Contemporary History

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of cost escalation in transportation infrastructure projects. Based on a sample of 258 transportation infrastructure projects worth US$90 billion and representing different project types, geographical regions, and historical periods, it is found with overwhelming statistical significance that the cost estimates used to decide whether such projects should be built are highly and systematically misleading. Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying. The policy implications are clear: legislators, administrators, investors, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust cost estimates and cost-benefit analyses produced by project promoters and their analysts.

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of traffic forecasts in transportation infrastructure projects. The sample used is the largest of its kind, covering 210 projects in 14 nations worth U.S.$59 billion. The study shows with very high statistical significance that forecasters generally do a poor job of estimating the demand for transportation infrastructure projects. For 9 out of 10 rail projects, passenger forecasts are overestimated; the average overestimation is 106%. For half of all road projects, the difference between actual and forecasted traffic is more than ±20%. The result is substantial financial risks, which are typically ignored or downplayed by planners and decision makers to the detriment of social and economic welfare. Our data also show that forecasts have not become more accurate over the 30-year period studied, despite claims to the contrary by forecasters. The causes of inaccuracy in forecasts are different for rail and road projects, with political causes playing a larger role for rail than for road. The cure is transparency, accountability, and new forecasting methods. The challenge is to change the governance structures for forecasting and project development. Our article shows how planners may help achieve this.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

This paper focuses on problems and their causes and cures in policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects. First, it identifies as the main problem in major infrastructure developments pervasive misinformation about the costs, benefits, and risks involved. A consequence of misinformation is cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and waste. Second, it explores the causes of misinformation and finds that political-economic explanations best account for the available evidence: planners and promoters deliberately misrepresent costs, benefits, and risks in order to increase the likelihood that it is their projects, and not those of their competition, that gain approval and funding. This results in the ‘survival of the unfittest’, in which often it is not the best projects that are built, but the most misrepresented ones. Finally, it presents measures for reforming policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects with a focus on better planning methods and changed governance structures, the latter being more important.

A major source of risk in project management is inaccurate forecasts of project costs, demand, and other impacts. The paper presents a promising new approach to mitigating such risk, based on theories of decision making under uncertainty which won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics. First, the paper documents inaccuracy and risk in project management. Second, it explains inaccuracy in terms of optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Third, the theoretical basis is presented for a promising new method called "reference class forecasting," which achieves accuracy by basing forecasts on actual performance in a reference class of comparable projects and thereby bypassing both optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Fourth, the paper presents the first instance of practical reference class forecasting, which concerns cost forecasts for large transportation infrastructure projects. Finally, potentials for and barriers to reference class forecasting are assessed.

"Over budget, over time, over and over again" appears to be an appropriate slogan for large, complex infrastructure projects. This article explains why cost, benefits, and time forecasts for such projects are systematically over-optimistic in the planning phase. The underlying reasons for forecasting errors are grouped into three categories: delusions or honest mistakes; deceptions or strategic manipulation of information or processes; or bad luck. Delusion and deception have each been addressed in the management literature before, but here they are jointly considered for the first time. They are specifically applied to infrastructure problems in a manner that allows both academics and practitioners to understand and implement the suggested corrective procedures. The article provides a framework for analyzing the relative explanatory power of delusion and deception. It also suggests a simplified framework for analyzing the complex principal-agent relationships that are involved in the approval and construction of large infrastructure projects, which can be used to improve forecasts. Finally, the article illustrates reference class forecasting, an outside view de-biasing technique that has proven successful in overcoming both delusion and deception in private and public investment decisions.

Scholars on migration increasingly rely on the concept of migration regime to capture the relation between mobility, regulation and discourse. Depending on authors' research interests, political goals and disciplinarity, the meaning of the term differs widely. This undifferentiated usage undermines the approach's potential to analyze the complexities that shape migration. Yet, such practical shortcomings do not outweigh the promises and potential the term offers to migration research. In two steps, this article aims to facilitate the ongoing debate. First we present a much required genealogy of the term from its initial meaning in the early 20th century up to today's array of dissimilar applications. We identify differences and, maybe more importantly, a set of similarities which shape the core of those diverse usages. Based on this overview, the second step charts out a layered and structurated approach to migration regime as an analytical concept and attempts to draw some outlines for interdiscipli-nary applicability. In order to develop a systematic approach to the interrelated practices which constitute the migration regime, our concluding methodolo-gical suggestions builds on questions of power relations and agency within a scalable migration regime.

