Books published by PIE - Peter Lang

At first glance, there could be few countries more diverse than Britain and Italy: one the cradle of democracy, a model for most other parliamentary systems; the other a young nation and the essence of political instability. Yet despite the differences, from the mid 1970s London and Rome shared a common destiny of struggle against the crisis which eventually led them to a new "renaissance" by the early 1980s. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this volume fills an important historiographical gap, casting new light on the unexplored relations between Britain and Italy during the Cold War.The "Italian case" concerned all the major Western powers: Italy was generally perceived as the great "sick man of Europe", and her very democratic solidity appeared to be challenged, while also seemingly threatening the stability of the continent and the East-West balance of power. Yet there was another "sick man" in the Old Continent: in those years, Britain was to face a severe economic and monetary crisis which weakened her international stance and forced her to play the double role of "doctor" of the Italian disease while being a "patient" herself. It is a tale of two crises, and two ways out of them.

Étienne Clémentel (1864-1936) fait partie des oubliés de la Troisième République. La présente biographie, initiée par sa petite fille, est la première qui lui soit consacrée sur une véritable scène éditoriale. Cet ouvrage est le fruit d¿un travail collectif. Il explore le parcours d¿un élu local, d¿un parlementaire, d¿un ministre, rendu original par une trajectoire sociale ascendante et une vocation artistique constamment affirmée et exploitée.Bien qüil ait été présent à de nombreux tournants de l¿histoire(la séparation de l¿Église et de l¿État, la Grande Guerre et ses conséquences, le cartel des Gauches), son action fut moins politique que structurelle et économique. Aux commandes du front économique en tant que ministre dans tous les gouvernements qui se sont succédé entre 1915 et 1919, il joua un rôle fondamental dans l¿organisation de la victoire de 1918, dans la diplomatie économique et dans la structuration nouvelle de l¿espace public.

Avant le plan Schuman du 9 mai 1950 et l¿unité européenne, Jean Monnet a été confronté aux relations économiques internationales. Pendant la Première Guerre, il invente les mécanismes du commerce et du financement international de guerre au profit des alliés. Il acquiert des compétences qui lui permettent de participer aux décisions économiques et monétaires internationales et intereuropéennes, dans le cadre de la SDN, dont il devient Secrétaire général adjoint ou comme financier privé, attaché à une banque d¿affaires américaine. Il contribue à la remise en ordre des finances autrichiennes, de l¿économie de la Haute-Silésie, et des monnaies polonaise et roumaine, voire même française. Il est invité à lancer la modernisation de la Chine de Tchang-Kaï-chek.Cependant, Monnet, qui n¿est pas un Keynes français, cherche à mettre l¿économie au service des collectivités humaines en inventant le premier Plan de modernisation et d¿équipement français. Il propose une gouvernance « fédérale » du marché, et veille au développement des potentialités des traités de Rome telles que le système monétaire européen, ou « le gouvernement européen » incarné par le Conseil européen. Monnet ne conçoit pas l¿économie sans régulation. Proche de Wall Street et des banquiers centraux, il n¿est pas un financier sans conscience puisqüil quitte la banque au nom de l¿intérêt général à partir de 1938 pour mettre son expérience et son réseau au service de la France, des Alliés et de l¿Europe. Il cherche toujours à développer les idées qui grandissent une communauté humaine et non celles qui la divisent.

Fifty years after the creation of Factors Chain International (FCI), the worldwide association of 400 factors in 90 countries, this book intends to fill a significant gap: cover a global perspective on the past, present & future of factoring, bringing together excellent historians with the top experts in the field, unifying these specialists around a shared academic and professional approach, producing a single vision of past legacies, current developments and future possibilities.The collaborative Factors & Actors project has been developed and fleshed out step by step. It has never been restricted to any particular region of the world, or any particular context or product. The collective work offered to the reader includes 30 contributions from 37 contributors who, each in their own way, cast a different eye over the birth of the global organization, the origins of such a type of financing, its 50 years of emergence and its future development against a backdrop of ever stricter regulation, compliance and risk management and in an environment of increasing technological innovation.The objective of this project is to increase awareness about a very special financing activity and its numerous virtues supporting the real economy, via both history and geography. Today factoring stands at the crossroads. Ten years after the start of an unprecedented financial crisis, the time is ripe to promote this new form of sound, secure and innovative financing.

In 1961, Martin Esslin named a body of plays that lacked plot, character depth, and details of time and space the "Theatre of the Absurd". Esslin explained that this type of theatre, minimalist in the extreme, constituted a response to the existential crisis of Europe, which was in the midst of recovering from World War II. But the fact that this body of theatre lacked details of time and space means that we may break the ties that anchor the Theatre of the Absurd irremediably to the historical context of post-World War II Europe. How can the Theatre of the Absurd speak meaningfully to us in the twenty-first century? This book explores this question by combining the avant-garde that Martin Esslin named in 1961 in his signature work The Theatre of the Absurd with gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis, and avant-garde studies. The Theatre of the Absurd is capable of subverting post-millennial institutions and ideologies, including the Prison Industrial Complex and the West¿s domination of the Islamic world in a post-9/11 era.

