Independence Movements and Their Aftermath

Independence Movements and Their Aftermath
Author: Jon B. Alterman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2018-11-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1442280816

This volume explores the varied outcomes that self-determination movements around the world have achieved, and in particular seeks to understand what factors promote better outcomes and what factors promote worse ones. Rather than focusing on the metric of achieving independence, the project evaluates the quality of societies after independence, including such elements as economic strength and political resilience, and it analyzes what factors contribute to different outcomes. The study finds that the single most determinative factor in the success of any independence movement is frequently beyond the control of such a movement, often relating to the global and historical contexts in which the movement finds itself. However, a whole host of factors are within the control of such a movement, but movements do not always seek to act on many of them. Activists become so convinced in the justness of the independence cause that they do not focus on actions that would contribute to greater success after independence.

Barcelona, the Left and the Independence Movement in Catalonia

Barcelona, the Left and the Independence Movement in Catalonia
Author: Richard Gillespie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2019-11-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351046853

Created by social movement activists and left-wing parties during years of austerity, Barcelona en Comú, or the Comuns (as they are known in Catalan), won control of the city council of Barcelona in May 2015. The ensuing municipal government gave the city its first ever female mayor in the form of former housing rights campaigner Ada Colau. The Comuns' administration proceeded to undertake ambitious initiatives, attempting to regenerate democracy by changing the relationship between municipal authority and citizen, addressing social inequality issues and seeking to curb the hitherto unbridled tourist expansion in the name of improving the environment for those who live in the Catalan capital. This book examines the extent to which the political project of the Comuns has brought radical change in Barcelona, where it has faced opposition from revolutionary anti-capitalists, traditional Catalan nationalists and independentistas, as well as conservative political and economic forces. It also considers the Comuns' relationship to Podemos and their prospects of growing beyond the city, in the metropolitan area of Barcelona and across Catalonia.

Freedom Time

Freedom Time
Author: Gary Wilder
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2015-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822375796

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.

Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence 1808-1833

Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence 1808-1833
Author: Simon Collier
Publisher: London : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 1967-12-02
Genre: History
ISBN:

This book covers the years from the breakdown of the Spanish Empire in America to the stabilisation of the new republic of Chile. It is a survey of the political ideas and the interplay of ideas and political action during the independence period. Whilst examining the influences making for change in late colonial Chile and the implications of political experiment and instability, much of the text is devoted to a description of the common ideology of the revolution. The author considers that the political theory was based on the notions of the social contract, the sovereignty of the people, representative government, the division of powers and a system of natural rights. It was derived from the liberal thought of the enlightenment and from the doctrines of the North American and French revolutions. But it was a complex of vaguer emotions and attitudes such as utopianism, anti-Spanish feeling, the 'black legend', an incipient nationalism and the idealisation of the Araucanian Indian which gave the revolution its mystique.

The United Nations and Decolonization

The United Nations and Decolonization
Author: Nicole Eggers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 135104401X

Differing interpretations of the history of the United Nations on the one hand conceive of it as an instrument to promote colonial interests while on the other emphasize its influence in facilitating self-determination for dependent territories. The authors in this book explore this dynamic in order to expand our understanding of both the achievements and the limits of international support for the independence of colonized peoples. This book will prove foundational for scholars and students of modern history, international history, and postcolonial history.

Territorial Politics and the Party System in Spain:

Territorial Politics and the Party System in Spain:
Author: Caroline Gray
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000062589

Across Western Europe, the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath not only brought economic havoc but also, in turn, intense political upheaval. Many of the political manifestations of the crisis seen in other Western and especially Southern European countries also hit Spain, where challenger parties caused unprecedented parliamentary fragmentation, resulting in four general elections in under four years from 2015 onwards. Yet Spain, a decentralised state where extensive powers are devolved to 17 regions known as ‘autonomous communities’, also stood out from its neighbours due to the importance of the territorial dimension of politics in shaping the political expression of the crisis. This book explains how and why the territorial dimension of politics contributed to shaping party system continuity and change in Spain in the aftermath of the financial crisis, with a particular focus on party behaviour. The territorial dimension encompasses the demands for ever greater autonomy or even sovereignty coming from certain parties within the historic regions of the Basque Country, Catalonia and, to a lesser extent, Galicia. It also encompasses where these historic regions sit within the broader dynamics of intergovernmental relations across Spain’s 17 autonomous communities in total, and how these dynamics contribute to shaping party strategies and behaviour in Spain. Such features became particularly salient in the aftermath of the financial crisis since this coincided with, and indeed accelerated, the rise of the independence movement in Catalonia.