Journal articles on the topic 'Austria – Politics and government – 1918-1938'

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1

Pavlovic, Vojislav. "France and the Serbian government's Yugoslav project." Balcanica, no. 37 (2006): 171–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/balc0637171p.

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The French government and statesmen had never considered the creation of a unified South-Slav state as an objective of the Great War. Officially acquainted with the project through the Nis Declaration in December 1914 they remained silent on the issue, as it involved both the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy and, following the Treaty of London in May 1915, an open conflict with Italy. In neither case, then, did French diplomacy deem it useful to trigger such a shift in the balance of power in Europe just to grant the wishes of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Naturally, in the spring of 1918 the dismantlement of Austria-Hungary was envisaged, but with the view to weakening the adversary camp, while the destiny of the Yugoslav provinces remained undecided. Moreover, war imperatives required extreme caution in relation to Italian intransigency. The Italian veto weighed heavily on French politics, to the extent that even the actual realization of the Yugoslav project, proclamation of a unified state on 1 December 1918 in Belgrade, took place without a consent or implicit support on the part of the French government.
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Golovlev, Alexander. "Political Control, Administrative Simplicity, or Economies of Scale? Four Cases of the Reunification of Nationalized Theatres in Russia, Germany, Austria, and France (1918–45)." New Theatre Quarterly 38, no. 2 (April 20, 2022): 107–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x22000021.

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In 1917–18, the new republican governments of Russia, Germany, and Austria nationalized their former court property. A monarchic-turned-national heritage of prestigious opera and dramatic theatres weighed heavily on national and regional budgets, prompting first attempts to create centralized forms of theatre governance. In a second wave of theatre reorganization in the mid-1930s, the Soviet government created ‘union theatres’ under a Committee for Arts Affairs; the German and Austrian theatres underwent the Nazi Gleichschaltung (1933–35 and 1938); and France, a ‘democratic outlier’, opted for nationalizing the Opéra and Opéra-Comique under the Réunion des théâtres lyriques nationaux. These conglomerates have so far been little studied as historically specific forms of theatre management, particularly from a comparative, trans-regime perspective. What balance can be struck between economic, political, and ‘artistic’ costs and benefits? How does ‘Baumol’s law’ of decreasing theatre profitability apply to these very different politico-economic systems, as well as to war economies? Dictatorships reveal an economic seduction power, while this essay argues for confirming a long-term ‘great European convergence’ of state-centred theatre management, internal structure, and accountability, both in peace and war. Here, the stated goals and short-term contingencies yielded to trends originating from the logic of theatre production itself, and the compromises that the state, theatre professionals, and the public accepted in exchange for the capital of prestige. Alexander Golovlev (PhD, European University Institute in Florence, 2017) is a senior research fellow at the HSE Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the University of Moscow. His recent publications include, for New Theatre Quarterly, ‘Theatre Policies of Soviet Stalinism and Italian Fascism Compared, 1920–1940s’ (2019), and ‘Balancing the Books and Staging Operas under Duress: Bolshoi Theatre Management, Wartime Economy, and State Sponsorship in 1941–1945’, Russian History XLVII, No. 4 (2020).
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Bondarchuk, Yaroslav. "DIPLOMATIC PRACTICES OF VIACHESLAV LYPYNSKYI IN THE ASSESSMENTS OF HISTORIANS." Naukovì zapiski Nacìonalʹnogo unìversitetu "Ostrozʹka akademìâ". Serìâ Ìstoričnì nauki 1, no. 32 (April 28, 2021): 85–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.25264/2409-6806-2021-32-85-89.

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In recent years, researchers are increasingly focused on the Viacheslav Lypynskyi (Ukrainian politician, theorist of Ukrainian conservatism) : from practical political actions to a detailed study of theoretical reflections. They interested in various vectors of Lipin studies. It should be noted that V. Lypynskyi became sufficiently studied in recent years as the head of the Ukrainian Embassy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Scientists, on the work of which drawn attention in the relevant topic: Igor Ducks, Igor Girich, Tatyana Ostashko, Irina Interim and others. This article is aimed at summing a certain result in the long run of scientists. The article is trying to collect, analyze, explore and outline certain results in the historiographic study of the place of V. Lypynskyi in the international politics of the Ukrainian state. The main submers are considered, which researchers studied in the context of the activities of V. Lypynskyi as ambassador during their work from 1918 to 1919. The topics of scientific research were especially studied: Embassy staff (appointment, the appointment of those who are responsible for certain sectors and criticism of personnel by opponents, both from among the government and the social democratic forces); The struggle for territorial encroachments and at the same time ratification of Beresia Agreement (peace treaty between the Ukrainian People’s Republic on the one hand and German, Austria-Hungarian, Ottoman Empires and the Bulgarian kingdom of the other side). The strong Polish diaspora prevented the joining of the Kholm region and part of the smashes in the Ukrainian state. Also, the activity that puts themselves the goal of helping the prisoners of war in concentration camps and citizens of Ukraine, which were in Austria – Hungary); Lypynskyi’s care from the post of Representative of Ukraine in Vienna (comes to power in Kiev in November 1918, the directory of UNR and the inability to find a common language with new government structures). As a result of scientific research, we conclude that this topic is sufficiently studied. Most scientific works used during the writing of the article are combined into a positive assessment of the role of V. Lipinsky as ambassador.
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Kucheruk, Oleksandr. "The Establishment of National States and Formation of the State Border between the Ukrainian National Republic And the Republic Of Lithuania in 1918The Establishment of National States and Formation of the State Border between the Ukrainian National Republic And the Republic Of Lithuania in 1918." Diplomatic Ukraine, no. XX (2019): 91–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.37837/2707-7683-2019-5.

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The article deals with the establishment of national states and formation of the state border between the Ukrainian National Republic and the Republic of Lithuania. In late 1917, a need to end the war and conclude a peace treaty was obvious, which resulted in the first negotiations between representatives of the Bolshevik government and Germany, joined by Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. The Ukrainian National Republic also got a chance to become an actor of European politics and participated in the peace negotiations in Brest-Lytovsk. The system of the Brest-Lytovsk peace treaties legalized the separation between Russia and its national entities, recognized the independence of the Ukrainian National Republic as well as Lithuania and Latvia. The details of the negotiations remain unknown, but in the context of the establishment of relations with great powers and new nation-states, the Ukrainian-Lithuanian contacts were not in the foreground, although remained relevant. In the summer of 1918, Lithuania was preparing to become a full-fledged monarchy and the final establishment of state borders was postponed. In October 1918, the Ministry of Military Affairs of the Ukrainian State established a commission dealing with the issue of the border line between Ukraine and Lithuania. However, the plans were not meant to be realized due to the revolution in Germany, the anti-Hetman uprising in Ukraine, the restoration of the republic, the next wave of the Russian aggression against the newly formed states and the Polish invasion against Ukraine and Lithuania. Consequently, the western territories of the Ukrainian National Republic as well as the Lithuanian capital Vilnius with the Vilnius Region came under the control of Poland. Thus, the delineated Ukrainian-Lithuanian border remained on paper and on new maps of Europe. Keywords: Ukrainian-Lithuanian border, monarchy, revolution, peace negotiations in Brest-Lytovsk.
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Bukowczyk, Piotr. "Polityka wyznaniowa w myśli austriackiej Partii Chrześcijańsko-Społecznej w latach 1918−1934." Wrocławskie Studia Politologiczne 21 (March 14, 2017): 35–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.19195/1643-0328.21.3.

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Religious policy in the thought of the Austrian Christian Social Party 1918−1934In the paper I present the vision of a relation between the state and religious denominations and the status of atheists and free-thinkers delineated in the political thought of the Christian Social Party Christlichsoziale Partei, active in Austria-Hungary and the First Republic of Austria, Christian-democratic, after 1931 influenced by Italian fascism and inclining towards authoritarianism. I infer it from its propaganda materials books, brochures, press articles, leaflets, posters and legislation enacted under its governmentI also show the impact of the social, cultural and political context on the postulates of the Christian Social Party with regard to religious policy.
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Czerwińska-Schupp, Ewa. "Faszyzm austriacki (1934–1938) – założenia filozoficzno-ideowe, ustrojowe i praktyka polityczna." Filozofia Publiczna i Edukacja Demokratyczna 1, no. 2 (July 31, 2018): 87–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/fped.2012.1.2.5.

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The purpose of this article consists in presentation of Austrian fascism (austrofascism) embodied in the Federal State of Austria 1934–1938. The State represented an important episode in the history of European authoritarianism. In the following paper I address four issues: (1) philosophical, ideological, and doctrinal justification of Austrian fascism, (2) legal and constitutional principles of the regime of Engelbert Dollfuß and Kurt Schuschnigg, (3) relationship between the formal structure of Federal State and the socio-political reality. Finally, (4) I try to answer two interrelated questions concerning the nature of the austrofascist dictatorship and the legitimacy of considering austrofascism as a system of government in the context of phenomenon of fascism.
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Lindström, Fredrik. "Ernest von Koerber and the Austrian State Idea: A Reinterpretation of the Koerber Plan (1900–1904)." Austrian History Yearbook 35 (January 2004): 143–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s006723780002097x.

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In comparison with most of his predecessors and successors as imperial Austrian minister president, Ernest von Koerber (1850–1919) has attracted a special sort of scholarly interest. In the rare instances when scholars have investigated Austrian governments during the era of the Dual Monarchy (1867–1918), these governments have been approached in the direct context of this system and era. Koerber's five-year-long government (1900–1904) has instead been studied in the considerably wider frame of reference of the modernization of Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are, in fact, qualities in Koerber's political program, often referred to as the “Koerber Plan,” that seem to merit such attention. When compared to most Austrian governments of the late Habsburg Empire, Koerber's minister presidency was extraordinarily active. In the eyes of both contemporaries and later observers, the large-scale investment program (mainly in railroads and canal construction) represented the essence of Koerber's modernization project. But he also carried out a widely noted liberalization of state control in society, elements of which included ending the policing of political meetings and practically canceling censorship of newspapers. His background as a civil servant also shaped his policies, especially his very active modernization and effectivization program for the state bureaucracy.
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Kozińska-Witt, Hanna. "The Union of Polish Cities in the Second Polish Republic, 1918–1939: Discourses of Local Government in a Divided Land." Contemporary European History 11, no. 4 (October 28, 2002): 549–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0960777302004034.

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The new Polish state was founded more than 100 years after Poland's partition by Prussia, Russia and Austria. The partitioned Polish lands had been included one way or another in the administrative structure of the ocupying powers, and the individuals who became active in urban issues in the new state were socialised by associations established by the partitioners. Poland became not only a arena for a meeting of Prussian, Russian and Austrian imaginations about local government but also a place with a great variety of municipal praxises as well. The author analyses different meanings of local government with special attention to those employed by municipal officers from Warsaw and Cracow within the Union of Polish Cities. There were strong regional cleavages in the Union, but the political development of the Polish state strengthened centralisation and the Union itself remained united.
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Feinberg, Melissa. "Democracy and Its Limits: Gender and Rights in the Czech Lands, 1918–1938." Nationalities Papers 30, no. 4 (December 2002): 553–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2002.10540507.

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On 28 October 1918, a group of Czech nationalists stood on the steps of the Obecni Dům (Municipal House) in Prague and proclaimed their independence from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, allying themselves with the new state of Czechoslovakia. Their declaration marked the beginning of a new era in the Czech lands, one in which Czechs, as the majority nation, hoped to redefine the terms of political discourse. The new Czechoslovak Republic, its Czech supporters declared, would be the antithesis of the Habsburg regime. In the place of a multinational Monarchy, they would erect a democratic nation-state. The second half of this political vision was complicated by the fact that the new Czechoslovakia actually contained many ethnic groups, but Czechs still tended to imagine their new Republic as the political expression of the Czech nation. At the same time, this “Czech-centered” politics also emphasized the democratic basis of the new country. Czechoslovakia, Czech leaders said, would be a state governed by its people and dedicated to protecting their rights and freedoms as individuals. A political culture that rested on both ethnic nationalism and democratic values obviously contained some internal tensions: the need to protect the interests of one specific nation and the duty to protect the individual rights of all citizens could rub uncomfortably against each other. Yet, at that moment in 1918, most Czechs failed to register this potential for ideological conflict, instead seeing an essential link between democratic politics and the good of the Czech nation. For many Czechs, democracy itself was a need of the nation, a political structure crucial to Czech national self-realization. This idea came from one prominent conception of Czech nationhood that had captured the public imagination in the fall of 1918. According to this strain of Czech national ideology, the Czech nation had a sort of democratic character. This meant that only an egalitarian, democratic government would suit a “Czech” state. So, paradoxically, a universal language of rights and freedoms was the key to building a truly national Czechoslovak Republic. It was with a state that emphasized equality and personal freedom that the Czechs would fulfill their national destiny.
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Lochhead, Ian. "The Politics of Empire and the Architecture of Identity: Public Architecture in New Zealand 1900-1918." Architectural History Aotearoa 1 (December 5, 2004): 33–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.26686/aha.v1i0.7893.

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During the period from 1900 to 1918 new governmental buildings were constructed throughout New Zealand as part of a campaign to provide accommodation for government departments. Post offices, court houses and departmental buildings appeared in provincial towns as well as in major cities, almost all products of the government's architectural office, led by John Campbell. The exuberant Imperial Baroque style adopted for these buildings reflects a new national confidence but also follows closely the precedent of British public building of the period. Auckland's former Chief Post Office (1908-11) for example, is closely modelled on Sir Henry Tanner's Central Post Office in London (1907). The extent and consistency of the Government's building programme was intended to promote a sense of national unity although its dependence on British models seems to confirm Hurst Seager's argument that New Zealand had yet to develop a distinctive architectural style. The use of the Imperial Baroque style, culminating in Campbell's design for Parliament Buildings of 1911, reflected New Zealand's strong sense of identification with the British Empire, also expressed through the contributions of its politicians at Imperial Conferences from 1897 to 1911. Unlike their counterparts from Canada and Australia, New Zealand politicians argued for stronger imperial bonds as a way of ensuring greater influence over imperial policies. This paper will argue that in fact, New Zealand public architecture of the period 1900-18 reflects a clear sense of national identity but one that is defined in terms of Britishness and conceived within the larger framework of the security provided by imperial solidarity.
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Marek, Pavel. "DEFENDER OF CZECHOSLOVAK UNITY. A PROBE INTO THE POLITICS OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK NATIONAL SOCIALISTS IN SLOVAKIA BETWEEN 1918 AND 1938." Scientific Herald of Uzhhorod University. Series: History, no. 2 (47) (December 20, 2022): 119–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.24144/2523-4498.2(47).2022.267340.

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Until 1989, the reformist current of the National Socialists was one of the backbone elements of the Czech/Czechoslovak party-political system. The political party of the Czech National Socialists was formed in the 1890s and during the years of the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918 – 1938) under the name Czechoslovak National Socialist Party (CSNP) was a regular part of government coalitions. The historiographical description of their activities and their contribution to solving the political, economic, social, and cultural problems of state formation corresponds to this fact. An exception in this context is the history of the party in Slovakia between 1918 and 1938, a period when the party leaders decided to extend the organization's reach to the entire territory of the newly formed state. Apart from partial mentions, we have only a few short historical studies, which are inaccurate in their findings and give only the most basic outline of the Party's policy in this territory. Therefore, the present study is one of the new probes into the Party's activities in Slovakia, aiming to reduce the historiographical debt. Given the limited scope, this article analyses the party's profile in Slovakia intending to evoke its Czechoslovakist programme, the programme of Czechoslovak national and state unity, which was not accepted with understanding in the conservative and especially nationalist and autonomist-oriented Slovak environment or was fundamentally rejected. In the field of political practice, the party projected the concept of unity into the issue of the search for the optimal administrative system of the Czechoslovak Republic. It was opposed not only to the vision of an autonomous Slovakia within Czechoslovakia, which she correctly perceived as the first step in the process leading to the state-law separation of Czechs and Slovaks, but also the provincial system. The ideal, fulfilling the idea of self-government, autonomy, and independence, was the county system. As a probe into the aforementioned topic, this study also analyses the relationship of the National Socialists in Slovakia to Hlinka's Slovak People's Party, which had the most significant electoral support of the population and differed with them programmatically and politically on the issues addressed in our study. It was their primary political opponent.
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Krovelshchikova, Valeria V., and Oksana A. Chalmova. "POLITICAL AND LEGAL DEBATES ON ESTABLISHMENT OF AUSTRIA AS A FEDERAL STATE." Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Pravo, no. 37 (2020): 75–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.17223/22253513/37/6.

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Austrian federalism is closely associated with political historical events during the period 1918-1920. The union of Länder relied on the recognition of their autonomy, adoption of state constitu-tions, and the possibility of establishing the representative bodies. Many historians of law and lawyers maintain that a new Republic would have been established as a centralised unitary state. Programs of political parties and the first constitutional drafts reflected the ideas of a federal state in which states had extensive powers and expanded representation in the federation. Political parties had repeatedly voiced their support for the Swiss federal model. Hans Kelsen’s constitutional drafts to be developed on behalf of the Secretary of State Karl Renner provided a solid foundation aimed to introduce federal constitutional principles and create a parliamentary republic. Constitution, system of federal institutions, as well as forms of government were widely discussed at the Länder conferences in Salzburg and Linz. Michael Mayr, Secretary of State, made a significant progress in overcoming disagreements. Mayr’s draft constitution focused primarily on achieving consensus with conflicting political parties. After the collapse of the coalition on June 10, 1920, political parties prepared and presented their constitutional drafts covering a broad range of issues: federal constitution, the Land par-liaments, and powers of states. From July 11 to September 23 1920 constitutional issues had been discussed by special subcommittee of the Constitutional National Constitutional Assembly composed of representa-tives of political parties, the state chancellery and Hans Kelsen as its scientific advisor. Delimitation of powers between the federation and the states, composition of the Federal Council, supremacy of federal law, indirect federal government were the most important issues of constitutional debates. Principle of equity and equality between the federation and the states was the key to overcoming most disagreements. Austria’s Federal Constitutional Law was passed on October 1, 1920. Despite the fact that the states did not participate in debates of the Constitutional National Assembly, they sent their representatives to the Federal Council in November 1920. However, the western Länder expressed their objections to the procedure for the adoption of the federal constitution. Efforts of the main social forces, their willingness to compromise resulted into a unique constitutional draft of the First Republic. The 1920 Constitution was a compromise solution between a centralized unitary state and a federation.
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Popenko, Yaroslav, and Ihor Sribnyak. "At the intersections of European diplomacy: Romania between the Central Bloc and the Entente (1914–1918)." Wschód Europy. Studia humanistyczno-społeczne 7, no. 1 (October 6, 2021): 143–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/we.2021.7.1.143-162.

