Anglophobia in Fascist Italy traces the roots of Fascist Anglophobia from the Great War and through the subsequent peace treaties and its development during the twenty years of Mussolini’s regime. Initially, Britain was seen by many Italians as a ‘false friend’ who was also the main obstacle to Italy’s foreign policy aspirations, a view embraced by Mussolini and his movement. While at times dormant, this Anglophobic sentiment did not disappear in the years that followed, and was later rekindled during the Ethiopian War. The peculiarly Fascist contribution to the assessment of Britain was ideological. From the mid-1920s, the regime’s intellectuals saw Fascism as the answer to a crisis in the Western world and as irredeemably opposed to Western civilisation of the sort exemplified by Britain. Britain was described as having failed the ‘problem of labour’, and Fascism framed as a salvation ideology, which nations would either embrace or face decay. The perception of Britain as a decaying and feeble nation increased after the Great Depression. The consequence of this was a consistent underrating of British power and resolve to resist Italian ambitions. An analysis of popular reception of the Fascist discourse shows that the tendency to underrate Britain had permeated large sectors of the Italian people, and that public opinion was more hostile to Britain than previously thought. Indeed, in some quarters hatred towards the British lasted until the end of the Second World War, in both occupied and liberated Italy.
state-societies (Giddens, 1998). Gerhard Schröder’s apparent embracing of the individualism and ‘workfare’ (Jessop, 1994) strategy of Blair’s ‘Third Way’ in his ‘Neue Mitte’ concept may be read as indicative of an acceptance of the necessary restructuring imperatives of a global economy. Yet, when we explore the debate taking place within and outside German state-society it becomes clear that the representation of Germany as a rigid and inflexible political economy in need of radical restructuring is by no means uncontested. An effective counter to neo-liberal claims
-based medium. Or, to put it more succinctly, the making of an ethnographic film, certainly one that aims to go beyond the merely descriptive, requires the skilful deployment of a filmic narrative. A third way in which the making of an ethnographic film requires one to go beyond observation concerns the relationship between the film-maker and their subjects. As the leading ethnographic film-maker David MacDougall once remarked, ‘No ethnographic film is merely a record of another society: it is always a record of a meeting between a film-maker and that
: 132–3). The attempt to distance the PSOE from Blair was also possibly linked to the resentment felt by the party at the closeness of the relationship between Blair and Aznar. A combination of social liberalism and social democracy therefore provided the PSOE with its characteristic ideology under Rodríguez Zapatero, rather than reference to a Blairite ‘third way’. Indeed, the pragmatism which was so characteristic of Blair’s period in office has been pointedly rejected by Rodríguez Zapatero, who has commented: ‘It’s important to govern on the basis of principles and
Labour, New Britain? (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Blair, T. (September 1998) The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century, Fabian Pamphlet 588. Blair, T. (10 November 2002) ‘My vision for Britain’, Observer. Callaghan, J. (1987) Time and Chance (London: Collins). Campbell, J. (1987) Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Crosland, C. A. R. (1962) The Conservative Enemy (London: Cape). M1738 - CALLAGHAN TEXT.indd 213 3/8/09 12:13:42 214 Resources for rethinking Department for Education and Employment (1997) Excellence in
11 The continuing relevance of Croslandite social democracy Kevin Hickson The aim of this chapter is to argue that as social democrats look for an alternative to the New Labour/Third Way approach, as they inevitably must do given the rather moderate nature of many areas of domestic policy since 1997 and given the current economic crisis (leaving aside the disastrous foreign policy adventures of the Blair years, notably of course Iraq), we could find a number of relevant ideas in the British social democratic tradition, specifically in the work of Tony Crosland
modernisation process under Blair represented a systematic repudiation of such a vision and an attempt, instead, to project a ‘Third Way’, ‘renewed’ or ‘post’-social democratic alternative. Ironically, in recent years, this has increasingly come to be re-packaged for export as a modernised ‘European social model’, appropriate, where the European tradition of social democracy was not, to the new competitive environment summoned by an era of globalisation. As this perhaps suggests, whether Labour is seen as a party with a social democratic past, a party with a social democratic
diminution by the Conservatives in their efforts to detect fraud and identify those who constituted an ‘undeserving poor’. Again, however, their task was rendered more difficult by the government’s own tougher stance against those who abused the welfare state, and New Labour’s ‘third way’ insistence that rights had to be matched by reciprocal responsibilities; the unemployed could no longer expect ‘something for nothing’ under a Labour government, with Blair insisting that welfare provision should be about providing ‘a hand-up, not a hand-out’. In this context, the
to ensure an end-state egalitarianism. This then explains why New Labour is committed to equal opportunities, social markets, education, employment and social inclusion. Although Buckler’s interpretation of Rawls is occasionally shaky – tending to regard him as a prototypical Third Wayer – he does show that New Labour’s is at best a weak egalitarianism (cf. Wissenburg, 2001). What of reciprocity? More than anyone, Stuart White (1999, 2001) has established how and why the New Labour project holds to the basic prin- TZP2 4/25/2005 4:50 PM Page 37 Justice and
negative one. Positive freedom consists, they say, in exactly this ‘growth’ of the individual: the free individual is one that develops, determines and changes her own desires and interests autonomously and ‘from within’. This is not freedom as the mere absence of obstacles, but freedom as self-realisation. Why should the mere absence of state interference be thought to guarantee such growth? Is there not some ‘third way’ between