Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

13 December: Becoming Attached: Sodomy, the Body, and the Origins of Democracy in Early Modern England

17 October: Coming soon! Berlin and the BBC Miles Taylor

22 July: What more of English Law and Continental Renaissance? Keval Nathwani

4 July: Promoting the pioneering writer and psychoanalyst Alix Strachey Gesa Stedman

11 March: "EUPL? Never heard of it." - And Why the European Union Prize for Literature is Still Worth a PhD Project Anna Schoon

16 February: Happy in Berlin – British Writers in the City 2.0 Gesa Stedman

7 February: From the Top Down to the Bottom and Upwards Again: the European Integration Cycle of Local Government Marius Guderjan

25 January: The History of Universities Seminar Miles Taylor

Becoming Attached: Sodomy, the Body, and the Origins of Democracy in Early Modern England

13 December, Aylon Cohen

Aylon Cohen is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a visiting scholar at the Centre, specializing in the areas of intellectual history, democratic, feminist, queer, and critical theory. Aylon’s dissertation project, titled “Becoming Attached: Sodomy, the Body, and the Origins of Democracy in Early Modern England,” studies the historical transition from the rule of the king to the sovereignty of the people in the long 18^th century.

My project asks: in an aristocratic world thoroughly suffused by hierarchical chains of subordination and submission at the peak of which the king ruled, how do subjects become attached to and practice revolutionary principles of democratic self-rule in their everyday lives? How do seemingly abstract democratic norms of equality become part of how citizens ordinarily relate to each other? And how should we understand the entangled relationship between intellectual history and the study of ideas with the concrete material practices that made possible the “Age of Democratic Revolutions,” the period from 1760 to 1800 in which the democratic state is said to come into being?

Many historical studies on the transition from monarchy to democracy commonly focus on institutional developments in the economy, state, and/or society to explain the shift away from a state identified with the king’s personal rule. Yet, in focusing on such infrastructural changes, such studies have difficulty explaining how subjects disinvested from the king’s personal rule in order to pledge fidelity and commitment to new political concepts of equality and “the people.” While work in intellectual history regularly centers extra-institutional explanations by attending to the history of concepts and ideas, this scholarship often analyzes political change by concentrating on philosophical texts and their discursive effects on how individuals make sense of the world. Synthesizing these separate emphases on the institutional-material and symbolic-ideational, my work explores the history of political power in Early Modern England by attending to transformations in the material practices and conceptual ideas of the body, the body politic, and bodily feeling. For instance, what do rituals of kneeling and bowing before the king’s body reveal about the representation and reproduction of political authority in the 17^th century royal court? What role did emergent practices of bodily intimacy across class boundaries, from the handshake to the hug, play in 18^th century transformations to aristocratic relations of subordination and the formation of new egalitarian relations between citizens?

With particular attention to the case of England and its international relationship to France, Holland, and the British colonies, my research makes use of an expansive archive including political pamphlets, juridical treatises, etiquette manuals, newspaper reports, satirical poetry, letters, and engravings to explore the transformation of political life. Their analyses charts an historical arc from the 16^th and 17^th century royal courts to 18^th century republican movements and shows how emerging spaces of political assembly, structured on novel principles of gender, sexuality, and class, reorganized social relations in and through the body and elicited new egalitarian relations of feeling between citizens. Investigating the conceptual and practical role of fraternity and fraternal love in the work of social contract theorists such as John Locke, republican organizations such as the Freemasons, and underground networks of sodomites that contemporaries called Molly Houses, my study shows how political theorists and actors over the course of the 18^th century reinvented metaphors of the body politic in order to reimagine principles of political authority and rule while simultaneously developing novel forms of bodily practice to create new relations of equality between citizens.

Coming soon! Berlin and the BBC

17 October, Miles Taylor

Next month the Centre for British Studies is hosting a two-day event, Berlin and the BBC.  This international symposium investigates the unique relationship between the British Broadcasting Corporation and the city of Berlin. International scholars from media and film studies, musicology, contemporary history and English literature together with news correspondents will critically assess how German culture and history, filtered through the experiences of Berlin, featured in the programmes and reporting of the BBC over a period of one hundred years. Co-hosted by the Museum Für Kommunikation and the British Embassy, and sponsored by the Deutsche-Britische Gesellschaft and the DFG, the event will conclude with a roundtable featuring BBC Berlin correspondents past and present.  

Why has Berlin been so significant for the BBC, and how has the BBC contributed to the lives of the city across the last 100 years? Founded in 1922, the BBC developed strong and influential connections with Germany from the start, focused particularly on Berlin. Germany pioneered radio technology in the 1920s, and the British regarded the principal Berlin radio networks as model examples to follow. The first Director-General of the BBC, John Reith, wanted to broadcast so-called high culture to British radio audiences and often selected Berlin orchestral music for the early live performances of the BBC. By the 1930s, special BBC correspondents were reporting from Berlin. The BBC in Berlin contributed to British attitudes towards the Third Reich, notably through its coverage of appeasement policy and the 1936 Olympic Games in the city. During the second world war, the BBC developed its German Service aimed at listeners across German-speaking regions, but with much of the content derived from and focused on Berlin. And after 1945, the BBC set up its operations in the occupied part of the city, becoming a key institution in the cultural politics of the Cold War, both westward-facing, in transmitting news and features from West Berlin to British and world listeners (and later TV viewers), and also DDR-centred with the continuing activity of the BBC German service. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990 were hugely significant moments for the BBC, with more radio and TV programmes and news items devoted to Berlin and its redevelopment in the 1990s and 2000s than other news organisations. 

As one of the few international cultural institutions that remained in situ in the city throughout the Weimar years, the Third Reich, the era of divided Germany through to the reunification and the return of the capital to the city, the BBC is a potentially revealing case-study of how British-German relations changed over time. We hope that our event will create a fuller understanding of how German culture has been presented to English-speaking audiences, and conversely how British national identity and memory has been formed by images and stereotypes of Germany.

What more of English Law and Continental Renaissance?

22 July, Keval Nathwani, Centre for British Studies

Sir John Baker’s essay English Law and the Renaissance took up the torch left by the early death of the great English jurist FW Maitland in 1906 in his quest to ‘continentalise’ English Law. That is, to show how English Law had been affected and influenced by the jurisprudence of the continent during the intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance. Baker’s use of the word ‘Renaissance’ does two important things. First it suggests that during the Renaissance there was an intellectual phenomenon, alongside the artistic and cultural revolutions, which manifested itself in the modernisation, sophistication, and general increase in legal activity. Part of this process was the centralisation of power through which the bureaucratic administration of legal processes could be more effectively managed. Secondly, Baker’s use of the word ‘Renaissance’ possesses geographic implications. It implies that this revolution in thinking took place ‘over there’ on the continent from which aspects were imported into the English Legal System. Central to Baker’s argument is that “changes taking place on the continent had more in common with those in England than has ever been thought arguable”.

It is from this that I took my research aims for my time at the Centre for British Studies in Berlin. In my Masters research I was particularly interested in the relationship between private property, the late feudal system, and how these were managed by the legal system. In particular by conciliar jurisdiction, or the more famous Star Chamber in the reign of Henry VII 1485-1509. As an equity tribunal Star Chamber could be seen as an aberration in the legal system, a means of shoring up power by the crown dependent of the right to due process by the common law enshrined in Magna Carta. This was true but its use by Henry VII and expansion by Cardinal Wolsey could also be seen to point to new ways of thinking about how legal questions, usually about property, could be solved more efficiently through the direct judgements of the King. Interestingly in the Holy Roman Empire a similar tribunal emerged. It was known as the Reichskammergericht or Imperial Chamber Court, effectively the Supreme Court of the Holy Roman Empire. The Reichskammergericht was effectively founded in 1495 at the Diet of Worms, 1495 during the development of the Imperial Reforms aimed at creating an Ewiger Landfrieden or Perpetual Peace. The parallels in legal thinking are remarkable and have as yet been un-researched. The desire to institutionalise legal norms to create a harmonious national environment, particularly in England after the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses, is perhaps the strongest one. Naturally, there were many differences in the operation of both tribunals, but the fact that they are both established de facto within 10 years of each other with similar legal aims is striking and worth further research.

The sources for such an investigation would present challenges. The records of the Reichskammergericht, were broken up and distributed among the federal states after 1806, the date of the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire by Napoleon Bonaparte, scattering its records across Germany's regional archives. Some of them, therefore, found their way to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. However, this has, on the whole posed a challenge to research into it despite some well-funded German research projects. However, unlike the records of the Star Chamber they do exist almost in their entirety whereas the Star Chamber book of orders and decrees were lost in the eighteenth century. The variety of sources and other related materiel provide an exciting prospect for such comparative cross border research.

The symbiotic relationship between English and Continental legal systems remain very poorly studied. Indeed with Brexit it is unlikely to get much better. What’s more, challenges in language too preclude many British legal historians to contemplate such a comparative approach. It would however be a vast own goal to ignore this hitherto missed opportunity in conceptual approaches to Legal History. The good news is that the wealth of material and ideas are huge and promise fascinating insights and valuable research.

Keval has recently completed his MPhil from the University of Cambridge in Early Modern history and is a visiting scholar at the Centre for British Studies. His interests are broadly English and European legal and constitutional history in the sixteenth century and he chose the GBZ because the cross cultural and broad historiographical interests of the academics, students and other scholars are tremendously intellectually stimulating.

Promoting the pioneering writer and psychoanalyst Alix Strachey

4 July, Gesa Stedman, Centre for British Studies

In the course of my research on Britons in Berlin, which led among other things to a trio of activities: an exhibition “Happy in Berlin? English Writers in the City, the 1920s and Beyond”, a book of the same title and a website (happy-in-berlin.org), I was struck by the lively letters penned by Alix Strachey who spent nearly a year in Berlin in 1924 and 1925. She came to be analysed by Freud’s disciple and close ally Karl Abraham, who had founded the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute a few years earlier. Strachey threw herself at Berlin’s nightlife, attended seminars and lectures at the Institute, and pursued the translation of Freud’s work into English, together with her husband James Strachey, who had returned to London. Their exchange of letters, although well known to historians of psychoanalysis, also throws a light on post-WWI Berlin and deserves much greater attention.

Long before Isherwood, Auden, and Spender immortalised Berlin, Alix Strachey immersed herself in this ambivalent and contradictory city. More importantly, she wrote about it and in a manner which makes not only for entertaining reading, but also provides a much-needed female perspective. Her accounts of fancy-dress balls and dances, acrimonious discussions amongst the cosmopolitan analysists, her German guesthouse, the difficulties of translation, life as an English café writer in Weimar Berlin and how she met Melanie Klein, are refreshing to say the least. I was therefore glad to be asked to write the biographical sketch on Alix Strachey for the Modernist Archives project, which has just been published. MAPS is particularly interested in the connections to the Hogarth Press and Virginia and Leonard Woolf, for whom Alix Strachey briefly worked before giving up out of boredom. For more detailed information, read the MAPS article here:
https://modernistarchives.com/person/alix-strachey

"EUPL? Never heard of it." - And Why the European Union Prize for Literature is Still Worth a PhD Project

11 March, Anna Schoon, Centre for British Studies

In British Cultural Studies, it can be relatively easy to choose a PhD topic which makes for both exciting research as well as engaging dinner conversations. When writing about films and series, pop artists, or fan culture, a wider audience can easily relate. Undoubtedly, this is not the main purpose of an academic research project. But let’s be honest: knowing that other people share your interest can be motivating and keep you going over the years.

My research, in contrast, was all about the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL), a literary prize launched by the European Commission in 2009. The usual reaction to mentioning this prize was that people had never heard of it – no matter whether they were well-informed about (contemporary) writing and publishing or had no particular interest in literature. Even some winning authors mentioned that the EUPL came as a big surprise, mainly because they didn’t know it existed. Why did it still make sense to centre my PhD project on this allegedly insignificant prize?

Before answering the question, it is worth briefly introducing the EUPL. This prize is funded by the EU’s cultural programmes, and it is organised by a consortium of literary associations: the Federation of European Publishers, the European and International Booksellers Federation, and the European Writers’ Council. The EUPL, which awards €5,000 to each winner, targets emerging writers of contemporary narrative fiction from the 35–40 countries participating in the EU’s cultural programmes. The prize is also noteworthy for its organisation. Pursuing the aim of “putting the spotlight on creativity and diverse wealth” of contemporary fiction in the greatest number of countries possible, the organisers implemented the following cycle structure stretched over three years:

(A lot can be said about this organisation alone, but that's for another blog post.)

After three years, every participating country has had a winner and the next cycle can begin. In 2021, the EUPL completed its fourth cycle; the fith one was launched in February 2022.