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The main tendencies of the development of the Kingdom of Romania during the First World War were analysed in this article. The stages of the diplomatic negotiations of the Romanian government with the countries of the Central Bloc and the Entente during 1914–1918 years are considered. Bucharest managed to take advantage of its own diplomatic balancing during the war, which was squeezed between the two military-political blocs. Thanks to its foreign policy strategy, the Romanian government had retained its sovereign right to the development and the acceptance of the most important decisions, and those which were touched of the upholding of the national interests of the state. Moreover, Romania managed to significantly expand its borders, which was possible due to the crisis and the destruction that was passed through Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire during 1917-1918 years. In the context of the foreign policy strategy of the kingdom during the World War, the «Bessarabian question» is partially covered and which role it played in the realization of the project of the creation of «Great Romania» by Bucharest. In addition, the certain reasons of the signing, the content and the consequences of the Bucharest peace treaty of 1918 year for the alignment of the forces in the Central European region at the final stage of the war were characterized. Ultimately, the authors state that the diplomatic balancing of the Romanian political leadership during the World War gave it the opportunity to gradually but steadily realize the project of the expansion of the state borders at the expense of the contiguous territories.
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Hołubko, Wiktor, and Adam Lityński. "Na gruzach imperium. Ukraina po upadku cesarstwa rosyjskiego: od rewolucji lutowej 1917 do traktatu brzeskiego 1918." Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne 69, no. 1 (October 4, 2018): 83–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/cph.2017.1.5.

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Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire took place in February (according to the Julian calendar) or in March (according to the Georgian calendar used in Western Europe). As a result, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicated in the first phase of the revolution which caused the fall of the Romanov dynasty. Consequently, the Provisional Government was brought into power. At the time, the First World War was ongoing and Russia suffered severe defeats in the conflict. The country was ruled by chaos and various political groupswere fighting against each other. Furthermore, many nations started their fight for independence from the Russian Empire. The most significant events took place in Ukraine. The national activists set up their own governmental authority – Central Council of Ukraine. And, at the same time, various domestic conflicts took place in Ukraine as well. The situation was very complicated then as a 600 kilometer-long front line ran across Ukraine.Moreover, most of the country was occupied by German and Austria-Hungarian armies. It is common knowledge that the Bolsheviks led their forces against the Provisional Government in Petrograd, which was the contemporary capital of Russia (modern-day Saint Petersburg), in October / November 1917. The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and, in consequence, the Russian Civil War started. The Bolsheviks were in no position to continue fighting in World War I and so they signed a separate peace treaty with Germany and Austria-Hungary in March 1918 in order to focus on the Russian Civil War. Ukraine, which was independent at the time, also signeda separate peace treaty with Germany and Austria-Hungary. A new phase in the war between Russia and Ukraine started which Ukraine eventually lost.
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POPENKO, Yaroslav, Ihor SRIBNYAK, Natalia YAKOVENKO, and Viktor MATVIYENKO. "“...COMING TO COMMON PEACE TOGETHER WITH OUR ALLIES”: ROMANIA’S FOREIGN POLICY BALANCING DURING WORLD WAR I." Skhid, no. 2(3) (December 27, 2021): 36–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.21847/1728-9343.2021.2(3).247245.

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The article covers the course of negotiations between the plenipotentiaries of Romania and the leading states of the Entente and the Quadruple Alliance during the First World War. Facing the dilemma of determining its own foreign policy orientation – by joining one of the mentioned military-political blocs, the Romanian government was hesitating for a long time to come to a final decision. At the same time, largely due to this balancing process, official Bucharest managed to preserve its sovereign right to work out and make the most important decisions, while consistently defending Romania's national interests. By taking the side of the Entente and receiving comprehensive military assistance from Russia, Romania at the same time faced enormous military and political problems due to military superiority of the allied Austrian and German forces at the Balkan theater of hostilities. Their occupation of much of Romania forced official Bucharest to seek an alternative, making it sign a separate agreement with the Central Block states. At the same time, its ratification was being delayed in every possible way, which enabled Romania to return to the camp of war winners at the right time. At the same time, official Bucharest made the most of the decline and liquidation of imperial institutions in Russia and Austria-Hungary at the final stage of the First World War, incorporating vast frontier territories into the Kingdom. Taking advantage of the revolutionary events in Russia, the Romanian government succeeded, in particular, in resolving the “Bessarabian problem” in its favor. In addition, Romania included Transylvania, Bukovina and part of Banat. An important foreign policy achievement of Romanian diplomacy was signing of the 1918 Bucharest Peace Treaty, as well as its participation in the Paris Peace Conference.
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Dmytryshyn, Basil. "The German Overthrow of the Central Rada, April, 1918: New Evidence from German Archives." Nationalities Papers 23, no. 4 (December 1995): 751–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905999508408414.

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On 9 February 1918, at Brest-Litovsk, the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire) concluded an unusually favorable treaty with the government of the Ukrainian Central Rada. By its terms, in exchange for diplomatic recognition and military support against a Russian Bolshevik invasion of the Ukraine, Rada negotiators placed at the disposal of the Central Powers, but primarily Germany, a surplus of foodstuffs and agricultural products estimated at 1,000,000 tonnes. The Brotfrieden, or bread peace, as this arrangement is generally known, had three significant repercussions. First, it greatly undermined Leon Trotsky's bargaining position and obstructionist tactics, forcing the Bolsheviks to accept German terms on 3 March 1918. Second, by acquiring a rich granary, and thus no longer fearing defeat through starvation, it enabled Germany to break the iron ring of the Allied blockade. And, third, it made it impossible for the Ukraine to receive a favorable hearing or reception from the Western (French, English and American) Allies at the peace conference.
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Williams, Paul D. "How Did They Do It? Explaining Queensland Labor's Second Electoral Hegemony." Queensland Review 18, no. 2 (2011): 112–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1375/qr.18.2.112.

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Australia's entrenched liberal democratic traditions of a free media, fair and frequent elections and robust public debate might encourage outside observers to assume Australia is subject to frequent changes in government. The reality is very different: Australian politics have instead been ‘largely unchanged’ since the beginning of our bipolar party system in 1910 (Aitkin 1977, p. 1), with Australians re-electing incumbents on numerous occasions for decades on end. The obvious federal example is the 23-year dominance of the Liberal-Country Party Coalition, first elected in 1949 and re-endorsed at the following eight House of Representatives elections. Even more protracted electoral hegemonies have been found at state level, including Labor's control of Tasmania (1934–82, except for 1969–72) and New South Wales (1941–65), and the Liberals' hold on Victoria (1952–82) and South Australia (1938–65, most unusually under one Premier, Thomas Playford). It is therefore not a question of whether parties can enjoy excessively long hegemonies in Australia; it is instead one of how they achieve it.
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Matiash, Iryna. "Relations between Ukraine and Central states: uncommon occupation in 1918." Diplomatic Ukraine, no. XIX (2018): 855–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.37837/2707-7683-2018-58.

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The review elucidates the contents of the monography by R. Pyroh with special attention paid to the relations between Ukraine and the Central Powers in 1918. It is noted that these relations are a multifaceted phenomenon of political, economic, and military ties caused by complicated vicissitudes of the final stage of World War I. It is observed that the signature of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk accelerated the independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and accorded it the status of an entity of international law. The author shares his insight that in historiography military presence is most commonly term as ‘occupation.’ The comprehensive study of relations of Ukraine with the Central Powers enables singling out specific features of their development that is impossible to embody in legal norms, such as those defined by the 1907 Hague Convention. The territory occupied by German and Austrian troops had its central government and administrations; bilateral diplomatic relations were established, trade and economic agreements were concluded, etc. The author stresses that the book is the first recorded survey of the operation of the German occupation zone, which covered various governorates and Crimea. The author also sets out its military and administrative structure, role of military and field justice, and clarification of the number of German armed forces in Ukraine. Furthermore, the book offers a nuanced view of the operation of the German occupation zone and identifies the main promoters of Hitler’s Ostpolitik in Ukraine. The problem of their ambiguity and volatility in respect of Ukraine leaves many zeitgeisty aspects. The German and Austrian occupation was a by-product of World War I, which, however, fell out of its historical context. The modern historiographical image of the German and Austrian occupation as a holistic phenomenon is in need of some adjustment. According to the review’s author, the launch of this monography gives grounds to hope that the 1918 Austrian and Hungarian occupation of Ukraine will be dealt with in further study. This book is intended for scholars, professors as well as those interested in the historical past of Ukraine. Key words: monography, WWI, occupation, UPP, Central Powers, German and Austrian occupation, occupation zone.
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Nazarova, Tatjana, and Olga Redkinа. "The Mennonites in the Civil War (1918–1920s): Survival Practices of an Ethno-Confessional Group." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 4. Istorija. Regionovedenie. Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenija, no. 4 (September 2022): 215–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu4.2022.4.19.

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Introduction. The article examines the survival practices of the Mennonites during the Civil War (based on the materials of the European part of the Russian state). Methods and materials. The memoirs, letters and diaries of the Mennonites; analytical materials on the situation of the Mennonites, prepared by commissions of the RCP(b) were the source base of the study. The methodological basis of the research was formed by the principles of historicism and objectivity, as well as special-historical methods: historical-comparative, historicalgenetic. Analysis. Analysis of the behavior of various regional groups of Mennonites during the Civil War revealed different practices of their response to wartime conditions and the nationwide crisis caused by them: political neutrality, the organization of self-defense units, active support of opposing forces, internal migration, emigration, attempts to preserve the traditional economic structure, mutual assistance. The following regional factors were identified that influenced the position of the Mennonites during the War: the brutality and proximity of hostilities; the land policy of the Bolsheviks and the acuteness of the agrarian question; the level of ethnophobia towards German-speaking citizens; the scale of repressions, confiscations; activities of the occupying German-Austrian forces, white governments, Makhnovist bands. Results. The article shows that in the south of Ukraine, where the Mennonites found themselves in the epicenter of fierce battles between Whites, Reds and Makhnovists, emigration abroad began earlier than in other regions; self-defense detachments acted in an organized manner. Ukrainian Mennonites took an active part in the activities of the German-Austrian and White armies. In other regions, the activities of self-defense detachments were less significant, instead of mass emigration abroad, the Mennonites chose internal migration to quieter areas in 1918–1920. T.P. Nazarova analyzed regional material on the development of Mennonite groups, revealed the nature of their relationship with warring political forces. O.Yu. Redkina analyzed historiography, considered the problem of the activities of the Mennonite self-defense units.
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20

Monolatii, Ivan. "«The November Breakdown» («November Action») 1918: a Revolution or a Military Coup?" Journal of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University 8, no. 2 (June 1, 2022): 28–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.15330/jpnu.8.2.28-33.

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The purpose of the study is to analyze peculiarities of the historical event «The November Breakdown» («November Action») – the national democratic revolution in the Western Ukrainian lands – not as a revolution in its classical version, but a military coup with the elements of the national liberation struggle of Western Ukrainians in the autumn of 1918. On the basis of the historical and political analysis of the historiographical heritage concerning the preconditions and creation of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, the events of October 31 – November 1, 1918, are described as discrepancies and generalizations of their direct participants; the research also clarifies the factors of political and ideological «explanations» of the revolutionary «November Breakdown» in historiography of the Ukrainian diaspora of the 20th Century. The Soviet and contemporary Ukrainian historiography statements about the «revolutionary nature» of the events in Eastern Halychyna in 1918, and hence the November 1918 national democratic revolution, are still debatable. Halychyna Ukrainians made a legal proclaimation of the Ukrainian state within the framework of the Austrian-Hungarian state, they were waiting for a peaceful transfer of power in Eastern Halychyna, and the armed uprising of October 31 – November 1, 1918, became a military coup in the geopolitical realities of the rising tension in the Polish-Ukrainian relations. Therefore, on November 1, the Austro-Hungarian government authorized an act of transfer of the state power in Eastern Halychyna to the Ukrainian National Council, and on November 13, 1918, the Council proclaimed Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. The origins of the myth about the «revolutionary character», or «revolution» in Eastern Halychyna in 1918, are rooted in attempts to «inject» the non-existent in reality class struggle of the region population into the broader context of the Bolshevik and socialist revolution. During the Khrushchev Thaw, in 1957 this myth underwent certain modification in the famous article of historian O.Karpenko, and later on, in 1993, this myth transformation turned into a «national-democratic revolution» in Western Ukrainian lands. In fact, the memoirs of the participants and creators of the «November Action», the external sources, as well as the mass media of that, do not interpret the events under study just as “a revolution”, but only as “a coup”, “disarmament”, etc., which testifies to the militaristic nature of events.
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Jacek Lis, Tomasz. "Emancipation of Women in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the austro-hungarian administration (1878-1918)." Historijski pogledi 4, no. 5 (May 31, 2021): 70–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.52259/historijskipogledi.2021.4.5.70.

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After the Congress of Berlin in 1878, in Bosnia and Hercegovina we saw big changes. The Austrian government was building roads, and railroad tracks. In the Austro-Hungarian period, also they changed their architectural style; from the prevailing ottoman one to more like in Vienna or Prague. This situation was a short time, in live only one generation. These changes affected to life and behavior of Bosnia and Hercegovinas’ citizens. Was changed several people, because after the Austrian arrive, a lot of Muslims Bosniacs, and Turks, were left this part. There were elites in this place. Their positions, how “new elites” take people which they came from different part of the Habsburg Monarchy; Hungarians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, etc. They were taking new ideas, how feminism. The emancipation of women was something new in these places. The first woman, which was proclaiming the slogans, as teachers. On the article we can show two examples; Jelica Belović-Bernadzikowska, and Jagoda Truhelka. They were born in Osijek, from giving Bosnian part ideas, that girl needs to will independent and need to have good graduated. These modern ideas, supported, in a way, the government because in the country was a school program for girls. Austro-Hungarian politics was building a school for girls, and take some scholarship went girl studied in University, how Marija Bergman, born in Bosnia, daughter of some Jews officials. However teachers not only modern women, similar roles had women-doctors. Girls who graduated Faculty of Medicine, arrive in Bosnia and Hercegovina and help Muslim women. Poles Teodora Krajewska and Czechs Anna Bayerova also take ideas of feminism, but, most important that she was great respect between patience. Propagating the feministic ideas was thinking which affect all women. Most important was not only slogans but also changes in everyday life normal family in Bosnia and Hercegovina. The other day only men can work on the farmland or work. After the Congress of Berlin situations was changed. On the consequences, women must be going to work, often how a worker in fabric. Work was hard, but women first time have their cash. Automatically her position in society was better. These situations have consequences for the city, as like villages. We sow this situation in the book Vere Ehrlich, which researched this topic in the interwar period. In the article, we went to show, that this changing was things also women, which life to margin, how prostitutes. Naturally, their life was always difficult, but the new government also got assistance. Habsburg's administration knew, that better control of specific profession, because this is the way how deal with the epidemic of syphilis, and something like this. In this work, we use scientific literature and documents from archives, mainly the Archive of Federation Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Historical Archive from city Sarajevo, when was document fo Jelica Belović-Bernadzikowska. How method we use case study and analyzing to literature and historical sources.
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Boyko, Ihor. "LIFE PATH, SCIENTIFIC-PEDAGOGICAL AND PUBLIC ACTIVITY OF VOLODYMYR SOKURENKO (TO THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH)." Visnyk of the Lviv University. Series Law 72, no. 72 (June 20, 2021): 158–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.30970/vla.2021.72.158.

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The life path, scientific-pedagogical and public activity of Volodymyr Sokurenko – a prominent Ukrainian jurist, doctor of law, professor, talented teacher of the Lviv Law School of Franko University are analyzed. It is found out that after graduating from a seven-year school in Zaporizhia, V. Sokurenko entered the Zaporizhia Aviation Technical School, where he studied two courses until 1937. 1/10/1937 he was enrolled as a cadet of the 2nd school of aircraft technicians named after All-Union Lenin Komsomol. In 1938, this school was renamed the Volga Military Aviation School, which he graduated on September 4, 1939 with the military rank of military technician of the 2nd category. As a junior aircraft technician, V. Sokurenko was sent to the military unit no. 8690 in Baku, and later to Maradnyany for further military service in the USSR Air Force. From September 4, 1939 to March 16, 1940, he was a junior aircraft technician of the 50th Fighter Regiment, 60th Air Brigade of the ZAK VO in Baku. The certificate issued by the Railway District Commissariat of Lviv on January 4, 1954 no. 3132 states that V. Sokurenko actually served in the staff of the Soviet Army from October 1937 to May 1946. The same certificate states that from 10/12/1941 to 20/09/1942 and from 12/07/1943 to 08/03/1945, he took part in the Soviet-German war, in particular in the second fighter aviation corps of the Reserve of the Supreme Command of the Soviet Army. In 1943 he joined the CPSU. He was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree and the Order of the Red Star (1943) as well as 9 medals «For Merit in Battle» during the Soviet-German war. With the start of the Soviet-German war, the Sokurenko family, like many other families, was evacuated to the town of Kamensk-Uralsky in the Sverdlovsk region, where their father worked at a metallurgical plant. After the war, the Sokurenko family moved to Lviv. In 1946, V. Sokurenko entered the Faculty of Law of the Ivan Franko Lviv State University, graduating with honors in 1950, and entered the graduate school of the Lviv State University at the Department of Theory and History of State and Law. V. Sokurenko successfully passed the candidate examinations and on December 25, 1953 in Moscow at the Institute of Law of the USSR he defended his thesis on the topic: «Socialist legal consciousness and its relationship with Soviet law». The supervisor of V. Sokurenko's candidate's thesis was N. Karieva. The Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, by its decision of March 31, 1954, awarded V. Sokurenko the degree of Candidate of Law. In addition, it is necessary to explain the place of defense of the candidate's thesis by V. Sokurenko. As it is known, the Institute of State and Law of the USSR has its history since 1925, when, in accordance with the resolution of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of March 25, 1925, the Institute of Soviet Construction was established at the Communist Academy. In 1936, the Institute became part of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1938 it was reorganized into the Institute of Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1941–1943 it was evacuated to Tashkent. In 1960-1991 it was called the Institute of State and Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In Ukraine, there is the Institute of State and Law named after V. Koretsky of the NAS of Ukraine – a leading research institution in Ukraine of legal profile, founded in 1949. It is noted that, as a graduate student, V. Sokurenko read a course on the history of political doctrines, conducted special seminars on the theory of state and law. After graduating from graduate school and defending his thesis, from October 1, 1953 he was enrolled as a senior lecturer and then associate professor at the Department of Theory and History of State and Law at the Faculty of Law of the Lviv State University named after Ivan Franko. By the decision of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR of December 18, 1957, V. Sokurenko was awarded the academic title of associate professor of the «Department of Theory and History of State and Law». V. Sokurenko took an active part in public life. During 1947-1951 he was a member of the party bureau of the party organization of LSU, worked as a chairman of the trade union committee of the university, from 1955 to 1957 he was a secretary of the party committee of the university. He delivered lectures for the population of Lviv region. Particularly, he lectured in Turka, Chervonohrad, and Yavoriv. He made reports to the party leaders, Soviet workers as well as business leaders. He led a philosophical seminar at the Faculty of Law. He was a deputy of the Lviv City Council of People's Deputies in 1955-1957 and 1975-1978. In December 1967, he defended his doctoral thesis on the topic: «Development of progressive political thought in Ukraine (until the early twentieth century)». The defense of the doctoral thesis was approved by the Higher Attestation Commission on June 14, 1968. During 1960-1990 he headed the Department of Theory and History of State and Law; in 1962-68 and 1972-77 he was the dean of the Law Faculty of the Ivan Franko Lviv State University. In connection with the criticism of the published literature, on September 10, 1977, V. Sokurenko wrote a statement requesting his dismissal from the post of Dean of the Faculty of Law due to deteriorating health. During 1955-1965 he was on research trips to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Austria, and Bulgaria. From August 1966 to March 1967, in particular, he spent seven months in the United States, England and Canada as a UN Fellow in the Department of Human Rights. From April to May 1968, he was a member of the government delegation to the International Conference on Human Rights in Iran for one month. He spoke, in addition to Ukrainian, English, Polish and Russian. V. Sokurenko played an important role in initiating the study of an important discipline at the Faculty of Law of the Lviv University – History of Political and Legal Studies, which has been studying the history of the emergence and development of theoretical knowledge about politics, state, law, ie the process of cognition by people of the phenomena of politics, state and law at different stages of history in different nations, from early statehood and modernity. Professor V. Sokurenko actively researched the problems of the theory of state and law, the history of Ukrainian legal and political thought. He was one of the first legal scholars in the USSR to begin research on the basics of legal deontology. V. Sokurenko conducted extensive research on the development of basic requirements for the professional and legal responsibilities of a lawyer, similar to the requirements for a doctor. In further research, the scholar analyzed the legal responsibilities, prospects for the development of the basics of professional deontology. In addition, he considered medical deontology from the standpoint of a lawyer, law and morality, focusing on internal (spiritual) processes, calling them «the spirit of law.» The main direction of V. Sokurenko's research was the problems of the theory of state and law, the history of legal and political studies. The main scientific works of professor V. Sokurenko include: «The main directions in the development of progressive state and legal thought in Ukraine: 16th – 19th centuries» (1958) (Russian), «Democratic doctrines about the state and law in Ukraine in the second half of the 19th century (M. Drahomanov, S. Podolynskyi, A. Terletskyi)» (1966), «Law. Freedom. Equality» (1981, co-authored) (in Russian), «State and legal views of Ivan Franko» (1966), «Socio-political views of Taras Shevchenko (to the 170th anniversary of his birth)» (1984); «Political and legal views of Ivan Franko (to the 130th anniversary of his birth)» (1986) (in Russian) and others. V. Sokurenko died on November 22, 1994 and was buried in Holoskivskyi Cemetery in Lviv. Volodymyr Sokurenko left a bright memory in the hearts of a wide range of scholars, colleagues and grateful students. The 100th anniversary of the Scholar is a splendid opportunity to once again draw attention to the rich scientific heritage of the lawyer, which is an integral part of the golden fund of Ukrainian legal science and education. It needs to be studied, taken into account and further developed.
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23

Satskiy, Pavlo. "The Relationship Between the UPR and the Entente in December 1917 ‒ March 1918: Crisis of the Status of Ukraine As a Subject of International Relations." European Historical Studies, no. 7 (2017): 123–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2524-048x.2017.07.103-124.

