To explain countries’ varying participation in the Belt and Road Initiative, this chapter begins with a discussion of recipient country characteristics that impact the demand for Chinese spending, including the political regime, clientelism, and the public-private orientation of the corporate sector. It then discusses the supply-side factors that influence Chinese foreign spending, including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), state-owned entities (e.g., SOEs), and private firms. Finally, it evaluates the compatibility of these demand and supply characteristics. The key prediction is that electoral autocracies will display the strongest compatibility with Chinese foreign construction spending. This is amplified when the leaders of these regimes have a weak or insecure hold on power. Electoral autocracies are also predicted to be the most avid adopters of Chinese standards stemming from their eagerness for Chinese infrastructure spending.

This chapter establishes the empirical facts regarding political regimes and the prevalence of clientelism and the public-private orientation of the corporate sector. It begins by showing that electoral autocracies constitute around half of all developing countries during the 2010s, the most of any regime type. They are especially prevalent in Africa and Asia. The theory posits that clientelism plays an important role in driving Chinese foreign infrastructure spending. Several widely used proxies for clientelism establish that it is most prevalent in electoral autocracies. The theory also posits state control of the corporate sector is important to attracting Chinese foreign spending. A variety of measures are used to establish that state ownership of the corporate sector is significantly higher in autocracies than in democracies, especially in industries related to infrastructure. Overall, this chapter provides robust evidence about the characteristics of political regimes posited to influence Chinese infrastructure spending.

The end of the twentieth century was once seen as the ultimate triumph of liberal, constitutional democracy, as new waves of democratization swept the world and as nation-states pursued bold plans of economic and institutional integration. By the third decade of the twenty-first century, however, constitutional democracies, liberal values, and global economic integration were under threat from a rising tide of populist authoritarianism. The distance between these two moments is not so great. In fact, their seemingly divergent moods and tendencies are best understood as distinct manifestations of common tensions that are fundamental to the idea of a sovereign and self-governing people. This introductory chapter argues that the resonance and endurance of popular sovereignty rest on its ambivalences and tensions, its contested status, and even its inherently fictional character. It demonstrates the value of revitalizing the study of popular sovereignty, conceived not as an ideological conviction or a rhetorical device but as a field of enduring questions through which seemingly disparate political phenomena can be understood.

Faced with the challenge of accommodating diversity, liberal justice and human rights promise to provide an adequate normative framework for securing equal liberties and rights for all. However, despite great advancements in theory and law, discrimination endures, and these promises have not been fulfilled for enduring minorities, especially in places of ethno-national conflict. The problem this chapter aims to highlight is that while liberal democracy and human rights frameworks provide us with a desirable ideal, they fail to provide useful guidance for progress, from a situation of ethno-national conflict – which often involves political exclusion, sharp inequalities, low mutual trust, and high animosity – to more just and peaceful societies that respect the human rights of all. Self-determination is currently blocked as a legal remedy; states are reluctant to grant minority rights, especially in cases where majority–minority relations are in conflict; and scholars of equality law, asserting that any real advancement is blocked because of the individualist orientation of the law, send us back to collective measures.

This chapter examines the policy issues that influence the shape and contours of the TV GVC. As with any trading system, the global TV industry is based on a set of social and political values that are predominantly those of open societies and market economies. These values are not universal and the nature and amount of participation of a country into the TV GVC depends on its elites’ degree of adherence to such values. Thus, the first section devotes special attention to China, which has largely shut its doors to the global TV industry. The second section examines the policy alternatives that exist for those countries that wish to embark on the path of GVC participation and economic upgrading. The chapter argues that such a policy has three key prongs: it must take into account the globalised nature of the TV industry and support firms that are best positioned to perform in the global marketplace, harness the benefits of trade, and incentivise creativity through regulation.

Chapter 17 ends with an exploration of the generalisability of this book’s findings, their limitations and potential for new research. It also returns to a fundamental challenge that right-wing populists’ religiously laden identity politics poses for Western societies. Namely, that instead of being just the latest iteration of religious opposition to secularisation, these developments point to a question of post-religious politics itself: what can still unite us in a society in which sources of social connectedness such as class, shared understandings of history, national culture and religion have lost most of their universal appeal and in which parts of the population are left in a profound crisis of identity? Who are ‘we’? Who is the ‘other’? As these questions drive a split between cosmopolitans and communitarians, right-wing populists have recognised a gap of representation and offered their own remedy: an ethno-cultural identity politics based on sweeping ideas of Western civilisation, in the context of which Christianity has become a secularised idea of ‘Christendom’ dissociated from Christian values, beliefs and institutions. Yet, faith leaders and mainstream parties also still have a tremendous influence over which role religion will play in liberal democracies. While the godless crusade may be well under way, its destination and success are yet to be determined.

This chapter describes three major violent events in the Amendolas’ lives. The first was a squadrist attack on Giovanni in central Rome on 26 December 1923. By the following summer, after the Fascist kidnapping and murder of the socialist Giacomo Matteotti, Amendola had become the leader of the Aventine Secession and thus head of the respectable opposition to the Fascist regime. What resulted was a still more vicious beating he was given in Tuscany on the night of 20–21 July 1925. Giovanni died of his injuries in Cannes in April 1926. His tomb carried the message ‘Here lies Giovanni Amendola, waiting’. Even Mussolini was willing to state that Giovanni was the noblest of his enemies (as well as the most menacing). Giovanni’s teenage son, Giorgio, watched his father’s persecution and decided, after 1926, that only communism offered a genuinely strong opposition to Fascism. He therefore joined the party in 1929. By 1943–4, he was a reasonably senior figure in the PCI, and he became responsible for its fighting resistance around Rome. Action culminated on 23 March 1944, with the attack on German soldiers in the Via Rasella.

