Distance is a central concern for global historians. It is a physical and external condition of social life that global processes bridge. Exchanges, encounters and conflicts between strangers are common themes of global historians. Distance is also a cultural and conceptual condition, one that defines relations between strangers far – and near. Mobility and the advent of new modes of transportation and communications had ambiguous effects of closing the gap between strangers while heightening social distances, the need to explain them and policies to redress them.

The introduction introduces the concept of imagination used in the book, explains the relation of art and of faith to this concept, and discusses the approach and method of the book, highlighting its understanding of theology and theology’s relationship to phenomenology and to other disciplines. The introduction concludes with an overview of the plan of the book.

For the thousands of children and teenagers who returned to Turkey with their parents during the mass exodus of 1984, the very concept of “return” was fraught. For many children, leaving West Germany in the 1980s was not a return or a remigration, but rather an immigration to a new country as emigrants from West Germany. The struggle of these archetypical “return children” was especially pronounced because they bore the burden of another label: “Almancı children,” or “Germanized children.” These children had particular difficulties reintegrating into the Turkish school system, and both the Turkish and West German media regularly emphasized the “liberal,” “democratic” education in Germany in contrast to an allegedly “authoritarian” education in Turkey. Although West German policymakers were initially relieved to export the burden of integrating these children to Turkey, they soon developed sympathy. Though twisted in the service of racism, this sympathy for the children’s plight compelled a rare relaxation of West German immigration policy. In 1989, just five years after kicking them out, Kohl’s government permitted the children to return once again – this time, not to their parents’ homeland but to the one that many considered their own: Germany.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.

This epilogue reexamines select themes – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism, and the inclusion of Turks in European society – applying the arguments put forth in the previous chapters to more recent developments. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, there was an explosion of racist violence that recalled the racism of the 1980s and reverberated throughout Germany and Turkey. The 1983 remigration law had its own echoes in a 1990 GDR law that incentivized the departure of unemployed foreign contract workers. In the new millennium, paying unwanted foreigners to leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – in Germany and a united Europe. Over time, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: Syrian asylum seekers. For its part, Turkey’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strained Turkey’s relations with Germany and the diaspora. These developments come with profound implications – regarding citizenship, political participation, and national identity – for the approximately 3 million Turks who live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned.

Chapter 4 explores the non-Indigenous community languages which form the single biggest site of language learning and maintenance in Australia. For the communities and families who have established and grown these sites of teaching and learning, the languages represent long-standing investments of commitment, love, identity, and intergenerational transmission of history and culture. The community language school communities which our students attend on weekends (often located in borrowed spaces, such as churches and temples) can be a very large part of students’ emotional and intellectual development. Given the diversity of the field, the chapter provides only a sketch of the extraordinary array of community languages, but it also discusses how mainstream schools provides some students with the opportunity to learn and extend their languages. The chapter explores the options in primary and secondary schools to learn a variety of selected languages within the curriculum and invites the reader to dig into some of the inequities in school provision in different Australian states and territories.

The conclusion presents the recent attempt of French republicans to develop the idea of “integration” as a response to criticisms regarding the exclusionary dimensions of republicanism. Finally, it lays out what the ideal of sharing freedom, as it was articulated during the revolutionary period, can offer as a blueprint for contemporary republican theory.

This chapter investigates the precarious arrangements embedded in the systems and processes of migration management across three different country contexts: the UK, Germany, and Australia. The country comparison shows how precarious workplace/worker and societal arrangements have been woven into the systems of migration management (Paret and Gleeson ; Vosko ). The examination employs an historical methodology to show how approaches to migration management create a racialised precarity in the destination country generally; and more specifically in the destination country labour market where different groups of migrant workers are channelled into and toil in the least favourable areas of the labour market. Accordingly, we shed light on the rules underscoring and the implications of the process of migrant worker acceptance, settlement, and integration in a new land and labour market.

