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10621. La naissance d'un géant: Arcelor-Mittal (1948-2006)

Author:
Éric Godelier
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In 2006 a terrible fight pitted two steel makers, Mittal and Arcelor, against each other. Understanding the dynamic of this enormous takeover requires a historical perspective. The structure, business strategy, and corporate governance of these groups evolved over a long period of time. This article explores the conflict in the context of the history of French steel industry. An examination of Usinor, moreover, as the ancestor and creator of Arcelor, can reveal a lot about the political, social and economical influence of steel makers in French society. Understanding the conflict also calls for an analysis of how a large company could change its corporate culture. Instead of reducing corporate culture to individual or collective “values,” as Edgar Schein did some time ago, this article explores Usinor's culture as a system of representations, material elements, technologies, products and ways of doing and thinking.
Topic:
Governance
Political Geography:
France

10622. French Color Blindness in Perspective: The Controversy over "Statistiques Ethniques"

Author:
Daniel Sabbagh and Shanny Peer
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In the United States, while some race-based policies such as affirmative action have faced often successful political and legal challenges over the last quarter-century, historically, the very principle of official racial classification has met with much less resistance. The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, according to which “no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” was not originally intended to incorporate a general rule of “color blindness.” And when in California, in 2003, the “Racial Privacy Initiative” led to a referendum on a measure—Proposition 54—demanding that “the state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin,” this restriction was meant to apply exclusively to the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment, that is, the three sites where affirmative action was once in effect and might be reinstated at some point, or so the proponents of that initiative feared. In any case, that measure was roundly defeated at the polls.
Political Geography:
United States and California

10623. The Children of Antifascism: Exploring Young Historians Clubs in the GDR

Author:
Catherine Plum
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
In 1982, a ninth grader named Anna from Eberswalde-Finow composed an essay in which she recounted one of the most influential moments in her life. One might have expected a description of a triumphant victory at a swim meet or gymnastics competition. Instead, Anna described a day four years earlier when she was formally inducted into a special club at her school. The initiation ceremony took place at an historical site laden with a disturbing legacy, the former concentration camp of Ravensbrück. Anna remembered the moment when she became a card-carrying member of the young military historians:
Topic:
Civil Society, Education, Government, and Political Theory

10624. The "Going" of the Third Reich: Recivilizing Germans through Political Education

Author:
Dieter K. Buse
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Historians and political sciences have begun to discuss how and when postwar Germany overcame its authoritarian past and reestablished democracy and a tolerant civil society. This article argues that the national and regional Offices for Political Education have contributed significantly to the recivilizing process. The article provides the first preliminary academic attempt to outline the offices' historical background, their changing institutional structure, and their place in the civic education context since the mid 1950s. A series of case studies examine the historical literature disseminated by specific offices to illustrate the process of overcoming a problematic past and constructing new identities. In turn, the historical role models promoted by the offices, the manner in which federalism was presented, the timing of and fashion in which the Holocaust became a significant theme and the way in which regional identities were understood and fostered, are examined. These cases illustrate how historical information was employed, at first in fairly simple and propagandistic fashion, but always to inculcate democratic and civil norms. The question of the impact of the offices' work is left open, since research on reception has yet to be undertaken, but some evidence about their important contributions to reshaping German values is provided.
Topic:
Democratization, Education, and Government
Political Geography:
Germany

10625. "Subaltern Nationalism" and the West Berlin Anti-Authoritarians

Author:
Jennifer Ruth Hosek
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
The West Berlin anti-authoritarians around Rudi Dutschke employed a notion of subaltern nationalism inspired by independence struggles in the global South and particularly by post 1959 Cuba to legitimate their loosely understood plans to recreate West Berlin as a revolutionary island. Responding to Che Guevara's call for many Vietnams, they imagined this Northern metropolis as a Focus spreading socialism of the third way throughout Europe, a conception that united their local and global aims. In focusing on their interpretation of societal changes and structures in Cuba, the anti-authoritarians deemphasized these plans' potential for violence. As a study of West German leftists in transnational context, this article suggests the limitations of confining analyses of their projects within national or Northern paradigms. As a study of the influence of the global South on the North in a non-(post)colonial situation, it suggests that such influence is greater than has heretofore been understood.
Topic:
Nationalism and Political Theory
Political Geography:
Europe, Germany, Cuba, Island, and Berlin

10626. Access to Secret Police Files, Justice, and Vetting in East Germany since 1989

Author:
Gary Bruce
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
In order to situate the current debate on whether the Federal Commission for the Files of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (the Stasi Archive) should cease to be an autonomous institution in the larger context, this article traces the history of the Stasi Archive and of the Stasi Files Law since 1989. Key to understanding the Stasi Archive and access to its files is the 1989 revolution which saw demonstrators demand access to information gathered by the secret police. Although the research quasimonopoly that the Stasi Archive enjoys would be ended by integration into the federal archives, file access for Stasi victims—the raison d'être of the archive—would be jeopardized. Calls for the dismantling of the Stasi archive are, therefore, premature. Some criticism can be directed at the vetting and trial process in East Germany since 1989, but it is important to remember that the Stasi Archive acted only in a support capacity for those activities.
Topic:
Security, Communism, Corruption, and Law
Political Geography:
Germany

