The Great War changed completely the map of Central Europe. New states were called into being, whose first decade of existence was the period of some of the greatest problems that ever confronted Europe. The Great War dislocated the normal equilibrium of production and consumption, cutting down production and increasing production, thus disorganising industrial life as a whole. The post-war financial experiments of Central Europe which followed were unparalleled in the annals of economic history. Increasing expenditure, unbalanced budgets, and adverse balance of trade, characterise the post-war period. To study the experiments of some of the succession states in the field of 'Economic Nationalism' and to analyse the results achieved, together with the League of Nations action in these matters is the main purpose of this thesis.

This thesis examines the role(s) played by German writers as cultural ambassadors after the First World War, at a time when culture was seen as increasingly important in Germany’s international relations. It focuses on the development and activities of the German branch of the International PEN Club and the international engagement of four writers from across Weimar Germany’s cultural and political spectrum: Hans Friedrich Blunck, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann and Ernst Toller. By exploring the agendas pursued by writers on the international stage and their direct and indirect interactions with state and non-state institutions, the thesis illuminates a spectrum of approaches to cultural diplomacy in the Weimar years. The thesis demonstrates how attempts to use varying conceptions of culture to diverse diplomatic ends were underpinned by manifold understandings of Germany’s position in the European and international orders; illustrates the differing negotiations of the sensitive relationship between culture and politics; and traces a range of expressions of nationalism, internationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism. This study of writers’ contributions to German foreign affairs sheds new light on the selected case studies and on the openness and contingency of the period, bringing new perspectives to bear on the complexities of the cultural politics and ideological landscape of the Weimar Republic.

This thesis analyses European themes in the work of the American painter RB Kitaj. It focuses most closely on the 1960s, a relatively under-researched period of his work, certainly compared with the 1970s and 80s, in part because most of the existing literature follows Kitaj's reading of his own oeuvre. Using canvases from the 1960s as examples, the thesis examines Kitaj's concerns with the history of the European Left prior to World War II. Study of these paintings reveals how, even at this early stage of his career, Kitaj conflated autobiography and history. A comparison of Kitaj's published and draft texts, written during and after these paintings were made, shows him altering their meaning according to his current concerns. This, in turn, shows how his revisions influenced later scholars' readings. Furthermore, due attention is given to two important, though often overlooked, bodies of work from the 1960s: the screenprints and the installation made at Lockheed for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Both reveal a sustained engagement with European themes, such as the Industrial Revolution, Modernism and its legacies, and Jewish history. Whereas Kitaj emphasised the centrality of Judaism to his work throughout the 1970 and 80s, he downplayed his concern with technology and Modernism, although both continued to inform his imagery until well into the 1980s. His shift away from new technology (eg photo-screenprinting) and a Modernist aesthetic, in favour of life drawing, is analysed against contemporary artistic debates in Britain, together with his fascination with the evolving history of the European Left during the 1970s. Kitaj's work reveals a sustained but constantly modulating, at times conflicted, meditation on European history and culture from an American perspective. In the final analysis, however, his engagement with Europe is, perhaps, the result of a spiritual and psychological impulse rooted in his personal and family history.

This thesis offers a new interpretation of the international history of the early period of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. Such a revision is necessary given the recently released material in the national archives of the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and the United States, and in the personal archives of those involved. Furthermore, by adopting a different methodology, made possible by the recent archive material, further new perspectives emerge of the international dimension. Rather than taking a single element of the international history of the Troubles – for example, the ‘Irish dimension’, ‘American dimension’, the Cold War, or European integration – this thesis takes a multidimensional approach analysing the impact of the interactions of each of the international actors. The starting point for this multidimensional analysis is the introduction of internment without trial on 9 August 1971. This was not just a significant event in Northern Ireland, but also had the effect of internationalising the Troubles. Over the months that followed the international dimension developed two distinct spheres of activity – a political sphere and a security sphere. Different combinations of actors interacted in each of these spheres. In addition to the moderate Northern Irish parties, the British and Irish governments participated in the political sphere. The US government eventually ruled itself out of this sphere following the US presidential election in November 1972, but only after it had flirted with intervention. However, interventions by the US Congress’s ‘Irish Caucus’ continued. Meanwhile, in the security sphere, comprehensive Anglo-Irish security cooperation proved impossible to achieve. Instead, Anglo-American and Hiberno-American security cooperation developed – with Dublin eventually exerting as much of an influence on US policy as the UK. However, the US government’s attempts to supress IRA support were seriously restricted by the administration’s unwillingness to pick a fight with the Irish Caucus. The international dimension was an integral component of the peace process that resulted in the establishing of a cross-community power-sharing executive and the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973. Even when this process was brought to an end by a Protestant backlash in May 1974 the principles developed during this period were confirmed and were to be central to future peace initiatives in Northern Ireland, including the Good Friday Agreement.