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On the basis of the archival papers, the research of the relations of Ukrainian People’s Republic with the allies of The Triple Alliance agreement, in particular with France, has been made. The system of relations of the Ukrainian People’s Republic institutions with the representatives of The Triple Alliance in Kyiv has been researched. However, the analysis of these relations has been made in the context of the events taking place in the entire European system of relations. In particular, the analysis of works of the French representative in Kyiv, General J. Tabouis, aimed at establishing systematic relations with the General Secretariat of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Though, it has been determined that the activity of J. Tabouis in Kyiv had been driven on suppressing the Ukrainian People’s Republic activity and had also been concentrated at creating the situation of political instability at deterring the command of the German-Austrian troops from the movement of the troops from the “Ukrainian” territory from the Eastern front to other areas. General J. Tabouis has also been actively cooperated with the Ukrainian national organizations, among members of which were the prisoners of war of Austrian-Hungarian, German, Polish and Czech and Slovaks armies. After the signing of The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the liberation of Kyiv from the Bolshevik army, the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian People’s Republic clearly expressed the hostile reaction to the mission of the Triple Alliance countries in Kyiv. In particular, some Ukrainian officials expressed the accusation regarding the participation of the French mission in creating chaotic conditions in Ukraine, in their subversive activity and their agreement with the Bolsheviks. Moreover, the Council of Ministers of Ukraine expressed the idea that due to the fact that the participation of Ukraine in the First World War was over, and The Triple Alliance did not accept the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the presence of the representatives of these countries in Kyiv was unsuitable. Thus, the Council of Ministers of Ukrainian People’s Republic and the command of the German troops in Ukraine demanded from the representatives of The Triple Alliance to leave the Ukrainian territory. So, the Ukrainian People’s Republic constrainedly put itself in the position of the actual collaborationist government, which had to withdraw the missions of the countries of The Triple Alliance because of the demand of occupation troops, which was not politically profitable in comparison to the state of the government of the Russian Federation.
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24

Stojanović, Dubravka. "Private Yugoslavism and Serbian Public Opinion, 1890–1914." East Central Europe 42, no. 1 (August 8, 2015): 9–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18763308-04201002.

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This article addresses manifestations of Yugoslavism in the pre-1914 period that have been neglected by recent scholarship. Its focus on everyday life reveals that since the mid-1890s there were constant contacts between the major ethnic groups that would constitute Yugoslavia after 1918. These contacts were not initiated by the political elite or by official activities. They were instead the reactions of ordinary residents of Belgrade who “discovered” peoples speaking the same language and having similar problems, “as we do.” There were many visits from Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia to Belgrade in the period 1890–1914 organized by different associations or individuals. Some of them organized public gatherings in the center of Belgrade that allowed residents to show “their love” to “our compatriots” from the South Slav lands of Austria-Hungary. Some of these events turned into real public demonstrations even before 1903, under the Obrenović dynasty and government, which was not Yugoslav oriented. And under the succeeding Karađorđević dynasty, even its leading Radical politicians favored the Yugoslav idea for a future state, although withholding public support until after the Serbian victory in the First Balkan War in 1912.
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25

Kladiwa, LukአFasora-Pavel. "Gemeindeverwaltung Und Lokale Eliten in Den Böhmischen Läandern 1850-1918, Teilergebnisse Der Forschung in Der Tschechischen Republik." East Central Europe 33, no. 1-2 (2006): 337–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187633006x00178.

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AbstractAs opposed to German scholarship, the issue of municipal self-government and communal elites has not received much attention in Czech historiography. This represents a significant shortcoming: in the absence of an analysis of the mechanisms by which self-governing municipalities functioned, it is not possible to describe the constitution of modem civil society in the nineteenth century, including the development of national relations. This article provides an overview of relevant German and Austrian literature, proposes a methodology of research in the Czech environment, including an analysis of the use-fulness of individual types of archival sources, and offers preliminary results of the reviewers' research on the cities of Moravská Ostrava and Brno. Close attention is paid to the social-professional composition of communal elites, national and religious development, municipal economies with regard to communal companies, and the process of creating a modem state administration.
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26

von Hagen, MarK. "The Entangled Eastern Front and the Making of the Ukrainian State: a Forgotten Peace – a Forgotten War and Nation-Building." Diplomatic Ukraine, no. XIX (2018): 45–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.37837/2707-7683-2018-2.

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In his article the author reproduced a picture of the Ukrainian state formation and described the stages of the independence movement deployment. Despite all the efforts — conscious or unconscious — of the numerous “authors” of Ukrainian statehood, there were always powerful forces who opposed the idea of Ukraine’s independence. The Bolsheviks and Whites showed the most hostile attitude towards the idea of the Ukrainian state and nation. This was confirmed by the devastating actions of the White Army and the Polish Republic in the western lands of Ukraine. A first war between Soviet Russia and Ukraine poisoned the relations of the two revolutionary governments and ruined the peace among the Ukrainian Bolsheviks. However, because of their state weakness and the urgent need for food for the starving Petrograd and other parts of Russia, Bolsheviks were supposed to pretend that they take their slogans of national self-determination seriously. Even recognizing the Ukrainian People’s Republic and at the same time putting ultimatums on it and threatening war, unless the UNR surrenders its armed forces and statehood to the subject of the Bolsheviks. The author explored the process of German-Austrian occupation of Ukraine, noting that the occupation in wartime is characterized by the features of colonial regimes of exploitation and subordination, which vividly and at the same time sadly demonstrates the presence of the Central Powers in Ukraine in 1918. By strengthening the Ukrainian government they had contracted with and promised military and political support, the Germans were simultaneously weakening and undermining it because of their inflated demands. The article also analyzes the limited sovereignty of the Ukrainian state, describes the attitude to the idea of the Ukrainian state and the nation of other peoples. Keywords: Ukrainian state, independence, sovereignty, occupation, Bolsheviks, Soviet Russia, Central states.
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27

Tsokhas, Kosmas. "‘Trouble Must Follow’: Australia's Ban on Iron Ore Exports to Japan in 1938." Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 4 (October 1995): 871–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x00016218.

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Despite the attention that has been given to the role of economic sanctions in Japan's decision to launch the Pacific war, Australia's decision to ban iron ore exports to Japan has been given little attention, even though this was one of the earliest economic sanctions imposed onimperial Japan in the 1930s. To a degree this neglect can be traced to a preoccupation with the actions and objectives of the great powers and a failure to consider the opportunities available to small nations to take significant initiatives. The following article traces the origins of the iron ore embargo back to 1934 when Essington Lewis, the Managing Director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Ltd (BHP), Australia's iron and steel monopoly, visited Japan and subsequently advocated the development of an Australian armaments industry to counter probable Japanese aggression in the Pacific. In Japan Lewis crossed paths with J. G. Latham, the Minister for External Affairs, who was leading the Australian government's Eastern Mission. Latham returned to Australia with conclusions that differed fundamentally from those of Lewis, who came up with a plan to take advantage of Japan's dependence on imports of iron ore and other iron products to finance investment in Australian armaments manufacturing. In explaining this outcome the article discusses interactions between a number of conflicts: between Latham and Lewis; between the British Treasury and the Foreign Office; and between the Japanese army and navy. In London the Treasury wanted to focus on the European theatre, while also holding down military spending in order to achieve balanced budgets. The Treasury believed that the way to best defend British commercial interests in Asia was to appease Japan. On the other hand, the Foreign Office was committed to the protection of British interests in the Far East by a more forceful diplomacy, although it was only willing to counten-ance behavior short of military action. Consistent with Latham's recommendations to his government, the emerging consensus in London was that while a settlement in China would help to safeguard British interests there, as long as the Japanese were bound up in their war in China they were less likely to attack British colonies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In 1936 this orientation was challenged by a shift in the balance of power in Tokyo away from the army and in favor of the navy. Although priority continued to be placed on winning the war in China and guarding against an attack from the Soviet Union, now the navy's plan for southward expansion was given more careful consideration and credibility.
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28

Spaull, Andrew. "The State School Teachers Decision (High Court 1929) Revisited." Australian Journal of Education 31, no. 3 (November 1987): 236–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000494418703100302.

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The State School Teachers decision of 1929 was recently overturned in the High Court (June 1986) thereby opening up the possibility for federal teachers organizations to obtain registration in the federal arbitration system, and eventually obtain one or more federal awards. The 1929 decision by the High Court of Australia was a significant decision in education and industrial relations, because it prevented state teachers and other public employees obtaining access to federal awards for the next 54 years. The decision, however, was veiled in unsettled legal argument, because the High Court overturned much of its expansive thinking of the 1918–25 period. Later generations of academic lawyers described the decision as a ‘bad one’ or ‘an anomalous decision’, but they and the current High Court failed to give any satisfactory explanation of why the Court had reached its decision. This paper offers such an explanation, arguing that the decision was not based on law (or the educational situation) but on the High Court's perceptions of the politics of federal-state relations in the period. The state teachers who had asked for a High Court ruling on the application of the Commonwealth's industrial relations powers (section 51 XXXV of the Constitution) to their work and employment were thus dragged momentarily onto the centre stage of Australian politics and law. They found themselves denied access to a federal award because the High Court felt that the federal arbitration ‘experiment’ had caused too much embarrassment to the federal system of government.
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Mamojka, Mojmír, and Jacek Dworzecki. "Development of Commercial Law in the Slovak Republic - Outline of problems." Internal Security 8, no. 1 (January 30, 2016): 81–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.5604/20805268.1231517.

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The article concerns the issue of trade law in the context of its evolution and the current realities of its being in force in Republic of Slovakia. In the paper the authors present an historical view of the creation of legal regulations about trade from ancient times to present days. In the first part of the paper the political system and its components are discussed. The reader will be able to acquaint themselves with the functioning of the apparatus of executive power (the government and ministries), legislative power (the parliament consisting of 150 members) and judiciary (independent courts and prosecutors) in the Republic of Slovakia. Moreover, this part of the article provides information about practical aspects of the creation of selected components of the constitutional legal order (e.g. parliamentary elections). In the second part, the paper covers the evolution of trade law over the centuries, approaches to regulations in Mesopotamia, based on, inter alia, the Code of Hammurabi, and also in ancient Egypt and Greece. Tracing the development of trade law over the centuries, the authors also present the evolution of legal regulations in this field in the XIX century, with particular reference to France, Germany and Austria-Hungary (especially the territory which today forms the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic). In the last part of the article, the forming of regulations of trade law in Czechoslovakia from 1918 and during subsequent periods which created the history of that country, to the overthrow communism and the peaceful division of the state in 1993 into two separate, independent state organisms – the Czech Republic and Slovakia - is approached.
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30

Revesz, Bela. "Draft for Understanding the Historical Background of Changes in the Ideological Language and Communication of Secret Services in 20th Century’s Hungary." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 33, no. 3 (August 11, 2020): 855–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09759-w.

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Abstract Words can mean different things to different people. This can be problematic, mainly for those working together in a bureaucratic institution, such as the secret service. Shared, certified, explicit and codified definitions offer a counter to subjective, solitary and/or culturally dominant definitions. It’s true that codified secrecy terms for secret services can be seen to involve a number of political, cultural, subcultural “languages”, but if words come from unclassified or declassified files, memorandums and/or records, one needs a deep understanding of the secret services. A remarkable feature of this bureaucratic language is the evolving nature of, certain “keywords” as important signifiers of historical transformation. Thus, the changes in the language of the secret services depends at least as much on the internal changes of the secret services as on the transformation in the external political-social environment. In spite of the confusion of Hungarian secret services in the revolutions of 1918–1919 and the disintegration of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, in the early 1920’s became a stable system. Between the two World Wars, the Hungarian State Police directed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (hereinafter referred to as MIA), the Military Intelligence and Counter-Espionage directed by the Ministry of Defence (hereinafter referred to as MoD), and the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie directed by both of the Ministries had their own operational service. This structure existed unchanged until 1945. Simultaneously with the forward advance of the soviet troops, government began to re-establish the former system of the secret services in the eastern part of the country. After WWII, in 1946, the “State-protection Department” as political police became independent from the police. However, from the beginning, they remained under the control of the Communist Party. After 1950, the State Security Authority provided special services for the MIA and the Military Political Directorate of the MoD. After quashing the revolution in 1956, in the spring of 1957, the MIA Political Investigation Department was established which—with slight modifications—kept the structure created during the “state protection era”. The MIA III. The State-Protection General Directorate was established in 1962. The reorganization was finalized in the middle of the 1960’s, which resulted in the new system, which—with the structure of Directorates—became the ultimate structure of the state secret police until the abolishment of the MIA General Directorate III in January 1990. These organizational transformations were largely the result of exogenous historical-political changes. Moreover, each new period had a major impact on the organizational communication, language use and vocabulary of the secret services. This study seeks to interpret these historical transformations.
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Witt, Katrina. "The Politics of Managing Pluralism: Austria-Hungary 1867-1918." Constellations 1, no. 1 (November 29, 2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.29173/cons6899.

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The multi-cultural nature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth century created much unrest among the many different ethnic groups within the Empire. As each group struggled against the other groups for more rights, dissolution threatened the Empire. The Hapsburg government under Franz Joseph used two different strategies in Austria and Hungary to keep the country united, and these strategies successfully kept the Empire together for half a century. After the Emperor’s death, opposing interests and separatism proved too powerful without Franz Joseph’s uniting influence, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed.
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Perovšek, Jurij. "Narodni svet in slovenska samoodločba leta 1918." Studia Historica Slovenica 19 (2019), no. 2 (October 30, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.32874/shs.2019-10.

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Category: 1.01 Original scientific paper Language: Original in Slovene (Abstract in Slovene and English, Summary in English) Key words: National Council for Slovenia and Istria, Anton Korošec, National manifestation and self-determination of October 29, 1918 in Ljubljana, Slovenian military, National government of the State of SHS in Ljubljana Abstract: With the establishment of the National Council for Slovenia and Istria (National Council) on August 16 and 17, 1918 in Ljubljana, Slovenian national politics embarked on a path of separation from Austria. The National Council has gradually developed into an authority in Slovenian lands. Legitimate Austrian authority began to die out as a sovereign power, and the revolutionary Slovenian authority, exercised by the National Council and its subordinate bodies, was more and more effective every day. In Slovenian lands, state relations with Austria were broken at a major national event on October 29, 1918 at the Congress Square in Ljubljana. The event was attended by more than 30,000 people of all ages and backgrounds, some 200 Slovenian officers and soldiers, and all the leading Slovenian political representatives who were in Ljubljana at that time. In their speeches, they welcomed the separation of Slovenians from Austria and the emergence of an independent state of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, who by then lived in the Habsburg Monarchy (SHS State), and soldiers broke the oath given to the Habsburg Ruler and declared loyalty to the SHS State. The military played a prominent role in establishing a new, Slovenian rule, and decisively contributed to the formation of the first Slovenian national government. On October 31, 1918, the National Council of SHS in Ljubljana was declared the supreme authority in the State of SHS by the National Council of SHS in Zagreb.
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Ryba, Mieczysław. "Przełomowe wydarzenia polityczne w Lublinie w czasie I wojny światowej. Na drodze do niepodległości / Landmarks of the First World War in Lublin. On the way to the independence." Annales UMCS, Historia 68, no. 1-2 (January 1, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/umcshist-2015-0002.

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AbstractThe author writes about the changes on the political scene in Lublin during the First World War. Since 1915, Lublin was occupied by German and Austrian troops. Some political groups wanted to cooperate with Germany and Austria-Hungary, some opposed to this. 5th November Act 1916 gave the promise of creating a Polish state. Therefore, political parties collaborating with the Germans increased their activity. Later came the growing disappointment against German policy towards Polish. The worst was adopted the Treaty of Brest in 1918, when the Germans and Austrians gave Ukraine a part of Polish territory. In Lublin gained an advantage an anti-German group.In November 1918, the government of Lublin formed the Socialists. To the political struggle, the government began Polish nationalists.
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Jeziorny, Dariusz. "The successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Polish diplomacy (1918–1920)." Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 16, no. 3 (November 5, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/1644-857x.16.03.06.

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Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Kingdom of SCS and Poland are the countries referred to as successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy since they were established out of its ruins. This article focuses on how meaningful these Central European states were to Polish diplomacy in 1918–1920, i.e. the period which was decisive in the creation of their independent existence. The aim of the article is to answer the question of how the gradual breakup of the unitary Austria-Hungary in 1918 was perceived by the Polish political elites. It will also examine what stance the government of the independent Polish state adopted towards the new countries that were being formed after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. All the states which were fully or partially composed of the former Austro-Hungarian territories are considered with the exception of Italy which was already recognised as one of the most important European powers and after its annexation of the Habsburg lands on the Adriatic Sea was even more of a power. The article will also explore whether the emerging countries played any role in the development of Polish foreign policy and if so, how significant this role was. A similar question can be asked in the case of the entire territory of the Danube Region. After the First World War, its political and economic unity was shattered, which could have been used by the nascent Poland while dealing with its weaker partners.
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Perovšek, Jurij. "Misel o Sloveniji in njeno udejanjenje v času od Majniške deklaracije do oblikovanja Države SHS in Narodne vlade SHS v Ljubljani." Studia Historica Slovenica 18 (2018), no. 2 (October 30, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.32874/shs.2018-16.