10627. Migration and Cultural Interaction across the Centuries: German History in a European Perspective

Author:
Dirk Hoerder
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Once upon a time, German studies seemed to be an easy field to define. Like fairytales, the resulting stories were addressed to a faithful audience—but here, an audience of adults, true believers in the nation and nation state. Today, by contrast, we understand that defining area studies is, in fact, a highly complex task involving overlapping regions and social spaces, and analyses of borderlands, interpenetrations, and métissage, as well as of processual structures and structured processes. Even geographies have become “processual.” The origins of area studies are often traced to the U.S., the hegemon in the Atlantic world's academe, and the emergence of American studies in the 1930s. Nevertheless, something like area studies also emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century, juxtaposing 1) a country and its colonies; and 2) a country and its neighbors. The former were inferior societies, the latter competitors in world markets and, repeatedly, enemies in war. Area studies—after a preceding period of knowledge acquisition as reflected in early mapmaking— became colonial studies, competitor state studies, enemy state studies—in each case transnational, transterritorial, and transcultural. Unable to deal with the concept of “trans,” i.e., with fuzzy borders and shifting categories and geographies, scholars in each bordered country set their own society, their Self, as the “yardstick.” The Other, the delimited opposite, was meant as a background foil before which their respective own nation was to appear as the most advanced and to which—knowledge and interest are inextricably linked—the profits from worldwide trade and the spoils from colonial acquisitions were naturally due (Folien- or Spiegeltheorie). Since then, motivations for country studies have become more complex but they basically are framed still by bordered territories, “national culture,” national consciousness or identity, nation-state policies, and international relations. Once the ideology of “nation” is abandoned, the blindfold removed so to say, it appears that German-language people may be studied in America or Russia—or Africans, Poles, and Turks in the German-language societies (plural!).
Topic:
Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Africa, Russia, America, Europe, Turkey, and Germany

10628. New Places, New Identities: The (Ever) Changing Concept of Heimat

Author:
Uta Larkey
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
This article analyzes contrasting notions of Heimat and Fremde, as explored cinematographically by three contemporary German filmmakers. The spatial aspect of Heimat, traditionally connected to a particular region or even neighborhood denotes the sense of belonging, whereas the temporal aspect—often associated with childhood and youth—carries the sense of longing. In the second half of the twentieth century, the concept has shifted to include identity, reflection and self-reflection, the loss of Heimat, and even multiple Heimaten. The article argues further that the notions of Heimat and Fremde are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent. Peter Lilienthal's film Ein Fremder concludes that in parts of German society the binary opposites of Heimat and Fremde are still intact. On the other hand, Peter Patzak in Adeus und Goodbye shows how Heimat and Fremde are mutually dependent and include a search for identity and individuality. In Michael Gutmann's travelogue-documentary, Familienreise, the protagonists experience aspects of Fremde and Heimatlosigkeit without ever finding Heimat.
Topic:
Migration
Political Geography:
Germany

10629. We Acted as Though We Were in a Movie—Memories of an East German Subculture

Author:
Lutz Kube
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Leander Haußmann (Sonnenallee), a theater and film director with East German roots, contributed the documentary Die Durchmacher to the television series Denk ich an Deutschland. In his documentary, Haußmann interviews some of his old friends who in the late 1970s formed a group in East Berlin and presents their stories about the time. This paper explores the image of the German Democratic Republic that is created by the memories of the participants and their presentation through Haußmann. An important element of the memories is the perspective from which they come: out of a subculture that tried to escape East German reality with only limited success. This article also examines how the ambiguity and unreliability of memories are presented in the film. The documentary is put into the context of a debate on the concept of "Ostalgia" (Ostalgie), arguing that this can still be a productive means to communicate East German experiences without idealizing them.
Topic:
Civil Society and Communism
Political Geography:
Germany

10630. When the Son Is Older than the Father: Dominik Graf's Denk ich an Deutschland Television Film

Author:
Margit Sinka
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Dominik Graf's Wispern im Berg der Dinge (A Whispering in the Mountain of Things) was the second film televised in the twelve-part Denk ich an Deutschland-documentary series launched on the eve of Germany's eighth Day of Unity (October 1998). Though Graf does not refer directly to Heinrich Heine, he clearly takes Heine's mode of thinking about Germany seriously—that is, he resolutely focuses on ruptures, which characterize Heine and his writings, and on the tensions provoked by the interplay of opposites evident in Heine's poem Nachtgedanken (1843), the source of the Denk ich an Deutschland phrase. In Graf's documentary, Heine's ruptures turn into ruptures between his father's excessively silent war generation and his own unanchored post 1968 generation. The tensions, on the other hand, are evoked by the filmic medium—in particular, between verbal and iconic images. Thinking about film when he thinks about Germany, Graf examines his deceased father's many roles in the West German films of the 1950s and 1960s—roles that had turned him into the representative of the damaged war generation. Faulting the purely verbal in a medium intended to give concrete, visual form to reality, Graf attempts to harness the powers of both verbal and iconic images in the service of identity formation, yet grants the edge to the iconic, as well as to the fictional rather than the factual.
Topic:
Civil Society
Political Geography:
Germany