UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item The Exiles' Return: Emigres, Anti-Nazis, and the Basic Law(2021) Miner, Samuel James; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation traces the historical origins of several novel features of the postwar West German Constitution (Basic Law). Next to a legally enforceable catalogue of basic rights, the novelty of the 1949 Basic Law lay in articles outlining the forfeiture of those basic rights for any individual, organization, or political party who fights against the “fundamental liberal-democratic order.” This is a pillar of “militant democracy,” a term invented by the emigre jurist Karl Loewenstein, but a feature of German constitutionalism since it uses by the Federal Constitutional Court. That court occupies the position of “guardian of the constitution” in postwar Germany. Postwar “new German constitutionalism” (Kommers) was largely a project of the parliamentary left. Despite their historical aversion to judicial power, postwar German anti-Nazis transferred tremendous powers to the judiciary, especially state and federal constitutional courts. The following dissertation is a collective intellectual biography of the key anti-Nazi and emigre constitutional framers behind the state and federal constitutions. It examines their lives between the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the late 1950s, when the Federal Constitutional Court established itself as the final arbiter of German law. The Federal Constitutional Court with its powers of judicial review was not an American export. Rather, it was a German response to the circumstances of postwar occupied Germany. Judicial review came to Germany as an anti-Nazi measure designed to prevent the continued use of Nazi statutes in defense of war criminals. Judges in Allied-occupied Germany were asked to review statutes for their adherence to principles of justice to avoid light sentences for Nazi criminals. To counter the tendencies of a reactionary judiciary, anti-Nazi jurists campaigned for a lay judiciary with mixed results. The state constitutions of the American occupation zone provided the prototype for how a “militant democracy” would function in postwar West Germany. The state constitutions were anti-Nazi documents written in response to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The framers of the state constitutions came from the ranks of recent re-emigrants and concentration camp survivors. The following dissertation examines their contributions to postwar law and politics.Item Negotiating the Place of Assyrians in Modern Iraq, 1960–1988(2015) Benjamen, Alda; Wien, Peter; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation deals with the social, intellectual, cultural, and political history of the Assyrians under changing regimes from the 1960s to the 1980s. It examines the place of Assyrians in relation to a state that was increasing in strength and influence, and locates their interactions within socio-political movements that were generally associated with the Iraqi opposition. It analyzes the ways in which Assyrians contextualized themselves in their society and negotiated for social, cultural, and political rights both from the state and from the movements with which they were affiliated. Assyrians began migrating to urban Iraqi centers in the second half of the twentieth century, and in the process became more integrated into their societies. But their native towns and villages in northern Iraq continued to occupy an important place in their communal identity, while interactions between rural and urban Assyrians were ongoing. Although substantially integrated in Iraqi society, Assyrians continued to retain aspects of the transnational character of their community. Transnational interactions between Iraqi Assyrians and Assyrians in neighboring countries and the diaspora are therefore another important phenomenon examined in this dissertation. Finally, the role of Assyrian women in these movements, and their portrayal by intellectuals, will be evaluated using a gendered perspective.Item "America was Promises": The Ideology of Equal Opportunity, 1877-1905(2009) Goldstene, Claire; Gerstle, Gary; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"`America was Promises': The Ideology of Equal Opportunity, 1877-1905" seeks to untangle one of the enduring ideas in American history--equal economic opportunity--by exploring the varied discourses about its meaning during the upheavals caused by the corporate consolidation of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In so doing, a new framework is proposed through which to comprehend the social and political disruptions wrought by the transition from an entrepreneurial to a corporate society. This framework centers on a series of tensions that have permeated the idea of opportunity in the American context. As an expression of capitalism, the ideology of equal opportunity historically occupies conflicted terrain as it endeavors to promote upward mobility by permitting more people to participate in the economic sphere and emphasizing merit over inherited wealth, while it concurrently acts as a mechanism to maintain economic inequality. This tension allowed the rhetoric of opportunity to animate social dissent among rural and urban workers--the origins of Progressive reform--even as it simultaneously served efforts by business elites to temper this dissent. The dissertation examines the discourses about the ideology of equal opportunity of prominent figures and groups located along a spectrum of political belief. Some grounded opportunity in land ownership (Booker T. Washington); others defined it as control of one's own labor (Knights of Labor); while others connected opportunity to increased leisure and consumption (Samuel Gompers and business elites). As this occurred, the site of opportunity shifted away from entrepreneurship toward competition for advancement and investment within the corporation. Most social activists and reformers stressed the conditions necessary for equal opportunity to thrive. They thus reinforced assumptions about the benefits of economic competition and differentially rewarding individuals, even as they objected to the results of that system. And, certainly, some of these arguments led to progressive changes. But because the necessary outcome of equal opportunity was an inequality of economic result, to move beyond the boundaries of equal opportunity ideology demanded a rare willingness (Edward Bellamy) to question the system of economic competition itself.