This quick presentation already indicates why the EUPL might not have been a very ‘popular’ prize: the organisation is somewhat confusing at first sight (Who wins? Where? And who selects what?), it is pretty industry-centred, and it privileges national over transnational contexts. Also, the EUPL has not created a huge media buzz. It does not reach more than a few thousand followers on social media (despite a potential audience of several hundreds of millions across Europe and beyond), and it is awarded to emerging authors who do not tend to attract the same amount of attention as literary prizes given to more established writers.

Yet why did I still choose to focus on this specific prize in my research? First of all, because the EUPL has been out there for more than twelve years. Hence, one can assume that it must have some value for the parties involved, even though several voices have pointed to pronounced deficiencies in achieving its declared goals. Secondly, the EUPL is not widely popular, but larger than life in online searches. In Google searches (in English) for ‘European literature EU’, ‘European literature’ or comparable combinations, the EUPL appears as the first (or among the first) search results. Thanks to the influence of search algorithms and web content optimised accordingly, the EUPL has the potential to reach a large audience – independent of any form of (literary) recognition. Another reason to consider it in more detail.

Yet most importantly, the EUPL is representative for a major gap in current literary research on European literature. There has been a consensus that the EU as a concrete political shape of the age-old idea of Europe has raised new questions about European culture and its role for some form of a European identity. However, many scholars with an interest in these questions tend to remain caught up in national models of thinking about culture, identity and legitimacy. Also, there is a strong sense of reservations against the involvement of the EU in cultural matters. The assumption of literary autonomy and that literature must not be instrumentalised by political institutions is prevalent.

Yet these two aspects in particular – unsuitable theoretical concepts and this bias against political institutions – have resulted in the fact that current assumptions foreclose a nuanced debate of the new institutional dimension of European literature. The goal of my PhD project was to open up the discussion again and provide alternative impulses to researching the close interconnection between Europe, the EU and European literature. And the EUPL was the perfect object to explore this issue.

And indeed, my research generated highly relevant insights for this line of research. For example, instead of speaking about ‘the EU’ in a pretty generalised way, one needs to pay attention to what exactly the EU can and cannot do in cultural matters, to who is involved in developing and implementing the existing EU cultural programmes, and how exactly decisions in this context are taken. I also found reasons to challenge the prevailing assumptions of literary autonomy and the national model of identity formation: today, literature, the market and politics are so deeply intertwined (for better or worse) that this changed context – in comparison to pre-EU discourses on Europe – urgently needs to be reflected in future research on Europe, the EU, and European literature. Instead of ‘imagining Europe’, ‘branding’ Europe’ with a special focus on the role of the creative economy, including the publishing world, emerges as a more promising approach.

While the EUPL seems like an unremarkable or even quirky subject at first, a detailed analysis allowed me to explore and eventually start filling a crucial gap in current literary and cultural research.

Happy in Berlin - British Writers in the City 2.0

16 February, Gesa Stedman, Centre for British Studies

The Oxford-Berlin project Happy in Berlin? British Writers in the City has enjoyed an interesting life so far, with three exhibitions, a podcast series, a co-authored book, and various off-shots. The project website has recently seen an update: together with The Stephen Spender Trust, Prof Stefano Evangelista and Gesa Stedman developed teaching materials for teachers of German and English which have recently been uploaded to happy-in-berlin.org.

A-Level students in both British and German schools can work with the map that the website provides, detailing the places which were important for British writers and providing short biographies of famous and not so famous authors such as Virginia Woolf, Alix Strachey, Christopher Isherwood or his friend William Robson-Scott who taught at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität during the 1930s and was spied upon by his fellow students and Nationalsocialist colleagues at the English department. With a focus on translation, teachers can base their teaching units on texts, authors, and places and explore how writers helped to create the myth of Britons in Berlin which has had a lasting legacy and informs cultural exchange and migration to this day. Virtual school exchanges based on these materials between schools in Oxford and Berlin are planned as a further activity.

In November 2021, Stefano and Gesa Stedman had the honour of doing a double-act at the Kühlhaus in Berlin Schöneberg as part of the new Oxford-Berlin venture, the Oxford Berlin LiedFest. We talked about the music and sounds which British writers encountered in Berlin, and some of the kind of music they would have heard, or for which they wrote the texts, was performed by passionate and very talented young musicians from Oxford and Berlin. The venue was a former slaughterhouse cooling tower, thus a suitably industrial Berlin space which reminded one of Christopher Isherwood and at the same time of post-WWII Berlin which attracted so many musicians and artists like David Bowie or Nick Cave.

At the moment, we are turning the three exhibitions into a travelling exhibition, based on the structure of the posters shown at HU’s main library foyer last summer. We were also honoured by a favourable review of the accompanying book in the Times Literary Supplement and see further interest being generated by the project. In other words, Happy in Berlin is alive and well and continues to occupy us as well as our audiences and students in interesting and creative ways.

From the Top Down to the Bottom and Upwards Again: the European Integration Cycle of Local Government

7 February, Marius Guderjan, Centre for British Studies

Looking at European integration through the prism of local government might seem a little odd at first. Since the introduction of the Lisbon Treaty major reforms to the EU have been off the table, and the EU has faced a number of regional and global challenges during the last decade; including the Euro crisis, an influx of refugees, climate emergency, a global pandemic, Brexit, autocratic regimes breaking the Union’s fundamental principles and laws, as well as external security threats at the member states’ doorsteps. In response, national governments have returned to more intergovernmental and even unilateral modes of governance to steer through difficult times.

And yet, next to the ‘high politics’ dealt with in Europe’s capitals, politicians and scholars tend to forget that without cities, towns and municipalities EU policies could hardly be realised. Local authorities across Europe are responsible for a wide range of social and economic tasks that are regulated by the EU, including environmental change, energy transition, the integration of refugees, healthcare and other essential public services. Through regulations and directives, but also through policy programmes and funding schemes, local authorities are drawn into the European polity. Policy-makers in Brussels have therefore turned to the local level for effective and innovative ways of developing and implementing their objectives. In particular, the European Commission and the European Parliament clearly acknowledge the essential role of local government for delivering the EU’s agenda.

Local government is not only at the receiving end of policies and laws coming top-down from Brussels. In response to European integration, municipalities adjust their practices, orientation, organisation and politics both internally and externally. Some local authorities and actors engage pro-actively in European affairs and connect themselves in European-wide networks and associations. Although the rise of Euroscepticism in the years before the UK’s EU-referendum had negatively affected the European engagement of English local authorities, we should bear in mind that local authorities in the UK were amongst the pioneers in Brussels and often bypassed the UK Government to deal directly with the EU. Birmingham was the first city to open an office in Brussels in 1984, and by the end of the 1990s, the UK had the highest number of local permanent representations.

Nowadays, local government drives ambitious initiatives that feed bottom-up into European policies around urban mobility, social service provision, environment, procurement, transport, housing. All of this has strengthened the local dimension within the Cohesion Policy and the Urban Agenda. Significant constitutional and procedural reforms highlight the growing role of the local level in the European integration process. The Committee of Regions, the right to local self-government, and the principles of subsidiarity and partnership have promoted local and multilevel governance within the EU’s formal and ‘living’ constitution.

In our book Local Government in the European Union: Completing the Integration Cycle, my colleague Tom Verhelst from Ghent University and I therefore link the macro-trajectories of European integration with micro-developments at the local level. Drawing from a combination of European integration theories and approaches (including intergovernmentalism, functionalism, fusion, post-functionalism, multilevel governance, and Europeanisation), we introduce the idea of an integration cycle to explain how local government responds to the evolution of European governance in different domains and phases.

Our theoretical explorations suggest that European integration of local government represents a ‘third way’ between an intergovernmental and a supranational perspective. Functional spillover of constraining laws triggers a ‘sovereignty reflex’ to preserve local autonomy, while cultivated spillover shifts the focus of local government towards European agendas. Political spillover then activates a small group of entrepreneurial local authorities and actors, who understand that engaging in European affairs is both a necessity and an opportunity for the future of their municipality.

Considering the vast diversity of local government across Europe, the different stages of the integration cycle do not equally involve all local authorities. Yet, as local pioneers seek to shape and access EU policy-making both formally and informally, local government completes the integration cycle. Subsequently, this may trigger a new loop of top-down and bottom-up dynamics in return.

Brexit and examples from other member states have shown that Eurosceptic politics set clear limits to the integration of all levels. Nevertheless, in times when both long-established and fairly young democracies are challenged by populist and radical movements, cities, towns and counties can be a vital locus of political discourse and legitimacy. Taking municipal insights and preferences better into account can make European governance more effective and in line with local practices. It can also help strengthen the links between citizens and EU institutions. After all, local governments are democratically elected stakeholders within the EU with a clear expertise of dealing with their policy challenges on the ground.

Being in direct touch with their citizens, local authorities take a vital role in overcoming national borders and in contributing to a mutual understanding of differences and similarities. It is in this spirit that our research seeks to improve our understanding of local government in the EU for politicians and people working in public authorities at multiple levels, as well as for academics who may find our empirical and theoretical insights useful for their own endeavours.

The History of Universities Seminar

25 January, Miles Taylor, Centre for British Studies

In 2021, with colleagues from Taiwan, the UK and Australia, I set up an online seminar programme on the ‘History of Universities’. My own interest in this enterprise developed from the book that I co-edited recently: Utopian universities: a global history of the new campuses of the 1960s (Bloomsbury Academic 2020). We identified a ‘gap in the market’. There was no regular seminar series dedicated to the history of universities. There were some well-established annual conferences in the UK, the EU, and the USA. However, most of these were suspended at the time because of Covid-19. Myself and my fellow convenors (Ku-ming Chang, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan; Heike Jons, Loughborough University, UK; and Tamson Pietsch, University of Technology Sydney, Australia) believe there is a strong new interest in the subject. Leading journals in the field show a proliferation of themes, periods of interest, and historical geographical contexts, and an increasing diversity of authors. There are established and emerging networks of scholars, for example, the Society for Research in Higher Education (UK), CHER (Consortium of Higher Educational Research, Portugal), and the International Commission on the History of Universities. Beyond this, higher education has become an important focus in the history of education, policy and international studies and the history and sociology of knowledge and science.

Moreover, universities are seldom out of the news these days. The general public is increasingly curious about the wider context of where and how academics work and students are educated, and knowledge and innovation are produced and communicated. Since the majority of scholarly work on universities is very presentist, we wanted our seminar series to examine universities in the past, in order to understand better higher education and research in the future. Current challenges include the Covid-19 pandemic; struggles over access and diversity; environmental crisis; austerity and controversial benefactions; the legacies of race and empire; as well as changing geopolitical alliances including Brexit and a more assertive China. All these have historical roots, precedents, or echoes.

We were also determined to make our coverage as international and comparative as possible, reaching back beyond the 19th century, and around the globe. Our initial call for papers invited topics on the history of particular universities, individual disciplines and scholars; practices of research, teaching and learning; scholarly communication, interaction, and networks; students and student movements; universities as communities and sites of ceremony; university design and architecture; universities and society; international relations, philanthropy and political economy; the impact of colonialism; international education.

Our programme was launched in the summer of 2021, in a fortnightly format. Seminar speakers included established scholars, as well as early career researchers. They came from the US, India, and the UK. We included two round-table seminars. One on ‘Universities and slavery’ – dealing with the ‘inconvenient’ pasts of some American and British universities which relied on the profits of the slave trade at their foundation. And another on ‘Universities in years of pandemic: 1665, 1918, 2020’ which compared the present effects of the pandemic with the ‘flu’ of 1919 and the plague of the 17th century.

The inaugural programme proved a success. We attracted a total of over 170 visitors to the four seminars, with an average audience for each occasion of c. 50. The trial of the concept had worked, so we proceeded to organise a programme for 2021-2, now jointly hosted by the GBZ and Loughborough University. This year’s seminar features talks about universities in Scotland, the history of the PhD, universities and the wars of religion in early modern Europe, higher education in the Habsburg empire in the 19th century, universities in Japanese-occupied China, and a comparative historical analysis of inequality in American and other national university systems.

I am delighted to have been able to bring this seminar with me when I moved from the University of York to the GBZ at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin! From one of the world’s newer public universities to the first and best research university in the world! I look forward to developing the ‘History of Universities’ in its new home, and in particular enhancing its links between British and German scholars.

