Do the transatlantic relations have a future after the Iraq crisis and what will they look like? This question will be discussed in this and the next issue of WeltTrends.<br> For this debate, Thomas Risse, Chair of International Relation at the Freie Universität Berlin, provides the initial input. Risse focuses on controversial issues inside of Europe, the outcome of which will be decisive for the future of the transatlantic relationship. Will the European consensus once constituted by the commitment to international law and multilateralism persist? What is the European position regarding democracy and human rights in the Middle East? Will Europe develop a strategy to cope with the new kind of threats posed by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of dictators or terrorists? Risse´s article has provoked a debate inside the German academic community, whose contributions will be published in the next issue of WeltTrends.

This issue of WeltTrends features the debate about the future of the transatlantic relationship and world order after the Iraq war. It was started by Thomas Risse with his article in the previous edition. Thomas Risse elaborated on three main points of contention between the United States and Europe: the role of international law and multilateralism, democracy and human rights, and the strategy towards new security threats. <br>Most of the scholars, contributing to the debate in this issue agree with Risse in that there is no alternative to the transatlantic partnership and offer possible paths towards its renewal. The debate will be continued with additional comments and a rebuttal by Thomas Risse in the next Winter issue.

In recent years, the relationship between religion and Enlightenment, traditionally cast in opposition to one another, has received increasing reconsideration. Scholars now recognise that even orthodox religion played a central role within the Enlightenment project. This development has marked a paradigm shift in Atlantic world and Enlightenment historiography. However, while the relationship between religion and Enlightenment has been greatly clarified, there remain major gaps in our understanding of the nature and parameters of this relationship. This thesis contributes to the understanding of religion’s function within Enlightenment thought and practice through a case study of the colonial missionary work of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). Using primary sources such as institutional records, sermons, journals, diaries and letters, it examines evangelism within the framework of the Enlightenment. The study demonstrates first how both the founders of the SSPCK and the Society’s most fervent advocates of missionary work in the colonies were simultaneously the foremost leaders of the British and American Enlightenment. It then traces the implications of this religious Enlightenment dynamic, illuminating not only the ambitions of the Society’s leadership but also certain contours of intimate encounters between Native Americans, Native Christians and white missionaries. As the SSPCK’s missionary endeavours demonstrate, the relationship between evangelism and Enlightenment not only changed all individuals and institutions involved. It also transformed the very landscape of British Protestant religion. This assessment points to the overarching conclusion that the Enlightenment shaped the very foundation of modern missions. In the process, however, British Atlantic Protestants of many different varieties wove the discourse of the Enlightenment into the tapestry of their understanding of evangelism as a primary means of identity formation, both personally and institutionally. Historiographically, this research forces a reexamination of the nuances of the religious Enlightenment. It also problematizes the static (albeit dominant) interpretation of evangelicalism by observing its emergence in light of the broader conditions of British Atlantic Protestantism.

For centuries, statesmen have engaged in personal encounters and correspondences with their political counterparts abroad and thereby exercised what can be called ‘personal diplomacy’ with the aim of influencing the other’s foreign policy. By tracing the use of this strategy in the history of the transatlantic relations between Germany and the United States of America from WWII to the present day, this research aims to analyze the applicability of the concept in this particular bilateral relationship and highlight the successes and failures of different statesmen’s attempts at exerting several types of power. To do so, Raven and French’s so-called ‘Power/Interaction Model of Interpersonal Influence’ is applied to the five case studies, which are the personal relationships between American presidents or secretaries of state and German chancellors or foreign ministers, namely Adenauer and Dulles, Ford and Kissinger, Kohl, Reagan and Bush Senior, Schröder and Bush Junior and Merkel and Obama. What transpires from the examination of their friendships or enmities is that personal relationships do indeed have an impact on statesmen’s political decisions in the German-American relationship, though, whether this influence has been essential or minor differs from case to case. Be that as it may, by presenting the numerous historical instances in which personal diplomacy can be said to have taken place and thereby demonstrating that there exists a trend, this thesis arrives at the verdict that personal diplomacy is a considerable factor in the two countries’ relations and one that demands attention if the scholarly discourse seeks to gain a full understanding of international political processes.