The Supplementary Green Book Guidance on Optimism Bias (HM Treasury 2003) with reference to the Review of Large Public Procurement in the UK (Mott MacDonald 2002) notes that there is a demonstrated, systematic, tendency for project appraisers to be overly optimistic and that to redress this tendency appraisers should make explicit, empirically based adjustments to the estimates of a project’s costs, benefits, and duration. HM Treasury recommends that these adjustments be based on data from past projects or similar projects elsewhere, and adjusted for the unique characteristics of the project in hand. In the absence of a more specific evidence base, HM Treasury has encouraged departments to collect data to inform future estimates of optimism, and in the meantime use the best available data. In response to this, the Department for Transport (henceforth DfT), has contracted Bent Flyvbjerg in association with COWI to undertake the consultancy assignment "Procedures for dealing with Optimism Bias in Transport Planning". The present Guidance Document is the result of this assignment.

Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has empha-
sized war-related factors (such as territorial control or the characteristics of armed groups) over political ones (such as ideological polarization or prewar political competition). Having distinguished between irregular and conventional civil wars and between direct and indirect violence, I theorize on the determinants of direct violence in conventional civil wars. I introduce a new data set of all 1,062 municipalities of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and I show that the degree of direct violence against civilians at the municipal level goes up where prewar electoral competition between rival political factions approaches parity. I also show that, following the first round of violence, war-related factors gain explanatory relevance. In particular, there is a clear endogenous trend whereby subsequent levels of violence are highly correlated
with initial levels of violence. In short, the paper demonstrates that an
understanding of the determinants of violence requires a theory combining the effect of political cleavages and wartime dynamics.

2008. 352 pp. r150.00 (hardcover). This volume is intended to explain why major investment projects (the so-called mega-projects) often are not completed on time and cost more than originally budgeted. Drawing from experiences of European and North American countries, the book also suggests ways to avoid such failures. Although the topic is rather specific, the book is worth reading for both experts and nonexperts as infrastructure development continues to be a major key to economic expansion across the globe.g row_486 380.. 408 For those who only have a vague idea of what a mega-project is, the book begins by introducing the topic and reviewing the most important recent literature. The first part of the volume, then, provides numerous insights on the complexity of mega-projects, starting from the large number of reasons why mega-projects might fail. For example, the project might be "underdesigned," thus less costly but less robust to unforeseen developments, or it might be "overdesigned," when a large number of weaknesses and possible problems are considered in advance, and solutions are evaluated before the problem actually occurs. Overdesigned projects are more robust, less likely to fail, but are much more costly. The project might involve the use of innovative technologies that have never been applied to a similar context, and that involve more uncertain implementation costs and results. Most projects have an impact on the environment and might face opposition for example from environmentalist groups. If representative of these groups have not been directly involved in the design of the project, they might try to stop it, thus causing delays and increasing costs. Finally, because of incorrect predictions of 380 GROWTH AND CHANGE, JUNE 2009

The following bibliography originated from the work carried out for the contribution “Ein fruchtbarer Gärungsprozess? - Rechtsgeschichtswissenschaft in der Berliner Republik“, (A Fruitful Fermentation Process? - Scholarship in Legal History in the Berlin Republic), in: Thomas Duve/Stefan Ruppert, Rechtswissenschaft in der Berliner Republik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (to be published January 2018). In the contribution to this volume, only the authors' surname and date of publication (of the respective title) are listed. The works referenced in the footnotes are also included in the bibliography.
The bibliography makes no claim to being exhaustive. It contains - within the scope of the article (see remark 3) - a selection of significant publications by those who went on to receive legal historical university chairs in the German-speaking countries in the late 1970s and 1980s, in particular, monographs; the published results of important joint endeavours, including larger third-party-funded projects; the academic qualification theses of legal historians who received professorships in the German-speaking countries after 1990.
Note: Downloadable document is in German.

Risk, including economic risk, is increasingly a concern for public policy and management. The possibility of dealing effectively with risk is hampered, however, by lack of a sound empirical basis for risk assessment and management. This article demonstrates the general point for cost and demand risks in urban rail projects. The article presents empirical evidence that allow valid economic risk assessment and management of urban rail projects, including benchmarking of individual or groups of projects. Benchmarking of the Copenhagen Metro is presented as a case in point. The approach developed is proposed as a model for other types of policies and projects in order to improve economic and financial risk assessment and management in policy and planning.

