Thesis (M.S.)--Middle East Technical University, 2004. / Keywords: NGOs, World Politics, Pressure / Lobby Groups, TÜSİAD.

This thesis consists of a transcript and edition of Fynes Moryson's unpublished Itinerary c.1617 - 1625, with introduction, text, annotations, bibliography and index. Moryson was a gentleman traveller whose accounts of journeys undertaken in the 1590s across much of Europe as far as the Holy Land in the Ottoman Empire provide contemporary evidence of secular and religious institutions, ceremonies, customs, manners, and national characteristics. The first part of Moryson's Itinerary was published in 1617. Some of the second part was transcribed in 1903 by Charles Hughes as Shakespeare's Europe, but this is the first transcript and edition of the whole manuscript. The work has involved investigation of the historical, classical and geographical sources available to Moryson, of Elizabethan secretary hand, and of travel writing as a form of primitive anthropology. Moryson emerges as a subjective observer full of the political and religious preconceptions of the age, capable of acute insight but often unsystematic and unscientific in the assembly and presentation of his information.

This thesis investigates antifascism and resistance to Nazi occupation in Luxembourg, France, Belgium and Germany. This analysis is done from a transnational perspective. Luxembourg is at the centre of the study, but the adjoining regions of its neighbouring countries which, together with the Grand Duchy, form the ‘Grande Région’, will be analysed in detail as well. Moreover, the post-war years are included in this study to examine the impact of the resistance after the war. While comparative and transnational studies of this subject have been attempted before, this will be the first time Luxembourg has been not only included in such a study but is at the centre of one. Moreover, the inclusion of the pre- and post-war eras will add to the understanding of the continuity of the resistance, which has been depicted as an isolated movement which suddenly occurred in 1940 and disappeared in 1945. The thesis is divided into three major parts. The first part covers the formation of nationhood in Luxembourg, and the transnational connections between the Grand Duchy and its neighbours until 1918. It looks at the importance of antifascism in Luxembourg from 1922 until 1939, by focusing on the Communist Party of Luxembourg, and on Italian immigrant communities. The second part deals with national experiences of occupation in Luxembourg, Belgium and France and with regional commonalities, and focuses on transnational connections within the resistance. The third part of the thesis contains the analysis of the postwar era, and of the resistance’s impact on it. It investigates the political inheritance of the resistance as well as the post-war malaise in the countries in questions, to then zoom in on Luxembourg for a detailed analysis of the depiction of transnational and national resistance in the media in the post-war years.

Operating at the theoretical boundary between Political Economy, International Relations and Regional European Integration Studies, this Doctoral thesis explores how the ‘top‐down' institutional redesign of the expanding European polity has worked to produce the necessary extra‐market (social and political) support structures for the rise of European financial capital, while profoundly reshaping the dynamics of accumulation and social reproduction on the European continent. As such, this work links the processes of deepening and widening European integration to the wider sphere of global financial integration and finance‐led restructuring, a lacuna in the existing literature. Concretely, I argued that finance, the preeminent globalising force rather than a tertiary activity, has been at the centre of European integration project. Over the past decade in particular, the transformations in the European financial sector, the so‐called financialisation of Europe, while seemingly driven by imperatives arising from the exigencies of economic competition, should be understood primarily as a political‐economic process deeply embedded in a geopolitical rivalry. Crucially, Europe's engagement, while embedded in a global financial system, is distinct. European finance proceeds on the basis of its institutional specificity. Here history, tradition, culture, and geopolitical context, and therefore in turn, specifically European institutions, define the mechanisms through which the financialisation of the European space has unfolded. From this standpoint, the thesis also explores the constitutive role played by Western European financial institutions in the financial integration of the Central European new member states and the consequent ideological and institutional reconfiguration of Europe's Eastern post‐communist periphery in line with the demands of a liberal (financialised) market democracy. In doing so, the thesis also poses a challenge to the dominancy of a‐historic and depoliticized (indeed teleological) narratives of capitalist state formation in post‐communist Central Europe, which ultimately reduces post‐communist transformations to a straightforward and technical transition towards a predefined capitalist future.

The cult of St Patrick in the medieval period has been largely neglected in modern scholarship, which has predominantly tended to favour analysis of the saint’s own fifth-century writings; the troublesome area of fixing exact dates for his fifth-century career and context; the seventh-century Patrician vitae in the context of political rivalries between Armagh, Kildare and Iona; and Patrick’s status as an icon of modern Irish identity. My thesis represents the first full-length study of Patrick’s relic cult between the seventh and the late twelfth centuries by primarily concentrating on the evidence from his various Latin and Irish Lives belonging to this period. Each of the Lives of Patrick provide us a lens through which we can observe a vibrant and diverse array of Patrician relics during our period, many of which survive only in these texts; however, these Lives also act like mirrors of the historical realities in which they were conceived. By studying the Lives over a broad chronological period we gain invaluable information on several key aspects: why authors have chosen or not to retain or omit certain stories featuring relics; whether the numerous and various miracles and functions that these relics perform in the narratives indicate the type of role they had in and their value to wider society; if there is a growth in the number of Patrician relics in the texts at any given point in our period. By placing these aspects in their historical contexts, this thesis musters a better understanding of the broader ecclesiastical and secular political fortunes in Ireland and elsewhere that helped shape the development of Patrick’s cult as we know of it today.

Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) was an Italian writer who was one of the first to make a living from the printing press. As the 'scourge of princes' he was notorious across Europe for his acerbic wit. However after his death his fame sank when his entire works were placed on the Papal Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. In the century that followed Aretino was a controversial figure, associated with pornography and atheism in the popular imagination and, like Machiavelli, became synonymous with Italian vice in the minds of foreign readers. Despite the complex history of his posthumous reputation abroad, surprisingly little research has been done on the topic. Instead we are left with a few disconnected articles which tend to focus on specific instances of Aretino's works being used as sources for later writers. This thesis therefore provides the first unified approach to examining Aretino's posthumous reputation in the early modern period. It does so by treating his afterlife not as a finished product to be referred to by later readers, but uncovers the processes by which Aretino's reputation mutated through the mediation of editors, translators, writers, readers, engravers and purveyors of erotic art. This thesis is divided into three main phases of Aretino's afterlife, which were previously compressed into a simple 'cause and effect' narrative of Aretino's work being censored in 1559 and his reputation immediately suffering because of it. In the first phase, Aretino's writing is still positively received by editors in England and the Low Countries attempting to restore his work back to their pre-censored state, and by English writers who see Aretino as an extemporal wit and a model for their growing professional aspirations. In the second phase, Aretino's reputation for bawdry and atheism is beginning to impact the way in which he is presented to later readers in Spain, the Low Countries, England, Germany and France, as translators and commentators begin to reframe his writing along newly enforced moral lines. In the third phase, two pornographic works with which Aretino initially had only a tangential relationship are misattributed to him and multiple images and texts from Italy, the Low Countries, England, and France are reproduced as 'Aretine' products. While the majority of the literary references to Aretino in this thesis are to English writers, as this overview makes clear this is not a traditional bilateral comparative study of cultural exchange between Italy and England. Instead it places the English reception of Aretino within an European context, with the Low Countries proving to be unexpectedly prominent in the circulation of his work, even though up till now this connection has never been studied by critics outside of the Netherlands.

Between 1939 and 1944 the underground forces of the Polish Government-in-Exile created an underground army in the Lublin region, which, at its height, numbered 60,000 men. The underground Army was created in order to facilitate the reestablishment of an independent Poland. The Army that was created, the AK, was in effect, an alliance organisation comprising, to varying degrees, members of all pro-independence underground groups. It was, in Lublin, to always suffer from internal stresses and strains, which were exaggerated by the actions of the region’s occupiers. These strains were highlighted and exploited by the ‘liberating’ Red Army. From the moment that they set foot in the province in July 1944, the forces of the Soviet Union aimed to put into place a Polish regime that was compliant and communist. The most interesting fact about the operation mounted by the AK to liberate Lublin province from the Germans, lies in the regional command’s reaction to both their orders and the demands made of them by the incoming Soviets. The regional commander’s decision in July 1944 to order his forces to hand in their weapons and disperse meant that the human stock of the underground would remain, that it would survive the first wave of NKVD arrests. This meant that, despite the massive setback of the post liberation era, a core, armed, and well structured underground still existed. What destroyed this attempt to preserve the AK in Lublin was the halting of the eastern front for five months. This meant that 2.2 million Soviets were operating in and around Lublin whilst the AK central command was fighting to liberate Warsaw. The halting of the front, therefore, was to hasten the fate of those in the underground, both in the capital and to the east. Ultimately it was the mass repression in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising that fatally weakened the Lublin underground as an organised, coherent entity. In many senses the crucial period for the AK in Lublin was the one from July until November 1944. The alliance of the underground in the area had been an often-difficult one but after months of silence from London, and the failure of the Warsaw Uprising and the Moscow talks, this alliance began to collapse. Whilst the framework of the underground had been almost destroyed by the winter of 1944-1945, crucially a framework of resistance had survived the NKVD’s concerted attempts to destroy it totally. The importance of this framework was clearly shown after the Red Army restarted its attack at the heart of the Third Reich in January 1945, removing the vast majority of troops from the region. The second underground was much more disjointed in its nature with weaker command structures. Yet because a framework was in place, because some respected officers and their men had survived the winter of 1944-45, the underground was to remain more organised in Lublin than in most other areas of Poland. Whilst the anti-communist underground was ultimately defeated, in Lublin it was to remain a sizeable threat to the communist regime until 1947.

