![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
- This r/imaginarymaps map imagines the creation, via migration in the 13th century, of a Turkic Christian minority akin to the Gagauz concentrated in northwestern Germany. Nice map, if questionable borders.
- What would have happened if, as nearly occurred in 1762, Prussia was crushed by its neighbours and divided? r/imaginarymaps shows the outcome.
- Could there ever have emerged, after the partitions of Poland, a dual-nation kingdom of Prussia-Poland? r/imaginarymaps shows this country.
- This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a southern Germany unified under Austria, separate from the sphere of Prussia in the north.
- Could a union of Bavaria with the German-speaking lands of Austria after 1919 have worked? r/imaginarymaps shows it.
[BLOG] Some Friday links
Sep. 7th, 2012 01:00 pm- Cosmic Variance's Sean Carroll considers the implications of the recent declaration on the existence of animal consciousness.
- Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram considers the ethical implications of restrictive immigration policies on the part of countries whose past actions--carbon dioxide pollution, or anti-drug wars--have created large numbers of potential migrants.
- Daniel Drezner doesn't like arguments advanced by the likes of Thomas Friedman that Chinese holdings of American sovereign debt gives China power over the United States. It doesn't, at least not the sort of power that--when used--wouldn't hurt China more than the United States.
- Eastern Approaches notes Bulgaria's decision to postpone Euro adoption, made in light of the ongoing crisis.
- Far Outliers concludes its conclusions from Prussian history book The Iron Kingdom with one conluding that in 1945, the Western powers believed that Prussia had to be destroyed to end German militarism, the Soviets--perhaps remarkably--coming to this conclusion later.
- A brief post by Razib Khan at GNXP notes that India is so much larger than Pakistan, proper cross-national (and intra-national) comparisons in South Asia would be better taken to use Indian states rather than India as a whole.
- Progressive Download's John Farrell notes, after T. Ryan Gregory, the importance of distinguishing between evolution as a theory and evolution as a fact.
- At The Power and the Money, Douglas Muir agrees with a recent International Crisis Group analysis arghuing that the likely medium-term outcome in Syria is not the overthrow of Assad, but ratehr the devolution of his government into a warlord regime unresponsive to the sorts of incentives states normally respond to.
- At The Signal, Susan Manus interviews a historian who has been trying to recover electronic work by Rent composer Jonathan Larson, saved in archaic formats and old programs.
- A Torontoist posting explores Torontonians' reaction to the risk of nuclear attack int he early Cold War.
- Eugene Volokh, at The Volokh Conspiracy, mourns the decision of Israel's Egged bus company to respond to attacks by Jerusalem-area Ultra-Orthodox on advertisements featuring women and Israeli human-rights legislation limiting misogyny by dropping advertising featuring human beings.
Tags:
- animal intelligence,
- animal rights,
- bulgaria,
- china,
- economics,
- european union,
- eurozone,
- evolution,
- feminism,
- geopolitics,
- germany,
- globalization,
- history,
- immigration,
- india,
- israel,
- links,
- migration,
- national identity,
- nuclear war,
- pakistan,
- popular culture,
- prussia,
- science,
- second world war,
- south asia,
- syria,
- toronto,
- united states,
- war
[BLOG] Some Wednesday links
Aug. 8th, 2012 04:02 pm- Daniel Drezner has to point out that the comparisons some Israelis like Netanyahu are making between Idi Amin's Uganda and modern Iran, with the implication that a successful strike against Iran's nuclear facilities will discredit Iran the way the Israeli commande attack at Entebbe did Amin is just, well, argh.
- Eastern Approaches is decidedly unimpressed with Romania's education system, and not only because it prompts many talented young people to leave their country to pursue their dreams.
- Far Outliers' Joel quotes from Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom to describe how post-German unification Prussia's Kulturkampf against Roman Catholics--at least partly a campaign against potential separatists--ended up backfiring and consolidated German Catholics behind their faith.
- Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig documents how the words sounding like, alternatively, "tea" and "chai" have diffused around the world into different languages following patterns of culture, history, and geography.
