Mauritius (formerly the Ile de France) and La Reunion (formerly the Ile Bourbon), but also the tiny island of Rodrigues. The two larger islands are less than a hundred nautical miles apart. The journey takes less than twelve hours by sea and roughly three¬ quarters of an hour by air. Rodrigues is 320 miles from Mauritius and 420 from Reunion.
The Maghreb
Authors: Jack Belinda
Published: October 2023

The Maghreb (Arabic for West) is essentially made up of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Maghrebi literatures are as hybrid, protean, and defiant as any francophone literature. Challenging literary typologies and prognoses, they embrace writing which has ‘come out of the Maghreb, oral texts which circulate in that space, texts which participate in an imaginaire maghrébin, texts written, published, and read principally in the Maghreb, and those written by authors born there, but often living elsewhere, in ‘exile’. These literatures are written in numerous languages: classical and dialectal Arabic, Berber, and French are the most significant. Nor do these remain distinct in written texts. Translations and transcriptions of material may constitute parts of a text written largely in (an)other language(s).
Algeria
Authors: Jack Belinda
Published: October 2023

It was Algeria’s relative separation from France during the Second World War which stimulated and encouraged writers, intellectuals and publishers to form new groups, and strengthen those which already existed, within the country. The most influential was the École d’Alger which had been set up during the rnid-1930s.
Egypt
Authors: Jack Belinda
Published: October 2023

That French travel writers had constructed an Egypt in French was a donné to which the first francophone Egyptian writers responded. Their desire was, above all, to explore and explain their country in greater depth and more accurately. It was largely for a French audience that they sought to set the record straight. Romans de mœrurs and transcriptions of oral material are the dominant genres during the first quarter of the century.
Population And Social Structure
Authors: Bonney Richard
Published: October 2023

The social structure of early modern Europe, in all its variety and complexity, was a consequence of a mixture of factors: history, prevailing social attitudes and the extent of economic development. ‘Structure’ is a more helpful term than the term ‘class’, which tends to imply anachronistic nineteenth-century definitions arising from a market-economy-based interpretation of the period, where the production of material goods and the creation of wealth were dominant. Many older studies, it is true, stressed the decisive role of the middle class in bringing about change in the early modern period, blaming or praising it for such diverse phenomena as the Reformation, the growth of representative institutions and economic expansion. Marxist historical determinism still depicts the revolt of the Netherlands, the English civil war and the French Revolution as ‘bourgeois revolutions’. But such concepts are too rigid. Discontented nobles as well as an emergent bourgeoisie played a decisive part in political upheaval, both in the Dutch revolt and the French wars of religion. In most European countries there is little evidence of any consciousness of a dynamic and self-confident middle class, sure of its role and its destiny in society, as was arguably the case with the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. The noble ethos, not the values of the middle class, prevailed in early modern Europe. The ambition of the successful entrepreneur was to become a nobleman, not to remain simply a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie. Only in the more advanced economies such as the Dutch Republic and England did so-called ‘bourgeois’ values prevail in some measure.
The European Economy
Authors: Bonney Richard
Published: October 2023

One of the difficulties faced by the historian of early modern Europe is to describe accurately a society and economy in which backwardness persisted yet where there were important trends towards what might be called modernity, perhaps even capitalism. Precise terminology is not easy to find: for example, are the terms ‘pre-industrial’ and ‘proto-industrial’ useful concepts when applied to this period? Recently, some French socio-economic historians, instead of emphasizing change, have substituted the idea of so-called ‘immobile history’, or ‘history that stands still’.’ They argue that during a long period of what was primarily agrarian history (variously described as 1320–1720, 1450–1720 or 1400–1800), society was imprisoned in its basic economic underdevelopment. This in turn is a revision of the more optimistic viewpoint of the French economic historian Simiand, expressed over fifty years ago, that the sixteenth century was a period of economic expansion (phase A), while the seventeenth century was one of recession (phase B). Such views may contain substantial truths but they are open to three objections. Firstly, the expansion of Simiand’s phase A did not occur evenly in all sectors of the economy: agriculture did not prosper throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. Secondly, some economies expanded during Simiand’s phase B: the prosperity of the Dutch Republic occurred at a time of general recession. Thirdly, the transition from phase A to phase B did not occur uniformly in Europe at any one fixed date nor was it to be found in all areas of economic activity at the same time. This is particularly true of price levels.
The Church and Christian life
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: October 2023

Shortly after his appointment as papal legate in Ireland, Gilbert, first bishop of Limerick, wrote a tract, De statu ecclesiae (Concerning church order). This may have been intended as a statement of intent for the reforming council of Rathbreasail (nn), at which he presided as legate, or alternatively as a digest of its conclusions. It laid out, dearly and schematically, the organizational structure of the Church. From the perspective of Rome the Irish Church was regrettably archaic; there were too many bishops but no territorial dioceses, the jurisdictional authority of the bishops was circumscribed, while abbots and their monasteries enjoyed considerable autonomy and spent as much time in ministering to the laity as in prayer within the cloister. In every respect this ran counter to contemporary orthodoxy. Gilbert showed, quite literally diagrammatically in the earliest manuscripts of this text, how matters should be ordered. The Church was an elaborate pyramid, which itself contained other interlocking and smaller triangles. At the base were the laity, divided, according to a tripartite scheme commonplace for several centuries, into those who worked (or ploughed) at bottom left, those who fought, next on the right, and above them those who prayed, presumably, though this is unclear, the pious laity.