In the Conclusion, I record the rival fates of Giovanni and Giorgio Amendola since 1980, whether in scholarship, public memory or Italian streetscapes. In each regard, the liberal democrat Giovanni Amendola has moved up and the communist Giorgio Amendola down. The (humane) communist world Giorgio believed in has all but totally disappeared. But liberal democracy, however much transmuted by an all but totalitarian neoliberalism, has prospered and, perhaps, triumphed. Certainly, when the centenary of Giovanni’s death occurs in 1926, it is likely that he will be celebrated as a father of his patria. What might be viewed as the historical limitations of his understanding of where the world was going, his all but non-existent commentary on capitalism and finance, his patriarchalism, his positive view of Italian imperialism – these no longer matter. He can take the leading place as his country’s most admirable saint and martyr of Anti-Fascism.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between Giovanni Amendola and Nelia Pavlova, born 1895. This complex love story has been all but entirely ignored by Italian scholarship on Giovanni and in the national memory. Apparently, the couple had a son who died of meningitis at the age of six in 1929. In Giovanni’s papers there is evidence of the love affair but no acknowledgement of the child. Since Nelia also claims on occasion to have been ‘married’ to Giovanni, some doubt must remain about the veracity of her account. She was a young woman who resembled Eva Kühn in quite a few ways: foreign, multilingual, independent, from her country’s leading political classes, intellectually able. Nelia was one the three people at Giovanni’s deathbed in Cannes (Giorgio was another). Over time, however, the Amendolas, as they put it, ‘lost contact’ with her. Yet she made for herself a distinguished career as a Paris journalist, an expert in Eastern Europe. While the Amendola sons became communists, she remained a liberal democrat, as well as a woman who always remembered Giovanni as her man. Her death probably occurred in 1940. She should not have been forgotten as easily as she has been.

Chapter 3 continues the account of the contest between Mussolini and his unapologetically violent new movement and Amendola’s efforts to reform and defend liberal democracy. As a patriot and a liberal, Giovanni was as staunchly anti-Marxist as the sometime Marxist Mussolini had become. But with his armed squads and populist newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s political recipe was more successful than Giovanni’s purism and rigour. By 1924, Amendola was the leader of the Aventine Secession, a rump of parliamentarians who withdrew from the Chamber of Deputies when Mussolini’s aides murdered their moderate socialist colleague, Matteotti. Amendola maintained his Anti-Fascist leadership until he was assaulted by Fascists in Tuscany in July 1925. After a retreat to Paris and two unsuccessful emergency operations, he died in Cannes in April 1926. While Giovanni was heavily engaged in politics, he continued to wrestle with his relationship with his wife, Eva Kühn, and their four children. Eva went in and out of mental institutions, whether fairly or not. At some point in these years, Giovanni entered into a relationship with the independent Bulgarian-French journalist Nelia Pavlova.

This chapter criticizes the strand of recent political science and political theory that claims liberal democracy is under threat from illiberal populism and that this is a wholly unique phenomenon of the present rather than part of recurrent crisis of liberal democracy tied to the political sociology of the Schumpeterian competitive party model. Viewed this way, this crisis is in fact a result of the failure of liberal democracy to offer citizens a defensible principle of legitimacy based on a robust notion political equality, the core principle of democracy. Precisely, what appears to be the source of its robustness, the competitive process of parties and politicians for the popular vote is—when viewed as a recurrent struggle to bring this model back under the control of citizens—the very source of its frailty. The dichotomy liberal democracy-populism blinds us in assessing the actual developments arising from the fragility of liberal democracy. Indeed, it may inform responses that will lead to outcomes quite at odds with the original intentions of those who deploy it.

You might expect a textbook on Australian politics to begin with a discussion of contemporary Australian politics taking place in a strangely shaped building in Canberra, or with a somewhat esoteric discussion of colonial parliaments. What we will explore in this first chapter are two connected ideas: what is politics and why do we study it. There will, of course, be an overview of the political institutions, as well as discussion of some important terms, and a peek at what challenges might lie ahead for Australian political structures.

So how should we think about with an examination of contemporary politics in Australia? We should begin with acknowledging that the politics we study now is the product, one way or another, of a series activities, actions and interactions that stretch far back in time. The real politics and history of Australia starts somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 years prior to white settlement – although how far back is not clear. If we acknowledge the past, we can understand how it has shaped our contemporary society.

It is a struggle to hold society together. Historically, that task has fallen both to law and religion. Sovereignty, the source of law’s binding power, like the miracle in Carl Schmidt’s political theology, lies outside law itself. That origin coincides with the kenotic excess of the sacred.

This chapter explores that strange excess through a visual genealogy of shifting sovereign imaginaries. They range from early modern legal emblems picturing the transcendental body of the King, to modern and late modern paintings and films depicting a metaphysical shift to the sacred body of the People. The question this visual history confronts is not whether the sacred binds the nomos of law, but how? The corporeal image goes beyond conceptual abstraction. It is a site from which desire (what Freud calls the cathexis of libido) binds us to values, rituals, and institutions. Libidinal investment ties us to a shared symbolic identity; disinvestment, by contrast, invites psychic and political-legal collapse.

As the contemporary crisis in liberal democracy deepens, we ask: what sovereign imaginary will break the pall of collective anxiety and unrest, and will it come in the service of human flourishing?

Liberal democracy is under siege. Conservative and reactionary political forces are undermining democratic processes to such an extent that we may be witnessing the emergence of hybrid political systems composed of democratic and dictatorial components. Brazil since 2018 is presented as an example of this dangerous degradation of liberal democracy. The chapter identifies the four main components of this process: electing autocrats, the plutocratic virus, fake news and algorithms, and the hijacking of institutions.