10 November: 'Affective Polarisation in the UK': First Authors' Workshop Gesa Stedman

25 October: Conference on Immigration Law and Policy, Border Control and Migrant Deaths Sam McIntosh

30 September: New Professor of British History and Society

20 April: UK Literature Festivals Judith Robinson

31 March: Anglophone Women of the Bauhaus Chiara Harrison Lambe

18 March: The dire mood in the UK's multilevel politics Marius Guderjan

4 March: Fighting an epidemic with moral superiority? Felicia Kompio

4 February: Pocock reads Tolkien Patricia Springborg

28 January: Brexit and the Provisions for Settling Disputes Gerhard Dannemann

20 January: Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Call for a "Eudaimonic Turn" Jürgen Schlaeger

'Affective Polarisation in the UK': First Authors' Workshop

10 November, Gesa Stedman, Centre for British Studies

Covid-19 kills, there is no doubt about it. But it does not kill randomly, as has become very obvious in the UK throughout the past one and a half years. People living in deprived areas, in crowded accommodation, with only limited access to healthy food, fresh air, and forced to work on the frontline often have underlying health conditions and are exposed more to the virus than people living in more affluent areas who are able to live a healthy life, and can work from home. Evidently the pandemic has not worked as the great leveller it was purported to be. On the contrary, it has exacerbated the existing social inequality in the UK even further. This inequality is unevenly distributed in terms of geography, age, ethnicity, and gender. All this has been documented and researched in great detail. What, however, requires further investigations, is the question of how Britain got to where it is now, how that compares with its crises-management in the past, and in which ways the superimposition of ten years of austerity, Brexit, and the pandemic have increased the affective polarisation that have arisen from these factors.

The editors and authors of a book entitled Affective Polarisation – Social, Economic and Cultural Divisions in the UK After Brexit and Covid-19 (Bristol University Press) met virtually for the first time on 29 October 2021 to discuss key terms and exchange views on draft chapters. Ranging across disciplines from ethnography, cultural studies, the social sciences and history to economics, contributors presented their arguments and responded to one another’s suggestions. It quickly became clear that all contributors share an interest in aiming for a deeper understanding of such seemingly simple terms as “affect”, “polarisation”, “the Left-Behind”, “Scotland” or “populism”. As academics, we are obliged to delve deeper into what appears all too often too straightforward in media representations and the news. A more nuanced and often contradictory image of the present emerges, which requires more than just one disciplinary perspective to unravel the different strands that make up our troubled contemporary times. The book is intended to explain what is happening, but also to place these events in a historical perspective and therefore show how decisions in the past are having an impact now.

The different disciplines guaranteed a wide array of methods, both quantitative and qualitative. This methodological variety, the interdisciplinary approach, and the fact that the chapter authors are affiliated to different research cultures both in the UK and in Europe, will ensure a broad-ranging account of these difficult topics. The next authors’ meeting will take place in spring 2022, and the book will be published in the summer of 2023. Hopefully, by that time, the pandemic will lie in the past already. Social inequality will not have been overcome by then, nor will affective polarisation, but the editors Gesa Stedman and Jana Gohrisch hope that, together with their co-authors, some light will have been shed on the reasons for finding oneself in such dire circumstances, and possibly also, showing up some promising ways out.

Conference on Immigration Law and Policy, Border Control and Migrant Deaths

25 October, Sam McIntosh, Centre for British Studies

On 30 September – 1 October 2021, I hosted a Conference at the GBZ on Immigration Law and Policy, Border Control and Migrant Deaths. It was funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung as part of my research project ‘Refugee Lives Matter: Protecting the human rights of migrants and refugees through international and regional obligations to investigate deaths.’

Planning and Covid
The conference had been quite a long time in the planning. It was expected to take place in 2020 but had to be cancelled because of the pandemic. Then we delayed again, hoping that the growing success of the vaccine roll-out would mean it would be possible to hold it as an in-person event this summer. Unfortunately, in the end, with continuing uncertainty over the summer regarding the course of the pandemic and travel restrictions, I took the difficult decision to move the entire event online. Nevertheless, it turned out that doing the conference online had certain advantages, not least because it meant that over 160 people from all over the world were able to register and participate.

I was also incredibly lucky with the response to my call for papers and was able to put together a fantastic programme of panels and speakers with expertise in migration, refugee law and policy, as well as contentious death investigation. In addition to academics well-established in their respective fields, I was particularly pleased to welcome a good number of Early Career Researchers who are also involved in some exciting and important research projects on these topics. Finally, I felt it was also vital for the conference to hear from legal practitioners and NGO workers who have been doing incredibly important work in these areas in difficult and often harrowing circumstances.

The Refugee Lives Matter Project
The conference was effectively the last component of my research project which has been looking at regional and international human rights obligations on states to investigate certain types of death, and their potential scope when it comes to fatal scenarios involving unsettled migrants and refugees in and around Europe. The research output is a book on the topic, which will be published by the Boltzmann Institute for Fundamental and Human Rights in partnership with the Manz Verlag in early 2022. The hope is that the book will be published open access so that, with the backing of the Boltzmann Institute, it will reach as wide an audience as possible which includes not just academics but also practitioners, campaigners and activists. It currently has the working title of ‘Protecting Life by Investigating Death: International and Regional Obligations on European States to Investigate the Deaths of Unsettled Migrants and Refugees’.

The Conference
As for the issues discussed at the conference, most people are familiar with the appalling number of deaths that have been occurring in the Mediterranean for decades, reaching a peak in 2016 when the International Organisation for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project records that 5,143 migrants died attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Europe in just one year. The organisation UNITED Against Refugee Deaths has been attempting to track border deaths in and around Europe since 1992 and has recorded over 44,000 fatalities. In addition to the near weekly tragedies occurring in the Mediterranean, there have been thousands of cases of migrants dying in refugee camps, immigration detention centres, or while crossing land borders into or between European states.

The vast majority of these deaths are ultimately the consequence of man-made physical manifestations of that most reified of concepts, ‘the border’. The physical and institutional manifestations of Europe’s borders are not just found along those imaginary lines that divide one state from another. They extend outwards, far into Europe’s neighbouring states (and indeed further still), and inwards deep within the bureaucracies of European states and institutions, as well as physically in the immigration detention centres and refugee camps that exist within Europe’s fortressed walls. When we examine the deaths of unsettled migrants and refugees within European states, we are likely to find the border lurking somewhere within, in what Moreno-Lax has described as the embodied border paradigm.

While on the one hand, the connections between immigration law and policy and migrant deaths are very clear – if it wasn’t for carrier sanctions and the weaponisation of the landscape and seascape as means of border control, deaths in the Mediterranean would be a fraction of what they are today – there are difficult questions that need to be asked on a number of related issues. These are the questions that occupied the conference panels and speakers: What exactly is the nature of border violence? How are the methods, tactics and technologies behind border violence changing and evolving, and what should the response be? Who is involved in border violence, be it directly or indirectly? What factors contribute to refugee and migrant vulnerability? What processes and procedures should be triggered when deaths occur? How can those responsible for deaths be held accountable? How can those policies, laws and practices that contribute to deaths be challenged most effectively? How can we ensure that survivors and the relatives of the deceased are given a voice and treated with respect and humanity? How can we ensure that they are given avenues to justice and legal accountability? What practical steps can we take as lawyers, academics, educators, campaigners and human beings to tackle some of these issues?

Amongst the topics the conference panels focussed on were: The regional implementation of international law and policy and its relationship to migrant and refugee vulnerability; The rise of immigration detention as a border control tactic in Europe; The ‘rightslessness’ of refugees in Libya; The securitisation and externalisation of European and US border control; The impact that dangerous journeys can have on migrants’ increased future vulnerability; Current issues in contentious death research; The role of private vessels in rescuing migrants at sea; and the role of families and survivors in investigations into deaths, including powerful contributions from a practicing lawyer describing her experiences trying to ensure proper inquests into the deaths of refugees in the UK, and the founders of the ‘Last Rights Project’ who are fighting for a new framework of respect for the rights of missing & dead refugees, migrants and bereaved family members.

New Professor of British History and Society at the Centre for British Studies

30 September, Centre for British Studies

Although we are sad to see Christiane Eisenberg leave, we are excited to welcome our new colleague. Miles Taylor has joined the Centre as Professor of British History and Society. He was previously Professor of Modern History at the University of York in the UK, and between 2008 and 2014 Director of the Institute of Historical Research in London. Professor Taylor is a 19th century specialist with a particular interest in Britain and its empire.

His recent books include Empress: Queen Victoria and India (Yale 2018) and (as co-editor) The Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is currently completing a book on parliamentary representation in the UK since the 18th century and a funded project on salt, protest and public health in India. He co-convenes a research seminar on the History of Universities and is General Editor of the New Cambridge History of Britain to be published in five volumes by Cambridge University Press.

UK Literature Festivals - tents, books and heated debate

20 April, Judith Robinson, Bath Spa University

Recently, I attended a virtual conference, hosted by the British Arts Festival Association (BAFA). I listened to festival organisers, including those responsible for some of the many British literature festivals, as they shared their experiences of managing the “pivot” to virtual content and debated the challenges of keeping their festivals afloat in these unprecedented times. A representative of the Wimbledon BookFest discussed how she ran a socially distanced literature festival on the beautiful Wimbledon Common. Lots of challenges had to be considered, from how authors might sign books (in advance) and whether to provide audiences with refreshments (a firm no!).

But the most interesting conversations took place when participants stopped looking backwards and, instead, pondered the future. The global pandemic and the enforced break from the continuous and often frantic efforts of producing annual festivals created a space where organisers were able to consider wide-ranging and complex issues, including accessibility, diversity, inclusion, community and much more.

It seems timely that I am about to begin my PhD research journey now, at such a pivotal time in the literature festival world.
My personal involvement with the world of British literature festivals began during my time as a student at the GBZ. I was lucky enough to secure an internship with the Cheltenham Literature Festival and was offered a full-time position with the festival after graduation. This formed the beginning of a 10-year career in literature festival and event programming and production. In 2018, I took up a position as lecturer at Bath Spa University where I now teach undergraduate and postgraduate students the intricacies of festival, event, and arts management. Simultaneously, I have maintained my foothold in the literature festival world by becoming a festival speaker, occasionally co-hosting events on literature in translation with publisher and writer Scott Pack. My career change has offered me a new perspective on the UK literature festival world, and has led me to think more deeply on the purpose and value of these events.

The UK literature festival tradition started with my previous employer, the Cheltenham Literature Festival, in 1949, featuring a modest nine events. This had increased to 440 events during its 60th anniversary edition in 2009. In 1973, the inaugural Ilkley Literature Festival, modelled on Cheltenham, featured no other than W.H. Auden. The Edinburgh International Book Festival followed in 1981 and the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in 1988.  Pre-pandemic, it had been estimated that there were around 350 literature festivals in the UK, ranging from the world-renowned Hay Festival to small-scale and volunteer-led festivals. As Alex Clark declared in the Guardian a few years ago, “you’ll find a festival anywhere from Crickhowell to Wigtown to Balham to Vanessa Bell’s farmhouse at Charleston”. These festivals feature writers, journalists, celebrities in a range of events - talks, interviews, debates, workshops. They are platforms for the celebration of the written and spoken word, but also commercial vehicles which are deeply intertwined with the publishing industry. Book sales are a key component of the literature festival infrastructure and financial model. This begs the question as to how artistic aspirations and commercial objectives interconnect? In my research, I hope to uncover more about what value UK publishers and festival organisers assign literature festivals, and how their perception might influence the future of these events.

As the UK slowly emerges from the 3rd lockdown, literature festivals across the UK are tentatively making plans for a live comeback. My research will accompany festivals and publishers as they adapt to a post-pandemic world and I am excited to share this journey with them.

Anglophone Women of the Bauhaus: A Study of Stella Steyn

31 March, Chiara Harrison Lambe, M.A. British Studies Alumna

April 2019 marked 100 years since the founding of the Bauhaus. Art institutions around the world commemorated the school’s centenary with events and exhibitions celebrating the varied achievements of its staff and alumni. In Berlin, the Bauhaus’ third and final home, I was entering the stage of the British Studies MA—the thesis. I was searching for a topic that resonated both personally for me and with the cultural moment. Then Dr. Gisela Holfter, director of the Centre for Irish-German Studies at the University of Limerick, alerted me to an understudied Bauhaus alumna, Irish-Jewish painter Stella Steyn (1907–1987), the only artist from Ireland known to have attended the Bauhaus in its 14-year history.

Although her name rarely appears in accounts of significant Irish artists of the last century, Steyn was a chameleonic talent and an important member of a generation of Irish women artists who ventured to Paris in the 1920s to further their study of art. There, at the age of 21, Steyn was personally commissioned to illustrate James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

I divided Steyn’s work into three phases, the Parisian/Joycean phase (1926–31); the Bauhaus phase (1931); and her Post-war/Nude phase (1951–61), which each correspond to three factors that I suggest affected the trajectory of Steyn’s career. These factors are male patronage, male genius, and the gendering of artistic genres to favour male artists. These points are raised in the foundational feminist texts ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971) by Linda Nochlin and Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (1981) by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock as critical factors for and against the success of women artists throughout history.