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Category: 1.01 Original scientific paper Language: Original in Slovenian (Abstract in Slovenian and English, Summary in English) Key words: May Declaration, Ivan Cankar, Slovenia, Declaration Movement, National Council for Slovenia and Istria, State of SHS, National Government of SHS in Ljubljana Excerpt: After the proclamation of the May Declaration on May 30, 1917, Ivan Cankar uttered the first mentioning of Slovenia as a national political entity on July 15, 1917. On August 2, 1917, the Catholic All-Slovenian People's Party (VLS) was in favour of the formation of a United Slovenia in the transdualistic Austrian Yugoslav community. In the spring of 1918, the word Slovenia was repeatedly pronounced by the VLS, and Ljubljana was proclaimed the Slovenian capital. With the establishment of the National Council for Slovenia and Istria in Ljubljana on August 16 and 17, 1918, the idea of Slovenia gained political ground. The author interprets the year 1917 and the May Declaration as a historical milestone after which the Slovenian national political development was focused on the formation of a Slovenian state entity and on the simultaneous experience of its national statehood. The autonomy of the Slovenian state law was not preserved in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians/Yugoslavia, and in the second Yugoslavia it was expressed in the federal position of Slovenia in the composite Yugoslav state. In 1991, with the proclamation of the Republic of Slovenia, Slovenia became a state name.
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Jendrzejewski, Błażej. "The evolving economic importance of Polish forests between 1918 and 1945." Rural History, August 13, 2021, 1–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0956793321000157.

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Abstract Poland, going through three partitions and two wars, has suffered enormous losses across many dimensions. Polish forests have been damaged or destroyed by direct or indirect results of those tragic events and at the same time, timber and non-timber forest products played an important role in rebuilding the nation. This article illustrates the scale of the losses and the economic importance of Polish forests between 1918 and 1945. Actions of three partitioning states (Russia, Prussia and Austria) left the newly liberated Poland with damaged and destroyed forests. For example, during the Second World War, Germany protected its forests by shifting the entire burden of war supplies (that is, wood, game, resin and tanning bark) onto the forests of the occupied countries, including Poland. Despite being left in a bad condition, Polish forests were able to provide wood and non-wood products necessary for the reconstruction of the country and helped to jumpstart some of the sectors of the national economy. This article provides a review of the literature on twentieth century Polish forestry, with a specific focus on its changing economic importance, government perception and policy and the role of forestry to Polish economic, political and cultural life.
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Embacher, Helga. "Controversies over Austria’s Nazi Past: Generational Changes and Grassroots Awakenings following the Waldheim Affair and the “Wehrmacht Exhibitions”." Nationalities Papers, July 21, 2022, 1–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/nps.2022.40.

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Abstract In 1945, the Austrian government constructed a new identity based on having been a “victim” of Nazi Germany. Thus, it had to hush up the fact that a majority of the population had welcomed the Anschluss, hundreds of thousands joined the NSDAP and served in the German Wehrmacht, and many were involved in the crimes of National Socialism. Only in the late 1980s, in the wake of the Waldheim Affair, did the years between 1938 and 1945 have to be re-interpreted. Ten years later, the exhibition “War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944” (short: Wehrmacht exhibition) questioned the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht.” Using the examples of the Waldheim Affair and the Wehrmacht exhibition, the article analyzes the influence of grassroots movements stimulated by these events. Since some members of the second generation defended the Wehrmacht rather than embracing the grassroots movements’ critique of earlier war myths, it will also problematize the category “generation.” Due to the leading role played by prominent Austrian Jews in these grassroots movements, the generational gap within the Jewish community is of further interest. I emphasize that the grassroots movements needed the support of Austrian political parties and from abroad to achieve a modicum of success.
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Robinson, Michael. "‘No Man’s Land’: Disability, Rehabilitation, Welfare Policy and the British Ex-Service Migrant in Australia, 1918–39." Social History of Medicine, August 3, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkz063.

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Abstract An inter-war analysis of the British and Australian departments charged with compensating disabled First World War veterans and the British ex-service migrant in inter-war Australia illustrates how nation-states have failed to unify welfare and disability rehabilitation. Contemporary welfare states continue to codify and establish categories of prioritisation regarding communities with disabilities for public finance administered by national government departments. This binational case study identifies reoccurring type one and type two error problems: policy can deny legitimate claims for state assistance while also validating and financing potentially illegitimate claims. This underlines the factors that dictate which error type is ruled to be the least significant and the impact the resulting model has on individual claimants. This study reinforces the thesis of David Gerber who stresses the ahistorical centrality of ‘biopolitics’ or the relationship between societal and political perceptions of a conflict on state policy, in the treatment of veteran communities.
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Heurich, Angelika. "Women in Australian Politics: Maintaining the Rage against the Political Machine." M/C Journal 22, no. 1 (March 13, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1498.

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Women in federal politics are under-represented today and always have been. At no time in the history of the federal parliament have women achieved equal representation with men. There have never been an equal number of women in any federal cabinet. Women have never held an equitable number of executive positions of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) or the Liberal Party. Australia has had only one female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and she was the recipient of sexist treatment in the parliament and the media. A 2019 report by Plan International found that girls and women, were “reluctant to pursue a career in politics, saying they worry about being treated unfairly.” The Report author said the results were unsurprisingwhen you consider how female politicians are still treated in Parliament and the media in this country, is it any wonder the next generation has no desire to expose themselves to this world? Unfortunately, in Australia, girls grow up seeing strong, smart, capable female politicians constantly reduced to what they’re wearing, comments about their sexuality and snipes about their gender.What voters may not always see is how women in politics respond to sexist treatment, or to bullying, or having to vote against their principles because of party rules, or to having no support to lead the party. Rather than being political victims and quitting, there is a ground-swell of women who are fighting back. The rage they feel at being excluded, bullied, harassed, name-called, and denied leadership opportunities is being channelled into rage against the structures that deny them equality. The rage they feel is building resilience and it is building networks of women across the political divide. This article highlights some female MPs who are “maintaining the rage”. It suggests that the rage that is evident in their public responses is empowering them to stand strong in the face of adversity, in solidarity with other female MPs, building their resilience, and strengthening calls for social change and political equality.Her-story of Women’s MovementsThroughout the twentieth century, women stood for equal rights and personal empowerment driven by rage against their disenfranchisement. Significant periods include the early 1900s, with suffragettes gaining the vote for women. The interwar period of 1919 to 1938 saw women campaign for financial independence from their husbands (Andrew). Australian women were active citizens in a range of campaigns for improved social, economic and political outcomes for women and their children.Early contributions made by women to Australian society were challenges to the regulations and of female sexuality and reproduction. Early twentieth century feminist organisations such The Women’s Peace Army, United Association of Women, the Australian Federation of Women’s Societies for Equal Citizenship, the Union of Australian Women, the National Council of Women, and the Australian Federation of Women Voters, proved the early forerunners to the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). It was in many of these early campaigns that the rage expressed in the concept of the “personal is political” (Hanisch) became entrenched in Australian feminist approaches to progressive social change. The idea of the “personal is political” encapsulated that it was necessary to challenge and change power relations, achievable when women fully participated in politics (van Acker 25). Attempts by women during the 1970s to voice concerns about issues of inequality, including sexuality, the right to abortion, availability of childcare, and sharing of household duties, were “deemed a personal problem” and not for public discussion (Hanisch). One core function of the WLM was to “advance women’s positions” via government legislation or, as van Acker (120) puts it, the need for “feminist intervention in the state.” However, in advocating for policy reform, the WLM had no coherent or organised strategy to ensure legislative change. The establishment of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), together with the Femocrat strategy, sought to rectify this. Formed in 1972, WEL was tasked with translating WLM concerns into government policy.The initial WEL campaign took issues of concern to WLM to the incoming Whitlam government (1972-1975). Lyndall Ryan (73) notes: women’s liberationists were the “stormtroopers” and WEL the “pragmatic face of feminism.” In 1973 Whitlam appointed Elizabeth Reid, a member of WLM, as Australia’s first Women’s Advisor. Of her appointment, Reid (3) said, “For the first time in our history we were being offered the opportunity to attempt to implement what for years we had been writing, yelling, marching and working towards. Not to respond would have felt as if our bluff had been called.” They had the opportunity in the Whitlam government to legislatively and fiscally address the rage that drove generations of women to yell and march.Following Reid were the appointments of Sara Dowse and Lyndall Ryan, continuing the Femocrat strategy of ensuring women were appointed to executive bureaucratic roles within the Whitlam government. The positions were not well received by the mainly male-dominated press gallery and parliament. As “inside agitators” (Eisenstein) for social change the central aim of Femocrats was social and economic equity for women, reflecting social justice and progressive social and public policy. Femocrats adopted a view about the value of women’s own lived experiences in policy development, application and outcome. The role of Senator Susan Ryan is of note. In 1981, Ryan wrote and introduced the Sex Discrimination Bill, the first piece of federal legislation of its type in Australia. Ryan was a founding member of WEL and was elected to the Senate in 1975 on the slogan “A woman’s place is in the Senate”. As Ryan herself puts it: “I came to believe that not only was a woman’s place in the House and in the Senate, as my first campaign slogan proclaimed, but a feminist’s place was in politics.” Ryan, the first Labor woman to represent the ACT in the Senate, was also the first Labor woman appointed as a federal Minister.With the election of the economic rationalist Hawke and Keating Governments (1983-1996) and the neoliberal Howard Government (1996-2007), what was a “visible, united, highly mobilised and state-focused women’s movement” declined (Lake 260). This is not to say that women today reject the value of women’s voices and experiences, particularly in politics. Many of the issues of the 1970s remain today: domestic violence, unequal pay, sexual harassment, and a lack of gender parity in political representation. Hence, it remains important that women continue to seek election to the national parliament.Gender Gap: Women in Power When examining federal elections held between 1972 and 2016, women have been under-represented in the lower house. In none of these elections have women achieved more than 30 per cent representation. Following the 1974 election less that one per cent of the lower house were women. No women were elected to the lower house at the 1975 or 1977 election. Between 1980 and 1996, female representation was less than 10 per cent. In 1996 this rose to 15 per cent and reached 29 per cent at the 2016 federal election.Following the 2016 federal election, only 32 per cent of both chambers were women. After the July 2016 election, only eight women were appointed to the Turnbull Ministry: six women in Cabinet and two women in the Outer Cabinet (Parliament of Australia). Despite the higher representation of women in the ALP, this is not reflected in the number of women in the Shadow Cabinet. Just as female parliamentarians have never achieved parity, neither have women in the Executive Branch.In 2017, Australia was ranked 50th in the world in terms of gender representation in parliament, between The Philippines and South Sudan. Globally, there are 38 States in which women account for less than 10 per cent of parliamentarians. As at January 2017, the three highest ranking countries in female representation were Rwanda, Bolivia and Cuba. The United Kingdom was ranked 47th, and the United States 104th (IPU and UNW). Globally only 18 per cent of government ministers are women (UNW). Between 1960 and 2013, 52 women became prime ministers worldwide, of those 43 have taken office since 1990 (Curtin 191).The 1995 United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women set a 30 per cent target for women in decision-making. This reflects the concept of “critical mass”. Critical mass proposes that for there to be a tipping balance where parity is likely to emerge, this requires a cohort of a minimum of 30 per cent of the minority group.Gender scholars use critical mass theory to explain that parity won’t occur while there are only a few token women in politics. Rather, only as numbers increase will women be able to build a strong enough presence to make female representation normative. Once a 30 per cent critical mass is evident, the argument is that this will encourage other women to join the cohort, making parity possible (Childs & Krook 725). This threshold also impacts on legislative outcomes, because the larger cohort of women are able to “influence their male colleagues to accept and approve legislation promoting women’s concerns” (Childs & Krook 725).Quotas: A Response to Gender InequalityWith women representing less than one in five parliamentarians worldwide, gender quotas have been introduced in 90 countries to redress this imbalance (Krook). Quotas are an equal opportunity measure specifically designed to re-dress inequality in political representation by allocating seats to under-represented groups (McCann 4). However, the effectiveness of the quota system is contested, with continued resistance, particularly in conservative parties. Fine (3) argues that one key objection to mandatory quotas is that they “violate the principle of merit”, suggesting insufficient numbers of women capable or qualified to hold parliamentary positions.In contrast, Gauja (2) suggests that “state-mandated electoral quotas work” because in countries with legislated quotas the number of women being nominated is significantly higher. While gender quotas have been brought to bear to address the gender gap, the ability to challenge the majority status of men has been limited (Hughes).In 1994 the ALP introduced rule-based party quotas to achieve equal representation by 2025 and a gender weighting system for female preselection votes. Conversely, the Liberal Party have a voluntary target of reaching 50 per cent female representation by 2025. But what of the treatment of women who do enter politics?Fig. 1: Portrait of Julia Gillard AC, 27th Prime Minister of Australia, at Parliament House, CanberraInside Politics: Misogyny and Mobs in the ALPIn 2010, Julia Gillard was elected as the leader of the governing ALP, making her Australia’s first female Prime Minister. Following the 2010 federal election, called 22 days after becoming Prime Minister, Gillard was faced with the first hung parliament since 1940. She formed a successful minority government before losing the leadership of the ALP in June 2013. Research demonstrates that “being a female prime minister is often fraught because it challenges many of the gender stereotypes associated with political leadership” (Curtin 192). In Curtin’s assessment Gillard was naïve in her view that interest in her as the country’s first female Prime Minister would quickly dissipate.Gillard, argues Curtin (192-193), “believed that her commitment to policy reform and government enterprise, to hard work and maintaining consensus in caucus, would readily outstrip the gender obsession.” As Curtin continues, “this did not happen.” Voters were continually reminded that Gillard “did not conform to the traditional.” And “worse, some high-profile men, from industry, the Liberal Party and the media, indulged in verbal attacks of a sexist nature throughout her term in office (Curtin 192-193).The treatment of Gillard is noted in terms of how misogyny reinforced negative perceptions about the patriarchal nature of parliamentary politics. The rage this created in public and media spheres was double-edged. On the one hand, some were outraged at the sexist treatment of Gillard. On the other hand, those opposing Gillard created a frenzy of personal and sexist attacks on her. Further attacking Gillard, on 25 February 2011, radio broadcaster Alan Jones called Gillard, not only by her first-name, but called her a “liar” (Kwek). These attacks and the informal way the Prime Minister was addressed, was unprecedented and caused outrage.An anti-carbon tax rally held in front of Parliament House in Canberra in March 2011, featured placards with the slogans “Ditch the Witch” and “Bob Brown’s Bitch”, referring to Gillard and her alliance with the Australian Greens, led by Senator Bob Brown. The Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and other members of the Liberal Party were photographed standing in front of the placards (Sydney Morning Herald, Vertigo). Criticism of women in positions of power is not limited to coming from men alone. Women from the Liberal Party were also seen in the photo of derogatory placards decrying Gillard’s alliances with the Greens.Gillard (Sydney Morning Herald, “Gillard”) said she was “offended when the Leader of the Opposition went outside in the front of Parliament and stood next to a sign that said, ‘Ditch the witch’. I was offended when the Leader of the Opposition stood next to a sign that ascribed me as a man’s bitch.”Vilification of Gillard culminated in October 2012, when Abbott moved a no-confidence motion against the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper. Abbott declared the Gillard government’s support for Slipper was evidence of the government’s acceptance of Slipper’s sexist attitudes (evident in allegations that Slipper sent a text to a political staffer describing female genitals). Gillard responded with what is known as the “Misogyny speech”, pointing at Abbott, shaking with rage, and proclaiming, “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man” (ABC). Apart from vilification, how principles can be forsaken for parliamentary, party or electoral needs, may leave some women circumspect about entering parliament. Similar attacks on political women may affirm this view.In 2010, Labor Senator Penny Wong, a gay Member of Parliament and advocate of same-sex marriage, voted against a bill supporting same-sex marriage, because it was not ALP policy (Q and A, “Passion”). Australian Marriage Equality spokesperson, Alex Greenwich, strongly condemned Wong’s vote as “deeply hypocritical” (Akersten). The Sydney Morning Herald (Dick), under the headline “Married to the Mob” asked:a question: what does it now take for a cabinet minister to speak out on a point of principle, to venture even a mild criticism of the party position? ... Would you object if your party, after fixing some areas of discrimination against a minority group of which you are a part, refused to move on the last major reform for that group because of ‘tradition’ without any cogent explanation of why that tradition should remain? Not if you’re Penny Wong.In 2017, during the postal vote campaign for marriage equality, Wong clarified her reasons for her 2010 vote against same-sex marriage saying in an interview: “In 2010 I had to argue a position I didn’t agree with. You get a choice as a party member don’t you? You either resign or do something like that and make a point, or you stay and fight and you change it.” Biding her time, Wong used her rage to change policy within the ALP.In continuing personal attacks on Gillard, on 19 March 2012, Gillard was told by Germaine Greer that she had a “big arse” (Q and A, “Politics”) and on 27 August 2012, Greer said Gillard looked like an “organ grinder’s monkey” (Q and A, “Media”). Such an attack by a prominent feminist from the 1970s, on the personal appearance of the Prime Minister, reinforced the perception that it was acceptable to criticise a woman in this position, in ways men have never been. Inside Politics: Leadership and Bullying inside the Liberal PartyWhile Gillard’s leadership was likely cut short by the ongoing attacks on her character, Liberal Deputy leader Julie Bishop was thwarted from rising to the leadership of the Liberal Party, thus making it unlikely she will become the Liberal Party’s first female Prime Minister. Julie Bishop was Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2018 and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 2007 to 2018, having entered politics in 1998.With the impending demise of Prime Minister Turnbull in August 2018, Bishop sought support from within the Liberal Party to run for the leadership. In the second round of leadership votes Bishop stood for the leadership in a three-cornered race, coming last in the vote to Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison. Bishop resigned as the Foreign Affairs Minister and took a seat on the backbench.When asked if the Liberal Party would elect a popular female leader, Bishop replied: “When we find one, I’m sure we will.” Political journalist Annabel Crabb offered further insight into what Bishop meant when she addressed the press in her red Rodo shoes, labelling the statement as “one of Julie Bishop’s chilliest-ever slapdowns.” Crabb, somewhat sardonically, suggested this translated as Bishop listing someone with her qualifications and experience as: “Woman Works Hard, Is Good at Her Job, Doesn't Screw Up, Loses Out Anyway.”For political journalist Tony Wright, Bishop was “clearly furious with those who had let their testosterone get the better of them and their party” and proceeded to “stride out in a pair of heels in the most vivid red to announce that, despite having resigned the deputy position she had occupied for 11 years, she was not about to quit the Parliament.” In response to the lack of support for Bishop in the leadership spill, female members of the federal parliament took to wearing red in the parliamentary chambers signalling that female members were “fed up with the machinations of the male majority” (Wright).Red signifies power, strength and anger. Worn in parliament, it was noticeable and striking, making a powerful statement. The following day, Bishop said: “It is evident … that there is an acceptance of a level of behaviour in Canberra that would not be tolerated in any other workplace across Australia" (Wright).Colour is political. The Suffragettes of the early twentieth century donned the colours of purple and white to create a statement of unity and solidarity. In recent months, Dr Kerryn Phelps used purple in her election campaign to win the vacated seat of Wentworth, following Turnbull’s resignation, perhaps as a nod to the Suffragettes. Public anger in Wentworth saw Phelps elected, despite the electorate having been seen as a safe Liberal seat.On 21 February 2019, the last sitting day of Parliament before the budget and federal election, Julie Bishop stood to announce her intention to leave politics at the next election. To some this was a surprise. To others it was expected. On finishing her speech, Bishop immediately exited the Lower House without acknowledging the Prime Minister. A proverbial full-stop to her outrage. She wore Suffragette white.Victorian Liberal backbencher Julia Banks, having declared herself so repelled by bullying during the Turnbull-Dutton leadership delirium, announced she was quitting the Liberal Party and sitting in the House of Representatives as an Independent. Banks said she could no longer tolerate the bullying, led by members of the reactionary right wing, the coup was aided by many MPs trading their vote for a leadership change in exchange for their individual promotion, preselection endorsements or silence. Their actions were undeniably for themselves, for their position in the party, their power, their personal ambition – not for the Australian people.The images of male Liberal Members of Parliament standing with their backs turned to Banks, as she tended her resignation from the Liberal Party, were powerful, indicating their disrespect and contempt. Yet Banks’s decision to stay in politics, as with Wong and Bishop is admirable. To maintain the rage from within the institutions and structures that act to sustain patriarchy is a brave, but necessary choice.Today, as much as any time in the past, a woman’s place is in politics, however, recent events highlight the ongoing poor treatment of women in Australian politics. Yet, in the face of negative treatment – gendered attacks on their character, dismissive treatment of their leadership abilities, and ongoing bullying and sexism, political women are fighting back. They are once again channelling their rage at the way they are being treated and how their abilities are constantly questioned. They are enraged to the point of standing in the face of adversity to bring about social and political change, just as the suffragettes and the women’s movements of the 1970s did before them. The current trend towards women planning to stand as Independents at the 2019 federal election is one indication of this. Women within the major parties, particularly on the conservative side of politics, have become quiet. Some are withdrawing, but most are likely regrouping, gathering the rage within and ready to make a stand after the dust of the 2019 election has settled.ReferencesAndrew, Merrindahl. Social Movements and the Limits of Strategy: How Australian Feminists Formed Positions on Work and Care. Canberra. Australian National University. 2008.Akersten, Matt. “Wong ‘Hypocrite’ on Gay Marriage.” SameSame.com 2010. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.samesame.com.au/news/5671/Wong-hypocrite-on-gay-marriage>.Banks, Julia. Media Statement, 27 Nov. 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <http://juliabanks.com.au/media-release/statement-2/>.Childs, Sarah, and Mona Lena Krook. “Critical Mass Theory and Women’s Political Representation.” Political Studies 56 (2008): 725-736.Crabb, Annabel. “Julie Bishop Loves to Speak in Code and She Saved Her Best One-Liner for Last.” ABC News 28 Aug. 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-28/julie-bishop-women-in-politics/10174136>.Curtin, Jennifer. “The Prime Ministership of Julia Gillard.” Australian Journal of Political Science 50.1 (2015): 190-204.Dick, Tim. “Married to the Mob.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 July 2010. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://m.smh.com.au/federal-election/married-to-the-mob-20100726-0r77.html?skin=dumb-phone>.Eisenstein, Hester. Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996.Fine, Cordelia. “Do Mandatory Gender Quotas Work?” The Monthly Mar. 2012. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/march/1330562640/cordelia-fine/status-quota>.Gauja, Anika. “How the Liberals Can Fix Their Gender Problem.” The Conversation 13 Oct. 2017. 16 Oct. 2017 <https://theconversation.com/how-the-liberals-can-fix-their-gender-problem- 85442>.Hanisch, Carol. “Introduction: The Personal is Political.” 2006. 18 Sep. 2016 <http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html>.Hughes, Melanie. “Intersectionality, Quotas, and Minority Women's Political Representation Worldwide.” American Political Science Review 105.3 (2011): 604-620.Inter-Parliamentary Union. Equality in Politics: A Survey of Women and Men in Parliaments. 2008. 25 Feb. 2018 <http://archive.ipu.org/pdf/publications/equality08-e.pdf>.Inter-Parliamentary Union and United Nations Women. Women in Politics: 2017. 2017. 29 Jan. 2018 <https://www.ipu.org/resources/publications/infographics/2017-03/women-in-politics-2017>.Krook, Mona Lena. “Gender Quotas as a Global Phenomenon: Actors and Strategies in Quota Adoption.” European Political Science 3.3 (2004): 59–65.———. “Candidate Gender Quotas: A Framework for Analysis.” European Journal of Political Research 46 (2007): 367–394.Kwek, Glenda. “Alan Jones Lets Rip at ‘Ju-liar’ Gillard.” Sydney Morning Herald 25 Feb. 2011. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/alan-jones-lets-rip-at-juliar-gillard-20110224-1b7km.html>.Lake, Marilyn. Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999.McCann, Joy. “Electoral Quotas for Women: An International Overview.” Parliament of Australia Library 14 Nov. 2013. 1 Feb. 2018 <https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1314/ElectoralQuotas>.Parliament of Australia. “Current Ministry List: The 45th Parliament.” 2016. 11 Sep. 2016 <http://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/parliamentary_handbook/current_ministry_list>.Plan International. “Girls Reluctant to Pursue a Life of Politics Cite Sexism as Key Reason.” 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <https://www.plan.org.au/media/media-releases/girls-have-little-to-no-desire-to-pursue-a-career-in-politics>.Q and A. “Mutilation and the Media Generation.” ABC Television 27 Aug. 2012. 28 Sep. 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3570412.htm>.———. “Politics and Porn in a Post-Feminist World.” ABC Television 19 Mar. 2012. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3451584.htm>.———. “Where Is the Passion?” ABC Television 26 Jul. 2010. 23 Mar. 2018 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s2958214.htm?show=transcript>.Reid, Elizabeth. “The Child of Our Movement: A Movement of Women.” Different Lives: Reflections on the Women’s Movement and Visions of Its Future. Ed. Jocelynne Scutt. Ringwood: Penguin 1987. 107-120.Ryan, L. “Feminism and the Federal Bureaucracy 1972-83.” Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions. Ed. Sophie Watson. Sydney: Allen and Unwin 1990.Ryan, Susan. “Fishes on Bicycles.” Papers on Parliament 17 (Sep. 1992). 1 Mar. 2018 <https://www.aph.gov.au/~/~/link.aspx?_id=981240E4C1394E1CA3D0957C42F99120>.Sydney Morning Herald. “‘Pinocchio Gillard’: Strong Anti-Gillard Emissions at Canberra Carbon Tax Protest.” 23 Mar. 2011. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/pinocchio-gillard-strong-antigillard-emissions-at-canberra-carbon-tax-protest-20110323-1c5w7.html>.———. “Gillard v Abbott on the Slipper Affair.” 10 Oct. 2012. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-09/gillard-vs-abbott-on-the-slipper-affair/4303618>.United Nations Women. Facts and Figures: Leadership and Political Participation. 2017. 1 Mar. 2018 <http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/leadership-and-political-participation/facts-and-figures>.Van Acker, Elizabeth. Different Voices: Gender and Politics in Australia. Melbourne: MacMillan Education Australia, 1999.Wright, Tony. “No Handmaids Here! Liberal Women Launch Their Red Resistance.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Sep. 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/no-handmaids-here-liberal-women-launch-their-red-resistance-20180917-p504bm.html>.Wong, Penny. “Marriage Equality Plebiscite.” Interview Transcript. The Project 1 Aug. 2017. 1 Mar. 2018 <https://www.pennywong.com.au/transcripts/the-project-2/>.
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40

