In the last three decades the anthropology of Western Europe has become almost exclusively an anthropology of urban life. The anthropology of rural life in Western Europe has been progressively neglected. Yet, just because cities concentrate people who continue to produce new and unexpected forms of social organization does not mean rurality becomes the emptying home of a tired traditionalism. Far from it. Since the city is only defined by opposition to the countryside, and since rural movements have urban effects, we cannot ignore the changes taking place in hamlets, villages, and rural towns throughout Western Europe. They are a integral part and parcel of life in Europe today. The key aim of this book is to redress this academic imbalance, by examining some of the central changes in the rural zones of contemporary Western Europe. In particular, most contributors look at the newcomers to these areas and the rainbow variety of effects they are having. The ‘alternative’ in our title is to be understood broadly. The contributors are not just looking at the self-proclaimed alternatives (hippies, New Agers, back-to-nature types, etc.) but at labour migrants from outside Western Europe and affluent resettlers as well. Members of all these groups are, in their own way, contributing towards the construction of a non-traditional countryside. All of them help to maintain life in rural areas which would otherwise be emptying of residents.
many cases destroyed by Russian and Syrian government bombardment, MSF was at a loss as to how to respond, despite its brilliance in publicity. 5 An exception to this general rule about political engagement is Palestine, above all for Western European relief workers. But for so many young people in the EU, Palestine is the great international cause of their time, and as such, paradoxically, it also becomes a domestic issue for them.
them in being able to respond to these things themselves. In Uganda, for example, they now have huge experience with managing Ebola. In my professional lifetime, I have seen the capacity of disaster-prone countries increase enormously. The need, certainly around earthquakes and trauma responses, for teams from Western Europe to go to disaster-prone countries has clearly gone down and is going down as it should. If we look at the Nepal earthquake, there was very little
a refugee’ ( UNHCR, 2005 ). The UN Regional Information Centre for Western Europe (UNRIC) together with the mtvU student media group at the University of Southern California, has produced Darfur is Dying . This simulation allows players to negotiate the ‘forces that threaten the survival of his or her refugee camp. It offers a faint glimpse of what it’s like for the more than 2.5 million who have been internally displaced by the crisis in Sudan’ ( HRE, 2009 ). 11 Then head of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group that
, 1373 – 8 , doi: 10.1093/cid/cis693 . Keller , M. , et al. ( 2019 ), ‘ Ancient Yersinia pestis Genomes from across Western Europe Reveal Early Diversification during the First Pandemic (541–750)’ , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 116 : 25 , 12363 – 72 , doi: 10.1073/pnas.1820447116
The Countries of Western Europe Austria Population 8.1 million (2000) Capital Vienna Territory 83,857 sq. km GDP per capita US$25,788 (2000) Unemployment 3.7 per cent of workforce (2000) State form Republic. The Austrian constitution of 1920, as amended in 1929, was restored on 1 May 1945. On 15 May 1955, the four Allied Powers signed the
moment in the long history of this relationship; they were part of one of the first post-Second World War audio-visual campaigns to promote a humanitarian cause at a transnational level. The Marshall Plan (MP) is the widely used term to describe the European Recovery Program (ERP), that is the material aid that the United States sent to the devastated economies of Western Europe to help
new situation also offered a unique opportunity for reconciliation and budding co-operation especially between Germany and France, whose rivalry had underlain both world wars. The Marshall Plan launched by the United States in 1948 kick-started economic recovery and co-operation in Western Europe, permitting democracy and a market economy to take hold. In Central and Eastern Europe, however, the Soviet political grip hardened and communist regimes posing as ‘people’s democracies’ were installed, emphasising state ownership of the means of production and central
2 Europe’s 1950s: reconstruction and reconciliation; confrontation and oppression If … the European Defence Community should not become effective; if France and Germany remain apart … That would compel an agonising reappraisal of basic United States policy. (John Foster Dulles)1 Summary Reconstruction in Western Europe, completed by the early 1950s, led to unbounded optimism about future economic growth and to a strong desire for closer integration. Following the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949 among ten West European countries, six went further in
not lead to the feared ‘domino effect’ of communist takeovers in the region, but instead exposed rifts among communist powers. In Western Europe, too, communism became more diversified with the rise of more reformist ‘eurocommunist’ movements in Italy and elsewhere. The nine-member EEC became the ‘Twelve’ as it accepted three new Mediterranean members: Greece in 1981 and Portugal and Spain in 1986. It thereby became more of a political, and less of a purely economic, institution, since all the three new members were considerably poorer than the existing Nine and