Male patrons were instrumental to Steyn’s early success. Her father, William Steyn, paid for her to attend art schools in Ireland, France, and Germany; her tutor, Patrick Tuohy, instilled in Steyn a lifelong interest in French art and recommended that she study in Paris; and James Joyce, along with other prominent members of the Parisian immigrant avant-garde such as Samuel Beckett and Jules Pascin, opened doors for the young artist that might have otherwise remained closed. In 1929, Steyn became one of the first artists to illustrate Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, then being published in instalments in the literary journal transition.

By 1930, Steyn was an established figure in Parisian artistic society. The Bauhaus, then the centre of the European cultural avant-garde, was the logical next step in Steyn’s multidisciplinary and multicultural art education. Little is confirmed about Steyn’s year at the Bauhaus but, in later life, she described her time there as ‘a false move’. The cult of male genius is given as a potential explanation for Steyn’s repudiation of the school. Today, the Bauhaus is widely viewed as a citadel of progressive ideals during a generally repressive historical moment. For its female students, however, the experience was far from revolutionary. Facing many of the same prejudices within the Bauhaus as without, women struggled to find their place in a gendered workshop system that barred them from joining disciplines other than weaving, bookbinding, and pottery.

Steyn was accepted to the Bauhaus Dessau on the personal recommendation of deputy director and abstract art pioneer Wassily Kandinsky, whose art practice was built on traditional gender roles and divisions. Once there, she found herself ‘out of sympathy’ with his methods. She worked independently for the remainder of her time at the school, producing work that departs significantly from her Parisian output in both style and tone. Perhaps because of her clash with Kandinsky, Steyn left the Bauhaus having been turned, in her own words, ‘permanently to the painting which had its roots in tradition’.

Steyn left the Bauhaus in 1932 following increasing Nazi activity in Dessau. She married, settled in England, and did not publicly resurface until 1951. For the following decade, Steyn exhibited figural and flower paintings at such celebrated London galleries as the Leicester and the Tate, as well as contributing for eight consecutive years to the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition. During this period, Steyn painted numerous nude self-portraits and female nudes in a variety of styles, many of which were never exhibited. In these subversive paintings, Steyn rejects the conventional language of the male-dominated genre of the female nude, transforming the women in her paintings from passive objects into active subjects. Steyn challenged expectations of a woman artist by refusing to be limited to certain subjects, such as highly feminised flower painting. She chose instead to also paint female nudes and religious and literary compositions in the style of traditional history painting, two genres associated with men artists. Posthumous reviews by male writers largely fail to acknowledge Steyn’s subversive genre choices, instead focussing on her technical skills and private life. Yet her female nudes can be understood as the culmination of a lifetime of asserting herself not only as a woman but a woman artist, and perhaps as a response to the giants of twentieth-century Modernism, Joyce and Kandinsky.

In art history, notable women artists, either those who achieved renown during their lifetime or are rediscovered long after their death, are often taken to be the exceptions that prove the rule that artistic genius is a male trait. Steyn seems to fit into neither camp: she was a moderate success during her lifetime, making significant headway as a young woman and then exhibiting in prestigious group shows in middle age, followed by a modest rediscovery after her death. The factors that must align for women artists to break through—male support, formidable talent, and a considerable amount of luck—only reinforce the notion that it is only men who deserve to be remembered for their art. However, this limited view denies Steyn, a vigorously progressive artist with a wide breadth of knowledge that enabled her to disrupt established artistic traditions, her rightful place in the Irish art tradition. This thesis is the first step towards mainstream acknowledgement of Steyn’s striking and diverse art practice.

The dire mood in the UK’s multilevel politics

18 March, Marius Guderjan, Centre for British Studies

Since I started working at the GBZ in summer 2014, shortly before the Scottish independence referendum on 18 September 2014, the relations between the UK Government and the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales have continuously worsened. On 4 March 2021, the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, said before the Welsh Affairs Committee of the House of Commons that “the Union as it is, is over” and “we have to create a new union.”

The EU referendum in 2016 was a bigger blow to multilevel politics across the UK. The irony is well-known: Scottish voters were told that only as part of the UK could they stay within the European Union. Although 62% in Scotland (and 55.8% in Northern Ireland) voted to remain in the EU, they were ‘dragged out’ of it against their will.

The Scottish and Welsh Governments were strongly opposed to the UK Government’s Brexit agenda, which caused a severe lack of trust between the administrations. Part of their problem had to do with the fact that the UK Government had surprisingly lost its parliamentary majority in the 2017 General Election and was deeply divided over the country’s future relationship with the EU. While the Northern Ireland Executive was suspended during most of this time, Scottish and Welsh ministers were not shy in expressing their frustration over the lack of engagement in the Joint Ministerial Committee (European Negotiations).

In July 2018, the Withdrawal Bill was introduced to convert EU law into UK law. According to the original Section 11 of the bill, the UK Government intended to ‘freeze’ devolved powers for retained EU law to ensure that the UK would not breach its international obligations during the transition period and beyond. The devolved administrations could not modify retained EU law unless the UK Government enabled them to do so. This was perceived as a serious ‘power grab’ by Westminster. The Scottish and Welsh Governments worked very closely together and set up a concerted campaign to exert pressure onto the UK Government, and successfully lobbied members of the Houses of Commons and Lords from various parties to amend the bill. The initial attempt to centralise the retained powers was softened after intense intergovernmental bargaining and they now returned to the devolved administration by default. Nevertheless, the Scottish Parliament did not give its consent to the bill and instead introduced its own Continuity Bill which was subsequently suspended by the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the UK Government changed its approach slightly and tried to accommodate some demands from the devolved administrations, mainly in relation to domestic issues. The governments worked remarkably well together on the Common Framework Programme to

”enable the functioning of the UK internal market, while acknowledging policy divergence; ensure compliance with international obligations; ensure the UK can negotiate, enter into and implement new trade agreements and international treaties; enable the management of common resources; administer and provide access to justice in cases with a cross-border element; and safeguard the security of the UK.” (Joint Ministerial Committee (EU Negotiations) Communique, October 2017)

This period of fairly amicable collaboration, however, ended with Boris Johnson’s arrival at No 10 Downing Street in July 2019. During a Zoom meeting with Conservative MPs in November 2020, Johnson called devolution “a disaster north of the border” and “Tony Blair’s biggest mistake”. Though he later said that he was referring to the SNP, Johnson’s comments were shocking to all devolved administrations.

The attitude of his Government to devolution has undermined a lot of the progress made on the Common Frameworks. Neither the Withdrawal Agreement nor the Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the UK and the EU (including the immigration regime and the opt-out of Erasmus+) reflect the preferences of the Scottish and Welsh Governments. When the Withdrawal Agreement Act was passed in January 2020, for the first time, all devolved legislators withheld their consent to a Westminster bill.

Since then, the democratic institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have faced an even bigger threat to their powers from the UK Internal Market Act, which received Royal Assent in December 2020. The act aims to replace the European Single Market with a UK model to manage policy divergence across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Outside of the UK, commentators were mostly concerned that the original bill would have allowed the UK to breach the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Withdrawal Agreement. The domestic controversy around the act is less well-known, yet of fundamental relevance to the devolved administrations. The UK Internal Market Act provides that any goods and services that can be sold in one part of the UK must also be allowed for sale in the rest of the UK. In practice, this undermines the capacities of Holyrood and the Senedd to make their own policies and laws work. If Scotland and Wales want to increase environmental or health standards for products, it will not be effective if English products with lower standards can enter their markets. Innovative policies introduced in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, which increase production costs, would then disadvantage local producers.

Where does this leave us? The risk of Scottish independence is as serious as ever and it remains to be seen whether Johnson can keep refusing the Scots a second referendum after the regional elections in May this year. Meanwhile, public support for Welsh independence is growing, particularly among young people. An independent Wales seems like an unlikely (or even unfeasible) scenario but there is a growing sentiment in Wales that the Union is no longer working in its current form.

After Covid-19 has dominated British politics for the last year (another unfortunate tale for multilevel politics), stopping the breakup of the Union is slowly becoming a top priority of the UK Government again. In February it announced it was setting up a new union strategy Cabinet Committee. This does not mean that the UK Government will suddenly befriend the devolved administrations. Rather, it will seek to address the people directly and use its financial powers (given by the Internal Market Bill) to put its mark on communities across the UK.

It would be wiser for the UK Government to start listening to the Welsh Government, which is not tired of proposing long-needed legislative, executive, judicial, financial and constitutional reforms to bring the UK into the 21st century (see e.g. Reforming Our Union). The Union can only be preserved by a solid intergovernmental architecture that provides the devolved administrations with effective consultation rights and prevents them from being overruled by Westminster. Unfortunately, I do not believe that Westminster is willing to accept curtailing its own powers, especially not under the current leadership. Therefore, management of the intergovernmental mood will continue to depend on statecraft under a constitutional framework that was barely functional when assisted by the EU regularity regime.

Fighting an epidemic with moral superiority?

4 March, Felicia Kompio, Centre for British Studies

In November 1831, during the cholera epidemic, The Bristol Board of Health admonished the public with the following announcement:

„To temperance and personal cleanliness (at all times so conducive to health) the Board most earnestly enjoin, as precautionary measures of the greatest moment, the strictest attention to ventilation and cleanliness in the houses of the poor, the doors and windows to be frequently left open to allow fresh air to pass through the rooms.“

Currently the Covid-19 pandemic exerts mounting pressure on the very fabric of our societies, exacerbating already existing inequalities. Looking at historic epidemics, this does not come as a surprise, nor does the observation that popular narratives closely link behavioural patterns framed as “lifestyle choices” to the contraction of disease. Currently it is drinking in the pub that’s to be policed instead of coming together for work. 200 years ago, it was ‘temperance and cleanliness’ that were seen as central to disease prevention.

When the cholera reached England in the early 1830s, the hastily convened Bristol Board of Health was mainly concerned with the sanitarily atrocious conditions the poorer inhabitants of the city had to live in. What was previously only regarded as a sign of moral shortcomings of the poor, like filthy clothing or body odour, now seemed to indicate an irresponsible neglect of the virtues that could help prevent a dreadful disease from taking hold; and cholera was dreadful indeed. Although not the deadliest of infectious diseases, the rapid deterioration of its victims and the degrading state to which they were reduced made it particularly traumatising for a society that prided itself on the achievements of modernity, including cleanliness and order. How a person was supposed to maintain personal hygiene when having to sleep with three or four others in one bed with several beds in one room, however, is a question neither the board of health nor the purveyors of “British civilization” were prepared to consider. 

Cholera first broke out in India in 1817 and spread across central Asia and Russia into Europe, following busy trading routes from the subcontinent controlled by the British East India Company to growing European consumer markets and factories. Most states responded by employing measures that had been developed to combat the Black Death in previous centuries. Authorities focused on closing borders to prevent the disease from entering the country and tens of thousands of soldiers patrolled the eastern borders of Prussia and Austria – however, they did not manage to curb the spread of the disease. Measures like these rested on the assumption that cholera was transmitted from one person to another via droplet infection, just like previous plagues.

European authorities ignored reports in the late 1820s from Russia and India detailing that rather than infect people who came in close contact with a victim, the disease spread along water supply lines, like rivers and reservoirs. In France, the public was told that the state had taken all necessary precautions and superior civilisation would provide the best safeguard against the „Asiatic disease“. In Bristol, meanwhile, the Board of Health, comprised of medical professionals as well as other members of the higher strata of society, called for temperance and cleanliness. As the poor were at a higher risk of falling ill, it did not seem unreasonable to assume that the rich were saved by the virtues they were assumed to cultivate. Health Board Members and other administrators overlooked that those who employed domestic servants were not exposed to the infection to the same extent because they did not prepare their own food or handle water directly from contaminated sources.

The highest infection rate in Bristol in 1832 was found in the cramped conditions of St. Peter’s Hospital, the local workhouse. The Guardians of the Poor, responsible for poor relieve in Bristol, had brought public attention to the problems before but ratepayers were reluctant to pay for improvements. The impression among the poorer inhabitants of the city was one of being ignored by the authorities and, worse, being left to die once falling destitute and turning to the workhouse for survival. This impression was exacerbated by recent scandals in other British cities, involving medical professionals buying stolen bodies for dissection and anatomical studies. To some Bristolians, doctors and local authorities were simply showing absolute disregard for the lives of the poor.

Everything came to a head when, in the summer of 1832, 105 people died from cholera in one month, 71 of them workhouse inmates. A rumour spread that authorities had people buried alive, which lead to riotous crowds breaking into a burial grounds, digging up corpses. Later, the dead were removed by boat to a burial site further upstream, preventing the public from taking notice.

