Books on the topic 'Creative Europe programme'

This publication brings together the results of the project 3DPAST: Living and virtual visiting European World Heritage, co-funded by the Creative Europe EU programme. The research highlighted the exceptional character and quality of living in vernacular dwellings found in World Heritage sites. This was possible by seizing the cultural space of European vernacular heritage, located in Pico island (Portugal), Cuenca town (Spain), Pienza (Italy), Old Rauma (Finland), Transylvania (Romania), Berat & Gjirokastra (Albania), Pátmos (Greece), and Upper Svaneti (Georgia). New digital realities grant the possibility to visit and to appreciate those places, to non-travelling audiences, who lack the opportunity to experience this unique heritage in situ. Creative potential is highlighted in 3D models and digital visualisations, which associate outstanding local knowledge with the vernacular expression of World Heritage.

European governments, against their initial instincts, invited the International Monetary Fund to design financial rescue programs during the euro crisis in cooperation with the European Commission and European Central Bank. These institutions, known as the “troika,” constitute a regime complex in the parlance of international political economy. This book poses four questions about the regime complex for crisis finance in the euro area: Why did European governments choose this particular mix of institutions? What was the strategy of key member states in directing several institutions to collaborate on lending programs? Why did this arrangement endure despite severe conflicts among the institutions? Should the member states of the euro area “go it alone” by creating a European Monetary Fund? This chapter elaborates on these questions and provides an overview of the book.

The Greek crisis of 2010 was a formative episode, during which European governments chose the mix of institutions that would formulate the rescue program and the institutions established the modalities for cooperation. This chapter examines the onset of the crisis in Greece and the genesis of its financial rescue. Specifically, it addresses the opposition to including the International Monetary Fund in the institutional mix for the first Greek program and the reasons why euro-area member states eventually selected it. The chapter also examines some of the institutional alternatives to the troika that might have been chosen but were rejected, creation of financial facilities of the euro area (the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism and temporary European Financial Stability Facility), and role of German politics and preferences in the development of the euro area’s institutional framework.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) incorporates citizens directly into budgetary decision-making. It continues to spread across the globe as government officials and citizens adopt this innovative program in the hopes of strengthening accountability, civil society, and well-being. Governments often transform PB’s rules and procedures to meet local needs, thus creating wide variation in how PB programs function. Some programs retain features of radical democracy, others focus on community mobilization, and yet other programs seek to promote participatory development. This book provides a theoretical and empirical explanation to account for widespread variation in PB’s adoption, adaptation, and impacts. The book first develops six “PB types,” then, to illustrate patterns of change across the globe, four empirical chapters present a rich set of case studies that illuminate the wide differences among these programs. The empirical chapters are organized regionally, with chapters on Latin America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and North America. The empirical chapters demonstrate that there are temporal, spatial, economic, and organizational factors that produce different programs across regions but similar programs within each region. A key finding is that the change in PB rules and design is now leading to significant differences in the outcomes these programs produce. We find that some programs successfully promote accountability, expand civil society, and improve well-being, but, that we continue to lack evidence that might demonstrate if PB leads to significant social or political change elsewhere.

Social innovation is a topic of increasing interest to policymakers, civil society, and business globally. However, there has yet to be a comprehensive account of the economic contexts of social innovation. This book aims to address this research gap. It weaves together work from economics, sociology and ethics for a novel theoretical approach: the Extended Social Grid Model (ESGM). Based upon four years of work across a range of countries, this book provides a thorough and nuanced discussion of how social innovation can address major social issues including marginalization, access to housing, clean water, and microcredit. Empirically, the book considers how social innovation has interfaced with the economy, but also the state and civil society in terms of long-term projects, programmes, and policies that have emerged and evolved within and across European states to drive more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable societies.

As the crisis evolved, euro-area governments first constructed two transitional financial facilities and then created a permanent fund. This chapter reviews the creation of the financial facilities of the euro area culminating in the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism. The ESM treaty contains a strong presumption, but not a strict legal requirement, that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will also be involved in assistance to a member state. As a political matter, the Fund’s involvement is strongly favored in creditor countries of the euro area. The emergence of the ESM, a new institutional player in crisis finance, prompted a reconsideration of the institutional arrangements under which crisis programs are designed. The chapter reviews proposals from research institutes and the European Parliament to combine resources of the European Commission and the ESM into a European Monetary Fund.