The break-up of Yugoslavia, and the ensuing wars, dominated the British foreign policy agenda for the first half of the 1990s. The way in which the British Government reacted to the series of crises was a matter of ongoing scrutiny by those within and outside of Parliament. The complex nature of the conflicts, in the early years of the post Cold War world, meant that responses by British politicians were in no way based on traditional ideological divisions, that is, M.P.s did not form neat, homogenous groups reflecting the three political currents. The Labour Party was no exception to this rule. The thesis is a study of the way in which politicians of the Labour Party responded to the break-up of Yugoslavia, and the way its M.P.s reacted to events in the region, and to the actions of the British Government. With close reference to Parliamentary debates as recorded in Hansard, the thesis shows the many and complex ways in which politicians from one British political party responded to a foreign policy episode. What is demonstrated is that a number of factors influenced the opinions of the politicians. One would expect to find some level of front and back bench division. However, what is apparent is much more complex. Whilst, in general, the Shadow Cabinet mirrored the responses of their Parliamentary opponents, of more interest is the way in which the back bench politicians contributed to debates. Some M.P.s followed the example of their senior colleagues, whereas others took totally different positions. However, the motivations for these opinions varied. It is not possible to offer a simple, generalised reading of the responses that were taken by members of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Contributions to debates were influenced by a variety of features: namely, the way in which an individual viewed an international institution such as the United Nations, NATO and the European Union; the attitude that they took towards military intervention; and finally, the way in which the events of the Second World War informed their position on a contemporary conflict. The thesis adds to the research undertaken by scholars such as Brendan Simms and Mark Phythian. Through close reference to debates in Hansard, this work offers the opportunity to gain a much more detailed understanding of the responses of one British political party to one episode in international relations.

Cultural identity is an issue that has concerned Portuguese artistic thought in a subliminal way ever since the end of the XIX century, with influences in architecture. Raul Lino, at the beginning of the last Century, was one of those who tried in a conscious manner, to tackle this problem both at the practical and theoretical level. Nevertheless, he never lived to see the real meaning of his proposal fully understood, not even after the retrospective of his work in the 1970 Exhibition in Lisbon. The intention behind this "Letter" is to give continuity to the perspective first formulated by him, starting from the analysis of one of the most significant accomplishments in the history of the Portuguese architecture, the INQUERITO into vernacular architecture. Having guaranteed the importance of cultural identity versus architecture as the driving force of the research, via the testimonies given by a host of relevant personalities in Portuguese cultural life, and evaluated the antecedents and convergences of the identity issue, the research field was defined as well as the methodology. This is based on a qualitative model which rendered the investigation viable, enabling the echoes of the INQUERITO to be appreciated in the architecture of the 1960s. The INQUERITO is therefore the subject of analysis and evaluation, as an instrument of research into the unique Portuguese vernacular architecture. The erudite architecture of its "protagonists" is also evaluated using similar criteria to assess the concerns with identity issue, mostly of a qualitative nature, as a corollary to the sensitivity side of the same issue. Finally, the importance of the identity perspective gave rise to an attempt at projecting the findings onto the teaching of architecture, so as to improve on the necessary humanization of relationships between real places and all their actors.

This thesis analyses the gendered choices made by bourgeois French women as creators and consumers of art, décor, fashion and feminism during the Third French Republic 1870-1914. Specifically, it examines the extent of female agency and individuality in fashioning a self-image, and how this issue relates to the limitations on women’s exercise of professional and political choice. The first of three core chapters (Chapter 2) establishes that women were able to construct a self-image as a creator and/or consumer of art, décor and fashion but this ability was limited by both the gendered discourses inherent in the French art world and, more widely, by the ideals of womanhood prescribed by bourgeois social mores. Subsequently, the complex and potentially confusing nature of the conflicting textual and visual images that bourgeois French women were exposed to as creators and consumers is discussed in Chapter 3, and exposes the many tensions and contradictions in their aesthetic roles. Finally, the correlation between female agency, aesthetics, and participation in the feminist movement is examined in Chapter 4 leading to the eventual conclusion that an increasing emphasis on physical appearance and aestheticism meant that few French women chose to fully discard domesticity and traditional notions of femininity in favour of a career and/or feminism. Instead, many gravitated towards less radical and publicly visible forms of feminist action whilst others renounced feminism entirely. By illustrating the importance of aesthetics in the personal, professional and political lives of bourgeois French women, this thesis brings to the discipline an ability to interconnect the study of cultural representations with more detailed evidence from women’s everyday lives. Furthermore, it will contribute to the history of female agency, individuality and political power by providing a richer, more informed picture of just how women in the Third Republic were shaped by aesthetics.