- Language Hat is intrigued by a New York Times story describing how a Spanish felt hat factory is kept afloat by orders from the couple hundred thousand Satmar Hasidim.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis commemorated on the 4th the creation in 1942 by the United States of the bracero guest workers program with Mexico, criticized for its poor treatment of the guest workers but in so doing preparing the ground for later Chicano rights movements.
- New APPS Blog's John Protevi starts with Plato's suggestion in the Republic that suitably capable women could belong to the class of protectors in his ideal polity to consider the complexely-gendered presentation of women athletes and the significant variations in performance within gender.
- Registan's guest blogger Navruz Nekbakhtshoev reports from Tajikistan's recently conflict-hit Badakhshan region, noting that the recent conflict wasn't an ethnic conflict mobilizing different groups on ethnoreligious lines but rather something more limited.
- Towleroad reports on Gaymercon, a proposed con for gay geeks that could conceivably take off.
[BLOG] Some Thursday links
Mar. 1st, 2012 11:18 pm- James Bow makes the point that streetcar systems like Toronto's are not the same as light rail.
- Over at Crasstalk, a poster makes the point that when Santorum talks about the threat gays in military service pose, he betrays his ignorance of Plato's observations and the Sacred Band of Thebes.
- At The Crux, Vaughan Bell discusses the interesting phenomenon of contagious hysteria as evidenced at a high school in upstate New York (here, involving seizures).
- Far Outliers is posting excerpts from Iron Kingdom, Clark's book on the history of Prussia, Two excerpts, one on the broad-based nature of patriotism in Prussia in the Napoleonic Wars and the other describing Prussia's shift from cautious support of the French Revolution against Austria to alliance against France, are noteworthy.
- Marginal Revolution observes that the incumbent Haitian president might be expelled from office if it turns out that he has been hiding a foreign citizenship, dual citizenship being illegal in Haiti.
- Progressive Download's John Farrell reports on claims to have discovered fragments of the Gospel of Mark dating back to the 1st century CE. Thoughts?
- The Volokh Conspiracy's Kenneth Anderson is almost certainly right to suggest that proposals to dispatch German tax officials to Greece are absolutely politically impossible.
This one's for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lemurbuoy.
* * *
Vesper & Cywinski, L. N. (Eds.). (2008). Two centuries of Prussia: The cosmopolitan spirit survives. Port Vancouver: International Studies Editions/Bass-Liebermann.
This provocative book-length exploration of the vicissitudes of Prussia as had the luck to be published on the two hundred year anniversary of the constitution of the modern Prussian state with the definitive annexation of Galicia that defined this state's eastern frontiers for the next two centuries. Even now that an associated broad Europe has allowed for a certain pan-nationalism, Prussia remains unique as a successful multinational state in north-central Europe, more effective in satisfying nationalist demands than, a perennially unstable Russia that keeps shedding provinces or a Swedish realm that no longer exists at all.
How did this happen? A variety of compelling articles explain how.
This book is a necessary acquisition for any library of note--not only unviersity libraries, but people's libraries and even personal libraries. How do you run a multinational society deriving its legitimacy from tradition? The Prussians will show you how.
- R. McDonald, Simcoe University
lemurbuoy.Vesper & Cywinski, L. N. (Eds.). (2008). Two centuries of Prussia: The cosmopolitan spirit survives. Port Vancouver: International Studies Editions/Bass-Liebermann.
This provocative book-length exploration of the vicissitudes of Prussia as had the luck to be published on the two hundred year anniversary of the constitution of the modern Prussian state with the definitive annexation of Galicia that defined this state's eastern frontiers for the next two centuries. Even now that an associated broad Europe has allowed for a certain pan-nationalism, Prussia remains unique as a successful multinational state in north-central Europe, more effective in satisfying nationalist demands than, a perennially unstable Russia that keeps shedding provinces or a Swedish realm that no longer exists at all.
How did this happen? A variety of compelling articles explain how.