Since the end of the nineteenth century the dairy sectors of some industrialised European and American countries have experienced a phase of growth that took place at a different rate and in a different manner in each country, and which was made possible by the availability of raw materials and a more widespread knowledge of scientific and technological methods. The sector¿s expansion was favoured by a revolution in transport networks, the beginning of globalisation in world markets and, decisively, by advances in packaging and refrigeration techniques. Italy in particular, despite its low availability of raw materials compared to other countries, rose quickly throughout the last century to become one of the largest international producers and exporters of cheese, especially of high value PDO cheeses. What factors were behind this achievement and which were the strengths and weaknesses of the sector during the twentieth century? The articles presented in this volume attempt to provide an answer to these questions from different points of view and using different interpretative approaches. The geographical range covered by these studies also reaches beyond Italy in order to look at other countries with relatively ancient dairy traditions. This comparative approach, although limited to just a few countries, is important in that it allows us to describe the evolution of a milk and dairy sector which has had such a large influence on the economic life of many regions in the Italian peninsula.

This collective book aims at examining in what terms, and to what extent, the "reception" of the Human Rights doctrine takes place in Eastern Orthodox countries, as well as in the Orthodox diaspora. A series of questions are raised regarding the resources and theological structures that are mobilized in the overall Human Rights¿ debate and controversy, the theological "interpretation" of Human Rights within the Eastern Orthodox spiritual tradition, and the similarities and/or divergences of this "interpretation", compared to the other Christian confessions. Special attention is given to the various Orthodox actors on the international arena, aside the national Orthodox churches, which participate in the Ecumenical dialogue, as well as the dialogue with the European and international institutions.Religious freedom, as a fundamental Human right, guaranteed by the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), constitutes a key-issue that contributes to broadening the reflections on the overall Human Rights-related problematic between East and West, by shading light on the more complex issue pertaining to the conceptualization and implementation of Human Rights in countries belonging to the Eastern Orthodox tradition.The present volume studies the diversity that characterizes the Orthodox theological traditions and interpretations regarding Human Rights, not only in terms of an "external", or a "strategical" approach of socio-political and ecclesial nature, but also through a reflexive analysis of theological discourses.

This book analyses the legal and political systems of three different regions of the Asian/Eurasian continent. More precisely it compares the origins of such systems as both the ancient foundations inherited from the past and the founding principles of modern systems today. It suggests that the European constructions, the East-Asian dynamics and the Centralasian transitions, often studied separately or at best in a comparison of only two of them, ought to be approached as three variations on a theme. The value for the readers and the challenge for the authors is to situate these origins within both legal norms and traditions, whether Latin or Asian, as well as within modern Anglo-Saxon common-law dimensions and remnants of the Soviet system.After Le régionalisme et ses limites (Peter Lang, 2016) and Mutations de société et réponses du droit (Peter Lang, 2017), this book furthers international, comparative research presented at conferences in Kazakhstan in 2014, France in 2016 and Korea in 2017. It covers i) law and politics in modern State-building, ii) formation and development of civil and economic law, iii) constitutionalism in Asia and in Europe, iv) international law and international relations.

By the mid-1960s, the whole European aviation industry had begun looking at two main solutions in order to survive competition from the USA: European cooperation, and exports to markets still closed to the Americans. Against this background, Anglo-Romanian dealings in the aviation industry over a period of almost thirty years are a case of converging politico-military interests with major interpretative potential. This holds true for the history of East-West relations and infra-Western commercial competition, but also for the transformation of domestic decision-making patterns and the change in economic priorities. While Britain became Romaniäs first commercial partner in order to offer a new outlet to the aviation industry, Bucharest was looking at the U.K. to pursue a strategy of industrial modernisation and political visibility. The story of their intersection sheds light on the lower-level reality of Détente in Europe. The degree of collaboration across the Iron Curtain was not just the product of a generally improved diplomatic atmosphere, but ¿ at least in the present case ¿ the result of a peculiar mixture of political ambition, economic viability, and technological expertise. Indeed, the change of economic paradigm in the UK (from Neo-Keynesianism to monetarist Neo-Liberalism), along with President Ceau¿escu¿s fixation with foreign debt, played a crucial role in the vicissitudes of Anglo-Romanian relations in the aviation industry in the period between the demise of Détente and the end of the Cold War. This points to a reasonably articulated model, which is hinged on the category of ¿transfer¿, rather than on the category of ¿cooperation¿.

Nous possédons des connaissances, nous obtenons des résultats scolaires, des diplômes ¿ Mais cela nous permet-il pour autant d¿agir dans les situations concrètes qui nous sont proposées dans toute leur diversité, du diagnostic médical à la dissertation, en passant par le problème mathématique ou l¿évaluation d¿un projet¿? Cet ouvrage évoque le déroulement et les résultats d¿une recherche tout à fait originale autour de la question¿: qüest-ce qui fait que nous sommes compétents¿? Qüest-ce qui fait que nous pouvons agir concrètement pour traiter des situations qui requièrent bien plus que des connaissances¿? Elle démonte ces mécanismes inscrits au fond de nous et montre le rôle que jouent respectivement des facteurs cognitifs et émotionnels dans notre capacité à traiter des situations complexes.Établis à partir d¿une base de données de plus de 11 000 personnes, en provenance de 8 pays, sur 3 continents et dans 4 régimes linguistiques différents, les résultats de la recherche font apparaître des résultats parfois saisissants sur ce qui caractérise le potentiel à agir à différents âges, selon le genre, selon les cultures, selon les domaines de compétences.De manière concrète, elle offre ¿ à partir d¿une série de questions à choix multiples (QCM) ¿ la possibilité de déterminer de façon très précise les forces et les faiblesses de chacun(e) en matière de passage à l¿action, aussi bien sur le plan émotionnel que cognitif, et pose ainsi les bases de pistes ciblées d¿amélioration du potentiel de chacun.