Chapter 8. The “Jewish Question,” White Diplomacy, and the Western Democracies

Author(s):  
Pierre Rosanvallon

It's a commonplace occurrence that citizens in Western democracies are disaffected with their political leaders and traditional democratic institutions. But this book argues that this crisis of confidence is partly a crisis of understanding. The book makes the case that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to comprehend and make better use of these new sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen our political self-belief and commitment to democracy. Drawing on examples from France and the United States, the book notes that there has been a major expansion of independent commissions, NGOs, regulatory authorities, and watchdogs in recent decades. At the same time, constitutional courts have become more willing and able to challenge legislatures. These institutional developments, which serve the democratic values of impartiality and reflexivity, have been accompanied by a new attentiveness to what the book calls the value of proximity, as governing structures have sought to find new spaces for minorities, the particular, and the local. To improve our democracies, we need to use these new sources of legitimacy more effectively and we need to incorporate them into our accounts of democratic government. This book is an original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 232-261
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk

The present article examines the place of the Jewish question in the ideology of the monarchist (right-wing, “black hundred”) parties. In spite of certain ideological differences in the right-wing camp (moderate Rights, Rights and extreme Right-Wing), anti-Semitism was characteristic of all monarchist parties to a certain extent, in any case before the First World War. That fact was reflected in the party documents, resolutions of the monarchist congresses, publications and speeches of the Right-Wing leaders. The suggestions of the monarchists in solving the Jewish questions added up to the preservation and strengthening of the existing restrictions with respect to the Jewish population in the Russian Empire. If in the beginning the restrictions were main in the economic, cultural and everyday life spheres, after the convocation of the State Duma the Rights strived after limiting also the political rights of the Jewish population of the Empire, seeing it as one of the primary guarantees for autocracy preservation in Russia, that was the main political goal of the conservatives.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3.1) ◽  
pp. 83-108
Author(s):  
Lars Rensmann

This article examines the current globalization of political antisemitism and its effects on the resurgent normalization of anti-Jewish discourse and politics in a global context. The focus is on three political spaces in which the “Jewish question” has been repoliticized and become a salient feature of political ideology, communication, and mobilization: the global radical right, global Islamism, and the global radical left. Different contexts and justificatory discourses notwithstanding, the comparative empirical analysis shows that three interrelated elements of globalized antisemitism feature most prominently across these different political spaces: anti-Jewish conspiracy myths; Holocaust denial or relativization; and hatred of Israel. It is argued that the current process of the globalization of political antisemitism has significantly contributed to antisemitism’s presence in all kinds of public spaces as well as the convergence of antisemitic ideology among a variety of different actors. Moreover, the globalization of political antisemitism has helped accelerate the dissemination and social acceptance of anti-Jewish tropes that currently take shape in broader publics, that is: the globalized mainstreaming of antisemitism. The article concludes by discussing some factors favorable to the globalization and normalization of antisemitism, and the resurgence of antisemitic politics in the current age. Keywords: conspiracy myths, globalization, Holocaust denial, Israel hatred, political antisemitism


1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 94-99
Author(s):  
Anna Verschik

One can often hear the question: are there any Jews in Estonia at all? And if there are, is there any reason to speak about Estonian Jewry in the sense we speak about Polish, Lithuanian, Galatian Jewry? Indeed, Estonia has never been a “traditional” land of Jews: during the Russian rule it did not belong to the so-called pale of settlement. Estonia never met with the “Jewish question”, there was no ground either for everyday or for official antisemitism. The Department of Jewish studies in the University of Tartu was the first one of its kind in the Nordic countries. At that time it was not unusual that an Estonian understood some Yiddish, there are also examples of the students who studied seriously the language and the culture of Jews. Pent Nurmekund, a famous polyglot was one of them. Nurmekund had learned a number of Yiddish folksongs and later translated some of them into Estonian. The two songs we are going to speak about are “Toibn” and “Main fraint”. Nurmekund performed both a Yiddish and an Estonian version of the first song. Main fraint was recorded only in Yiddish, the Estonian translation was published in the literary periodical Looming.


1997 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent von Wroblewsky
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1/2020) ◽  
pp. 109-124
Author(s):  
Dejan Bursac

The study is designed to empirically test the effects which different ruling party ideologies have on spending for public order and safety budget component in Central and Eastern European countries. The transitional environment and especially post-Cold War security context have altered the concept of security in former socialist societies. Our assumption, based not just on theoretical concepts of left and right ideologies, but also on studies examining this matter in more developed Western democracies, was that right-leaning cabinets will have higher levels of budget consumption for law and order than leftist governments. The empirical model confirmed this hypothesis, albeit only partially. A number of other political, economic, and contextual variables connected with transitional setting, which usually have effect on general levels of spending or certain budget areas, have demonstrated a low significance when comes to law and order spending.


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