- Vesper and Cywinski's introduction, "Prussia Between Russia and Germany," properly situates the origins of modern Prussia in the unique positions of both Prussia and Poland between a threatening Holy Roman Empire of fragile German states and their menacing Great Power allies and an expansive Russia. The travails of the Polish Partitions that saw ethnic Poland placed under Prussia control may have occurred with the intent of creating a broader Prussian realm, the authors note, but it also had the effect of creating a Prussian monarchy with a citizenry concentrated in lands once belonging to the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Napoleonic promises of liberation to Prussian Germans and Poles had their effect, but the Russian armies also ready to be massed on the states eastern frontier also counted. Is it any wonder, the authors ask, that the 1817 proclamation of the union of Polish notables with the Hohenzollern dynasty was made sincerely?
- Chapter 3 by Kempel, "The Constitution of the Prussian Populations," is a compelling statistical analysis of the population trends, marking the relative intensification of Polish migration (and Polish assimilation) in most of German-populated Prussia apart from the famously pluricultural region of Silesia, and the diffusion of Poland's Jews westwards following typical patterns of chain migration. Wozniak and Dombrowski's Chapter 4, a survey of the major constitutional developments in Prussia history, makes the telling point that the territorial Estates active on the ground since 1897 have been quite functional, united by the relatively strong presence of the monarchy as symbolic guardians of the untidy of the realm--guardians, it might be added, whose role has been sanctified by first the Great Northern war then by the Wars of Austrian Dissolution earlier in the 20th century.
- Foreign policy is treated by Kostova at length (Chapter 9, "Prussia In A Changing World"), as she examines the multipolarity that allowed Prussia to remain at a profitable equidistance from the European republic's alliance around France and Germany, the northern monarchies' of Sweden and especially Britain, and a Russia resentful of Prussia's notable economic success. Yager's Chapter 10, "Prussian Militarism In The Post-Napoleonic World," particularly the role of the nobility in a professionalized military as titular and sometimes more-than-titular heads of the famously efficient Landeswehr. The treatment of Prussia's atomic weaponry program is brief, but modern force levels, especially on the eastern frontier and with the hypersonics, are covered at length.
- The populations of smaller minorities apart from the Prussian Germans and the Poles are treated spottily neglected. Prussian pragmatism did, as explored in Chapter 9 by Savukynas et al., "Lithuania Between Grand Duchy And Nation," allow Prussia to manage the absorption of its Lithuanian conquests into the Prussian realm more efficiently than Sweden did its Baltic and Karelian acquisitions. Although there were explorations of the effects of Prussia on Jews in in Chapter 11 (Todorsky et al, "Yiddish Or German? Debates On the Jewish National Language") and Chapter 12 (Braunstein and Kaplan, "The Jews of Olystyn and Berlin: A Study In Migration") this collection is lacking. Finally, Czechs, Lemko and Masurians are no treated at all.
- Finally, the concluding Chapter 15, Soderström's "Prussia In The Future," is a worthwhile survey of continuing trends--the Bund's increasingly notable loudness on Palestinian affairs, ongoing disputes about the coincidence of ethnic with political frontiers, new migration trends from the wider world (the chain migration of Thais is given prominence in this), and declining economic growth--that is nonetheless bullish on Prussia's prospects. If nothing else, the latest convulsions to the east will serve as a deterrent to the few separatists.
This book is a necessary acquisition for any library of note--not only unviersity libraries, but people's libraries and even personal libraries. How do you run a multinational society deriving its legitimacy from tradition? The Prussians will show you how.
- R. McDonald, Simcoe University
[REVIEW] Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom
Aug. 5th, 2008 11:31 pmPrussia, annihilated after the Second World War by Allied powers eager to eradicate the militarism that led to the Third Reich, is undergoing something of a revival in historical writing, with works like Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1700-1947 demonstrating a decidedly impressive reediting of the traditional blood-and-war narrative associated with Prussia. I'm not alone: Writers like Daniel Johnson at The Telegraph, Volker Ulrich at Sign and Sight, Patrick White at The Guardian, and William Grimes at The New York Times (1, 2, 3, 4).