This thesis examines the effect of the Euro crisis on the construction of European identities in three case study countries- Germany, Ireland and Poland. Combining a social constructivist approach to European identities with the constructivist and discursive institutionalist literature on ideational change and crisis, it investigates the extent to which the crisis constituted a 'critical juncture' for European identity discourses. Through extensive qualitative frame analysis of political and media discourse at key moments of the crisis, it examines how European identities are constructed through the debates about the crisis. The central argument is that the Euro crisis has had little effect on European identities because actors construct the crisis in their respective national contexts. In doing this, they draw on existing identities and ideas which then 'endogenises' the crisis into the existing national discourses. Where identity change is possible, it is subtle rather than a dramatic shift. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the EU has remained completely unified. Because the crisis generally serves to reinforce, rather than challenge, existing identities, attachments to national sovereignty and old national stereotypes have created or reinforced divisions particularly between northern and southern Europe and core and periphery.

This thesis examines the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a co-educational outdoors organisation that claimed to be a youth organisation and a cultural movement active from August 1920 to January 1932. Originally part of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the Kibbo Kift offers rich insight into the interwar period in Britain specifically because it carried forward late Victorian and Edwardian ideology in how it envisioned Britain. Members constructed their own historical narrative, which endeavoured to place the organisation at the heart of British life. The organisation’s internal life revolved around the unique mythology members developed, and the movement aspired to regenerate Britain after the First World War physically and spiritually. This thesis argues Kibbo Kift was a distinctive movement that drew upon its members’ intellectual preoccupations and ideals and inspired its members to create unique cultural artefacts. While the Kibbo Kift was ultimately too politically ambiguous to have lasting political impact on a national scale, examining the organisation offers important insight into intellectual thought and cultural production during the British interwar period. This thesis charts the changes the organisation underwent through its membership and the different trends of intellectual thought brought in by individual members, such as its leader, John Hargrave, brought to the group. It examines the cultural production of the organisation’s unique mythology, which created a distinctive historical narrative. It surveys gender issues within the organisation through the “roof tree”, an experimental family unit, and the group’s increasing anti-feminism. Finally, it considers how Clifford H. Douglas’ economic theory of social credit caused the Kibbo Kift to transform into the Green Shirts Movement for Social Credit and later into the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The present study focuses on emotion discourses in early modern travel books. It attempts a close textual, intertextual, and contextual analysis of several embedded narratives on emotions in three late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel books: Kitāb Nāṣir al-Dīn 'ala 'l-Qawm al-Kāfirīn: Mukhtaṣar Riḥlat al-Shihāb 'ila Liqā´ al-Aḥbāb by Andalusian traveller Ahmed bin Qāsim al-Ḥajarī (1570- c.1641), The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam by an English craftsman, Thomas Dallam (1575-1630), and Seyahâtnâme (The Book of Travels) by Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611-1685). In these travel books, al-Ḥajarī, Dallam, and Evliya narrate their journeys as emotionally protean experiences. They associate emotions with the contexts of their journeys, their volition to travel, and their authorial motives to write about their journeys. They display their emotions in their dreams, humour, and other subjective experiences. Their narratives yield uncommon notions of emotions, namely the emotions of encounter. A love story between a Muslim traveller and a Catholic girl, an English craftsman's anxiety at the court of an Ottoman Sultan, a disgusting meal in a foreign land, are just a few examples of emotionally freighted situations which are unlikely to be found in any genre but a travel book. The close textual analysis aims to identify the role of the writers' cultures in shaping and regulating their discourses on emotions. The intertextual and contextual analysis of these narratives reveals that the meaning and function of these displayed emotions revolve around the traveller's community affiliation, religion, ideology, and other culture-specific discourses and practices such as Sufism, folk medicine, myths, folk traditions, natural and geographical phenomena, cultural scripts, social norms, and power relations. In a nutshell, reading the travellers' discourses on emotions means reading many cultural and historical aspects of the early modern world. To approach discourses on emotions in texts of the past, the present study draws on the theory of culture-construction of emotions. It uses three analytical notions from the fields of language, anthropology and history of emotions: 'emotional communities', 'emotional styles' and 'emotional self-fashioning'. The present study uses a theoretical framework defined by a recent wave of studies on self-narratives as sources for the history and cultural diversity of emotions in the medieval and early modern periods. Within this approach, travel writing is seen as a self-narrative, a communicative act, and a social practice. This approach to emotion discourses in Riḥla, travel journals and Seyahat genres allows us to project the transcultural and entangled history of the early modern Mediterranean, which as much it was a contested frontier between Islam and Christianity, was also a space of religious conversion and hybrid identities, the articulation of diplomacy and cultural exchange, mysticism and religious pluralism. This approach also pinpoints the diverse forms of cosmopolitanism, or rather cosmopolitanisms, in the plural.