Although the cholera has largely vanished from industrialised countries, still today an individual’s socio-economic status is closely linked to the risk of contracting a disease, like Covid-19, and dying from it. Epidemics are historic events because they cause extraordinary suffering but also highlight society’s fault lines.

Pocock reads Tolkien

4 February, Patricia Springborg, Visiting Researcher, Centre for British Studies

Prof. Springborg’s reply to Patrick Bahners' article in the FAZ, Wednesday, 6 January 2021.

Bahners reads Pocock’s interpretation of Tom Bombadil’s role in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a figure representing England’s constitutional incapacity to integrate and, more specifically, as emblematic of Brexit. For Patricia Springborg this is only “half right”:

Pocock Reads Tolkien

Patrick Bahners should know that historians among us were simply amazed by the ingenuity of his article in the FAZ Feuilleton, January 6, 2021: “Er bleibt außen vor, Pocock liest Tolkien”. And in particular for the implicit Brexit allegory. As a student of Pocock’s when he was still in New Zealand, I have always known that Pocock’s mission was to establish a form of British Studies designed to counterbalance the hegemony of England, by giving due regard to the kingdoms of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and also the British Commonwealth to which he belonged. Pocock charted the beginnings of English hegemony, represented today by the power of the City of London and its elites, the Parliament at Westminster, and the commanding heights of Oxford and Cambridge.

As early as Pocock’s doctoral thesis, published as The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, as Bahners reminds us, this was one of his major themes, for which Tom Bombadil was emblematic. However, I believe we must take with a huge grain of salt Pocock’s portrayal of the insularity of seventeenth century common lawyers, whom he claims only discovered feudalism in the seventeenth century. England had belonged to the Holy Roman Empire for almost 1000 years, long enough to know what feudalism was, feudal tenure, the imperial fisc and serfdom. The “insularity” of the Common Lawyers, I would argue, was a deliberately crafted Englishness designed to claim post-Reformation national sovereignty. And indeed in the Civil War, the common lawyers and parliamentarians prevailed.

The English Reformation was, I would argue, the first model for Brexit, marking its divorce from the Holy Roman Empire and, just as importantly, from the papal monarchy. Previous to the sixteenth century Britain (and I say Britain deliberately, because its cultural centres tended to be in the north and west, accessible by sea), was very well integrated into Europe. For instance, the Twelfth Century Renaissance, marked by a huge furore at the University of Paris, prompted by the reception of the ancient Greek authors, translated first into Arabic and from Arabic into Latin, and then the Arabic commentaries, featured medieval British scholars like Michael Scot and Adelard of Bath prominently. The translation movements had benefited greatly from the constant interchange of personnel between the Norman Kingdom of England and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, the two most powerful kingdoms in Europe at the time. Sicily was Arabic speaking and promised access to the Arabic scientific MSS necessary to advance public administration and economic development. Indeed, it was in this period that the Royal Exchequer was founded, inspired by the introduction of Arabic arithmetic and the ability to calculate taxes, which Roman numerals did not permit.

Bahners, himself an Oxford graduate, is very sympathetic to the portrayal of Tom Bombadil, by both Tolkien and Pocock. That Tom Bombadil stands for England’s constitutional incapacity to integrate, however, is in my view a step too far. For, during the long Middle Ages, Britain was as well integrated into the Holy Roman Empire as offshore islands could be. But when it decided to pursue an empire of its own, England simply swallowed up the border regions it failed to integrate, and still does. But what imperial powers have ever been known to meaningfully integrate? When the American colonies initially struggled for “no taxation without representation”, the representation they sought was that guaranteed by Magna Carta: seats in the Parliament at Westminster, which proved simply impracticable given that the Atlantic Ocean lay between them. (Although not inconceivable for Ireland, which quickly jumped on the bandwagon). And there simply was no ancient model for the independence of colonies. As Ronald Syme, Regius Professor of Roman Studies at Oxford and, like Pocock, a New Zealander, argued in his little book, Colonial Elites: Rome, Spain and the Americas (1958), had the British Empire integrated its colonial elites in the way that Rome did, it might have lasted longer. But long succession of empires on the Eurasian land mass that centred around what the Arabs call the Mediterranean Lake, offered possibilities of integration that trans-Atlantic empire did not. And the tyranny of distance forbad the integration of colonial elites in any meaningful sense.

Syme is paradigmatic for the British Empire in a way that is also relevant for Brexit, although rarely discussed, and that is as a representative of the colonial diaspora. There was a time when both professors of Roman Studies at Oxford and Harvard were New Zealanders. The professor of Roman Studies at Harvard, Ernst Badian, an Austrian-Jewish refugee, was the student of JGA Pocock’s father, LG Pocock, and Ernst Badian’s great book, Foreign Clientelae (1958) is rumoured to be inspired by the Cicero graffiti on LG Pocock’s walls at the University of Canterbury. Canterbury had another illustrious alumnus, and that was Ernst Rutherford, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry in 1908, known as the father of nuclear physics, and considered by the Encyclopaedia Britannica to be the greatest experimental physicist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867). I grew up in the village where Ernst Rutherford was born and grew up, less than a kilometre from his family home, 13 miles from the city of Nelson, first created a city by Queen Victoria in 1841, but still numbering not more than 55,000 souls. From the Brightwater village primary school of less than 100 pupils in my time, 6 graduated PhDs in Physics from Cambridge. This was a case of modelling - if he can do it, we can do it - and typical of the colonial diaspora.

Those who say that Brexit represents nostalgia for British empire, are only half right. The Empire died with WWII, but the British Commonwealth that survived, a voluntary association of 53 nations, some big, some small, sharing common law, and a common culture, 16 of whom have the Queen as the Head of the Commonwealth, as Head of State, is not inconsequential. The Commonwealth, along with the US, a former colony with a common law regime, has always been over-represented in the commanding heights of the English economy. Although I have always been a bitter opponent of Brexit, I do admit that when Boris Johnson claims that he got the deal he wanted, he probably means, he managed to re-establish the system pre-accession to the European Community, when the UK could fill many jobs with Commonwealth people, on a points system that allowed it to accept only the immigrants it wants, and not all comers. The Commonwealth, which suffered in terms of influence and markets at the point of British accession in the 1970s, may be heaving a sigh of relief at a post-Brexit and post-pandemic reopening to Britain. And it can offer large cohorts of people to compensate for the regrettable loss of Europeans.

Brexit and the Provisions for Settling Disputes

28 January, Gerhard Dannemann, Centre for British Studies

One of the most contentious issues during the negotiation of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was the enforcement of its provisions and the settlement of disputes. The UK was wary of any remaining influence of the EU legislator and the Court of Justice of the European Union on the UK. The EU did not want to depend on the goodwill of the UK, and became deeply suspicious once the UK government announced legislative plans which would have enabled it to violate the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement.

Eventually, the EU and the UK found a compromise. A Partnership Council (PC) is set up to monitor compliance and to develop the rules of the TCA. This Partnership Council is co-chaired by an EU Commissioner and a UK Minister, and has sixteen specialized committees, plus four working groups, to deal with all issues which will arise under the TCA.

Any arising disputes which cannot be solved by the PC or otherwise in agreement between the EU and the UK Government are to be brought before an ad-hoc arbitration tribunal. Within 180 days from the entry into force of the TCA, the PC will establish three lists of arbitrators. List 1 is proposed by the EU, List 2 by the UK Government. List 3, to be drawn up by the PC, contains the names of potential chairpersons of arbitration tribunals, who must not be nationals of the UK or of an EU Member State. For each specific dispute, an arbitration panel is drawn up with one member from each list. Detailed regulations aim to ensure that no party can delay the appointment of the tribunal, which must publish an interim report within 100 days and a binding ruling within 130 days.

There are also detailed rules on how the EU and the UK must comply with rulings by the arbitration tribunal. Failure to comply with a ruling will allow the aggrieved party to suspend its obligations under the TCA. This means that the EU could eventually impose tariffs on certain goods if the UK refuses to comply e.g. with “level playing field” provisions on environmental standards, or the UK could refuse to grant EU fishers access to UK waters if the EU adopts unauthorized restrictions for the import of UK fish.

While the mere presence of binding arbitration arrangements and the availability of sanctions can provide a strong incentive for compliance with the TCA, three factors in particular make future arbitration and even sanctions likely. First, numerous issues have not found a permanent regulation in the TCA. For example, while the UK has promised not to fall behind existing EU standards notably in the areas of employee and consumer rights, and environmental protection, distortions in competition which might arise through further legal development can cause much conflict and may eventually lead to an end of tariff free trade. The same applies to deviating standards in state aid. Similarly, the TCA covers fishing rights for EU boats in UK waters and vice versa for a limited period of 5 ½ years, after which annual renegotiations have to take place. Second, even where TCA provisions are permanent, conflicts are likely to arise due to the sheer complexity of both international trade and the TCA provisions. Third, political and economic incentives may tempt either party to the agreement not to follow the TCA in both letter and spirit.

Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Call for a "Eudaimonic Turn"

20 January, Jürgen Schlaeger, Centre for British Studies

Do we need a ‘eudaimonic turn’ in literary studies, i.e., a new approach, that makes ‘well-being’ the preferred target for literary analyses? A collection of essays published in 2013 recommended such a turn and bolstered this new approach with ‘arguments from ‘positive psychology’ as a new guideline for literary studies. (The Eudamonic Turn: Wellbeing in Literary Studies’. (James O. Pawelski, D.J. Moores (eds.), Madison: Fairleigh Dickensen UP, 2013). Only a year ago it was at the centre of a conference that discussed the time-honoured question of what constitutes the ‘Value of Literature’ of in cultures past and present.

That no less than a ‘turn’ is needed because the available paradigms of literary interpretation are one-sided, blinkered, exhausted, and, therefore, in urgent need of rebooting, is a tall order, indeed. Looking, however, at the broad spectrum of the now widely practiced, mostly agenda-driven approaches in literary and cultural studies, a ‘turn’ towards well-being seems to signal not so much a radical change in direction as a supplementary option for approaches to literary works, that have given priority to human well-being in all its shades and variations for quite some time now. And to the extent that the proposed turn chimes in with these trends it also inherits and has to shoulder the problems they have created. 

One of the most damaging problems of such tendencies towards feel-good research questions and interpretations is that students no longer think that they are obliged to familiarize themselves with texts or aspects of texts, movements and contexts that do not promise to produce a high yield for their chosen preference of angle. In fact, such an attitude towards the duties of academic perspicuity and solidity often produces now B.A.s and M.A.s in English, American or Anglophone literatures whose knowledge of the respective literary traditions and the cultures they are embedded in is, to put it mildly, often very patchy. In the process, they tend to ignore the very specific ‘voice’ of texts past and present, since they deem it no longer important to concentrate on and analyse something that, so far, no other text or person has been able to put so convincingly into words. Instead, more often than not, it is chosen for the productivity of the yield it promises for the loaded and often narrow questions asked. Even more damaging is, however, that such attitudes towards the business of criticism surreptitiously or openly tend to reverse the still valid sequence of analysis and judgment so central to the standing of the field in the academic world. Finding what one wants to see and then presenting one’s findings with a “Lo and behold, there it is!”, is not what characterises viable scholarship.

My claim here is not that literary scholarship has to find legitimacy in hard work with hard earned results, all sweat and struggle, but that ‘understanding’, ‘knowledge’, validity and evidence in the academic world are not immediate pleasure or satisfaction guaranteeing exercises, but they are intellectual pleasures that come only when one is prepared to invest all one’s talents, time and energy into what one is doing – it is long distance training with, yes, the aches and frustrations it entails, but in the end it pays. 

Put in simple terms: many of the popular interpretative practices and research agendas regrettably feed and encourage intellectual attitudes that mistake their own moral, ethical or political convictions for academically certified achievements with pleasure guaranteed. 

Just to give you an example for the problematic consequences of such agenda-driven approaches: 

Of course, I can subject a text like Robinson Crusoe to an analysis that promises to trace evidence of colonialism, racism and even anti-feminism. And there are, no doubt, such traces to be found: Robinson is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and ‘colonises it’ to survive. He rescues a ‘native’ from another island who had been taken by an enemy tribe and brought to Robinson’s island to be killed and eaten. Robinson willingly takes upon him ‘the white man’s burden’, i.e., the moral obligation to ‘civilize’ him by teaching him to make himself useful, to speak English and to become a Christian. All of that is not really a good example for the actual devastations of slavery and colonialism so widespread at the beginning of the 18th century. In addition, Robinson has, before he is shipwrecked, gone through a number of sea-faring adventures, among which is an episode in which he is captured by Arab pirates and sold into slavery. So, as to slavery, Defoe’s main character is both victim and perpetrator. Women play no part in the core portion of the novel. Only later, after the hero’s return to England, he marries, fathers three children, buries his wife, farms out his offspring and is off, back to his little kingdom on the island - all of that on a meagre three pages out of a total of more than 600 – a fact which could easily be constructed as evidence for a culpable negligence on the part of the author. 