Panfilova, T. "National issue in the West Ukrainian People's Republic. The 100th Anniversary of the achievements of Ukrainian state-building." Democratic governance, no. 25 (June 21, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.33990/2070-4038.25.2020.213661.

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Problem setting. In different epochs, the state-building processes in Ukraine had characteristic features that should be taken into account today. The achievements of the Central Rada, the Hetmanate, the Directory, and the Soviet government in Ukraine reveal the complex external and internal circumstances of state-building. Political leaders of this period pursued their own principles of governance, often ignoring the lessons of the past. Under each government, there were different views among the political electorate on this issue, which did not always reflect the interests of the people of Ukraine, and important decisions were generally made to please Western Europe.Recent research and publications analysis. Historical events of the early XXth century in Eastern Galicia are interesting for researchers of various specialities. In particular, V. Velykochyi, L. Volosianko, Yu. Zaitsev, S. Kobuta, O. Krasivskyi, M. Lytvyn, K. Mytsan, I. Pater, H. Poslavska, O. Rublov, O. Reient, Yu. Slyvka, V. Soldatenko, I. Soliar and others.Highlighting previously unsettled parts of the general problem. Modern problems of state-building in Ukraine and the participation of representatives of national minorities in them need a thorough scientific substantiation. In this regard, the direction of previously unresolved issues concerning the current state-building practices of the past years is singled out.Taking into account the lessons of national history, identifying the relationship between historical experience and modern problems, ensuring certain heredity, combining Ukrainian achievements with the achievements of world practice of state-building determines the topicality of the problem.Paper main body. Meaningful experience of state-building must be taken into account when reforming modern state structures and, in particular, regarding the definition of powers, tasks, cooperation of various branches of government. Nevertheless, the events of 1917 – 1920ies haven’t been studied enough, because the understanding of the achievements and miscalculations of Ukrainian state-building of the revolutionary era would help to outline the strategic understanding of Ukraine’s tasks at the present stage.In October 1918 after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ukrainians of Western Ukraine began preparations to create their own independent state. In the western Ukrainian lands, although the state revival took place under the significant influence of the events in the Dnieper region, in almost all aspects the desire of Western Ukrainians to gain state independence was radically different from the attempts of Eastern Ukrainians.In a short time, the West Ukrainian People's Republic managed to create a fairly effective system of public administration, based on the constitutional practice of Austria.Already in the first months in Western Ukraine, central and local public administration bodies were formed: the Ukrainian National Council, the State Secretariat, State Secretaries, County National Councils, County Commissioners, Public and City Councils, and Public and City Commissioners.The courts were independent of other branches of government, according to the law of November 21, 1918, and the Highest State Court in Lviv, following the Austrian model, was the Supreme court institution.The West Ukrainian People's Republic managed to ensure stability and order on its territory, despite the war, and it was even passed the Law on Land (April 14, 1919) and introduced its own currency – hryvnia and karbovantsi. Prompt and effective creation of public administration is a unique achievement in the whole of Eastern Europe. It was an ideal model of a modern European democratic state governed by the rule of law – the result of the propensity of Galicians to social organization, which developed significantly in the pre-war decade.The Act of Unity became a powerful manifestation of the will of Ukrainians to ethnic and territorial consolidation, evidence of their dynamic self-identification, and the formation of a political nation.Conclusions of the research and prospects for further studies. The experience of Ukrainian state-building is important for today, as it makes it possible to anticipate similar situations and avoid mistakes. The West Ukrainian People's Republic has left a noticeable mark in the development of Ukrainian national statehood. For the first time since the Galician-Volyn era, Western Ukrainians gained national independence. Important reforms have been carried out in many spheres of public life. An effective system of central and local authorities and administration, health care, education, publishing, and a capable Ukrainian Galician Army was created.The main achievement of the events of 1917 – 1920 was the revival of the idea of Ukrainian statehood and national-state consciousness of the population of Ukraine, and a new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals picked up the concept of the national-state building.
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41

Deer, Patrick, and Toby Miller. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C Journal 5, no. 1 (March 1, 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1938.

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By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).
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42

Collins-Gearing, Brooke. "Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal, Some Are More Equal than ‘Others’." M/C Journal 11, no. 2 (June 1, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.35.