This paper explores how theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may be used to conduct quality control and due diligence in project management. First, a much-neglected issue in project management is identified, namely that the front-end estimates of costs and benefits – used in the business cases, cost-benefit analyses, and social and environmental impact assessments that typically support decisions on projects – are typically significantly different from actual ex post costs and benefits, and are therefore poor predictors of the actual value and viability of projects. Second, it is discussed how Kahneman and Tversky’s theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may help explain and remedy this situation through quality control of decisions. Third, it is described what quality control and due diligence are in the context of project management, and an eight-step procedure is outlined for due diligence based on the outside view. Fourth, the procedure is tested on a real-life, multibillion-dollar project, organized as a public-private partnership. Finally, Akerlof and Shiller’s recent discussion in economics of “firing the forecaster” is discussed together with its relevance to project management. In sum, the paper demonstrates the need, the theoretical basis, a practical methodology, and a real-life example for how to de-bias project management using quality control and due diligence based on the outside view.

This chapter is a first step towards a comparative history of child adoption law and practices in Western Europe since child adoption became legal in Germany (1900), Sweden (1917), France (1923), England and Wales (1927) and Italy (1942). Relying mainly on long time series from these five countries, I analyze the incidence and the developments of domestic adoptions of both unrelated and related children as well as more recent developments in inter-country adoption. In most Western European countries child adoption incidence increased from the early 20th century to approximately the 1970s, likely because of rising demand for child adoption. Child adoption incidence has decreased since the 1970s because of a fall in adoptable children from both domestic and foreign backgrounds. In addition, the people of Sweden and England and Wales have long adopted children much more frequently than those of Germany, let alone France and Italy. The history of child adoption in Western Europe thus reflects major demographic trends since 1900 as well as a North-South gradient in child adoption incidence.

This article explores how British immigration control policy was carried out during the nineteen-seventies to filter immigration, while addressing the perceived problem of ‘non-white’ colonial migration. Recently released government documents suggest that the immigration control system should be viewed as a series of inter-connected institutions and actors that operated under the influence of a number of different, and often contradictory, factors. The result of these competing factors was an immigration control system that, relying on the paradoxical whims of the government and other sections of civil society, was restrictive and suspicious towards potential migrants, but at the same time constrained in its behaviour.

In the 1980s and 1990s, political leaders in Western democracies used management and managerialism to initiate change. The result was privatization, deregulation, public cost-cutting programs and a greater influence of business leaders and managerial principles in politics and public administration. This change was possible because management itself had transformed from a systems approach to a more personal approach, which made the manager the symbolic figurehead of organizational change and success. Management and rock star CEOs became a big hit in popular culture. An in-depth analysis of the Dutch case shows that political leaders explicitly and purposely presented themselves as managers and were perceived as such. These ‘managers in politics’, (prime) ministers and chairmen of political parties transformed their organizations in a managerial way. By focusing on Dutch environmental policy, we establish that this transformation effected the content of environmental policy. Around 2000, the manager steadily lost his/her attractiveness as he/she was held responsible for economic decline and governmental problems. A new political language, influenced by the experiences with management in the 1980s and 1990s, was introduced. Entrepreneurship instead of managerialism, value-driven politics instead of ‘no nonsense’ business talk and ‘emotional’ instead of ‘rational’ management models became popular. This article thus argues that more attention should be paid to the historical change of management in the 1980s and 1990s; that this change should be understood as a linguistic change first that, however, initiated a change of practices; and that concentrating on politics, public administration and popular culture provides a new understanding of the kind of management change that took place.

Do different types of megaprojects have different cost overruns? This apparently simple question is at the heart of research at the University of Oxford aimed at understanding the characteristics of megaprojects, particularly in terms of how they are established, run and concluded. In this study, we set out to investigate cost overruns in the Olympic Games. To do so, we examined the costs of the Games over half a century, including both summer and winter Olympics. We looked at the evolution of final reported costs and compared these to the costs established in the Games bids, submitted to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) up to seven years before the Games occurred. In so doing we established the largest dataset of its kind, and documented for the first time in a consistent fashion the costs and cost overruns for the Olympic Games, from 1960 to 2012. We discovered that the Games stand out in two distinct ways compared to other megaprojects: (1) The Games overrun with 100 per cent consistency. No other type of megaproject is this consistent regarding cost overrun. Other project types are typically on budget from time to time, but not the Olympics. (2) With an average cost overrun in real terms of 179 per cent – and 324 per cent in nominal terms – overruns in the Games have historically been significantly larger than for other types of megaprojects, including infrastructure, construction, ICT, and dams. The data thus show that for a city and nation to decide to host the Olympic Games is to take on one of the most financially risky type of megaproject that exists, something that many cities and nations have learned to their peril. For the London 2012 Games, we find that: (1) With sports-related real costs currently estimated at USD14.8 billion, London is on track to become the most costly Olympics ever. (2) With a projected cost overrun of 101 per cent in real terms, overrun for London is below the historical average for the Games, but not significantly so. (3) The London cost overrun is, however, significantly higher than overruns for recent Games since 1999. London therefore is reversing a positive trend of falling cost overruns for the Games.