Today’s European Union (EU) is based on treaties negotiated and ratified by the member states. They form a kind of “constitution” for the Union. The first three treaties, the Treaty of Paris, creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, and the two Treaties of Rome, creating the European Economic Community (EEC) and European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) in 1957, were the founding treaties. They were subsequently reformed several times by new treaties, including the Treaty of Maastricht, which created the European Union in 1992. The latest major treaty reform was the Treaty of Lisbon, which entered into force in 2009. Scholarship concerning these treaties has evolved over time. In the early years, it was mostly lawyers writing about the treaties, but soon historians and political scientists also took an interest in these novel constructions in Europe. Interestingly, American political scientists were the first to develop theories of European integration; foremost among these was Ernst Haas, whose 1958 book The Uniting of Europe developed the theory later referred to as neo-functionalism. The sector on integration of coal and steel would have an expansive logic. There would be a process of “spill-over,” which would lead to more integration.It turned out that integration was less of an automatic process than suggested by Haas and his followers. When integration slowed down in the 1970s, many political scientists lost interest and turned their attention elsewhere. It was only in the 1980s, when the internal market program gave European integration a new momentum that political scientists began studying European integration again from theoretical perspectives. The negotiation and entry into force of the Single European Act (SEA) in the mid-1980s led to many new studies, including by American political scientist Andrew Moravcsik. His study of the SEA included a critique of neo-functionalism that created much debate. Eventually, in an article in the early 1990s, he called his approach “liberal intergovernmentalism.” It took final form in 1998 in the book The Choice for Europe. According to Moravcsik, to understand major historic decisions—including new treaties—we need to focus on national preferences and interstate bargaining.The study of treaty reforms, from the SEA to the Lisbon Treaty, conducted by political scientists—including the treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice—have often contrasted neo-functionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism. But other approaches and theories were developed, including various institutionalist and social constructivist frameworks. No consensus has emerged, so the scholarly debates continue.

This chapter examines three strands of the European Union’s energy policy: the internal energy market, energy security, and climate change. Energy policy has rapidly gained in importance for the EU, as it faces the challenges of creating an internal energy market, increasing energy security, and playing an active role in combating climate change. Reform of the energy market has been a constant activity since the late 1980s and has been based on liberalizing cross-border competition, but this could be increasingly undermined by member-state intervention and subsidy to promote renewable energy and to ensure adequate back-up power. Efforts to curb energy use and to develop a low-carbon economy are at the heart of Europe’s new programmes and targets to combat climate change. The chapter shows that each of the three strands of the EU’s energy policy involve different policy-making communities and illustrate a range of different policy modes.

Chapter 5 examines the creation of the classic free port, which taxed only for commercial services. The latter half of the seventeenth century inaugurated an age of conscious experimentation in economic policy. Amidst intensified commercial competition throughout the central Mediterranean, the Medici regime launched a panel of interventions aimed at improving the grand duchy’s economic position. For Livorno, this program culminated in the reform of 1676, which eliminated import/export duties and simplified collection procedures. This reform constituted an important moment in the development of commodity markets and secured Livorno’s role in brokering trade between northwestern Europe, Italy, and the Levant.

The effective prevention of and the fight against all types of transnational organised crime (TOC) has been one of the biggest challenges to the criminal policy of the EU for decades. In this connection, the EU and its member states are facing the task of striking an equitable balance between the interest in ensuring an effective criminal justice system on one hand, and the protection of civil rights that the rule of law offers on the other. On the basis of the EU strategies and programmes to create an area of freedom, security, and justice, this chapter retraces the development of European criminal law in relation to TOC. It shows that the acquis communautaire now attained comprises a multiplicity of legal instruments aiming at the protection of European society and its economies from organised crime.

This book situates the war in Syria within the actual and imagined system of international criminal justice. It explores the legal impediments and diplomatic challenges that have led to the fatal trinity that is Syria: the massive commission of international crimes that are subject to detailed investigations and documentation but whose perpetrators have enjoyed virtually complete impunity. The book tracks a number of accountability solutions to this tragic state of affairs that are being explored within multilateral gatherings, by states, and by civil society actors, including innovations of institutional design; the reactivation of a range of domestic jurisdictional principles (including universal jurisdiction in Europe); the emergence of creative investigative and documentation techniques, technologies, and organizations; and the rejection of state consent as a precondition for the exercise of jurisdiction. Engaging both law and policy around international justice, the text offers a set of justice blueprints, within and without the International Criminal Court. It also considers the utility, propriety, and practicality of establishing an ad hoc tribunal and pursuing a transitional justice program without a genuine political transition. All told, the book attempts to capture the creative energy radiating from members of the international community intent on advancing the accountability norm in Syria even in the face of geopolitical blockages within the U.N. Security Council. In so doing, it presents the range of juridical measures—both criminal and civil—that are available to the international community to respond to the crisis, if only the political will existed.