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We ask you now, reader, to put your mind, as a citizen of the Australian Commonwealth, to the facts presented in these pages. We ask you to study the problem, in the way that we present the case, from the Aborigines’ point of view. We do not ask for your charity; we do not ask you to study us as scientific-freaks. Above all, we do not ask for your “protection”. No, thanks! We have had 150 years of that! We ask only for justice, decency, and fair play. (Patten and Ferguson 3-4) Jack Patten and William Ferguson’s above declaration on “Plain Speaking” in Aborigines Claim Citizenship Rights! A Statement of the Case for the Aborigines Progressive Association (1938), outlining Aboriginal Australians view of colonisation and the call for Aboriginal self-determinacy, will be my guiding framework in writing this paper. I ask you to study the problem, as it is presented, from the viewpoint of an Indigenous woman who seeks to understand how “sorry” has been uttered in political domains as a word divorced from the moral freight attached to a history of “degrading, humiliating and exterminating” Aboriginal Australians (Patten and Ferguson 11). I wish to argue that the Opposition leader’s utterance of “sorry” in his 13 February 2008 “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament” was an indicator of the insidious ways in which colonisation has treated Aboriginal Australians as less than, not equal to, white Australians and to examine the ways in which this particular utterance of the word “sorry” is built on longstanding colonial frameworks that position ‘the Aborigine’ as peripheral in the representation of a national identity – a national identity that, as shown by the transcript of the apology, continues to romanticise settler values and ignore Indigenous rights. Nelson’s address tries to disassociate the word “sorry” from any moral attachment. The basis of his address is on constructing a national identity where all injustices are equal. In offering this apology, let us not create one injustice in our attempts to address another. (Nelson) All sorrys are equal, but some are more equal than others. Listening to Nelson’s address, words resembling those of Orwell’s ran through my head. The word “sorry” in relation to Indigenous Australians has taken on cultural, political, educational and economic proportions. The previous government’s refusal to utter the word was attached to the ways in which formations of rhetorically self-sufficient arguments of practicality, equality and justice “functioned to sustain and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia” (Augoustinos, LeCouteur and Soyland 105). How then, I wondered as I nervously waited for Nelson to begin apologising, would he transform this inherited collective discursive practice of legitimised racism that upheld mainstream Australia’s social reality? The need for an apology, and the history of political refusal to give it, is not a simple classification of one event, one moment in history. The ‘act’ of removing children is not a singular, one-off event. The need to do, the justification and rationalisation of the doing and what that means now, the having done, as well as the impact on those that were left behind, those that were taken, those that were born after, are all bound up in this particular “sorry”. Given that reluctance of the previous government to admit injustices were done and still exist, this utterance of the word “sorry” from the leader of the opposition precariously sat between freely offering it and reluctantly giving it. The above quote from Nelson, and its central concern of not performing any injustice towards mainstream Australia (“let us not” [my italics]) very definitely defines this sorry in relation to one particular injustice (the removing of Indigenous children) which therefore ignores the surrounding and complicit colonialist and racist attitudes, policies and practices that both institutionalised and perpetuated racism against Australia’s Indigenous peoples. This comment also clearly articulates the opposition’s concern that mainstream Australia not be offended by this act of offering the word “sorry”. Nelson’s address and the ways that it constructs what this “sorry” is for, what it isn’t for, and who it is for, continues to uphold and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. From the very start of Nelson’s “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament”, two specific clarifications were emphasised: the “sorry” was directed at a limited time period in history; and that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. Nelson defines this distinction: “two cultures; one ancient, proud and celebrating its deep bond with this land for some 50,000 years. The other, no less proud, arrived here with little more than visionary hope deeply rooted in gritty determination to build an Australian nation.” This cultural division maintains colonising discourses that define and label, legitimate and exclude groups and communities. It draws from the binary oppositions of self and other, white and black, civilised and primitive. It maintains a divide between the two predominant ideas of history that this country struggles with and it silences those in that space in between, ignoring for example, the effects of colonisation and miscegenation in blurring the lines between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’. Although acknowledging that Indigenous Australians inhabited this land for a good few thousand decades before the proud, gritty, determined visionaries of a couple of hundred years ago, the “sorry” that is to be uttered is only in relation to “the first seven decades of the 20th century”. Nelson establishes from the outset that any forthcoming apology, on behalf of “us” – read as non-Indigenous Anglo-Australians – in reference to ‘them’ – “those Aboriginal people forcibly removed” – is only valid for the “period within which these events occurred [which] was one that defined and shaped Australia”. My reading of this sectioning of a period in Australia’s history is that while recognising that certain colonising actions were unjust, specifically in this instance the removal of Indigenous children, this period of time is also seen as influential and significant to the growth of the country. What this does is to allow the important colonial enterprise to subsume the unjust actions by the colonisers by other important colonial actions. Explicit in Nelson’s address is that this particular time frame saw the nation of Australia reach the heights of achievements and is a triumphant period – an approach which extends beyond taking the highs with the lows, and the good with the bad, towards overshadowing any minor ‘unfortunate’ mistakes that might have been made, ‘occasionally’, along the way. Throughout the address, there are continual reminders to the listeners that the “us” should not be placed at a disadvantage in the act of saying “sorry”: to do so would be to create injustice, whereas this “sorry” is strictly about attempting to “address another”. By sectioning off a specific period in the history of colonised Australia, the assumption is that all that happened before 1910 and all that happened after 1970 are “sorry” free. This not only ignores the lead up to the official policy of removal, how it was sanctioned and the aftermath of removal as outlined in The Bringing Them Home Report (1997); it also prevents Indigenous concepts of time from playing a legitimate and recognised role in the construct of both history and society. Aboriginal time is cyclical and moves around important events: those events that are most significant to an individual are held closer than those that are insignificant or mundane. Aleksendar Janca and Clothilde Bullen state that “time is perceived in relation to the socially sanctioned importance of events and is most often identified by stages in life or historic relevance of events” (41). The speech attempts to distinguish between moments and acts in history: firmly placing the act of removing children in a past society and as only one act of injustice amongst many acts of triumph. “Our generation does not own these actions, nor should it feel guilt for what was done in many, but not all cases, with the best of intentions” (Nelson). What was done is still being felt by Indigenous Australians today. And by differentiating between those that committed these actions and “our generation”, the address relies on a linear idea of time, to distance any wrongdoing from present day white Australians. What I struggle with here is that those wrongdoings continue to be felt according to Indigenous concepts of time and therefore these acts are not in a far away past but very much felt in the present. The need to not own these actions further entrenches the idea of separateness between Indigenous Australia and non-Indigenous Australia. The fear of being guilty or at blame evokes notions of wrong and right and this address is at pains not to do that – not to lay blame or evoke shame. Nelson’s address is relying on a national identity that has historically silenced and marginalised Indigenous Australians. If there is no blame to be accepted, if there is no attached shame to be acknowledged (“great pride, but occasionally shame” (Nelson)) and dealt with, then national identity is implicitly one of “discovery”, peaceful settlement and progress. Where are the Aboriginal perspectives of history in this idea of a national identity – then and now? And does this mean that colonialism happened and is now over? State and territory actions upon, against and in exclusion of Indigenous Australians are not actions that can be positioned as past discriminations; they continue today and are a direct result of those that preceded them. Throughout his address, Nelson emphasises the progressiveness of “today” and how that owes its success to the “past”: “In doing so, we reach from within ourselves to our past, those whose lives connect us to it and in deep understanding of its importance to our future”. By relying on a dichotomous approach – us and them, white and black, past and present – Nelson emphasises the distance between this generation of Australia and any momentary unjust actions in the past. The belief is that time moves on – away from the past and towards the future. That advancement, progression and civilisation are linear movements, all heading towards a more enlightened state. “We will be at our best today – and every day – if we pause to place ourselves in the shoes of others, imbued with the imaginative capacity to see this issue through their eyes with decency and respect”. But where is the recognition that today’s experiences, the results of what has been created by the past, are also attached to the need to offer an apology? Nelson’s “we” (Anglo-Australians) are being asked to stop and think about how “they” (Aborigines) might see things differently to the mainstream norm. The implication here also is that “they” – members of the Stolen Generations – must be prepared to understand the position white Australia is coming from, and acknowledge the good that white Australia has achieved. Anglo-Australian pride and achievement is reinforced throughout the address as the basis on which our national identity is understood. Ignoring its exclusion and silencing of the Indigenous Australians to whom his “sorry” is directed, Nelson perpetuates this ideology here in his address: “In brutally harsh conditions, from the small number of early British settlers our non Indigenous ancestors have given us a nation the envy of any in the world”. This gift of a nation where there was none before disregards the acts of invasion, segregation, protection and assimilation that characterise the colonisation of this nation. It also reverts to romanticised settler notions of triumph over great adversities – a notion that could just as easily be attached to Indigenous Australians yet Nelson specifically addresses “our non Indigenous ancestors”. He does add “But Aboriginal Australians made involuntary sacrifices, different but no less important, to make possible the economic and social development of our modern [my emphasis] Australia.” Indigenous Australians certainly made voluntary sacrifices, similar to and different from those made by non Indigenous Australians (Indigenous Australians also went to both World Wars and fought for this nation) and a great deal of “our modern” country’s economic success was achieved on the backs of Blackfellas (Taylor 9). But “involuntary sacrifices” is surely a contradiction in terms, either intellectually shoddy or breathtakingly disingenuous. To make a sacrifice is to do it voluntarily, to give something up for a greater good. “Involuntary sacrifices”, like “collateral damage” and other calculatedly cold-blooded euphemisms, conveniently covers up the question of who was doing what to whom – of who was sacrificed, and by whom. In the attempt to construct a basis of equal contribution between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as well as equal acts of struggle and triumphing, Nelson’s account of history and nation building draws from the positioning of the oppressors but tries to suppress any notion of racial oppression. It maintains the separateness of Indigenous experiences of colonisation from the colonisers themselves. His reiteration that these occasional acts of unjustness came from benevolent and charitable white Australians privileges non-Indigenous ways of knowing and doing over Indigenous ones and attempts to present them as untainted and innate as opposed to repressive, discriminatory and racist. We honour those in our past who have suffered and all those who have made sacrifices for us by the way we live our lives and shape our nation. Today we recommit to do so – as one people. (Nelson) The political need to identify as “one people” drives assimilation policies (the attitude at the very heart of removing Aboriginal children on the basis that they were Aboriginal and needed to be absorbed into one society of whites). By honouring everyone, and therefore taking the focus off any act of unjustness by non-Indigenous peoples on Indigenous peoples, Nelson’s narrative again upholds an idea of contemporary national identity that has not only romanticised the past but ignores the inequalities of the present day. He spends a good few hundred words reminding his listeners that white Australia deserves to maintain its hard won position. And there is no doubt he is talking to white Australia – his focus is on Western constructs of patriotism and success. He reverts to settler/colonial discourse to uphold ideas of equity and access: These generations considered their responsibilities to their country and one another more important than their rights. They did not buy something until they had saved up for it and values were always more important than value. Living in considerably more difficult times, they had dreams for our nation but little money. Theirs was a mesh of values enshrined in God, King and Country and the belief in something greater than yourself. Neglectful indifference to all they achieved while seeing their actions in the separations only, through the values of our comfortable, modern Australia, will be to diminish ourselves. In “the separations only…” highlights Nelson’s colonial logic, which compartmentalises time, space, people and events and tries to disconnect one colonial act from another. The ideology, attitudes and policies that allowed the taking of Indigenous children were not separate from all other colonial and colonising acts and processes. The desire for a White Australia, a clear cut policy which was in existence at the same time as protection, removal and assimilation policies, cannot be disassociated from either the taking of children or the creation of this “comfortable, modern Australia” today. “Neglectful indifference to all they achieved” could aptly be applied to Indigenous peoples throughout Australian history – pre and post invasion. Where is the active acknowledgment of the denial of Indigenous rights so that “these generations [of non-Indigenous Australians could] consider their responsibilities to their country and one another more important than their rights”? Nelson adheres to the colonialist national narrative to focus on the “positive”, which Patrick Wolfe has argued in his critique of settler colonialism, is an attempt to mask disruptive moments that reveal the scope of state and national power over Aboriginal Australians (33). After consistently reinforcing the colonial/settler narrative, Nelson’s address moves on to insert Indigenous Australians into a well-defined and confined space within a specific chapter of that narrative. His perfunctory overview of the first seven decades of the 20th century alludes to Protection Boards and Reserves, assimilation policies and Christianisation, all underlined with white benevolence. Having established the innocent, inherently humane and decent motivations of “white families”, he resorts to appropriating Indigenous people’s stories and experiences. In the retelling of these stories, two prominent themes in Nelson’s text become apparent. White fellas were only trying to help the poor Blackfella back then, and one need only glance at Aboriginal communities today to see that white fellas are only trying to help the poor Blackfella again. It is reasonably argued that removal from squalor led to better lives – children fed, housed and educated for an adult world of [sic] which they could not have imagined. However, from my life as a family doctor and knowing the impact of my own father’s removal from his unmarried teenaged mother, not knowing who you are is the source of deep, scarring sorrows the real meaning of which can be known only to those who have endured it. No one should bring a sense of moral superiority to this debate in seeking to diminish the view that good was being sought to be done. (Nelson) A sense of moral superiority is what motivates colonisation: it is what motivated the enforced removal of children. The reference to “removal from squalor” is somewhat reminiscent of the 1909 Aborigines Protection Act. Act No. 25, 1909, section 11(1) which states: The board may, in accordance with and subject to the provisions of the Apprentices Act, 1901, by indenture bind or cause to be bound the child of any aborigine, or the neglected child of any person apparently having an admixture of aboriginal blood in his veins, to be apprenticed to any master, and may collect and institute proceedings for the recovery of any wages payable under such indenture, and may expend the same as the board may think fit in the interest of the child. Every child so apprenticed shall be under the supervision of the board, or of such person that may be authorised in that behalf by the regulations. (144) Neglect was often defined as simply being Aboriginal. The representation that being removed would lead to a better life relies on Western attitudes about society and culture. It dismisses any notion of Indigenous rights to be Indigenous and defines a better life according to how white society views it. Throughout most of the 1900s, Aboriginal children that were removed to experience this better life were trained in positions of servants. Nelson’s inclusion of his own personal experience as a non Indigenous Australian who has experienced loss and sorrow sustains his textual purpose to reduce human experiences to a common ground, an equal footing – to make all injustices equal. And he finishes the paragraph off with the subtle reminder that this “sorry” is only for “those” Aboriginal Australians that were removed in the first seven decades of last century. After retelling the experience of one Indigenous person as told to the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, he retells the experience of an Indigenous woman as told to a non-Indigenous man. The appropriate protocols concerning the re-using of Indigenous knowledge and intellectual copyright appeared to be absent in this address. Not only does the individual remain unacknowledged but the potential for misappropriating Indigenous experiences for non Indigenous purposes is apparent. The insertion of the story dismisses the importance of the original act of telling, and the significance of the unspeakable through decades of silence. Felman presents the complexities of the survivor’s tale: “the victim’s story has to overcome not just the silence of the dead but the indelible coercive power of the oppressor’s terrifying, brutal silencing of the surviving, and the inherent speechless silence of the living in the face of an unthinkable, unknowable, ungraspable event” (227). In telling this story Nelson unravelled the foundation of equality he had attempted to resurrect. And his indication towards current happenings in the Northern Territory only served to further highlight the inequities that Indigenous peoples continue to face, resist and surpass. Nelson’s statement that “separation was then, and remains today, a painful but necessary part of public policy in the protection of children” is another reminder of the “indelible coercive power of the oppressor’s terrifying” potential to repeat history. The final unmasking of the hypocritical and contested nature of Nelson’s national ideology and narrative is in his telling of the “facts” – the statistics concerning Indigenous life expectancy, Indigenous infant mortality rates, “diabetes, kidney disease, hospitalisation of women from assault, imprisonment, overcrowding, educational underperformance and unemployment”. These statistics are a result not of what Nelson terms “existential aimlessness” (immediately preceding paragraph) but of colonisation – theft of land, oppression, abuse, discrimination, and lack of any rights whether citizenship or Aboriginal. These contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples are the direct linear result of the last two hundred years of white nation building. The address is concluded with mention of Neville Bonner, portrayed here as the perfect example of what reading, writing, expressing yourself with dignity and treating people with decency and courtesy can achieve. Bonner is presented as the ‘ideal’ Blackfella, a product of the assimilation period: he could read and write and was dignified, decent and courteous (and, coincidentally, Liberal). The inclusion of this reference to Bonner in the address may hint at the “My best friend is an Aborigine” syndrome (Heiss 71), but it also provides a discursive example to the listener of the ways in which ‘equalness’ is suggested, assumed, privileged or denied. It is a reminder, in the same vein of Patten and Ferguson’s fights for rights, that what is equal has always been apparent to the colonised. Your present official attitude is one of prejudice and misunderstanding … we are no more dirty, lazy stupid, criminal, or immoral than yourselves. Also, your slanders against our race are a moral lie, told to throw all the blame for your troubles on to us. You, who originally conquered us by guns against our spears, now rely on superiority of numbers to support your false claims of moral and intellectual superiority. After 150 years, we ask you to review the situation and give us a fair deal – a New Deal for Aborigines. The cards have been stacked against us, and we now ask you to play the game like decent Australians. Remember, we do not ask for charity, we ask for justice. Nelson quotes Bonner’s words that “[unjust hardships] can only be changed when people of non Aboriginal extraction are prepared to listen, to hear what Aboriginal people are saying and then work with us to achieve those ends”. The need for non-Indigenous Australians to listen, to be shaken out of their complacent equalness appears to have gone unheard. Fiumara, in her philosophy of listening, states: “at this point the opportunity is offered for becoming aware that the compulsion to win is due less to the intrinsic difficulty of the situation than to inhibitions induced by a non-listening language that prevents us from seeing that which would otherwise be clear” (198). It is this compulsion to win, or to at least not be seen to be losing that contributes to the unequalness of this particular “sorry” and the need to construct an equal footing. This particular utterance of sorry does not come from an acknowledged place of difference and its attached history of colonisation; instead it strives to create a foundation based on a lack of anyone being positioned on the high moral ground. It is an irony that pervades the address considering it was the coloniser’s belief in his/her moral superiority that took the first child to begin with. Nelson’s address attempts to construct the utterance of “sorry”, and its intended meaning in this specific context, on ‘equal’ ground: his representation is that we are all Australians, “us” and ‘them’ combined, “we” all suffered and made sacrifices; “we” all deserve respect and equal acknowledgment of the contribution “we” all made to this “enviable” nation. And therein lies the unequalness, the inequality, the injustice, of this particular “sorry”. This particular “sorry” is born from and maintains the structures, policies, discourses and language that led to the taking of Indigenous children in the first place. In his attempt to create a “sorry” that drew equally from the “charitable” as well as the “misjudged” deeds of white Australia, Nelson’s “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament” increased the experiences of inequality. Chow writes that in the politics of admittance the equal depends on “acceptance by permission … and yet, being ‘admitted’ is never simply a matter of possessing the right permit, for validation and acknowledgment must also be present for admittance to be complete” (36-37). References Augoustinos, Martha, Amanda LeCouteur, and John Soyland. “Self-Sufficient Arguments in Political Rhetoric: Constructing Reconciliation and Apologizing to the Stolen Generations.” Discourse and Society 13.1 (2002): 105-142.Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997.Aborigines Protection Act 1909: An Act to Provide for the Protection and Care of Aborigines; To Repeal the Supply of Liquors Aborigines Prevention Act; To Amend the Vagrancy Act, 1902, and the Police Offences (Amendment) Act, 1908; And for Purposes Consequent Thereon or Incidental Thereto. Assented to 20 Dec. 1909. Digital Collections: Books and Serial, National Library of Australia. 24 Mar. 2008 < http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.aus-vn71409-9x-s1-v >.Chow, Rey. “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon.” In Anthony C. Alessandrini, ed. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1999. 34-56.Felman, Shoshana. “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust.” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001): 201-238.Fiumara, Gemma Corradi. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.Heiss, Anita. I’m Not a Racist But… UK: Salt Publishing, 2007.Janca, Aleksandar, and Clothilde Bullen. “Aboriginal Concept of Time and Its Mental Health Implications.” Australian Psychiatry 11 (Supplement 2003): 40-44.Nelson, Brendan. “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament.” 14 Feb. 2008 < http://www.liberal.org.au/info/news/detail/20080213_ WearesorryAddresstoParliament.php >.Patten, Jack, and William Ferguson. Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights! A Statement for the Aborigines Progressive Association. Sydney: The Publicist, 1938.Taylor, Martin, and James Francis. Bludgers in Grass Castles: Native Title and the Unpaid Debts of the Pastoral Industry. Chippendale: Resistance Books, 1997.William, Ross. “‘Why Should I Feel Guilty?’ Reflections on the Workings of White-Aboriginal Relations.” Australian Psychologist 35.2 (2000): 136-142.Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London and New York: Cassell, 1999.
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43

Burns, Alex, and Axel Bruns. ""Share" Editorial." M/C Journal 6, no. 2 (April 1, 2003). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2151.

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Does the arrival of the network society mean we are now a culture of collectors, a society of sharers? We mused about these questions while assembling this M/C Journal issue, which has its genesis in a past event of ‘shared’ confusion. Alex Burns booked into Axel Bruns’s hotel room at the 1998 National Young Writer’s Festival (NYWF) in Newcastle. This ‘identity theft’ soon extended to discussion panels and sessions, where some audience members wondered if the NYWF program had typographical errors. We planned, over café latte at Haddon’s Café, to do a co-session at next year’s festival. By then the ‘identity theft’ had spread to online media. We both shared some common interests: the music of Robert Fripp and King Crimson, underground electronica and experimental turntablism, the Internet sites Slashdot and MediaChannel.org, and the creative possibilities of Open Publishing. “If you’re going to use a pseudonym,” a prominent publisher wrote to Alex Burns in 2001, “you could have created a better one than Axel Bruns.” We haven’t yet done our doppelgänger double-act at NYWF but this online collaboration is a beginning. What became clear during the editorial process was that some people and communities were better at sharing than others. Is sharing the answer or the problem: does it open new possibilities for a better, fairer future, or does it destroy existing structures to leave nothing but an uncontrollable mess? The feature article by Graham Meikle elaborates on several themes explored in his insightful book Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (New York: Routledge, London: Pluto Press, 2002). Meikle’s study of the influential IndyMedia network dissects three ‘compelling founder’s stories’: the Sydney-based Active software team, the tradition of alternative media, and the frenetic energy of ‘DiY culture’. Meikle remarks that each of these ur-myths “highlights an emphasis on access and participation; each stresses new avenues and methods for new people to create news; each shifts the boundary of who gets to speak.” As the IndyMedia movement goes truly global, its autonomous teams are confronting how to be an international brand for Open Publishing, underpinned by a viable Open Source platform. IndyMedia’s encounter with the Founder’s Trap may have its roots in paradigms of intellectual property. What drives Open Source platforms like IndyMedia and Linux, Tom Graves proposes, are collaborative synergies and ‘win-win’ outcomes on a vast and unpredictable scale. Graves outlines how projects like Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation’s ‘GNU Public License’ challenge the Western paradigm of property rights. He believes that Open Source platforms are “a more equitable and sustainable means to manage the tangible and intangible resources of this world we share.” The ‘clash’ between the Western paradigm of property rights and emerging Open Source platforms became manifest in the 1990s through a series of file-sharing wars. Andy Deck surveys how the ‘browser war’ between Microsoft and Netscape escalated into a long-running Department of Justice anti-trust lawsuit. The Motion Picture Association of America targeted DVD hackers, Napster’s attempt to make the ‘Digital Jukebox in the Sky’ a reality was soon derailed by malicious lawsuits, and Time-Warner CEO Gerald Levin depicted pre-merger broadband as ‘the final battleground’ for global media. Whilst Linux and Mozilla hold out promise for a more altruistic future, Deck contemplates, with a reference to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), that Internet producers “must conform to the distribution technologies and content formats favoured by the entertainment and marketing sectors, or else resign themselves to occupying the margins of media activity.” File-sharing, as an innovative way of sharing access to new media, has had social repercussions. Marjorie Kibby reports that “global music sales fell from $41.5 billion in 1995 to $38.5 billion in 1999.” Peer-to-Peer networks like KaZaA, Grokster and Morpheus have surged in consumer popularity while commercial music file subscription services have largely fallen by the wayside. File-sharing has forever changed the norms of music consumption, Kibby argues: it offers consumers “cheap or free, flexibility of formats, immediacy, breadth of choice, connections with artists and other fans, and access to related commodities.” The fragmentation of Australian families into new diversities has co-evolved with the proliferation of digital media. Donell Holloway suggests that the arrival of pay television in Australia has resurrected the ‘house and hearth’ tradition of 1940s radio broadcasts. Internet-based media and games shifted the access of media to individual bedrooms, and changed their spatial and temporal natures. However pay television’s artificial limit of one television set per household reinstated the living room as a family space. It remains to be seen whether or not this ‘bounded’ control will revive family battles, dominance hierarchies and power games. This issue closes with a series of reflections on how the September 11 terrorist attacks transfixed our collective gaze: the ‘sharing’ of media connects to shared responses to media coverage. For Tara Brabazon the intrusive media coverage of September 11 had its precursor in how Great Britain’s media documented the Welsh mining disaster at Aberfan on 20 October 1966. “In the stark grey iconography of September 11,” Brabazon writes, “there was an odd photocopy of Aberfan, but in the negative.” By capturing the death and grief at Aberfan, Brabazon observes, the cameras mounted a scathing critique of industrialisation and the searing legacy of preventable accidents. This verité coverage forces the audience to actively engage with the trauma unfolding on the television screen, and to connect with their own emotions. Or at least that was the promise never explored, because the “Welsh working class community seemed out of time and space in 1960s Britain,” and because political pundits quickly harnessed the disaster for their own electioneering purposes. In the early 1990s a series of ‘humanitarian’ interventions and televised conflicts popularized the ‘CNN Effect’ in media studies circles as a model of how captivated audiences and global media vectors could influence government policies. However the U.S. Government, echoing the coverage of Aberfan, used the ‘CNN Effect’ for counterintelligence and consensus-making purposes. Alex Burns reviews three books on how media coverage of the September 11 carnage re-mapped our ‘virtual geographies’ with disturbing consequences, and how editors and news values were instrumental in this process. U.S. President George W. Bush’s post-September 11 speeches used ‘shared’ meanings and symbols, news values morphed into the language of strategic geography, and risk reportage obliterated the ideal of journalistic objectivity. The deployment of ‘embedded’ journalists during the Second Gulf War (March-April 2003) is the latest development of this unfolding trend. September 11 imagery also revitalized the Holocaust aesthetic and portrayal of J.G. Ballard-style ‘institutionalised disaster areas’. Royce Smith examines why, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, macabre photo-manipulations of the last moments became the latest Internet urban legend. Drawing upon the theoretical contributions of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes and others, Smith suggests that these photo-manipulations were a kitsch form of post-traumatic visualisation for some viewers. Others seized on Associated Press wire photos, whose visuals suggested the ‘face of Satan’ in the smoke of the World Trade Center (WTC) ruins, as moral explanations of disruptive events. Imagery of people jumping from the WTC’s North Tower, mostly censored in North America’s press, restored the humanness of the catastrophe and the reality of the viewer’s own mortality. The discovery of surviving artwork in the WTC ruins, notably Rodin’s The Thinker and Fritz Koenig’s The Sphere, have prompted art scholars to resurrect this ‘dead art’ as a memorial to September 11’s victims. Perhaps art has always best outlined the contradictions that are inherent in the sharing of cultural artefacts. Art is part of our, of humanity’s, shared cultural heritage, and is celebrated as speaking to the most fundamental of human qualities, connecting us regardless of the markers of individual identity that may divide us – yet art is also itself dividing us along lines of skill and talent, on the side of art production, and of tastes and interests, on the side of art consumption. Though perhaps intending to share the artist’s vision, some art also commands exorbitant sums of money which buy the privilege of not having to share that vision with others, or (in the case of museums and galleries) to set the parameters – and entry fees – for that sharing. Digital networks have long been promoted as providing the environment for unlimited sharing of art and other content, and for shared, collaborative approaches to the production of that content. It is no surprise that the Internet features prominently in almost all of the articles in this ‘share’ issue of M/C Journal. It has disrupted the existing systems of exchange, but how the pieces will fall remains to be seen. For now, we share with you these reports from the many nodes of the network society – no doubt, more connections will continue to emerge. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Burns, Alex and Bruns, Axel. ""Share" Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Burns, A. & Bruns, A. (2003, Apr 23). "Share" Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/01-editorial.php>
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Craven, Allison Ruth. "The Last of the Long Takes: Feminism, Sexual Harassment, and the Action of Change." M/C Journal 23, no. 2 (May 13, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1599.