Modernism often reveled in the loss of control, the permeation of personal boundaries, the introduction of ambiguity, that evocation of the senses brings about. It strove to loosen the structures and categories culture inscribes. In this dissertation, I argue that food scenes constitute the crux of many pivotal moments in Modernist fiction and express a philosophy of the human subject. Modernists argue that, in eating, a person takes the outside world into him or herself. The senses that precede, imbue and follow eating threaten and transcend the integrity of the subject. I argue that by foregrounding such moments, Modernists posited a phenomenological view of subjectivity, one which can best be illuminated by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Guided by his theory of intersubjectivity, I explore the phenomenological presentation of particular sensual encounters with food in the work of Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Willa Cather. I show how characters, in their encounters with sensual otherness, feel themselves overcome in poignant moments of ecstasy, disgust, or revelation of self-constitution through the alimentary. I also argue that Modernist fiction does not only display Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, but also nuances his timeless and placeless presentation of the encounter between a universal subject and any object, by considering the sensual eating experience within various historical food conditions, such as the explosion of the canned food industry and the gradual dissolution of the formal meal, and from various subject positions, based on gender, ethnicity or relative political empowerment. In engaging phenomenology, my project deviates from the long tradition in scholarship of considering symbolic and structural meanings to the occlusion of sense. In each eating scene I explore I consider how gustatory, haptic, and aromatic properties of food objects--such as liquidness, sweetness, bloodiness and lightness--intervene in more cerebral human relations. Fundamental to the fascinating Modernist depictions of food and eating, is the idea that the senses have an undeniable impact on human affairs in their own right.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1907 novel, The Shuttle, is an important contribution to turn-of-the-century transatlantic literature because it offers a unifying perspective on Anglo-American relations. Rather than a conventional emphasis on the problematic tensions between the U.S. and Britain, Burnett tells a second story of complementary national traits that highlights the dynamic aspect of transatlantic relations and affords each nation a share of their Anglophone heritage. Burnett employs transatlantic travel to advance her notion of a common heritage. As a tool for understanding the narrative logic of The Shuttle, Michel de Certeau's theory of narrative space explains how Burnett uses movement to write a new transatlantic story; featuring steam-driven travel in the novel marks a new phase in the transatlantic relationship. Burnett's solution of a joint Anglo Atlantic culture expressed through the marriage plot makes The Shuttle a progressive novel within the transatlantic tradition. Whereas many nineteenth-century writers emphasized a contentious Anglo-American legacy, Burnett imagines the grounds for a new history. She joins these transatlantic-oriented authors, but challenges and revises the historical narrative to reflect a more complementary relationship that may develop into a hybrid culture of its own.

“On the Margins: Steady Sellers and the Problem of Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America,” reimagines the trans-Atlantic history of the novel by attending to the importance of cheaply printed canonical books. I demonstrate that some of the most lasting “steady sellers” in literary history—John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote —owe their fame and endurance to cheap trans-Atlantic abridgments and the poor, Black, female, juvenile and otherwise marginalized readers whose growing demand kept them steadily in print. From chapbook abridgments of Robinson Crusoe pitched to working class readers, to toy book adaptations of The Pilgrim’s Progress for young girls, to illustrated, third-person, single volume adaptations of Pamela that subtly reorient the narrative toward questions of interracial sexual violence, and Jacksonian-era political cartoons satirizing Don Quixote, examples and invocations of these stories in early U.S. print culture suggest that the novel’s literary and material coherence was being vigorously renegotiated against the backdrop of an increasingly diverse print marketplace. We see this conflict most clearly in many of the defining American literary works of the nineteenth-century, including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World(1850), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884). Each of these works dramatizes the divergent interpretations present in the print histories of steady sellers in ways that center the experiences of marginalized readers. In bringing together the uneven circulation histories of steady sellers and the formation of U.S. literary culture, this project aims to challenge critical orthodoxies about the rise of the novel and acknowledge the vital role that poor, female, Black, and juvenile readers played in the formation, negotiation, and contestation of literary canons. / 2024-11-03T00:00:00Z

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Yes / As the EU and UK negotiate a new relationship, this paper explores the welfare implications of this policy change and its interaction with major trade policy initiatives. We evaluate five Brexit scenarios, based on different assumptions regarding Brexit, TTIP and various free trade deals the UK may attempt to broker with the US or Commonwealth countries. We also consider the dynamics of welfare changes over a period of two decades. Our estimates suggest that the impact of Brexit is negative in all policy scenarios, with lower welfare losses under a soft Brexit scenario. The losses are exacerbated if TTIP comes into force, demonstrating the benefits of being a member of a large trade bloc. However, they occur gradually and can be partially compensated by signing new free trade agreements. To further minimise losses, the UK should avoid a hard Brexit.