This is paperback edition of the 1999 book, unchanged except for a brief Epilogue dealing with Kosovo.  I still think this is the most detailed study of constitutionalism at the end  of Yugoslavia, and in the constitutional design of the successor Republics, and thus of constitutional nationalism, or state chauvinism.

In modern society, secularization has not produced a definitive separation between the spheres of religion and politics. With the development of mass politics, the boundaries between these two spheres have often become confused, and on these occasions politics has assumed its own religious dimension. At the same time as this process of secularization within both the state and society, there has also been a 'sacralization of politics', which reached its highest point in the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. Nazism, fascism and romantic nationalism all made decisive contributions to the 'sacralization of politics'; but democracy, socialism and communism have also contributed to the birth of new secular cults. The religious aspects of mass movements such as nazism have already been studied, whilst we do not yet have an in-depth study of fascism from this point of view. This article does not claim to provide such a study; merely to put forward some considerations on the importance and function of political religion within fascism. There has always been an interest in this field: as early as the 1920s some researchers focused their attention on fascism's rituals and symbols, claiming that they were examples of a secular religiousness, which they viewed as one of the more original aspects of the movement, as well as being one of the factors behind its success. Fascism 'has the rudiments of a new religion', wrote Schneider and Clough in 1929, but 'whether or not these will grow remains to be seen, but certainly there can be no doubt that already this new cult has taken some hold of the Italians' heart and imagination'. 1 In 1932, Mussolini declared that the fascist state had not created its own god, as Robespierre had done, but it had recognized 'the god of ascetics, saints and heroes, and also the God which is seen and worshipped by the primitive and genuine heart of the people'. He also added that whilst the fascist state did not have its own theology, it did have its own morality. 2

This essay aims to shed light on the ways in which several empires, states, and nationalist movements competed for political power in the Adriatic space. In particular, it analyzes the ways in which international, national, and local narratives converged in the critical political and economic space of the Adriatic Sea both before and after World War I to justify territorial appropriation. The possibility of geopolitical changes triggered by the Great War whetted the territorial appetites of the new nation-states that had established themselves on the ruins of multinational empires in 1918. At the same time, the same possibilities spurred Italian irredentist aspirations, as Italy directed its imperial policy increasingly toward the East. Hence, the phrase “Scramble for Africa,” which prompted the title of this article, can also be applied to the Adriatic space in the same period.

The emergence of the South Korean New Right movement in the mid-2000s led to the questions of how to commemorate and evaluate the ROK state establishment in 1948, and when to precisely trace such a "foundation" (1919 or 1948?) to be vividly discussed in South Korean society. Was 1948 primarily a political division? Or was it a "foundation for success"? Following the 2008 Foundation Day Dispute, a significant number of scholarly works on the subject has been produced. This article analyses the conservative side of this discourse, approaching the foundation dispute as a conservative attempt to regain hegemony over South Korean Cultural memory in post-democratisation South Korea. Analysing New Right-authored historiography on the subject of "foundation," the present study discloses how conservatives narrated the formative years of the South Korean state, arguing that merely dismissing the New Right as historical revisionists is too simple a conclusion. Rather, this article argues that struggles over Cultural memory are rooted in the ideological and institutional polarisation of South Korean intellectuals in contemporary South Korea. Furthermore, by contextualising the Foundation View against progressive historiography within South Korea as well as Cold War history in a global context, this study answers why the Foundation View ultimately failed to gain acceptance.