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The advent of the #MeToo movement and the scale of participation in 85 countries (Gill and Orgad; see Google Trends) has greatly expanded debate about the revival of feminism (Winch Littler and Keeler) and the contribution of digital media to a “reconfiguration” of feminism (Jouet). Insofar as these campaigns are concerned with sexual harassment and related forms of sexual abuse, the longer history of sexual harassment in which this practice was named by women’s movement activists in the 1970s has gone largely unremarked except in the broad sense of the recharging or “techno-echo[es]” (Jouet) of earlier “waves” of feminism. However, #MeToo and its companion movement #TimesUp, and its fighting fund timesupnow.org, stemmed directly from the allegations in 2017 against the media mogul Harvey Weinstein by Hollywood professionals and celebrities. The naming of prominent, powerful men as harassers and the celebrity sphere of activism have become features of #MeToo that warrant comparison with the naming of sexual harassment in the earlier era of feminism.While the practices it named were not new, the term “sexual harassment” was new, and it became a defining issue in second wave feminism that was conceptualised within the continuum of sexual violence. I outline this history, and how it transformed the private, individual experiences of many women into a shared public consciousness about sexual coercion in the workplace, and some of the debate that this generated within the women’s movement at the time. It offers scope to compare the threshold politics of naming names in the 21st century, and its celebrity vanguard which has led to some ambivalence about the lasting impact. For Kathy Davis (in Zarkov and Davis), for instance, it is atypical of the collective goals of second wave feminism.In comparing the two eras, Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s is a bridging incident. It dates from closer to the time in which sexual harassment was named, and Hill’s testimony is now recognised as a prototype of the kinds of claims made against powerful men in the #MeToo era. Lauren Berlant’s account of “Diva Citizenship”, formulated in response to Hill’s testimony to the US Senate, now seems prescient of the unfolding spectacle of feminist subjectivities in the digital public sphere and speaks directly to the relation between individual and collective action in making lasting change. The possibility of change, however, descends from the intervention of the women’s movement in naming sexual harassment.The Name Is AllI found my boss in a room ... . He was alone ... . He greeted me ... touched my hair and ... said ... “Come, Ruth, sit down here.” He motioned to his knee. I felt my face flush. I backed away towards the door ... . Then he rose ... and ... put his hand into his pocket, took out a roll of bills, counted off three dollars, and brought it over to me at the door. “Tell your father,” he said, “to find you a new shop for tomorrow morning.” (Cohen 129)Sexual coercion in the workplace, such as referred to in this workplace novel published in 1918, was spoken about among women in subcultures and gossip long before it was named as sexual harassment. But it had no place in public discourse. Women’s knowledge of sexual harassment coalesced in an act of naming that is reputed to have occurred in a consciousness raising group in New York at the height of the second wave women’s movement. Lin Farley lays claim to it in her book, Sexual Shakedown, first published in 1978, in describing the coinage of the term from a workshop on women and work in 1974 at Cornell University. The group of participants was made up, she says, of near equal numbers of black and white women with “economic backgrounds ranging from very affluent to poor” (11). She describes how, “when we had finished, there was an unmistakable pattern to our employment ... . Each one of us had already quit or been fired from a job at least once because we had been made too uncomfortable by the behaviour of men” (11–12). She claims to have later devised the term “sexual harassment” in collaboration with others from this group (12).The naming of sexual harassment has been described as a kind of “discovery” (Leeds TUCRIC 1) and possibly “the only concept of sexual violence to be labelled by women themselves” (Hearn et al. 20). Not everyone agrees that Farley’s group first coined the term (see Herbert 1989) and there is some evidence that it was in use from the early 1970s. Catherine Mackinnon accredits its first use to the Working Women United Institute in New York in connection with the case of Carmita Wood in 1975 (25). Yet Farley’s account gained authority and is cited in several other contemporary radical feminist works (for instance, see Storrie and Dykstra 26; Wise and Stanley 48), and Sexual Shakedown can now be listed among the iconic feminist manifestoes of the second wave era.The key insight of Farley’s book was that sexual coercion in the workplace was more than aberrant behaviour by individual men but was systemic and organised. She suggests how the phrase sexual harassment “is the first verbal description of women’s feelings about this behaviour and it unstintingly conveys a negative perception of male aggression in the workplace” (32). Others followed in seeing it as organised expression of male power that functions “to keep women out of non-traditional occupations and to reinforce their secondary status in the workplace” (Pringle 93), a wisdom that is now widely accepted but seemed radical at the time.A theoretical literature on sexual harassment grew rapidly from the 1970s in which the definition of sexual harassment was a key element. In Sexual Shakedown, Farley defines it with specific connection to the workplace and a woman’s “function as worker” (33). Some definitions attempted to cover a range of practices that “might threaten a woman’s job security or create a stressful or intimidating working environment” ranging from touching to rape (Sedley and Benn 6). In the wider radical feminist discussion, sexual harassment was located within the “continuum of sexual violence”, a paradigm that highlighted the links between “every day abuses” and “less common experiences labelled as crimes” (Kelly 59). Accordingly, it was seen as a diminished category of rape, termed “little rape” (Bularzik 26), or a means whereby women are “reminded” of the “ever present threat of rape” (Rubinstein 165).The upsurge of research and writing served to document the prevalence and history of sexual harassment. Radical feminist accounts situated the origins in the long-standing patriarchal assumption that economic responsibility for women is ultimately held by men, and how “women forced to earn their own living in the past were believed to be defenceless and possibly immoral” (Rubinstein 166). Various accounts highlighted the intersecting effects of racism and sexism in the experience of black women, and women of colour, in a way that would be now termed intersectional. Jo Dixon discussed black women’s “least advantaged position in the economy coupled with the legacy of slavery” (164), while, in Australia, Linda Rubinstein describes the “sexual exploitation of aboriginal women employed as domestic servants on outback stations” which was “as common as the better documented abuse of slaves in the American South” (166).In The Sexual Harassment of Working Women, Catherine Mackinnon provided a pioneering legal argument that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination. She defined two types: the quid pro quo, when “sexual compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be exchanged, for an employment opportunity” (32); and sexual harassment as a “persistent condition of work” that “simply makes the work environment unbearable” (40). Thus the feminist histories of sexual harassment became detailed and strategic. The naming of sexual harassment was a moment of relinquishing women’s experience to the gaze of feminism and the bureaucratic gaze of the state, and, in the legal interventions that followed, it ceased to be exclusively a feminist issue.In Australia, a period of bureaucratisation and state intervention commenced in the late 1970s that corresponded with similar legislative responses abroad. The federal Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 1984 to include a definition of sexual harassment, and State and Territory jurisdictions also framed legislation pertaining to sexual harassment (see Law Council of Australia). The regimes of redress were linked with Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action frameworks and were of a civil order. Under the law, there was potential for employers to be found vicariously liable for sexual harassment.In the women’s movement, legislative strategies were deemed reformist. Radical and socialist feminists perceived the de-gendering effects of these policies in the workplace that risked collusion with the state. Some argued that naming and defining sexual harassment denies that women constantly deal with a range of harassment anywhere, not only in the workplace (Wise and Stanley 10); while others argued that reformist approaches effectively legitimate other forms of sex discrimination not covered by legislation (Game and Pringle 290). However, in feminism and in the policy realm, the debate concerned sexual harassment in the general workplace. In contrast to #MeToo, it was not led by celebrity voices, nor galvanised by incidents in the sphere of entertainment, nor, by and large, among figures of public office, except for a couple of notable exceptions, including Anita Hill.The “Spectacle of Subjectivity” in the “Scene of Public Life”Through the early 1990s as an MA candidate at the University of Queensland, I studied media coverage of sexual harassment cases, clipping newspapers and noting electronic media reports on a daily basis. These mainly concerned incidents in government sector workplaces or small commercial enterprises. While the public prominence of the parties involved was not generally a factor in reportage, occasionally, prominent individuals were affected, such as the harassment of the athlete Michelle Baumgartner at the Commonwealth Games in 1990 which received extensive coverage but the offenders were never publicly named or disciplined. Two other incidents stand out: the Ormond College case at the University of Melbourne, about which much has been written; and Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas during his nomination to the US Supreme Court in 1991.The spectacle of Hill’s testimony to the US Senate is now an archetype of claims against powerful men, although, at the time, her credibility was attacked and her dignified presentation was criticised as “too composed. Too cool. Too censorious” (Legge 31). Hill was also seen to counterpose the struggles of race and gender, and Thomas himself famously described it as “a hi-tech lynching of an uppity black” (qtd in Stephens 1). By “hi-tech”, Thomas alluded to the occasion of the first-ever live national broadcast of the United States Senate hearings in which Hill’s claims were aired directly to the national public, and re-broadcast internationally in news coverage. Thus, it was not only the claims but the scale and medium of delivery to a global audience that set it apart from other sexual harassment stories.Recent events have since prompted revisiting of the inequity of Hill’s treatment at the Senate hearings. But well before this, in an epic and polemical study of American public culture, Berlant reflected at length on the heroism of Hill’s “witnessing” as paradigmatic of citizenship in post-Reaganite America’s “shrinking” public sphere. It forms part of her much wider thesis regarding the “intimate public sphere” and the form of citizenship “produced by personal acts and values” (5) in the absence of a context that “makes ordinary citizens feel they have a common public culture, or influence on a state” (3), and in which the fundamental inequality of minority cultures is assumed. For Berlant, Hill’s testimony becomes the model of “Diva Citizenship”; the “strange intimacy” in which the Citizen Diva, “the subordinated person”, believes in the capacity of the privileged ones “to learn and to change” and “trust[s] ... their innocence of ... their obliviousness” of the system that has supported her subjugation (222–223). While Berlant’s thesis pertains to profound social inequalities, there is no mistaking the comparison to the digital feminist in the #MeToo era in the call to identify with her suffering and courage.Of Hill’s testimony, Berlant describes how: “a member of a stigmatised population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship” (222). It is an “act of heroic pedagogy” (223) which occurs when “a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege” (223). In such settings, “acts of language can feel like explosives” and put “the dominant story into suspended animation” (223). The Diva Citizen cannot “change the world” but “challenges her audience” to identify with her “suffering” and the “courage she has had to produce” in “calling on people to change the practices of citizenship into which they currently consent” (223). But Berlant cautions that the strongest of Divas cannot alone achieve change because “remaking the scene of public life into a spectacle of subjectivity” can lead to “a confusion of ... memorable rhetorical performance with sustained social change itself” (223). Instead, she argues that the Diva’s act is a call; the political obligation for the action of change lies with the collective, the greater body politic.The EchoIf Acts of Diva Citizenship abound in the #MeToo movement, relations between the individual and the collective are in question in a number of ways. This suggests a basis of comparison between past and present feminisms which have come full circle in the renewed recognition of sexual harassment in the continuum of sexual violence. Compared with the past, the voices of #MeToo are arguably empowered by a genuine, if gradual, change in the symbolic status of women, and a corresponding destabilization of the images of male power since the second wave era of feminism. The one who names an abuser on Twitter symbolises a power of individual courage, backed by a responding collective voice of supporters. Yet there are concerns about who can “speak out” without access to social media or with the constraint that “the sanctions would be too great” (Zarkov and Davis). Conversely, the “spreadability” — as Jenkins, Ford and Green term the travelling properties of digital media — and the apparent relative ease of online activism might belie the challenge and courage of those who make the claims and those who respond.The collective voice is also allied with other grassroots movements like SlutWalk (Jouet), the women’s marches in the US against the Trump presidency, and the several national campaigns — in India and Egypt, for instance (Zarkov and Davis) — that contest sexual violence and gender inequality. The “sheer numbers” of participation in #MeToo testify to “the collectivity of it all” and the diversity of the movement (Gill and Orgad). If the #MeToo hashtag gained traction with the “experiences of white heterosexual women in the US”, it “quickly expanded” due to “broad and inclusive appeal” with stories of queer women and men and people of colour well beyond the Global North. Even so, Tarana Burke, who founded the #MeToo hashtag in 2006 in her campaign of social justice for working class women and girls of colour, and endorsed its adoption by Hollywood, highlights the many “untold stories”.More strikingly, #MeToo participants name the names of the alleged harassers. The naming of names, famous names, is threshold-crossing and as much the public-startling power of the disclosures as the allegations and stimulates newsworthiness in conventional media. The resonance is amplified in the context of the American crisis over the Trump presidency in the sense that the powerful men called out become echoes or avatars of Trump’s monstrous manhood and the urgency of denouncing it. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, the name is all. A figure of immense power who symbolised an industry, naming Weinstein blew away the defensive old Hollywood myths of “casting couches” and promised, perhaps idealistically, the possibility for changing a culture and an industrial system.The Hollywood setting for activism is the most striking comparison with second wave feminism. A sense of contradiction emerges in this new “visibility” of sexual harassment in a culture that remains predominantly “voyeuristic” and “sexist” (Karkov and Davis), and not least in the realm of Hollywood where the sexualisation of women workers has long been a notorious open secret. A barrage of Hollywood feminism has accompanied #MeToo and #TimesUp in the campaign for diversity at the Oscars, and the stream of film remakes of formerly all-male narrative films that star all-female casts (Ghostbusters; Oceans 11; Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels). Cynically, this trend to make popular cinema a public sphere for gender equality in the film industry seems more glorifying than subversive of Hollywood masculinities. Uneasily, it does not overcome those lingering questions about why these conditions were uncontested openly for so long, and why it took so long for someone to go public, as Rose McGowan did, with claims about Harvey Weinstein.However, a reading of She Said, by Jodie Kantor and Megan Tuohey, the journalists who broke the Weinstein story in the New York Times — following their three year efforts to produce a legally water-tight report — makes clear that it was not for want of stories, but firm evidence and, more importantly, on-the-record testimony. If not for their (and others’) fastidious journalism and trust-building and the Citizen Divas prepared to disclose their experiences publicly, Weinstein might not be convicted today. Yet without the naming of the problem of sexual harassment in the women’s movement all those years ago, none of this may have come to pass. Lin Farley can now be found on YouTube retelling the story (see “New Mexico in Focus”).It places the debate about digital activism and Hollywood feminism in some perspective and, like the work of journalists, it is testament to the symbiosis of individual and collective effort in the action of change. The tweeting activism of #MeToo supplements the plenum of knowledge and action about sexual harassment across time: the workplace novels, the consciousness raising, the legislation and the poster campaigns. In different ways, in both eras, this literature demonstrates that names matter in calling for change on sexual harassment. But, if #MeToo is to become the last long take on sexual harassment, then, as Berlant advocates, the responsibility lies with the body politic who must act collectively for change in ways that will last well beyond the courage of the Citizen Divas who so bravely call it on.ReferencesBerlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. 1997. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.Bularzik, Mary. “Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes.” Radical America 12.4 (1978): 25-43.Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow. NY: Doran, 1918.Dixon, Jo. “Feminist Reforms of Sexual Coercion Laws.” Sexual Coercion: A Sourcebook on Its Nature, Causes and Prevention. Eds. Elizabeth Grauerholz and Mary A. Karlewski. Massachusetts: Lexington, 1991. 161-171.Farley, Lin. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Working World. London: Melbourne House, 1978.Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Beyond Gender at Work: Secretaries.” Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1986. 273–91.Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualisation of Culture’ to #MeToo.” Sexualities 21.8 (2018): 1313–1324. <https://doi-org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.1177/1363460718794647>.Google Trends. “Me Too Rising: A Visualisation of the Movement from Google Trends.” 2017–2020. <https://metoorising.withgoogle.com>.Hearn, Jeff, Deborah Shepherd, Peter Sherrif, and Gibson Burrell. The Sexuality of Organization. London: Sage, 1989.Herbert, Carrie. Talking of Silence: The Sexual Harassment of Schoolgirls. London: Falmer, 1989.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013.Jouet, Josiane. “Digital Feminism: Questioning the Renewal of Activism.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 8.1 (2018). 1 Jan. 2018. <http://dx.doi.org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.22381/JRGS8120187>.Kantor, Jodi, and Megan Twohey. She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.Kelly, Liz. “The Continuum of Sexual Violence.” Women, Violence, and Social Control. Eds. Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard. London: MacMillan, 1989. 46–60.Legge, Kate. “The Harassment of America.” Weekend Australian 19–20 Oct. 1991: 31.Mackinnon, Catherine. The Sexual Harassment of Working Women. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.New Mexico in Focus, a Production of NMPBS. 26 Jan. 2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlO5PiwZk8U>.Pringle, Rosemary. Secretaries Talk. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988.Rubinstein, Linda. “Dominance Eroticized: Sexual Harassment of Working Women.” Worth Her Salt. Eds. Margaret Bevege, Margaret James, and Carmel Shute. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982. 163–74.Sedley, Ann, and Melissa Benn. Sexual Harassment at Work. London: NCCL Rights for Women Unit, 1986.Stephens, Peter. “America’s Sick and Awful Farce.” Sydney Morning Herald 14 Oct. 1991: 1.Storrie, Kathleen, and Pearl Dykstra. “Bibliography on Sexual Harassment.” Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation 10.4 (1981–1982): 25–32.Wise, Sue, and Liz Stanley. Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Every Day Life. London: Pandora, 1987.Winch, Alison, Jo Littler, and Jessalyn Keller. “Why ‘Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies’?” Feminist Media Studies 16.4 (2016): 557–572. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1193285>.Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women's Studies 25.1 (2018): 3–9. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506817749436>.
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Polain, Marcella Kathleen. "Writing with an Ear to the Ground: The Armenian Genocide's "Stubborn Murmur"." M/C Journal 16, no. 1 (March 19, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.591.

