Affective machines or the inner self? Drawing the boundaries of the female body in the socialist romantic imagination

This article explores two conflicting aesthetics of the female body in post-Stalinist Soviet science fiction. One represented women of the communist future as explorers of the space frontier in assemblages with machines, testing the cultural border between the female and the technological. Another appealed to the mysterious female nature as the Other of human culture, pushing forward the understanding of socialist progress as a masculine project. This article argues that both aesthetics grew within the cultural phenomenon of socialist Romanticism, which emerged in the mid-1950s as a reaction to Stalin-era quasi-Enlightenment rationality and its dominant style of socialist realism.     

The writer as the people's therapist: Der Nister's last decade, 1939–49

ABSTRACT

World War II and the Holocaust caused profound changes in the style and themes of Der Nister's writing. He reevaluated his symbolist legacy and emerged as one of the most powerful and tragic voices in Soviet Yiddish literature. His transformation from a respected but marginal literary figure into a self-styled national leader became complete with his adventurous journey to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Far East, which he envisioned as a site of new Jewish revival. His illusions were crushed by his arrest in 1949.     

Images of transit: the experiential traces of Soviet Jewish emigration

ABSTRACT

Between 1971 and 1990, approximately 185,000 Soviet Jews who immigrated to countries other than Israel traveled through Austria and Italy. This period of transit migration through the “Vienna–Rome pipeline” left deep impressions on most emigrants, as it entailed their first encounter with the West as well as their first steps in their new identity as immigrants. This essay focuses on photography of remnants of the journey – of objects, of old photographs, and of landscapes – in order to explore ideas about immigrants' relationship to the passage of time and their migration experiences. It emphasizes the embodied though often unacknowledged tenor of the past rather than treating it as a distant object of nostalgia. This essay further shows that immigrants draw not only on their experiences in the Soviet Union or the United States to reflect on their lives; the places of transit migration also hold lasting meaning for them.     

“I bled like you,brother, although I was a thousand miles away”: postwar Yiddish sources on the experiences of Polish Jews in Soviet exile during World War II

ABSTRACT

An estimated 230,000 Polish Jews escaped Nazi persecution during World War II by flight or deportation to the interior of the Soviet Union. This article examines early postwar Yiddish and Polish sources on their survival in Soviet exile such as poems, newspaper articles, and witness testimonies. Two sets of sources are analyzed in-depth, testimonies written by young people in Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) camps in occupied Germany and Yiddish poetry from Poland and the DP camps. The author argues that many former exiles were eager to write down their experiences. In doing so, they were aware of the complex nature of deportation and flight that characterized the experiences of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union. In their testimonies many young witnesses express their understanding that they too were “marked by the khurbn.” Whereas Yiddish poetry from the same period helps us understand how writers dealt with their own story of wartime survival outside the realm of German persecution. In their poetry they seek meaning in their own suffering and express their desire to establish a dialogue with other survivors.     

Les relations entre droit international et droit européen du travail et leur incidence sur le développement du droit social international et européen

Des observations sur la manière dont le droit de l'Union européenne fait place aux instruments destinés à assurer la protection des travailleurs élaborés à l'échelle internationale ou à l'action des organisations internationales pour la protection des droits sociaux, cette contribution tire une typologie destinée à mettre au jour les liens, souvent tenus mais d'une grande diversité, qui rattachent le droit européen au «droit international du travail», au sens large.     

浙江非公企业劳资矛盾与工会调节作用研究——基于农民工租住地工会的实证研究

随着社会经济的发展,非公有制经济对我国经济的贡献越来越大,非公有制企业的劳资关系问题也日益突出.今天的中国,尽管工会面临着种种困境,但工会的作用仍然很重要.当前迫切需要解决的是工会代表工人利益的有效性问题.农民工租住地工会通过组建工会的方式吸纳农民工精英进入工会管理层,并动员农民工参与社区的公共生活,逐渐使他们产生了“社区认同”,农民工管理发生了由社会被动防控与管理型向主动引导、服务、建设型的转变,由分割向融合的转变,破解工会在农民工集聚的地方如何组织管理与协调劳资矛盾,促成了社区的和谐与稳定.探讨市场经济条件下企业外工会力量的成长或许能为中国工会转型提供一些借鉴和帮助,为转型期创新社会管理提供有益探索.     

The European Union in the flows of international students: attractiveness and inconsistency

This paper aims to describe the overall pattern of flows of international students and to determine the factors that can explain the variation of countries' attractiveness. In a second step, it assesses the position of the European Union as a whole in these flows at the global level. Is the EU strong enough in the global competition to attract the best brains? Besides, it shows how attractiveness factors can vary according to the profile of a sample of European Union member countries. In the third section of the paper, we raise some reflexions on the relations of the EU with its neighbourhood with respect to the flows of international students. In fact, the EU may not be able to maintain its status as a major power if it does not better regulate its relations with neighbour countries, especially in the domain of higher education and students' mobility.     

The impact of the European Youth Guarantee on active labour market policies: A convergence analysis

The European Union’s (EU) Youth Guarantee aims to improve the labour market situation of young people. Rather than prescribing a uniform policy model, it acknowledges that supportive measures need to align with national, regional and local circumstances. It thus seeks to promote mutual policy learning through the open method of coordination. As an innovative measure, the EU has deployed funding programmes to support the domestic measures related to the Youth Guarantee. We therefore examined in this study whether this mix of recommendations and financial incentives has entailed a convergence of member state policies. Our analysis of policy outputs for the period 2007?2014 yields a mixed empirical picture. There is catching‐up convergence regarding policies’ sectoral coverage but increasing divergence concerning the number of adopted policy instruments. The first two years of financial incentives did not produce any effect on enhancing policy experimentation among less active member states. We offer an optimistic and a pessimistic interpretation of these findings.     

Redefining membership: restrictive rights and categorisation in European Union migration policy

This article analyses European Union (EU) policy-making on the rights of third-country nationals (TCN) against the backdrop of theoretical literature on the transformation of citizenship. The aim is to evaluate why and to which extent EU policy expands citizenship rights to TCNs, thus redefining the criteria for membership in the European polity. The research emphasises the role of norms and frames in policy-making and is based on secondary sources, primary documents and semi-structured interviews. The analysis reveals how the combination of a principled conflict over citizenship and a strategic conflict over competence led to a legal framework characterised by ‘restrictive rights’ and ‘politics of categorisation’. ‘Restrictive rights’ means that membership rights are granted to TCN in principle, but subject to very restrictive conditions. ‘The politics of categorisation’ refers to the political construction of migrant categories that are subject to different rights-regimes. Both phenomena have the ambiguous effect of enabling the expansion of rights to non-citizens while at the same time creating new lines of division and mechanisms of exclusion.     

Pension reforms in EU11 countries: An evaluation of post‐socialist pension policies

This article evaluates the pension policy pathways of the 11 former state socialist nations that have joined the European Union since 2004. Focusing primarily on the post‐2004 period, the analysis discusses the most important measurable outcomes of these countries’ pension reforms, in terms of poverty alleviation, pension adequacy and fiscal sustainability. Going beyond the quantifiable concepts, we also investigate the quality of the 11 countries’ pension systems in terms of equity as well as efficiency, emphasizing the less conspicuous design errors present in these systems. Although these errors have received little attention to date, they may harm pension schemes along several dimensions, including their fiscal sustainability.