Political Geography Quarterly最新文献

Australian women now work in the paid labourforce in greater numbers. Accordingly, local community services to help care for workers' dependents are becoming increasingly important, as fewer households include full-time carers. But there are considerable differences in the way local states approach the task of caring for workers' dependents, and these have varied implications for particular class and gender groups. Focusing on child-care provision, but with some reference also to services for aged dependents, this paper describes the community-service practice of two Melbourne municipalities and the class and gender biases they incorporate. It then proposes an initial explanation of the differences found, drawing on interactions between bureaucrats, elected councillors and community activists in those places.

The article explores attitudes of nations and states to territory and boundaries. These attitudes are divided into two categories. First, expressive arguments for maintaining or acquiring territory invoke a higher principle of ideology, faith, history, nature, language, race, community, or culture to prove that this territory ‘belongs’. For example, ‘historical rights’ are presented to prove that the state is entitled to a certain territory. Second, instrumental arguments in which territory and boundaries are regarded as dependent variables. These arguments invoke functional ‘needs’ such as strategy, defence, economic viability, social development, transport and communication to prove that territory is required. The value of territory is thus defined as a means to other collective goals.

To investigate these attitudes, a concrete case-study is presented: was the Zionist movement willing to trade territory for other values when confronted with this decision in 1937? In that year, a British Royal Commission proposed that the territory of western Palestine be divided between Arabs and Jews and that an independent Jewish state be established on a territory of 5000 sq.km. The proposal resulted in a heated controversy within the Zionist movement: should the Jews accept a state on merely one fifth of their homeland?

Five positions regarding this partition proposal are placed on a continuum: strong opposition, opposition, undecided, support, strong support. They are further examined according to their ‘expressive’ and ‘instrumental’ contents.

The resolution of the Zionist Congress in August 1937 was to adopt partition on principle and to negotiate with the British government the precise terms for establishing a Jewish state. This decision is presented as a victory of the instrumentalist pragmatic approach, according to which territory was a means for accomplishing other goals. The choice parameters of the 1937 decision typify the dilemma that later confronted the State of Israel, as well as other nation-states in similar situations.

This paper offers an interpretation of dairy farmers' view of their political relations which is set against the background of Offe's theory of the state. Offe sees the state as facing a series of crises which are the result of the internal contradictions of ‘late’ capitalist systems. The state must simultaneously maintain both the accumulation process and the legitimacy of its actions. But the legitimacy of the state's actions can only be assessed in terms of people's understanding of those actions. Using dairy farmers' own interpretations, I show that the right of the state to impose policy measures is not challenged, even while farmers criticize those measures and their sources. I argue that the internationalization of policy-making for European agriculture has enhanced the legitimacy of the UK state, while making farmers feel powerless to intervene. State functions rely, not so much on their appearance of being fair and just, as on their ability to resonate with nationalistic sentiments, redirect potential conflicts into safe sites and instil feelings of powerlessness and inevitability.

This Study seeks to account for the incidence of military conflict in territorial exchanges between states during the period 1816–1980. In seeking to understand the conditions for military conflict when States exchange homeland territory, our model relies on three factors: the importance or significance of the territory exchanged: the expansionist tendencies of the states involved: and the relative power distribution between those states. The results show divergent patterns for the period before World War I and the period thereafter. The relative significance of each factor varies according to each era, and the importance of the gaining or losing side in the territorial exchange is also dependent on the time period. Possible theoretical explanations are discussed.