The special edition of the national professional scientific and practical legal magazine “The Slovo of the National School of Judges of Ukraine” was published, which contains reports delivered at the online conference "Ensuring the unity of judicial practise: the legal positions of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court and standards of the Council of Europe", held on the occasion of the third anniversary of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court. time of thematic sessions and webinars for judges of each of the courts of cassation in the Supreme Court, as well as joint sessions for judges of different jurisdictions at the end of 2020. The National School of Judges of Ukraine held these events together with the Supreme Court and in synergy with the Council of Europe projects "Support to Judicial Reform in Ukraine", "Further Support for Ukraine's Implementation in the Context of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights", USAID New Justice Program, OSCE Project Coordinator in Ukraine. These are projects that support various aspects of judicial reform in Ukraine, compliance with Council of Europe standards and recommendations, offering best practices from member states to help make priorities in the national reform process. The conference and training events were attended by more than 550 participants - judges of the Supreme Court, other courts, leading Ukrainian and foreign experts, representatives of the legal community. Trainers and all structural subdivisions of the National School of Judges of Ukraine were involved, the training activities of which were identified by the CCEJ in one of its conclusions as one of the important tools to ensure the unity of judicial practice. Programs of activities included reports on the role of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court in ensuring the unity of judicial practice and the impact on the legal system; unity of judicial practice in the context of standards - improving access to justice in Ukraine: removing procedural obstacles and ensuring the right to an impartial court, approaches to identifying cases of minor complexity and cases of significant public interest or exceptional importance for a party in the context of access to court of cassation: practice the supreme courts of the member states of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights; key positions of the Supreme Court - application of the provisions of the procedural codes on the grounds for transferring the case to the Chamber, the joint chamber or the Supreme Court, the impact of its decisions on legislative activity, ensuring the specialization of courts and judges, the practice of the Supreme Court of the Supreme Court on administrative cases, the practice of considering cases of disciplinary liability of judges, conclusions on the rules of criminal law, review of court decisions in criminal proceedings in exceptional circumstances; the impact of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights on the case law of national courts and the justification of court decisions and the "balance of rights" in civil cases in its practice, the development of the doctrine of human rights protection; ECtHR standards on evidence and the burden of proof, the conclusions of the CCEJ and their reflection in judicial practice; judicial rule-making in the activities of European courts of cassation, etc. The issues raised are analyzed in the Ukrainian and international contexts from report to report, which, we hope, will be appreciated by every lawyer - both practitioners and theorists. As well as the fact that the depth of disclosure of each of the topics through the practice of application serves the development of law and contributes to the formation of the unity of judicial practice of the Supreme Court, the creation of case law is a contribution to rulemaking and lawmaking. The conversion of intellectual discourse into the practice of Ukrainian courts is an important step towards strengthening public confidence in the judiciary. And here the unifying force of the Supreme Court can be especially important, as the Chairman of the Supreme Court Valentyna Danishevska rightly remarked, speaking about the expectations of the society.

Compared to armies and navies, which have existed as professional fighting services for centuries, the technology that makes air forces possible is much newer. As a result, these services have had to quickly develop methods of preparing aviators to operate in conditions ranging from peace or routine security to full-scale war. The first book to address the history and scope of air power professionalization through learning programs, Educating Air Forces offers valuable new insight into strategy and tactics worldwide. Here, a group of international experts examine the philosophies, policies, and practices of air service educational efforts in the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the UK. The contributors discuss the founding, successes, and failures of European air force learning programs between the Great War and World War II and explore how the tense Cold War political climate influenced the creation, curriculum, and results of various programs. They also consider how educational programs are adapting to soldiers' needs and the demands of modern warfare. Featuring contributions from eminent scholars in the field, this volume surveys the learning approaches globally employed by air forces in the past century and evaluates their effectiveness. Educating Air Forces reveals how experiential learning and formal education are not only inextricably intertwined, but also necessary to cope with advances in modern warfare.

This chapter covers the first stage of EU-Mercosur policy relations by focussing on the period of 1985 to 1990. At this stage, policy relations were not institutionalized. Policy relations began in 1985 for several reasons. Firstly, the European Union signed the Treaty of Accession of Spain and Portugal which meant the beginning in terms of a new direction in policy towards Latin America, including the Mercosur countries; this is a clear reflection of the creation of a “commitment” towards Latin America, although at a very low level due to the low “ambition” towards the region. Secondly, in 1985, Mercosur countries also started their own regional integration programme. This stage proved to be key in the development of EU-Mercosur relations because it established a new emphasis on EU policy towards Latin America by establishing channels for communication between the two regions, particularly through the development of the annual EU-Rio Group meetings; without this engagement, the EU and Mercosur would have not developed their relationship, and the fact that it came at this point helps to explain the events of the following stages. By the time Mercosur was officially launched in 1991, the EU was fully aware of the integration movement in South America thanks to these years of European Union-Latin America relations. In relation to the engagement of the European Union towards Mercosur, the conclusion comes from a low “ambition” and “commitment” on the European side. This stage of the policy shows the lowest engagement of the three stages. But this engagement is certainly superior to the pre-Iberian membership era.

This chapter analyzes the food economy of the Third Reich, arguing that the Nazi state relied on individual food acts (eating, cooking, and shopping) to create and maintain racial categories. It looks at the ways in which the country’s rationing program gave new categories of race, and especially the category of the Jew, bodily significance by shaping what people could and should eat. This also meant that racial belonging determined life by determining food supply. Not only Jews and other undesirable races but also Aryans were defined through the food system. This was done by Nazi agricultural discourse that linked racial health with controlling Eastern European farming land, as well by as the valorization of specific foods like the casserole (Eintopf) and whole-grain bread.

Language and translation governed the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. This study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role in the Dominican evangelizing program to the larger frame of culture contact in postconquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts is used to reveal the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse and combines with an examination of language contact in different social contexts. A major aim is to spotlight the role of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity. As translators, chief catechists, and parish administrators they made evangelization in many respects an indigenous enterprise and the Mexican church it created an indigenous church.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.