The orientalist literature subjected the Middle East in an exotic way — mostly as an “Arabian Nights” society ruled by traditional sultans and/or tribal chiefs — rather than modern governance structure’s “bureaucracy.” The presumption within postcolonial scholarship has been that this perception influenced the policy landscape in the United States and Europe, especially the media depictions of the oriental leaders and leadership. The paper empirically tests this hypothesis through content analysis using Weber’s categorization of leadership of two newspapers of record — The New York Times in the United States and The London Times in the United Kingdom — during the period of state building in Saudi Arabia (1901–1932). I find that rather than depicting the Saudi leadership as “backward,” these newspapers in particular, tend to overstate the development of the Saudi state during this period. As Weber is best known for his three types of authority, it benefits the discipline to see how the interpretive communities of Western journalists operationalized “authority” in terms of politics and religion of Saudi Arabia as this monarchy emerged.

This volume, in Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series, examines how France, Belgium and the Netherlands emerged from the military collapse and humiliating Nazi occupation they suffered during the Second World War. Rather than traditional armed conflict, the human consequences of Nazi policies were resistance, genocide and labour migration to Germany. Pieter Lagrou offers a genuinely comparative approach to these issues, based on extensive archival research; he underlines the divergence between ambiguous experiences of occupation and the univocal post-war patriotic narratives which followed. His book reveals striking differences in political cultures as well as close convergence in the creation of a common Western European discourse, and uncovers disturbing aspects of the aftermath of the war, including post-war antisemitism and the marginalisation of resistance veterans. Brilliantly researched and fluently written, this book will be of central interest to all scholars and students of twentieth-century European history.

Two recent books have broken the silence on a issue that has so far been disregarded in the history of contemporary Italy: La minaccia stupefacente. Storia politica della droga in Italia by Paolo Nencini (il Mulino, 2017) and Piccola città. Una storia comune di eroina by Vanessa Roghi (Laterza, 2018). Although by different approaches, both deal with the consumption of drugs and the increase of drug addiction from a historical point of view, as phenomena with signi cant consequences not only in the private life, but also in the public and social spheres. Starting from a review of these two texts, the author outlines a periodization for the Italian case, highlights the most relevant thematic links, crosses various historical backgrounds and different disciplinary perspectives, in order to sketch new paths of research.

Following the health crisis that hit the Italian Army in the first year of World War I, the High Command established a Neuropsychiatric Service and in addition also a Military Medical School in San Giorgio di Nogaro (Udine) to train medical officers. The psychiatrist Angelo Alberti worked as Psychiatric Consultant in the Neuropsychiat- ric Service and at the same time he was Assistant Professor in the Military Medical School. His scientific work and the clinical activ- ity carried out in San Giorgio di Nogaro provided new elements to understand and to redefine the position of Italian Psychiatry in the widespread phenomenon of War psycho-neuroses. The aim of the present paper is to show that the cross-study of archival documents and literature detected a more complex and multifaceted scenario of Italian Psychiatry than was assumed before. The paper presents details, that have not been reported until now.

This paper explores the built environment in two rural areas of Northwest Spain that were historically inhabited by two of the so-called “cursed peoples.” Combining contemporary archaeology and material culture studies, we analyze the role played by the house in processes of socio-economic and cultural change, and in the reproduction of internal hegemony within villages. To do so, we study the tensions and connections existing between the transformations undergone by the built environment during the last century and different socio-economic processes, including the depopulation of the rural areas, their conversion into tourist attractions, and the current process of individualisation of subjectivity in line with the transformations taking place in the postmodern era.

Neste texto analisa-se a recepção da obra e do legado de Gandhi no Portugal colonial do século XX.
Verifica-se que é na imprensa progressista que se dá mais atenção a Gandhi – em particular pela sua faceta de destacado líder da independência indiana face ao jugo colonial inglês mas também pelos seus princípios pacifistas, humanistas, de tolerância religiosa, fraternidade e igualdade.
Recorre-se ao seu exemplo para falar da justeza da sua causa mas também doutros temas (conexos ou não): emancipação da Índia portuguesa e questão colonial; relação entre civilizações e culturas; ingredientes duma política à escala planetária mais tolerante e dialogante.
A recepção de Gandhi em Portugal foi amiúde um estratagema para fintar a censura política, num contexto de afirmação das correntes da autodeterminação dos povos, primeiro, e do anticolonialismo, depois. Grupos de activistas goeses e doutros pensadores progressistas interligaram distintas imprensas: a goesa emancipalista, a libertária, a demo-republicana (v.g., Seara Nova) e parte da católica. Alguns entraram em debate com autores nacionalistas, envolvendo outra imprensa na liça. Foi frequente que séries de artigos (e/ou conferências) originassem opúsculos ou livros, atestando a relevância desses escritos e abrindo o debate a novos auditórios. Além disso, foram publicadas traduções das memórias de Gandhi e de biografias de referência, entre o pós-II Guerra Mundial e os anos 1960, o período de contenda acesa em torno da Índia portuguesa entre a nova União Indiana e o vetusto Portugal colonial.
A cobertura de Gandhi e seu uso na questão goesa é mais um indicador a atestar a relevância pioneira da Índia portuguesa no que tange a discutir o fim do colonialismo português.