Put briefly, Clark makes a convincing case that Prussia's Hohenzollerns responded to the devastation inflicted on Brandenburg, lacking defensible frontiers,during the Thirty Years War and pragmatically, developing an efficient military-driven state to defend Brandenburg (and East Prussia) effectively in the middle of a Germany that was still a contested buffer zone. The Hohenzollern dynasty that, in an amusing echo of Ernest Renan's argument that a nation is constituted by a continuous referendum on the part of its citizens, willed their state into existence did create a dynamic and pragmatically tolerant (Huguenots are mentioned, as are Jews) state that, after several rounds of reforms and substantial territorial expansions, first into Poland in the last quarter of the late 18th century and then in Germany in the first quarter of the late 19th, became the dominant German state. Eventually, the pragmatism of Prussian statesmen like Bismarck placed the Kingdom at the heart of a wider German Empire, The basic militarized insecurity that was the institutionalized flaw of Prussia, Clark continues, unfortunately infected the emergent German state with a malign reputation rooted in an innately reactionary Prussia that, in many cases, did not exist given an advanced economy and a fair degree of social liberalism. Even after the First World War, when a republicanized Free State of Prussia became a federal unit lucky enough to enjoy more efficient and competent government than Germany as a whole, Prussia's reputation followed it. The Second World War and the post-war partition of Prussia annihilated the existence of a political unit that by the time of the Nazi takeover, governed more people than France, and Prussia's historical units from west to east followed their own directions.
I really don't want to, and to some extent can't, criticize the The Iron Kingdom very much, apart from noting that this well-written tome with its compelling arguments is supported by an impressively diverse array of sources, covering a diverse subdivision of history at a diverse, from international power politics to the lived experience of the common people. The only contention thing that I can bring against this book is an observation that the sort of militarism that may have aided in the state's survival could quickly extend into wars of outright aggression that, well, actually did earn Prussia a reputation as a militarily aggressive state interested in territorial expansions out of proportino to its size, the War of the Austrian Succession triggered by Frederick the Great's occupation of Silesia being a case in point. I suspect that this is not entirely fair given the actions of other great powers, but well.
Put briefly, Clark makes a convincing case that Prussia's Hohenzollerns responded to the devastation inflicted on Brandenburg, lacking defensible frontiers,during the Thirty Years War and pragmatically, developing an efficient military-driven state to defend Brandenburg (and East Prussia) effectively in the middle of a Germany that was still a contested buffer zone. The Hohenzollern dynasty that, in an amusing echo of Ernest Renan's argument that a nation is constituted by a continuous referendum on the part of its citizens, willed their state into existence did create a dynamic and pragmatically tolerant (Huguenots are mentioned, as are Jews) state that, after several rounds of reforms and substantial territorial expansions, first into Poland in the last quarter of the late 18th century and then in Germany in the first quarter of the late 19th, became the dominant German state. Eventually, the pragmatism of Prussian statesmen like Bismarck placed the Kingdom at the heart of a wider German Empire, The basic militarized insecurity that was the institutionalized flaw of Prussia, Clark continues, unfortunately infected the emergent German state with a malign reputation rooted in an innately reactionary Prussia that, in many cases, did not exist given an advanced economy and a fair degree of social liberalism. Even after the First World War, when a republicanized Free State of Prussia became a federal unit lucky enough to enjoy more efficient and competent government than Germany as a whole, Prussia's reputation followed it. The Second World War and the post-war partition of Prussia annihilated the existence of a political unit that by the time of the Nazi takeover, governed more people than France, and Prussia's historical units from west to east followed their own directions.
I really don't want to, and to some extent can't, criticize the The Iron Kingdom very much, apart from noting that this well-written tome with its compelling arguments is supported by an impressively diverse array of sources, covering a diverse subdivision of history at a diverse, from international power politics to the lived experience of the common people. The only contention thing that I can bring against this book is an observation that the sort of militarism that may have aided in the state's survival could quickly extend into wars of outright aggression that, well, actually did earn Prussia a reputation as a militarily aggressive state interested in territorial expansions out of proportino to its size, the War of the Austrian Succession triggered by Frederick the Great's occupation of Silesia being a case in point. I suspect that this is not entirely fair given the actions of other great powers, but well.
