Typescript. / Bibliography: leaves [459]-494. / Photocopy. / xxi, 494 leaves ; 31 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of History, 1976

This dissertation argues that Catholic social thought was a central component of post-1945 West European reconstruction: it simultaneously provided a vocabulary for a post-fascist order, brought Catholics into coalition with liberals and socialists, and inspired much of the social policy of the new republics. This was, to many, a shocking outcome, as Catholics a few decades earlier had been largely opposed to the democratic Versailles order. Their continent-wide transition to democracy has yet to be convincingly explained. The answer, I argue, should be sought at the level of social thought. Following a number of anthropologists and political scientists, I suggest that modern governance is related far more closely to social theory, and social science, than it is to political theory, narrowly understood. Catholics lacked a genuine political theory, but they did not lack a sociology--and it is the latter that is required to govern a modern state. Following this insight, my research uncovered the forgotten universe of Catholic social science, showing how it was produced in the interwar years and put into practice after 1945. I trace three figures as exemplars of three different regional traditions: Jacques Maritain (France), Waldemar Gurian (Germany), and Eugen Kogon (Austria). Their stories of exile, incarceration, and furious intellectual production are paradigmatic of Europe's tragic century. Each of them began on the authoritarian right wing, suffered at the hands of Nazism, and emerged after 1945 as leading lights of the Christian Democratic culture that remade Western Europe. The dissertation traces their stories in deep context as a way to reconstruct the social-scientific, transnational imagination of interwar Catholicism. This methodology allows us to see how European Catholics, faced with interwar crisis, developed theories of economic growth and political order that were just as sophisticated as anything on offer from socialists or liberals. In the end, it was more influential as well--the European welfare state, after all, was born under Catholic auspices. The research contained in this dissertation draws on research from over a dozen archives and more than seventy periodicals and newspapers. This source base allows for a reconstruction of the transnational network of Catholic knowledge production across, primarily, France, Germany, and Austria, but also into Switzerland, Italy, Iberia, and the Atlantic World more broadly.

This work highlights civic events and celebration as functional components of Belfast, Northern Ireland's ongoing post-conflict regeneration. Exploring the broad networks that fund and organize such events through a material semiotic approach, this dissertation sketches an outline of the process that produces parades, and examines the motivations and intentions behind them. It finds that parades function within a negotiated process of "place-making" to convey idealized visions of a peaceful "New Belfast". In particular the tropes of multiculturalism and European identity are repeated as aspirational ideals for Belfast's regeneration. The parades display, and in doing so reify these ideals as a temporary reality. Longer-term effects of the parades are difficult to determine, but they may potentially change public opinion regarding the social space of the city center, leading to more integrated and liberal use of the city center. In these events, issues central to Belfast's political life--from tourism, physical redevelopment, to European integration--are addressed through carnivalesque play and performance, as the events' producers and participants imagine Belfast's future urban identity.

This dissertation analyzes the works of Yiddish and Hebrew writer Isaac Leib Peretz (1852-1915) during the 1890's. It criticaly engages with the entire range of Peretz's literary output during this period in both languages. It argues that Peretz functioned as a literary agent of the Jewish working class in Eastern Europe which was an ethnic-class fraction that was represented politically by the emerging Jewish Socialist Bund. During this period, Peretz's Yiddish-centric ideology emerged alongside his development as a writer of prose as well as of poetry. Thus he evolved from being a social realist, naturalist, and romantic bilingual politically radical writer into becoming a predominantly Yiddish writer of symbolist drama, folk-tales, and neo-romantic Hasidic stories and poetry during the 20th century. This thesis refutes the long-standing convention in Peretz-scholarship that his interest in new literary styles coinsided with a rejection of revolutionary politics; rather it reflected his ongoing search for new ways of expressing his radicalism.