Texto em livre acesso em: http://historiasp.franca.unesp.br/a-recepcao-da-obra-e-do-legado-de-gandhi-no-portugal-colonial-entre-a-paz-e-a-guerra/

Nb: na imagem, capa da 1.ª ed. port. da autobiografia de Gandhi, História da minha vida (Lx, Eds Atlante, 1943, trad. Telo de Mascarenhas).

Este trabalho integra um projeto que se dedica ao estudo dos inícios do vegetarianismo e do naturismo em Portugal. Procura contextualizar a ligação entre as duas realidades para, em seguida, verificar a extensão dos ideais naturistas ao Brasil, em particular na região do Pará, por meio da fundação de uma efémera colónia naturista em Boim (na margem do rio Tapajós) e do projeto fracassado de criação de uma nos arredores de Belém. Outras tentativas de divulgação das ideias vegetarianas e naturistas passaram pela chegada de livros e revistas portugueses e pela fundação de sociedades vegetarianas e naturistas em várias cidades brasileiras. Importa, pois, problematizar e interpretar esses percursos por meio de fontes inéditas.

Contemporary society seems obsessed with time, yet current debates on temporality have rarely taken its history into account. Given that the twentieth century was characterized by frequent ruptures and numerous supersessions of competing régimes d’historicité, it is remarkable that time has not played a more central role in its analysis. This article surveys, first, the role of time in the writing of history. Second, it discusses the history of time along three poles: standardization vs. pluralization, discipline vs. flexibility, and acceleration vs. Eigenzeit (one’s own time). Third, it sketches three concepts – temporalization, rhythm and simultaneity – as building blocks for a 'time-history' of the twentieth century.

The collective management of irrigation is an essential factor in agrarian development, both present and past. However, the relationship of irrigation associations with the state remains underexplored, despite the increasingly important role played by water policies in the modern world. The present article examines this relationship in Spain over the last two centuries. Our results suggest that, first, the state played a decisive part in the emergence and evolution of irrigation associations, and this belies the assumption of the traditional origin of these institutions; second, that farmers, despite being subject to the regulatory framework, enjoyed substantial autonomy in the management of water resources; and, third, that the relationship between local associations and the state changed over time, in response to political regime changes and the transformation of irrigation agriculture. When the state tried to impose authoritarian policies upon irrigation users, these reacted by developing unprecedented forms of organisation.

The stabilisation and longevity of Franco’s regime can be explained by the interpenetration of society and the institutions of the ‘New State’ in three overlapping areas: firstly, in the sphere of the shared culture of the community of civil war victors; secondly, through repression, based on the decisive collaboration of those supporting Francoism, which cut short any possible opposition; thirdly, in the socio-economic sphere, where those making up the groups supporting the ‘New State’ would see their personal interests fulfilled. At the same time, the defeated would be ensnared in a maze of misery and silence, abandoning any political concerns and concentrating instead on survival. Accordingly, the regime proved able to win support from a broad range of social groups while also eliminating any signs of opposition.

The article concerns the policy of ‘war communism’ in Soviet Russia
during the civil war. In historiography, there are two dominant views
regarding this phenomenon – while some researchers argue that it was
a crisis policy (pragmatic and determined by external circumstances),
others are inclined to claim that it was a utopian policy (a frantic
attempt to immediately implement the communist ideal). Based on
the revisionist works by Lars T. Lih, the author argues with the
interpretation of the Bolshevik utopian policy, focusing on the analysis
of three basic elements of this interpretation, namely: the contingent
policy in the countryside, Leon Trotsky’s book entitled Terrorism and
Communism and the work entitled The ABC of Communism by Nikolai
Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. Thus, the article is an attempt
to create a different picture of the Bolshevik policy in the fi rst years
after the revolution from the one that is popular in the Polish historical
discourse.