This study concerns two women who were religiously active either side of the Great Schism (1378–1417), a period of intensification of the excesses of personal pride and political ambition that divided the western Church and caused distress to devoted, thoughtful laity and clerics alike. Devout laity sought new expressions of piety in these stressful times and through examining the written legacies of two non-enclosed religious women, Caterina Benincasa and Margery Kempe, I explore not only the contemplative/devotional practices that characterise them, but also the clerics upon whom they relied for protection, support and guidance in male-dominated, strife-ridden medieval Europe. The two women, a northern Italian lifelong virgin for Christ and an East Anglian mother of fourteen children, prima facie, appear to have little in common except claimed illiteracy, a diversity of influences and acknowledging Bridget of Sweden as a fundamental inspirational source. However, both of their personal and literary management teams included members of several religious orders and their written productions were mostly dictated to and edited by men. They both negotiated their ecclesiastical acceptance from the position of institutionally inferior women through the exclusively female rôles of mother/sister/daughter in exerting influence over their father/brother/son managers through confronting them with their male self-images. Although the management practices applied in each case were very different in terms of structure and hierarchical level, the women‘s negotiations with the men followed similar lines, albeit through different written media. Caterina‘s negotiating techniques are found in the immediate medium of her letters and they involve persuasion and instruction as she tries to create situations that she can control in furtherance of her objectives. The study includes a selection of twelve letters that I have translated in full and analysed from the perspective of the register of the dialogues, the style and the imagery contained therein. Evidence of Margery Kempe‘s influence over her managers, including her husband, comes solely from the medium of the retrospective narrative of her Book in which she chooses the events that illustrate how she reacts to and manipulates people and situations to her advantage. The clerical managers were responsible for keeping their head-strong charges compliant with ever-changing contemporary views of orthodoxy within parameters negotiated between the women and the institutional church. Although there are clear, identifiable parallels between the managers in their styles and techniques, there are also differences rooted in the managers‘ perceptions of the two women‘s respective contributions to the furtherance of institutional aims. Caterina‘s situation was that of a woman whose institutional support was considered necessary at the highest levels of the Church‘s management structure. In Margery Kempe‘s case the management seemed to use her to develop aspects of their local inter-institutional competition for status and alms in Lynn. Despite this difference in influential level there is the strong probability of personal contact and shared theological academic backgrounds among the clerics that draws the teams together. This study concentrates primarily on comparing and contrasting the subtleties of the negotiations between each woman and her managers, negotiations which are often influenced by the women‘s introduction of the transcendental force of God‘s will as revealed only to them, and secondarily on the possible connections between the managers that link England to Italy, Lynn to Siena and Margery to Caterina. The management techniques revealed are independent of any connections between the managers and there is little by way of common techniques apart from the complexities of reciprocal management and the women‘s exploitation of male conceptions of what is appropriate to themselves (the managers) and to women in the Church.

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The following dissertation reassess previous explanations for the transmission of Byzantine iconography to western material culture that have been classified by the classical canon as being manifestations of a ‘barbarian’ ruler attempting to legitimize their fledgling culture. The tumultuous relationship between the east and the west during the Late Antique period to the middle Byzantine period and the subsequent visual culture that demonstrates cross-cultural exchange comprises the majority of my analysis. I approach the topic in a case study fashion focusing on five rulers: Theodoric, Charlemagne, and the three Ottos. The source material chosen for this dissertation varies as it has been selected based on claims by previous scholarship of demonstrating some level of Byzantine influence. My re-examination of these works includes the application of an interdisciplinary theoretical framework first postulated by Robert Hayden: Competitive Sharing. This theory suggests that material culture displaying syncretism was not a reflection of admiration, but of competition. An implication of this study is that art was an active participant in the relationship between the east and the west, serving as a communicative device, rather than as the more frequently cited passive role of a conduit for iconographical transmission or cultural legitimization.