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1909–22: Turkey exterminated over 1.5 million of its ethnically Armenian, and hundreds of thousands of its ethnically Greek and Assyrian, citizens. Most died in 1915. This period of decimation in now widely called the Armenian Genocide (Balakian 179-80).1910: Siamanto first published his poem, The Dance: “The corpses were piled as trees, / and from the springs, from the streams and the road, / the blood was a stubborn murmur.” When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when “everything that could happen has already happened,” then time is nothing: “there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language” (Nichanian 142).2007: In my novel The Edge of the World a ceramic bowl, luminous blue, recurs as motif. Imagine you are tiny: the bowl is broken but you don’t remember breaking it. You’re awash with tears. You sit on the floor, gather shards but, no matter how you try, you can’t fix it. Imagine, now, that the bowl is the sky, huge and upturned above your head. You have always known, through every wash of your blood, that life is shockingly precarious. Silence—between heartbeats, between the words your parents speak—tells you: something inside you is terribly wrong; home is not home but there is no other home; you “can never be fully grounded in a community which does not share or empathise with the experience of persecution” (Wajnryb 130). This is the stubborn murmur of your body.Because time is nothing, this essay is fragmented, non-linear. Its main characters: my mother, grandmother (Hovsanna), grandfather (Benyamin), some of my mother’s older siblings (Krikor, Maree, Hovsep, Arusiak), and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Ottoman military officer, Young Turk leader, first president of Turkey). 1915–2013: Turkey invests much energy in genocide denial, minimisation and deflection of responsibility. 24 April 2012: Barack Obama refers to the Medz Yeghern (Great Calamity). The use of this term is decried as appeasement, privileging political alliance with Turkey over human rights. 2003: Between Genocide and Catastrophe, letters between Armenian-American theorist David Kazanjian and Armenian-French theorist Marc Nichanian, contest the naming of the “event” (126). Nichanian says those who call it the Genocide are:repeating every day, everywhere, in all places, the original denial of the Catastrophe. But this is part of the catastrophic structure of the survivor. By using the word “Genocide”, we survivors are only repeating […] the denial of the loss. We probably cannot help it. We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do […] we claim all over the world that we have been “genocided;” we relentlessly need to prove our own death. We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner. (127)1992: In Revolution and Genocide, historian Robert Melson identifies the Armenian Genocide as “total” because it was public policy intended to exterminate a large fraction of Armenian society, “including the families of its members, and the destruction of its social and cultural identity in most or all aspects” (26).1986: Boyajian and Grigorian assert that the Genocide “is still operative” because, without full acknowledgement, “the ghosts won’t go away” (qtd. in Hovannisian 183). They rise up from earth, silence, water, dreams: Armenian literature, Armenian homes haunted by them. 2013: My heart pounds: Medz Yeghern, Aksor (Exile), Anashmaneli (Indefinable), Darakrutiun (Deportation), Chart (Massacre), Brnagaght (Forced migration), Aghed (Catastrophe), Genocide. I am awash. Time is nothing.1909–15: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was both a serving Ottoman officer and a leader of the revolutionary Young Turks. He led Ottoman troops in the repulsion of the Allied invasion before dawn on 25 April at Gallipoli and other sites. Many troops died in a series of battles that eventually saw the Ottomans triumph. Out of this was born one of Australia’s founding myths: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), courageous in the face of certain defeat. They are commemorated yearly on 25 April, ANZAC Day. To question this myth is to risk being labelled traitor.1919–23: Ataturk began a nationalist revolution against the occupying Allies, the nascent neighbouring Republic of Armenia, and others. The Allies withdrew two years later. Ataturk was installed as unofficial leader, becoming President in 1923. 1920–1922: The last waves of the Genocide. 2007: Robert Manne published A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide, calling for a recontextualisation of the cultural view of the Gallipoli landings in light of the concurrence of the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place just over the rise, had been witnessed by many military personnel and widely reported by international media at the time. Armenian networks across Australia were abuzz. There were media discussions. I listened, stared out of my office window at the horizon, imagined Armenian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Did they feel like me—like they were holding their breath?Then it all went quiet. Manne wrote: “It is a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.” 1992: I bought an old house to make a home for me and my two small children. The rooms were large, the ceilings high, and behind it was a jacaranda with a sturdy tree house built high up in its fork. One of my mother’s Armenian friends kindly offered to help with repairs. He and my mother would spend Saturdays with us, working, looking after the kids. Mum would stay the night; her friend would go home. But one night he took a sleeping bag up the ladder to the tree house, saying it reminded him of growing up in Lebanon. The following morning he was subdued; I suspect there were not as many mosquitoes in Lebanon as we had in our garden. But at dinner the previous night he had been in high spirits. The conversation had turned, as always, to politics. He and my mother had argued about Turkey and Russia, Britain’s role in the development of the Middle East conflict, the USA’s roughshod foreign policy and its effect on the world—and, of course, the Armenian Genocide, and the killingof Turkish governmental representatives by Armenians, in Australia and across the world, during the 1980s. He had intimated he knew the attackers and had materially supported them. But surely it was the beer talking. Later, when I asked my mother, she looked at me with round eyes and shrugged, uncharacteristically silent. 2002: Greek-American diva Diamanda Galas performed Dexifiones: Will and Testament at the Perth Concert Hall, her operatic work for “the forgotten victims of the Armenian and Anatolian Greek Genocide” (Galas).Her voice is so powerful it alters me.1925: My grandmother, Hovsanna, and my grandfather, Benyamin, had twice been separated in the Genocide (1915 and 1922) and twice reunited. But in early 1925, she had buried him, once a prosperous businessman, in a swamp. Armenians were not permitted burial in cemeteries. Once they had lived together in a big house with their dozen children; now there were only three with her. Maree, half-mad and 18 years old, and quiet Hovsep, aged seven,walked. Then five-year-old aunt, Arusiak—small, hungry, tired—had been carried by Hovsanna for months. They were walking from Cilicia to Jerusalem and its Armenian Quarter. Someone had said they had seen Krikor, her eldest son, there. Hovsanna was pregnant for the last time. Together the four reached Aleppo in Syria, found a Christian orphanage for girls, and Hovsanna, her pregnancy near its end, could carry Arusiak no further. She left her, promising to return. Hovsanna’s pains began in Beirut’s busy streets. She found privacy in the only place she could, under a house, crawled in. Whenever my mother spoke of her birth she described it like this: I was born under a stranger’s house like a dog.1975: My friend and I travelled to Albany by bus. After six hours we were looking down York Street, between Mount Clarence and Mount Melville, and beyond to Princess Royal Harbour, sapphire blue, and against which the town’s prosperous life—its shopfronts, hotels, cars, tourists, historic buildings—played out. It took away my breath: the deep harbour, whaling history, fishing boats. Rain and sun and scudding cloud; cliffs and swells; rocky points and the white curves of bays. It was from Albany that young Western Australian men, volunteers for World War I, embarked on ships for the Middle East, Gallipoli, sailing out of Princess Royal Harbour.1985: The Australian Government announced that Turkey had agreed to have the site of the 1915 Gallipoli landings renamed Anzac Cove. Commentators and politicians acknowledged it as historic praised Turkey for her generosity, expressed satisfaction that, 70 years on, former foes were able to embrace the shared human experience of war. We were justifiably proud of ourselves.2005: Turkey made her own requests. The entrance to Albany’s Princess Royal Harbour was renamed Ataturk Channel. A large bronze statue of Ataturk was erected on the headland overlooking the Harbour entrance. 24 April 1915: In the town of Hasan Beyli, in Cilicia, southwest Turkey, my great grandfather, a successful and respected businessman in his 50s, was asleep in his bed beside his wife. He had been born in that house, as had his father, grandfather, and all his children. His brother, my great uncle, had bought the house next door as a young man, brought his bride home to it, lived there ever since; between the two households there had been one child after another. All the cousins grew up together. My great grandfather and great uncle had gone to work that morning, despite their wives’ concerns, but had returned home early. The women had been relieved to see them. They made coffee, talked. Everyone had heard the rumours. Enemy ships were massing off the coast. 1978: The second time in Albany was my honeymoon. We had driven into the Goldfields then headed south. Such distance, such beautiful strangeness: red earth, red rocks; scant forests of low trees, thin arms outstretched; the dry, pale, flat land of Norseman. Shimmering heat. Then the big, wild coast.On our second morning—a cool, overcast day—we took our handline to a jetty. The ocean was mercury; a line of cormorants settled and bobbed. Suddenly fish bit; we reeled them in. I leaned over the jetty’s side, looked down into the deep. The water was clear and undisturbed save the twirling of a pike that looked like it had reversed gravity and was shooting straight up to me. Its scales flashed silver as itbroke the surface.1982: How could I concentrate on splicing a film with this story in my head? Besides the desk, the only other furniture in the editing suite was a whiteboard. I took a marker and divided the board into three columns for the three generations: my grandparents, Hovsanna and Benyamin; my mother; someone like me. There was a lot in the first column, some in the second, nothing in the third. I stared at the blankness of my then-young life.A teacher came in to check my editing. I tried to explain what I had been doing. “I think,” he said, stony-faced, “that should be your third film, not your first.”When he had gone I stared at the reels of film, the white board blankness, the wall. It took 25 years to find the form, the words to say it: a novel not a film, prose not pictures.2007: Ten minutes before the launch of The Edge of the World, the venue was empty. I made myself busy, told myself: what do you expect? Your research has shown, over and over, this is a story about which few know or very much care, an inconvenient, unfashionable story; it is perfectly in keeping that no-one will come. When I stepped onto the rostrum to speak, there were so many people that they crowded the doorway, spilled onto the pavement. “I want to thank my mother,” I said, “who, pretending to do her homework, listened instead to the story her mother told other Armenian survivor-women, kept that story for 50 years, and then passed it on to me.” 2013: There is a section of The Edge of the World I needed to find because it had really happened and, when it happened, I knew, there in my living room, that Boyajian and Grigorian (183) were right about the Armenian Genocide being “still operative.” But I knew even more than that: I knew that the Diaspora triggered by genocide is both rescue and weapon, the new life in this host nation both sanctuary and betrayal. I picked up a copy, paced, flicked, followed my nose, found it:On 25 April, the day after Genocide memorial-day, I am watching television. The Prime Minister stands at the ANZAC memorial in western Turkey and delivers a poetic and moving speech. My eyes fill with tears, and I moan a little and cover them. In his speech he talks about the heroism of the Turkish soldiers in their defence of their homeland, about the extent of their losses – sixty thousand men. I glance at my son. He raises his eyebrows at me. I lose count of how many times Kemal Ataturk is mentioned as the Father of Modern Turkey. I think of my grandmother and grandfather, and all my baby aunts and uncles […] I curl over like a mollusc; the ache in my chest draws me in. I feel small and very tired; I feel like I need to wash.Is it true that if we repeat something often enough and loud enough it becomes the truth? The Prime Minister quotes Kemal Ataturk: the ANZACS who died and are buried on that western coast are deemed ‘sons of Turkey’. My son turns my grandfather’s, my mother’s, my eyes to me and says, It is amazing they can be so friendly after we attacked them.I draw up my knees to my chest, lay my head and arms down. My limbs feel weak and useless. My throat hurts. I look at my Australian son with his Armenian face (325-6).24 April 1915 cont: There had been trouble all my great grandfather’s life: pogrom here, massacre there. But this land was accustomed to colonisers: the Mongols, the Persians, latterly the Ottomans. They invade, conquer, rise, fall; Armenians stay. This had been Armenian homeland for thousands of years.No-one masses ships off a coast unless planning an invasion. So be it. These Europeans could not be worse than the Ottomans. That night, were my great grandfather and great uncle awoken by the pounding at each door, or by the horses and gendarmes’ boots? They were seized, each family herded at gunpoint into its garden, and made to watch. Hanging is slow. There could be no mistakes. The gendarmes used the stoutest branches, stayed until they were sure the men weredead. This happened to hundreds of prominent Armenian men all over Turkey that night.Before dawn, the Allies made landfall.Each year those lost in the Genocide are remembered on 24 April, the day before ANZAC Day.1969: I asked my mother if she had any brothers and sisters. She froze, her hands in the sink. I stared at her, then slipped from the room.1915: The Ottoman government decreed: all Armenians were to surrender their documents and report to authorities. Able-bodied men were taken away, my grandfather among them. Women and children, the elderly and disabled, were told to prepare to walk to a safe camp where they would stay for the duration of the war. They would be accompanied by armed soldiers for their protection. They were permitted to take with them what they could carry (Bryce 1916).It began immediately, pretty young women and children first. There are so many ways to kill. Months later, a few dazed, starved survivors stumbled into the Syrian desert, were driven into lakes, or herded into churches and set alight.Most husbands and fathers were never seen again. 2003: I arrived early at my son’s school, parked in the shade, opened The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, and began to read. Soon I was annotating furiously. Ruth Wajnryb writes of “growing up among innocent peers in an innocent landscape” and also that the notion of “freedom of speech” in Australia “seems often, to derive from that innocent landscape where reside people who have no personal scars or who have little relevant historical knowledge” (141).1984: I travelled to Vancouver, Canada, and knocked on Arusiak’s door. Afraid she would not agree to meet me, I hadn’t told her I was coming. She was welcoming and gracious. This was my first experience of extended family and I felt loved in a new and important way, a way I had read about, had observed in my friends, had longed for. One afternoon she said, “You know our mother left me in an orphanage…When I saw her again, it was too late. I didn’t know who they were, what a family was. I felt nothing.” “Yes, I know,” I replied, my heart full and hurting. The next morning, over breakfast, she quietly asked me to leave. 1926: When my mother was a baby, her 18 year-old sister, Maree, tried to drown her in the sea. My mother clearly recalled Maree’s face had been disfigured by a sword. Hovsanna, would ask my mother to forgive Maree’s constant abuse and bad behaviour, saying, “She is only half a person.”1930: Someone gave Hovsanna the money to travel to Aleppo and reclaim Arusiak, by then 10 years old. My mother was intrigued by the appearance of this sister but Arusiak was watchful and withdrawn. When she finally did speak to my then five-year-old mother, she hissed: “Why did she leave me behind and keep you?”Soon after Arusiak appeared, Maree, “only half a person,” disappeared. My mother was happy about that.1935: At 15, Arusiak found a live-in job and left. My mother was 10 years old; her brother Hovsep, who cared for her before and after school every day while their mother worked, and always had, was seventeen. She adored him. He had just finished high school and was going to study medicine. One day he fell ill. He died within a week.1980: My mother told me she never saw her mother laugh or, once Hovsep died, in anything other than black. Two or three times before Hovsep died, she saw her smile a little, and twice she heard her singing when she thought she was alone: “A very sad song,” my mother would say, “that made me cry.”1942: At seventeen, my mother had been working as a live-in nanny for three years. Every week on her only half-day off she had caught the bus home. But now Hovsanna was in hospital, so my mother had been visiting her there. One day her employer told her she must go to the hospital immediately. She ran. Hovsanna was lying alone and very still. Something wasn’t right. My mother searched the hospital corridors but found no-one. She picked up a phone. When someone answered she told them to send help. Then she ran all the way home, grabbed Arusiak’s photograph and ran all the way back. She laid it on her mother’s chest, said, “It’s all right, Mama, Arusiak’s here.”1976: My mother said she didn’t like my boyfriend; I was not to go out with him. She said she never disobeyed her own mother because she really loved her mother. I went out with my boyfriend. When I came home, my belongings were on the front porch. The door was bolted. I was seventeen.2003: I read Wajnryb who identifies violent eruptions of anger and frozen silences as some of the behaviours consistent in families with a genocidal history (126). 1970: My father had been dead over a year. My brothers and I were, all under 12, made too much noise. My mother picked up the phone: she can’t stand us, she screamed; she will call an orphanage to take us away. We begged.I fled to my room. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t keep still. I paced, pressed my face into a corner; shook and cried, knowing (because she had always told us so) that she didn’t make idle threats, knowing that this was what I had sometimes glimpsed on her face when she looked at us.2012: The Internet reveals images of Ataturk’s bronze statue overlooking Princess Royal Harbour. Of course, it’s outsized, imposing. The inscription on its plinth reads: "Peace at Home/ Peace in the World." He wears a suit, looks like a scholar, is moving towards us, a scroll in his hand. The look in his eyes is all intensity. Something distant has arrested him – a receding or re-emerging vision. Perhaps a murmur that builds, subsides, builds again. (Medz Yeghern, Aksor, Aghed, Genocide). And what is written on that scroll?2013: My partner suggested we go to Albany, escape Perth’s brutal summer. I tried to explain why it’s impossible. There is no memorial in Albany, or anywhere else in Western Australia, to the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide. ReferencesAkcam, Taner. “The Politics of Genocide.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 11 Dec. 2011. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OxAJaaw81eU&noredirect=1genocide›.Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigress: The Armenian Genocide. London: William Heinemann, 2004.BBC. “Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938).” BBC History. 2013. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/ataturk_kemal.shtml›.Boyajian, Levon, and Haigaz Grigorian. “Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide.”The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. Ed. Richard Hovannisian. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. 177–85.Bryce, Viscount. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916.Galas, Diamanda. Program Notes. Dexifiones: Will and Testament. Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. 2001.———.“Dexifiones: Will and Testament FULL Live Lisboa 2001 Part 1.” Online Video Clip. YouTube, 5 Nov. 2011. Web. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvVnYbxWArM›.Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47.Manne, Robert. “A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.” The Monthly Feb. 2007. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/turkish-tale-gallipoli-and-armenian-genocide-robert-manne-459›.Matiossian, Vartan. “When Dictionaries Are Left Unopened: How ‘Medz Yeghern’ Turned into a Terminology of Denial.” The Armenian Weekly 27 Nov. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/11/27/when-dictionaries-are-left-unopened-how-medz-yeghern-turned-into-terminology-of-denial/›.Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Nicholson, Brendan. “ASIO Detected Bomb Plot by Armenian Terrorists.” The Australian 2 Jan. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/cabinet-papers/asio-detected-bomb-plot-by-armenian-terrorists/story-fnbkqb54-1226234411154›.“President Obama Issues Statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.” The Armenian Weekly 24 Apr. 2012. 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/04/24/president-obama-issues-statement-on-armenian-remembrance-day/›.Polain, Marcella. The Edge of the World. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007.Siamanto. “The Dance.” Trans. Peter Balakian and Nervart Yaghlian. Adonias Dalgas Memorial Page 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.terezakis.com/dalgas.html›.Stockings, Craig. “Let’s Have a Truce in the Battle of the Anzac Myth.” The Australian 25 Apr. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/lets-have-a-truce-in-the-battle-of-the-anzac-myth/story-e6frgd0x-1226337486382›.Wajnryb, Ruth. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2001.
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