The article deals with the nexus between Jewish immigration to the Federal Republic of Germany and legal definitions of German ethnicity (Volkszugehörigkeit). It claims that the recognition of Jewish immigrants as Germans was continuously negotiated between different bureaucratic and societal actors struggling over the power to define who is a German. Examining the production of national belonging in practice, it breaks open the “black box” of the often alleged “ethnocultural” and “descent-based” German perception of nationhood. The fluid boundary between “German” and “Jewish” immigrants was only fixed in 1991 with the creation of the separate category of “Jewish quota refugee.”

In this paper we discuss the heritage of the WWII evacuation and the so-called ‘burning of Lapland’ within a Sámi reindeer herding community, and assess how these wartime experiences have moulded, and continue to mould, the ways people memorialise and engage with the WWII material remains. Our focus is on the village of Vuotso, which is home to the southernmost Sámi community in Finland. The Nazi German troops established a large military base there in 1941, and the Germans and the villagers lived as close neighbours for several years. In 1944 the villagers were evacuated before the outbreak of the Finno-German ‘Lapland War’ of 1944–1945, in which the German troops annihilated their military installations and the civilian infrastructure. Today the ruins of demolished German military installations persist around the village as vivid reminders, and act for the villagers as important active agents in memorising this vital phase in Lapland’s recent past. They also appear to facilitate nostalgia for the more independent days before traditional Sámi lifeways were ruptured by stronger Finnish State intervention in the post-war decades.

In the framework of linguistic or national minorities in Europe, the Friulian case can be considered, from several points of view, an exemplary one. This applies not only to the historical development of its minoritisation and to the steadiness of its claims to recognition and protection but also to the way, during the last decades, that the community has been trying to promote its language and concretely affirm those fundamental rights related to the use of the language itself, through laws and actions of language policy and planning.The contribution aims to present the Friulian case, illustrating the evolution of legislation and policies and identifying their impact on the language itself, its formal and informal use, its social presence, the community’s legitimation, self-representation and delimitation, and the establishment of language rights.It is an interesting path with noteworthy results. It is also a discontinuous itinerary, with ups and downs, in which most of the protection rules (Law 482/1999 and the Regional ones 15/1996 and 29/2007) have not found real application.Therefore, the language is still excluded from several fundamental contexts and, despite some encouraging data coming from the most recent sociolinguistic research, its public use and its presence in education and in the media are still victims of old prejudices, which inspire the contradictory choices of political and institutional decision-makers.Friulian is at the same time a resistant and emerging language and a strongly minoritized one.

Keywords: Friulian language, Friulian community, language rights, language planning policies, legislation, Friuli, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy, Europe

What social and political conditions help explain the number of white supremacist groups? This study uses pooled time-series cross-sectional methods to assess the explanatory power of three racial threat accounts. First, since lynchings indicated intense animosity against blacks that may persist, anti-black hate groups should be especially numerous where lynching rates were substantial in the distant past. Second, where or when white political and cultural dominance is threatened by large or growing black populations, additional white supremacist groups should be present. And third, these anti-black movements often recruit by emphasizing the links between race and violent street crime. Since the public mistakenly believes that most violent crimes are committed by blacks who victimize whites, larger numbers of hate groups should be present where murder rates are most substantial. With other theoretically plausible determinants such as unemployment and college completion rates held constant, the results confirm these three threat theory predictions.

While the first "oil shock" of 1973 / 74 has been extensively researched by historians, the crisis' impact on oil-importing countries of the "Third World" has received relatively little attention. The article deals with this lacuna by considering the exemplary case of Zambia. It asks how this central African country perceived the oil crisis and dealt with its effects and how it was influenced by it in the medium term. Comparing the country with both Western industrial states and other "developing countries," the essay argues that Zambia, having just experienced a decade of growth and profiting from record high copper revenues, only belatedly realized the dangers of the situation, but was particularly hard hit in the end.

Like Weimar Germany, contemporary Russia is home to fascist actors and widespread nationalism. But unlike interwar Germany, the party system in post-Soviet Russia is heavily manipulated and civil society remains underdeveloped. This means that fascists have not had a chance to use elections or to penetrate civil society in order to build up political support. The continuing presence of a resolutely authoritarian, yet non-fascist “national leader” (Vladimir Putin) keeps the country from becoming a liberal democracy but it also, for now, makes it less likely that the regime will become fascist.