This chapter outlines several threads of personality psychology to explore what it can tell us about virtue science. Personality psychology includes structural approaches (e.g., Big 5 and HEXACO), process approaches (e.g., the Cognitive-Affective Processing System or CAPS), integrations of structural and process approaches (e.g., Whole Trait Theory and the Three-Tiered Framework of Personality), and an emerging focus on systematic changes in personality through the lifespan. This research has clarified that traits exist and are measurable, that traits relate predictably to meaningful outcomes, that informant reports correlate to self-reports on personality, and that personality emerges cross-culturally. CAPS was developed to account for situational variation in personality expression. The systematic developmental changes in personality suggest that individuals mature as they adopt important roles in life, such as work and mating relationships. The integrative approaches to personality highlight its multidimensional nature and make it reasonable to consider merging the study of personality and virtue. The chapter concludes by arguing that virtues and personality dimensions are sufficiently different because virtue science emphasizes morality, choice, and practical wisdom, whereas personality theory and research do not. It suggests that traits may be best understood as a genus with at least two species: personality and virtue.

Time is an active element in a communitarian theory of WTO law. Across the passage of time, the idea-complexes of obligations and rights identified in previous chapters interact, bringing about law in a third overarching idea-complex. This chapter examines how this third idea-complex takes the form of a sui generis legal system generating transformative justice. Here the law focuses on the present and is reasoned abductively according to the best inference consistent with current knowledge. Notwithstanding this reconciliation, the transformations required and induced by it are profound. They demand that actors pay attention to interests other than their own. They also demand that actors conceive of and conform their behavior in light of that transformed interest. In WTO law this interest co-exists uneasily with the sovereignty of states so that there is a persistent tension between individual member interests and the collective interest of the membership. Outcomes of WTO disputes often manifest this basic tension.

The proportion of the population living into old age has been increasing worldwide. For the first time in history, there are more older people than children under 5 years of age. The task for public health is to understand the relationships between ageing, health and the environment (physical, social and economic) in which people live, to promote healthy ageing and prevent the disability and subsequent dependency that is often associated with growing old.

This chapter examines the factors that lead to ageing populations and explores the health, social and economic consequences of the change in the population structure. It then goes on to outline strategies that can lead to healthy ageing and other public health actions that could help to manage the challenges posed – and the opportunities afforded – by the relative and absolute increase in the number of older people.

This chapter starts by considering the key differences that make public health practice focused on children unique to that focused on adults and older people and emphasizes the importance of early intervention as part of a life-course approach. The demography of the health of children is detailed, followed by a description of the major causes of ill health in children and young people, key public health challenges for this age group and their families and a summary of effective public health interventions to improve health and well-being and reduce inequalities. Three case studies are offered: the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; childhood obesity; and children’s and adolescents’ mental health. These highlight the complexity of these major public health challenges, how the tools described in Part 1 can be used to understand them and the importance of strategic and system-wide approaches.

This chapter offers an overview of literacy development in Europe. The European Union is a political and economic union of twenty-seven Member States. Its members are industrialized nations that value inclusion and allow free movement of its citizens within the union. Good skills in reading, mathematics, and science are viewed as a prerequisite for integration in the knowledge society, but challenges remain. The chapter starts out by presenting evidence related to the spread of literacy in Europe and discusses current notions about the relationship between schooling and literacy abilities and about the role of skills for full integration in society. Furthermore, evidence is provided on the variation in reading development in different orthographies and its relationship with home and school factors. In particular, current literacy achievement levels in primary and secondary school are related to home-background factors. Finally, the chapter discusses how comparative reports on literacy development in European Member States can contribute to our understanding of reading development in Europe and inform policy decisions.

Well-connected systems that safely and ethically share information have a lot of potential to improve care and safety. Due to systems having developed organically and over long periods of time, the reality today is more piecemeal. There are several current initiatives to develop and improve the situation; the main barriers are often managerial or ethical rather than technical. Increasingly, the focus is on moving data out of big silos like hospitals to places where it can be accessed (when appropriate) by others.