Altogether, for a demonstration of racism, colonialism, or anti-feminism so prevalent during Defoe’s lifetime, his novel is not a particularly productive field of investigation. Most important of all, a student still determined to go for the above-mentioned questions would completely miss the unique role this novel has played in the development of world literature. Except, perhaps, for the Bible no other text has instigated, inspired and shaped so many translations, imitations and adaptations throughout the centuries in nearly all cultures of the world.

It is, therefore, high time that we count our losses, take to heart what Rita Felski has recommended so convincingly in her book The Limits of Critique, and concentrate on what literary texts are actually doing and telling us rather than subjecting texts to exercises in affirmation of one’s own preferences.

Abstract of a contribution to a volume on ‘The Value of Literature’ edited by Ansgar and Vera Nünning, published soon.

18 November: Pandemics, War, Literature Gesa Stedman

16 July: A Jurist uprooted Jason Allen

14 July: Refugee Lives Matter Sam McIntosh

29 June: 100 Years of Britons in Berlin Anisia Petcu

18 June: Bildung durch Wissenschaft Jürgen Schlaeger

8 June: Teaching in Times of COVID-19 Sonya Permiakova

2 June: What is Cultural Project Management? Anisia Petcu

20 May: Researching UK Politics in Times of a Global Pandemic Marius Guderjan

11 May: Brexit and Corona Gesa Stedman

Pandemics, War, Literature: The First-Ever Virtual Meeting of the Research Group Writing 1900

18 November, Gesa Stedman, Centre for British Studies

100 years ago, in an uncanny parallel to our current predicament, the world suffered from the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic. Virginia Woolf was one author who charted the wave-like ups and down of both World War I and the flu which dominated the war’s turbulent aftermath.

The years after the end of WWI, rather than the war itself, was the focal point of the first-ever virtual meeting of the international research network Writing 1900 (www.writing1900.org). In preparation of a special issue of the Journal for European Studies, participants presented their papers-in-progress, each with a respondent to kick off the discussion.

Although it is more fun meeting in person, the workshop-style session went surprisingly well, and everyone found it productive – once the technical connection via video was stable. The volume is well on its way to being ready for publication next year, but everyone agreed that the overall coherence of the special issue would profit from renewed discussion.

Apart from the presentations and responses, we had a general seminar-style discussion based on two recent publications by historians on WWI and/or its aftermath. It emerged that writing about war is never simple, not even a hundred years after its official end in November 1918. For one thing, the war didn’t end as quickly in some areas of the world, e.g. in Eastern Europe. For another, its legacy was far-reaching and had a heavy impact on the inter-war years which followed WWI, especially if one adopts a more global approach. The latter was represented by two speakers at the meeting, which focussed on the importance of the war effort by Caribbean soldiers and their treatment on the one hand, and on a comparison of Turkish and English war poetry on the other. Both the different temporalities of the war in different parts of the world, and different fall-outs, including literary outcomes, were discussed.

How difficult it was to rebuild networks across national borders was another topic which several papers concentrated on, but also on aesthetic and formal aspects of the (impossibility of) representation of war and its aftermath. English writers abroad often indirectly commented on home affairs – not always overtly – and thus one can read their interventions from a postcolonial as well as from a national perspective. Writers such as Virginia Woolf, CRL James, Hope Mirrlees, Vernon Lee, Alix Strachey, to name but a few, show how the volume’s authors concentrate less on male canonical war writing, but make an effort to highlight other voices.

The workshop was a follow-up event from the large DFG-funded conference Writing Europe 1918 – 2020 which took place at the Centre in 2018.

A Jurist Uprooted: The Life and Times of F.A. Mann 

16 July, Jason Grant Allen, Centre for British Studies 

En route to teach a class on the English Legal System at the Humboldt-Universität Law Faculty for the first time, I paused to observe a huddle of high school students around the Bebelplatz memorial to the book burning of 10 May 1933. I thought of Carl Schmitt’s summary of a conference of German law professors in Berlin three years later, lamenting the fact that “on the one hand we keep pointing to the necessary fight against the Jewish spirit, yet on the other hand, at the end of 1936, a seminar library in legal studies looks as if the greater part of the legal literature is being produced by Jews.” The answer, according to his colleague Hans Frank, was to put all works by Jewish authors—including “half Jews” and converts to Christianity - “without distinction” in a section of the library called “Judaica”.

Universities, as institutions, subsist through seismic political and cultural changes, outlasting not only regimes but also sovereign states; they are communities that unite successive generations into an entity with a continuous existence. I had come to Berlin to study the life and work of a German Jew that had taken his doctorate from the Berlin University in 1933—and left for England the very next day. How apt it was, then, to pause at this memorial and to appreciate the opportunity to contribute, as part of the modern German academy, to our understanding of German Jews’ contribution to legal scholarship.   

A Legal Polymath

F.A. Mann was a legal polymath and a branch of German legal scholarship that flourished in common law soil, becoming not only a successful solicitor but a prolific academic writer. Mann’s Berlin thesis was on in-kind contributions to the capital of limited liability companies. His remarkable career spanned fields of law with a combination of breadth and depth that is, frankly, astonishing. Many of these fields are highly topical today: The law of money, the concept of jurisdiction in public international law, the law of commercial arbitration, and foreign relations law, to name but a few. 

One aspect of the latter is the law governing the recognition of states. The case of Carl Zeiss Stiftung v Rayner & Keeler Ltd [1966] 2 All ER 536 illustrates the combination of conceptual difficulty and practical importance that is characteristic of Mann’s work. An action was brought by English solicitors purporting to act for the East-German Carl Zeiss Foundation against a West-German entity using the Carl Zeiss Foundation name. The problem was that Her Majesty’s UK Government had not recognised the GDR as a sovereign state, so it was doubtful whether the organs of the GDR could bring an action in the English courts at all. Foreign relations law, of course, also became a matter of topical interest in the context of Brexit. In R (Miller) v Brexit Secretary (No 1) [2017] UKSC 5, the UK Supreme Court had to decide what the UK constitutional requirements for a valid notice under Art. 50 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union were. This boiled down to a question of the scope and reviewability of HM UK Government’s prerogative powers in the field of international relations.

A Unique Archive

The impulse for the marvellous project, done here at the Centre, was given when Mann’s daughter-in-law, Anne Kriken Mann, bequeathed an archive of over 10,000 unpublished documents—mainly letters—to the Humboldt-Universität. To these were added further documents from Mann’s firm, Herbert Smith Freehills. With the support of the DFG, Professor Gerhard Dannemann made a preliminary exploration of the archive which provided the basis for the current project. 

Professor Dannemann, myself, our Research Associate Christoph König and student assistants Ricarda Callies and Marco Mauer are now coordinating a group of almost 30 co-investigators and affiliates from Germany, the UK, the US, Scandinavia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, including distinguished practitioners, scholars, and members of the judiciary. The archive forms a kind of lynchpin for the activities of the group. Some are interested in historical research proper, and the rest bring the domain-specific expertise necessary for a “deep dive” into Mann’s various fields of activity. As well as individual cooperation partners, the project involves the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in London (an institution with which Mann was closely involved) and the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, and a close association with the Leo Baeck Institute New York | Berlin.

My own field of research is in the law of money, which Mann is credited with establishing as a sub-discipline within English law. Mann’s major text, The Legal Aspect of Money, was first published in 1938 and last published by Mann in 1991 (currently, the eighth edition is in progress, edited by project member Charles Proctor). Together with the archival resources, this provides insight into the way that monetary law developed in response to technological and political changes over the course of the 20th century, as well as insight into the interaction of law and economics in our understanding of money.  

Heim ins Reich?

An important aspect of our project is the question: How do we deal with the biography of a German Jew of Mann’s generation? One motivation behind a project like this is to “repatriate” German Jews such as Mann to the scholarly tradition from which they came—and which they, paradoxically, did much to preserve in exile. This is a worthy goal. But there are pitfalls. German scholars are, in effect, caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla is that to identify subjects as German Jews—and not as (undifferentiated) Germans—seems to risk lapsing back into Nazi-era racial categories. Charybdis is that, to discuss subjects as “just” Germans who happened to be “of Jewish faith” or “of Jewish background” pushes a major biographical feature to the periphery—a biographical feature that assumed even greater importance post-1933.

This project thus represents an opportunity to reconsider the way that German scholarship deals with its “Jewish Question”. The impulse for many Germans is to equate Jewish identity with religious identity, i.e., rejecting the Nazi idea that Jewishness is a matter of “race”. The problem is that this does not conform with the self-identification of many Jews; for us, Jewishness is just as much a matter of culture, ethnicity, and possibly even “race” as it is of religion. The claim that Jewishness is “just the same” as Catholicism or Protestantism misses something very important about the Jewish experience, particularly post-1933; the idea that being “assimilated”, “secular”, or even “anti-religious” negates a person’s Jewish identity is not only absurd, but often quite offensive.

From the Jewish perspective, much of the existing literature seems to say: “Put him in the Ehrenhalle of the German academy, but leave that Jewish stuff at the door!” This echoes Albert Einstein’s wry remark, quoted in the New York Times in 1930: “If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.” At its worst, neglect of Jewish identity has the effect of expunging the fact that a person was a Jew from the record—rendering the German Kulturgut conveniently Judenrein. The search for a new path has already made for stimulating debate within the project group. The GBZ provides an excellent forum for these debates, and the diverse project group is ideally situated to tackle the question with the courage and the sensitivity it deserves.

Refugee Lives Matter: Emotional Responses, Practical Research

14 July, Sam McIntosh, Centre for British Studies

Tense Exchanges

A few years ago, I was at a large conference on migration and refugee law in Europe. The participants included academics, legal practitioners, NGO workers, campaigners, government officials and officials from intergovernmental organisations such as the EU, the UN’s International Organisation for Migration, the UNHCR and the Red Cross. As might be expected, the make-up of the conference meant that the atmosphere was at times a little tense. Very occasionally, jaws would clench, voices would rise, and anger would bubble just above the surface. This was understandable. The topics being discussed held life or death significance; the tragedies being referred to – tragedies that some of those present had witnessed first-hand – were very real tragedies; and the arguments being made sometimes strained under the weight of duplicity or naïve ideology, depending on your point of view.

Words and Platitudes

In one panel session amongst many, the audience heard from presenters who variously defended or attacked EU policy in this area. All of the panellists were articulate and referred to research, evidence and statistics to back up their competing arguments. As the Chair prepared to open the discussion up to questions from the audience, he acknowledged the strong feelings that the topic elicited and asked everyone to remember that, as he put it, we were all united in finding the deaths in the Mediterranean an “intolerable” tragedy. 

At the end of the discussion, I left with something that can best be described as a mental itch. Something about the session had bothered me and I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was. Eventually, I realised it was the seemingly innocuous comment made by the Chair: in particular, the use of the word “intolerable” and the fact that he cast everyone at the conference as having the same ultimate priorities. It occurred to me that while I am sure everyone present wanted the number of deaths in the Mediterranean to be lower, I could not personally avoid the conclusion that for some at least, these deaths were a regrettable but ultimately tolerable consequence of the pursuit of what they saw as a more important priority – visibly aggressive border control. The myth, I felt, was that the only alternative to the off-shoring and securitisation of border control that might substantially reduce the number of deaths in the Mediterranean, was the (politically unacceptable) alternative of no border controls at all. 

A Research Project

My research project is called Refugee Lives Matter - Protecting the human rights of unsettled migrants and refugees through international and regional obligations to investigate deaths. I am looking at international and regional legal obligations to investigate certain types of death, and the scope of these obligations when it comes to the deaths of migrants and refugees within or close to Europe’s borders. The project is not just concerned with deaths in the Mediterranean but also deaths at the hands of police or other State actors, deaths in prisons, immigration detention centres, refugee camps or during attempts to cross Europe’s internal borders illicitly. The project is not directly concerned with arguments about border control policy: rather it is focussed on assessing a procedural tool that could, amongst other things, publicly expose the consequences of certain policies and practices, provide an important source of evidence for debates about policy change, and provide public accountability for any operational and systemic wrongdoing. 