This dissertation examines the relationship between state failures and state legitimacy in Italy. The study is based on a one-year ethnographic field research in Varese City. The political party Northern League and its followers (Leghisti) has been chosen to observe the state-society relationships. It has been discovered that among others, three factors were instrumental in the process by which the state-society relationships has been deteriorated so as to open the path for an alternative legitimacy claim such as Padanian nationalism. Initially, revelations of political corruption and illegal state practices, failure of the state to address problems related to globalization such as global economic integration and uncontrolled immigration were instrumental. Later, struggle of hegemony and subjugation between the League and the state has been another important cause for deteriorated relationships. This study also provides qualitative data on the processes by which those deteriorated relationships and state failures contributed the rise of xenophobia and suggests that this failures of the state coupled with the problems brought about by the uncontrolled immigration and global economic expansion is likely to open a path for criminalization of both immigrants and local people.

This dissertation is about holes. It begins by analyzing the proverbial “hole in the fence” at late-Soviet enterprises: the way that workers pragmatically employed the planned economy's distribution rules by actions that were both morally commendable and questionably legal. It then analyzes the omission of this hole in perestroika economic analysis, which devoted surprisingly little attention to enterprises' central role in providing welfare and exerting social control, or to employees' pragmatic employment of the enterprises' rules. This analytic hole is compounded by a historiographic one: by the omission of the post-1956 omission of Stalin's name from public mention. Framing the perestroika reforms against “Stalinism,” perestroika-era texts typically trace the start of de-Stalinization to Khrushchev's “Cult of Personality” speech, after which Stalin's name disappeared from textbooks; rather than to the post-1953 reforms that fundamentally restructured labor, economic and punitive institutions to create characteristically late-Soviet methods of retaining and motivating labor: including the widespread disciplinary lenience that allowed workers to pragmatically employ enterprise rules. Precluded by this historiography from seeing how late-Soviet institutions had evolved in the post-Stalin absence of forced labor laws and how they practically functioned, popular and expert analysis instead tended to analyze citizens' relationships to the state in subjective terms: as a question of stagnant mindsets and loss of faith. Defined by its non-complicit denouncement of a retrospectively posited “Stalinist” state, the subject position taken by this analysis precluded speakers from seeing the presence behind all these holes: from seeing how they had practically constructed themselves and the late-Soviet system by pursuing their own economic, social and political goals through its institutions. The perestroika reform laws that were justified by this analysis intended to “speed up” society by intervening in workers' and citizens' feelings of ownership and responsibility. But, lacking a practical understanding of how late-Soviet institutions functioned, they instead quickly crashed the economy.

How is the future constituted as an object of knowledge, activity, and concern in the present? This dissertation poses this question in contemporary Greece, where long-unfolding processes of European integration and more recent experiences of acute crisis have made preoccupation with the future a central feature of everyday social life. To answer the question, the dissertation examines one prominent frame for thinking about and acting upon the future in Greece today—namely, practices and discourses oriented around the economy. The dissertation presents the findings of thirty months of ethnographic study of lay and expert activity ranging from economists running macroeconomic models and policy makers devising national taxation schemes to activists operating alternative distribution networks and pensioners visiting the bank. The account moves through three orders of inquiry. First, it traces how economic practices and discourses constitute the future as an object in the present and describes the contours of this future. Second, it demonstrates how the economy becomes a routine and legitimate frame for thinking about and acting on the future in the present. Third, it shows how the economy’s work on the future shapes everyday understandings and experiences of the economy and the nation. Ultimately, the dissertation not only addresses the initial question of how the future is constituted in the present, but also gives an account of how the future operates as a key site for establishing and contesting claims to knowledge, legitimacy, and belonging in this present.

Thesis (B.A.Hons. 1971) from the Dept. of History, University of Adelaide, 1971.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Iowa, 2007. / Thesis supervisors: Florence E. Babb, Rudolf Colloredo-Mansfield. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 252-267).

I examine the origins of the anti-totalitarian collective memory pervading Central and Eastern Europe by tracking the genesis and development of the region’s ubiquitous and state-sponsored memory institutes. I deploy field analysis, prosopography and in-depth interviews to reveal how these hybrid institutes generate a potent anti-communist symbolic repertoire by overseeing alliances and exchanges across political, historiographic and Eurocratic fields. Memory institutes ensure this hegemony fundamentally via two mechanisms: The scientific validation of their activities by way of scholarly co-optation, and its regional legitimation through incursions into European arenas. I conclude that memory institutes are ultimately a key element of post-communist political competition, responsible for creating a durable symbolic advantage for the right’s conservative identity politics.