Perhaps the most important investigative obligation for State parties to the European Convention on Human Rights arises under Article 2 (The Right to Life). As I’m sure my fantastic Law and Society students will tell you, an investigative obligation does not exist on a plain reading of the text but was instead read into it by the European Court of Human Rights in the 1995 case of McCann v. the United Kingdom. In its judgment the Court held:

[… A] general legal prohibition of arbitrary killing by the agents of the State would be ineffective, in practice, if there existed no procedure for reviewing the lawfulness of the use of lethal force by State authorities. The obligation to protect the right to life under this provision, read in conjunction with the State's general duty under Article 1 of the Convention to “secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms defined in [the] Convention”, requires by implication that there should be some form of effective official investigation when individuals have been killed as a result of the use of force by, inter alia, agents of the State. (McCann v. the United Kingdom [1995] ECHR 31, para 161)

The Court would later expand the investigative obligation’s scope to non-use-of-force deaths, including cases where States were accused of failing to take adequate positive steps to protect life. It also developed a number of minimum requirements for these investigations: they have to be independent, effective, carried out promptly and with reasonable expedition, open to public scrutiny, and involve the deceased’s next of kin where possible.

Why is death investigation particularly important in this context? And why is this question relevant to the concern expressed in the story about the conference? First of all, investigations have the potential to identify the connections between State policies and practices and their fatal consequences, and give public and official expression to those connections where they exist – helping to provide some accountability for domestic and supranational institutions that work in this area. Second, where practical systemic or operational failures contribute to a death, an investigation can provide an opportunity for lesson learning. Third, while justice is a multifaceted and subjective concept, a reliable, public, independent, official narrative about the circumstances surrounding a death can itself constitute an important element of justice for families and survivors even if they also seek other remedies. Fourth, in contested death scenarios, an effective investigation is typically a prerequisite to the pursuit of those other remedies. Finally, providing families with answers about dead or missing loved ones is essential for the grieving process to take its course. Indeed, on a very basic level bodies are more likely to be identified and successful contact made with next of kin where there has been a proper investigation.

Conclusion

The unnatural deaths of migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean, or in Europe’s prisons, refugee camps, immigration detentions centres, or in the back of food transport trucks etc. are not inevitable. Independent and effective investigations into those deaths can strengthen accountability, lead to valuable lesson learning, provide families with answers, and may just help counter a growing trend for policy in this area to be dictated by political appeasement rather than evidence.
 

100 years of Britons in Berlin

29 June, Anisia Petcu, Centre for British Studies

In just a few short days, our student-led project is going online!

“100 years of Britons in Berlin: From the Roaring 20s to the 2020s” offers an interactive journey through the decades, in which academic rigour, youthful curiosity and Berlin’s well-known subversive vein come together for an exciting project. With a focus on the presence and contributions of British nationals in Berlin in the last 100 years, the exhibition looks at the impact various individuals have had on the city, as well as the opportunities that Berlin presented for British immigrants. With difference and controversy acting almost as guiding threads throughout our research, we will look at how the city has acted as a safe space for queer identities, the significance it holds for WWII survivors of the Kindertransport, at its physical and political divisions, at its relevance during the Cold War. Likewise, we will investigate how these episodes have been working on the British psyche and how they have influenced the social and cultural landscape, both in Germany and the UK. In particular, we will look at the reflection of this history in British art production, be it in music, literature or painting.

Alongside the historical perspective, our website also invites you to find out about the present realities of being British and living in Berlin – a perspective which goes beyond the questions and uncertainties of Brexit. Instead, we present a series of testimonials of diverse British nationals who have chosen to relocate to Berlin, and who have shared with us the significance of the city, of its streets, landmarks, nooks and crannies, in what we are calling a “memory map”. In doing so, we hope to show how the significance of the city has evolved in the last 100 years. We also invite you to discover some of its literary gems and discover how literature can serve as a tool to learn more about both the city and the British community currently living in it.

Website Launch – July 3rd

Our website launch will be accompanied by two live online events.

On July 3rd, at 6 pm , we will organise a panel discussion, led by Daniel Tetlow, co-founder of the “British in Germany” association. His guests will be Sasha Perera (musician), Dr Siofra McCherry (writer and coach), Emma Lawson (poetry editor at SAND Journal), and Bleach (drag queen and activist). Together they will discuss the present realities of living in Berlin, the impact Brexit is having on people active in the creative industries, as well as the very pressing issue of being a member of a minority in British and German contexts. If you would like to participate in our panel, please register at https://forms.gle/7pJr1jnuhKNLmuB1A.

The following day, on July 4th, at 12pm, we will be organising a 90-minute creative writing workshop, in which participants will work with award-winning novelist Ben Fergusson to produce their own pieces of evocative Cold War fiction. Participants will read short texts and discuss techniques of evocation in short stories and novels. They will then feed this knowledge into their very own short piece of writing during the session. The workshop will end with a short Q&A in which Ben will answer questions relating to writing and getting published. If you wish to register, please visit @british_berlin and register in the comments . And hurry! The places are limited. You can find out more about Ben and his writing at http://www.benfergusson.com/.

We are very happy to be able to present this innovative project, and we look forward to welcoming you on our website! Make sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, to stay up do date with our developments. If you have any other questions, please contact us at info@british-berlin.com.

Bildung durch Wissenschaft

18 June, Jürgen Schlaeger, Senior Professor, Centre for British Studies 

The book, Bildung durch Wissenschaft, written by Jürgen Schlaeger und Heinz-Elmar Tenorth and published early this year, endeavours to clarify the central message about the uniqueness of a university education encapsulated in Humboldt-University’s mission statement.

A Question in Urgent Need of Clarification 

This book investigates the Institutional Strategy: ‚Bildung durch Wissenschaft‘, our university had committed itself to for the Excellence Initiative competition. In the English version, the idea encapsulated in this formula is rendered as ‘Educating Enquiring Minds’ and ‘Translating Humboldt into the 21st Century’, both not particularly enlightening descriptions as to what is really at stake. A clarification seemed to us all the more necessary, because the idea of a university education associated with the founding father of our university for most of the 19th and the 20th centuries, has come increasingly under attack as a no longer useful guideline for university education in the 21st century. 

Central to what came to be known as ‘Humboldt’s model’ world-wide, was the notion of ‘Bildung’ which did not simply signify any kind of education but a special intellectual and cultural imprint, which, it was thought, only a research based University education can generate and which had to be distinguished from ‘Ausbildung’, which was seen as an advanced professional training offered, for instance, by polytechnics or, as they are now called, ‘Universities of Applied Sciences’.

It is hardly surprising that in our post-industrial world such a distinction between ‘Bildung’ and ‘Ausbildung’ has increasingly lost support. The school- and Bologna-reforms as well as the growing importance of an empirically controlled input-output pedagogics and of ‘employability’ as major principles for preparing young people for the labour-market of the future have done much to weaken the traditional term ‘Bildung’ as a special kind of ‘deep learning’.

In view of the, in many cases incalculable, changes in tomorrow’s labour markets, and taking into account the ongoing controversies about what kinds of skills and intellectual abilities the future workforce will have to be taught now, it seemed to us indispensable to find plausible answers to the question of how much and which parts of the traditional concepts of university teaching are still essential for preparing young people as best as possible for the challenges of the future. 

In order to find the answer to this pressing problem, the book analyses the core issue at the bottom of all contemporary debates about education, namely to what extent a university’s teaching philosophy should still take guidance from Humboldt’s ideal of a cognitive make-up that only comes with many years of research-based studies at a university.

School and University: A Broken Chain in Need of Repair

The first part of the book, written by the author of this website-post, is homing in on its central theme by discussing the recent changes in methods and general principles of educating young people from an early age onwards until they enter university. The argument then moves on to the growing wave of concerns, articulated by university teachers about the ‘intellectual immaturity’ of the generations of students now entering university. The available evidence shows clearly that the original Humboldtian chain of continuity from school to university, stretching from the initiation of children in their primary school years to maturation, which, in Germany, certifies the ability and right to enter university (‘Hochschulreife’), has broken. In recent years this has put increasing pressure on universities to adapt their standards to what they get from the school system by offering ‘bridge-courses’ or other ‘repair-work-classes’ to a growing number of their freshers. 
Such concerns are not vented because the ill-prepared freshers are generally thought to be less talented and their motivation to learn and know weaker than they used to be. The book rather argues that it is the impact of pressures and factors on the way young people are taught to think, to access information and to process it, which has given them a cognitive tilt that does not sit well with the requirements of research-based teaching and the intellectual solidity and creativity, it promises to foster.

In all this, the now prevailing educational philosophies and pedagogic regimes have played a pivotal role in that they have helped shape a mental imprint, that is too often dominated by short-termism, by a disposition to go for for quick and superficial solutions of problems. This type of teaching philosophy unfortunately all too often also nourishes a notion of understanding things as merely putting together pre-packaged pieces of knowledge gathered from the internet and other easily accessible sources, rather than using information as a starting point for doing some serious thinking by themselves. Furthermore, inadvertently an expectation of teachers and pupils alike has managed to creep in, that learning must be easy, must be fun; that it is the task and duty of teachers to make topics and problems palatable as well as interesting. This has been reinforced by a spreading practice of rewarding graduates top marks which their efforts do not justify.

Looking Back and Forward

Whereas the first part of the book explores these shifts in cognitive mentality, motivation and expectation, and discusses their detrimental effects for a research-oriented teaching programme such as universities offer, the second part of the book, written by the eminent educationalist Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, lays bare the structural shifts and changes in teaching regimes throughout the past 200 years and puts contemporary developments in a broader historical and structural context. The conclusions on which both parts of the book converge, are quite straightforward:  If universities want to carry on doing what they have been doing so successfully for many generations now – i.e. advancing scientific knowledge and helping ever new generation of students to develop the kind of intellectual imprint and creativity, needed to penetrate and deal with ever more complex problems and new cognitive challenges - then they must resist the general trend towards an increasing ‘pedagogisation’ of teaching.

What Needs to be Done?

The moment students enter university, they have to be told in no uncertain terms that to succeed, they have to develop the capacity for deferring gratification, for working at a problem with determination and persistence, because these are attitudes that will help them develop the intellectual muscle and mental attitudes, necessary for penetrating complex problems and solving difficult questions. Studying at a university takes stamina; it is long-distance training and not a series of enjoyable, leisurely spaced-out sprints with guarantees for applause and success. Nobody would assume that there is a quick way to become a good pianist. Everybody knows and takes for granted that to play the piano well, takes a minimum of talent and regular practice, preferably from a very early age onwards. Why present-day school-teaching regimes have forgotten this and are trying to make things as easy as possible, remains a mystery. Against such tendencies, to stick to ‘Bildung durch Wissenschaft’ and the unique education it offers, is an effective antidote! 

Teaching in Times of COVID-19

8 June, Sonya Permiakova, Centre for British Studies

At the time of writing, it has been two months since the official start of the lockdown in Berlin. It has also been over a month of what feels like the oddest summer semester at the Centre for British Studies to date. Since Humboldt-Universität announced the new regulations including the complete switch to the digital teaching as a measure against the spread of COVID-19, the staff left the offices at Mohrenstraße 60 to work from home. Needless to say, it was only one of many things that since then have changed. For once, staff meetings now happen over Zoom, without the comfort of the proverbial “Kaffee und Kuchen”. Monday lectures and other events, including the annual Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften, had been cancelled or postponed. Most importantly, the concerns for M.A. British Studies students’ well-being and access to teaching have been on everyone´s mind ever since the lockdown began. I talked to my colleagues – Felicia Kompio, Dr Paolo Chiocchetti, Dr Sam McIntosh and Anisia Petcu, all academic staff members at the Centre for British Studies, to find out how they have been adapting to the challenges of digital teaching over the course of this first month in the “Brave New World”.
 

Concerns

Since the decision on distant learning was announced, it was clear there is no time for a smooth transition. Paolo Chiocchetti, who joined the Centre for British Studies last semester, is currently teaching a class on British International Relations and co-teaching an interdisciplinary course called Self, Society and Agency with Felicia Kompio. His main concern was how best to balance direct contact with the students with accessibility: “Not all our students necessarily have a personal laptop, a stable broadband connection, a quiet space to join the conversation, and live in the Central European Time zone.” Paolo’s concern had since proven to be on point: throughout this first month of teaching we have seen students tuning into class in the middle of the night from their home countries where they are currently self-isolating, while few others struggle with their internet connection or simply finding a place to work in their tiny student dorms.

For all of us, another major concern was whether it is possible to incorporate elements of interactivity which in “peaceful times” are so essential to teaching – especially given the limited technical resources. Furthermore, none of us had conceptualized an entire course for online teaching before, which meant it would inevitably be a learning experience for both lecturers and students alike. 
 

Solutions

Even though all the lecturers are facing similar challenges, we came up with different digital solutions. Some, like Sam McIntosh and me, decided to record their lectures using Screencast-O-Matic and add the interactive components elsewhere: for his course entitled Coercive State, Sam supplements the lecture format with Zoom calls, where students are encouraged to discuss their reading materials and ask questions. Sam also managed to incorporate other interactive elements into his class: “I experimented a bit by getting the students to give presentations in one seminar and this worked really well with the students using power point by sharing their screens and giving well thought-out and interesting presentations”.

I am currently teaching a class called Literary Films and Cinematic Novels, which is also structured around the pre-recorded lecture format and the occasional Zoom conference calls. In addition to that, I decided to send out a weekly newsletter informing the students on all latest updates as well as suggesting a short film from the BFI archive. I also encourage students to submit small check in exercises “hidden” within each video lecture. 

For his teaching, Paolo also uses a broad range of available online platforms and applications: “My solution was to create self-study modules with all necessary resources, which can be comfortably studied at home and at the students' own time and pace, supplemented by a variety of optional learning support tools (brief group sessions on Zoom, individual conversation on Zoom or Whatsapp, Moodle Forum, e-mail). The online teaching is working surprisingly well, with most students taking advantage of the various tools and few technical glitches.”
 

What didn’t work?

As the first months of teaching online are behind us, it is fair to say that some things did not work as planned. For Sam, the biggest drawback turned out to be the lack of immediate response to the lectures which helps to navigate the teaching process in many ways: “It’s quite uninspiring lecturing to a computer and unfortunately I think this comes across in the recordings (something I need to work on!) and I miss the interaction that I normally have in the lectures. I also can’t pick up signs that a particular point I’m making might need more of an explanation and I just have to hope the students will bring their questions or queries to the seminar”. Both Felicia Kompio and Paolo also note that it turned out to be much more difficult to keep a lively discussion in an online class than in face-to-face teaching.

As all of us are currently working from home, figuring out how to divide the day into periods of work and rest has also become increasingly difficult, which from the very beginning had its inevitable effect on productivity. Felicia notes that she initially struggled with balancing teaching and other administrative tasks from home: “I always separated my private life, which includes my PhD research, and my paid work. Now, this is no longer possible, and it took me a while to re-organise myself around that.” 

I have also noticed my workload has increased significantly in comparison to face-to-face teaching. For instance, the first recorded lecture took me eight hours to complete, but this has since then improved. It appears that this new challenge is, above all else, a valuable exercise in flexibility.
 

Lessons for the future

As we ask ourselves what may the outcome of this experimental semester be – both for the Centre for British Studies, but also for the education system as a whole, it is essential to remember that moments of crisis affect different groups at a different pace. Paolo comments: “The COVID crisis is bound to deepen inequalities in society and in the university system, both among students and among the faculty and administrative staff. While some are barely affected, others have lost or will lose their sources of income, are stuck at home juggling work and care duties, face technical and travel restrictions, and so on. The political authorities and the universities should do more to address these issues”.

Anisia Petcu, an alumna of the Centre for British Studies herself, is facing, perhaps, most challenges among the teaching staff in the given circumstances: together with the current MA students she is currently re-imagining the event format of Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften in accordance with the COVID-19 restrictions. Anisia believes that above all else this time will remind us that there are benefits to face-to-face teaching that (at least as of spring 2020) no technology can offer: “I think it's made us aware of how much more goes into the experience of studying and teaching […] – chats with your colleagues before the seminar starts, a quick bite or a coffee in between two classes, the enjoyment you get from free, spontaneous, face to face debates over a text, an idea, a point that was made in class. Whether a student or part of the teaching staff, I think we've all come to appreciate these little things a little more”. 

I believe it is fair to say that all of the teaching staff at the Centre for British Studies are hoping someday to return to the “live” experience of those small simple pleasures of face-to-face teaching – and, of course, to see our students in class, for a change, without the assistance of Zoom. For now, however, both students and lecturers try to do their best to adapt to whatever comes our way. 
 

What is Cultural Project Management?

2 June, Anisia Petcu, Centre for British Studies

Time and time again, we have been told by our students that what set our MA curriculum apart for them from other university courses was our focus on interdisciplinarity and on the integration of applied courses and seminars. One outstanding example for a such an element in the teaching philosophy of the Centre is the Cultural Project Management course, which spans almost the entire length of the first academic year. In this course, the students conceptualise, document, produce and run an exhibition which focuses on a topic highlighting the academic work done by the Centre for British Studies each year. While the students benefit from supervision and guidance by a member of the academic staff, they are also allowed a considerable measure of independence and authority to decide how they design the exhibition and implement their choice of focus in the framework of the given overall theme.

An exhibition from home?

Usually, the exhibition takes place on one night in June, as part of the Berlin Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften, in the Senatsaal of the HU main building. It is an event which attracts thousands of visitors, and our exhibition represents one of the highlights of the serious of events organised all over the university, as our students have consistently been able to put together an attractive and innovative programme, in which the main exhibition is embedded in workshops, public readings, musical performances, children’s activities, food and drinks stalls.
This year, due to the COViD pandemic, the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften was unfortunately cancelled, as have all other live, large-scale events. As a result we found ourselves in the position of having to come up with a creative alternative, to ensure that our students can still successfully complete the CPM course, gain all the knowledge and skills that it brings, and that the interested general public can enjoy what they have come to appreciate so much over the years. Therefore… we moved online! In a swift rethinking of our strategy, we adapted the content and project plans and are currently working on building an online exhibition, which is scheduled to go live on July 3rd. 

100 Years of Britons in Berlin – From the Roaring 20s to the 2020s!

This year’s exhibition is focused on the lives of British individuals in Berlin in the last hundred years. The students will be documenting the fascinating history of the German capital as seen through the eyes of Britons who have travelled, worked, wrote, played or simply lived here. We will present the fascinating interplay between a tumultuous city and the multi-faceted identities of people from Britain. The exhibition takes our visitors from a capital of sexual liberation and extravagant parties, to a city ravaged by war, divided by politics, reunited and then reinvented in the last 30 years.

Naturally, one of the biggest challenges in adapting to a new online format  has been finding good alternatives for the live and interactive elements that our exhibition would otherwise have offered. Luckily, our students proved to be more than up to the task. They have come up with a number of innovative strategies to ensure that our audience will get a chance to actively participate in our efforts: in an online panel discussion, in virtual workshops, videos, interactive maps and interviews. These formats are all in the books for this upcoming highlight. 

Have we sparked your interest? The make sure to follow us on social media (@british_berlin) and have a look at our website once it goes live! More details about the programme will be made available online very soon!
 

Researching UK Politics in Times of a Global Pandemic

20 May, Marius Guderjan, Centre for British Studies

In this contribution to the GBZ-Blog, I am trying to combine insights from my current research project with my personal experience in conducting such a project during the Corona pandemic. As part of my habilitation thesis, I was granted a scholarship funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft which I started in September last year. The aim during my one-year research leave is to study the relations between the devolved governments and UK Government and to conduct a series of around 60 interviews with politicians and officials across the UK. For this endeavour, I am based at the University of Stirling in Scotland as an honorary research fellow.

Devolution and intergovernmental relations

Unlike in federal states, such as Germany where the relations between the governments of the Länder and the Bund, are strongly institutionalised with the Bundesrat at the heart, intergovernmental arrangements in the UK are only weakly formalised and lack a systematic approach. Since the late 1990s, an increasing number of legislative and fiscal powers have gradually been devolved to the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales (renamed the Welsh Parliament this May) and the Northern Ireland Assembly. At the same time, however, procedures to structure how these different governments cooperate around policies and laws that affect both the responsibilities of the devolved legislatures and Westminster have been neglected. The sovereignty of the UK Parliament has remained in principle untouched and it still cannot be legally bound by a codified constitution, a constitutional court or by the devolved administrations and legislatures. Therefore, intergovernmental relations rest on the goodwill of the UK Government, which is manifested by a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding, the Joint Ministerial Committee (JMC) and a series of specific agreements and concordats. Even the Sewel Convention, which requires the legislative consent of the devolved legislatures when a bill by the UK Parliament impacts their powers, can ultimately not stop Westminster from doing so. While the convention is under normal circumstances fairly effective in protecting the devolved administrations’ interests from interference by the UK Government, it depends on the latter to respect the veto of the former. In January, for the first time, all devolved legislators refused to give their consent to the European Union Withdrawal Agreement Bill. And yet, Westminster passed the bill allowing the UK to leave the EU on 31 January.

Brexit and multilevel politics

This brings us to the peculiarity of Brexit when it comes to governing a unitary, but multi-level state without a robust intergovernmental architecture. The EU has created a quasi-federal constitution integrating the legal frameworks and the interaction across – and within – Member States. While the devolution settlement in Britain conveniently evolved under the EU’s regulatory regime, the decision to leave the EU has posed serious questions about the functionality of the UK’s territorial policy. This is why Brexit has evoked a serious and ongoing intergovernmental conflict, as, in contrast to the UK Government, the elected majorities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland prefer a close alignment with the European Single Market. The political relations have been particularly strained by the UK Government’s intentions to exercise control over powers in devolved policy areas, once these are repatriated from the EU. On the other hand, despite these tensions, Brexit has also encouraged unpreceded levels of cooperation between the different governments involved. After all, for future internal and external trade, the UK Government relies on cooperation of the devolved administrations to ensure the implementation of common standards. Consequently (and also to prepare for a no-deal Brexit), beyond the existing, often ineffective arrangements, first and forest the Joint Ministerial Committee, the existing web of ministerial and official forums, working groups and ad hoc relations has expanded under the public radar.

Researching intergovernmental relations in time of Brexit and Corona

Because, prior to the EU Referendum, intergovernmental cooperation was very restricted, my research has become significantly more interesting in these turbulent times. Because of the informal character of these interactions, only an in-depth qualitative study can lead to a better understanding of the different institutions and practices, of the nature of cooperation and conflict, and of the influence of the devolved administration on policies and legislation enacted by the UK Government. Although major developments are unlikely to be concluded at the time I am hoping to finalise my thesis, my scholarship has allowed me to gather extremely valuable insights from governments with profoundly different perspectives. Unfortunately, and I am certainly not the only one who’s research is affected by the current pandemic, I had to return from London earlier than planned and could not meet all my interviewees in person. Since then, however, I have made considerable progress in analysing and writing up my findings so far. I had already travelled to Edinburgh, to Cardiff and to London, but have only been able to do about two-thirds of the interviews I had planned. It is, of course, possible to talk to people over the phone or via an online call, and I have occasionally done so. Still, part of gaining a better understanding of what is actually happening, is seeing the places where people work, and the action is taking place. According to my initial schedule, I had arranged to visit Belfast in June. At the moment, there seems to be at least a glimpse of hope that this might be possible. Meanwhile, until travelling to the UK becomes an option again, the data I had already collected will keep me busy in the coming weeks and months.

You can read Marius' detailled analysis of the current state of devolution in the UK here:

The (dis-)intergration of intergovernmental relations

Brexit and Corona

11 May, Gesa Stedman, Centre for British Studies

Brexit? Isn’t that yesterday’s news? It might seem that Corona has overtaken everything, but in actual fact, Brexit and austerity are as relevant as they were before the current crisis hit the UK. Britain is a contested nation, whose current problems with a lack of health-care provision and the expected effects of an economic downturn on the already existing social divisions and geographic imbalances can be traced back to earlier political decisions and developments. Ten years of austerity politics under the Conservative-LibDem coaltion, and under the subsequent Conservative governments, and in particular the drastic lack of funding for the National Health Service (NHS) have left the country ill-prepared for the current pandemic. Often, poor people have been hit the hardest, as their health is often bad to start with, and they are more adversely affected by loosing their precarious badly-paid jobs, and by the economic recession which is expected to hit the UK along with most other countries.

No Deal or a Prolonged Transition Period?

The current Brexit negotiations had to be postponed due to Corona, and have resumed only to become once again mired in the question of how to deal with the fact that Northern Ireland belongs to the UK, but is geographically on an island with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state. Very soon, the British government will have to decide whether it wants an extension of the transition period which it has promised not to allow, or let Britain crash out of the European Union with no deal at the end of the year, with even more drastic economic and other consequences than were predicted for such a case before the Corona crises began.

A Four-Nations-Perspective provided by the Berlin Britain Research Network

Our most recent co-authored book looks at Brexit and austerity, and how both are connected. It takes a four-nations-approach to the UK, including contributions from Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, and looks at each nation and its specific reaction and voting pattern in the Brexit referendum. It was written both by insiders and outsiders, authors based in the UK and authors based on the Continent. They have a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds, thus making the book a source of different perspectives, from a quantitative-based account of regional resistance to austerity measures, to qualitative analyses of how the underfunded NHS and anti-migration politics produced a toxic brew with which the public now has to deal. It asks which forms of agency are available to different agents in Britain, and how their capacity to act has been shaped by recent political deicisions. The result of a number of conferences organised by the Berlin Britain Research Network, the book was published by Bristol University Press, and is available here:

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/contested-britain

More information on the research network:

Berlin Britain Research Network