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Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to reveal the formation and development of Slovenia's neo-corporatist industrial relations system in the 1990s, and its change which overlaps with Slovenia's accession to the EU and the eurozone.


Design/methodology/approach
The approach is based on the presumption that the transitional processes engaged in by the societies of "real socialism" were merely part of a larger and deeper transition – the great recommodification of the post-war decommodified societies of European democratic capitalism.


Findings
Already by the mid-1990s, the Slovenian industrial relations system contained all key features of the neo-corporatist regimes emerging after the Second World War in the European systems of democratic capitalism. Like those systems, in the 1990s Slovenia also saw a system being formed of political exchanges based on wage restraint policy. The combination of this wage policy and appropriate national monetary policy facilitated the Slovenian economy's competitiveness and above-average growth. Slovenia was a success story.


Originality/value
The Slovenian system started to change in the middle of the last decade. The trigger of this change was Slovenia's entry to the eurozone. Since then, Slovenian neo-corporatism has been subject to systematic deregulation. Despite this, the analysis suggests the Slovenian industrial relations system still contains a coordinating mechanism that distinguishes it from other "post-communist", and, generally speaking, liberal market economies.

New liberal spaces in several Southeast Asian countries have created a window of opportunity for non-state actors to lobby for the promotion of democracy and human rights in ASEAN. Democratically elected governments cannot ignore the voices of their constituencies and consequently promote liberal values at the regional level. This is mainly the case for Indonesia and the Philippines, and the other member states find it difficult to close their eyes to liberal agendas. Both Jakarta and Manila follow a foreign policy strategy of reforming ASEAN into an organization that actively subscribes to democratic values, as the process of negotiating the ASEAN Charter demonstrated. The charter gives evidence of the group's cautious liberal turn as it explicitly identifies the rule of law, good governance, democratic principles and constitutional government as essential elements of political order. However, it is a long way from the cautious acceptance of general democratic values to the active promotion and regional enforcements of rules based on these norms. In view of the diversity of political systems and ideologies within ASEAN, it comes as no surprise that the association as a collective actor is unable to agree on any meaningful strategy as to how to support and respond to political change. ASEAN's failure to use diplomatic leverage to pressure its member Burma for political reforms is a case in point. At the same time ASEAN does not impede democracy, and future analysts might be looking back on the commitment to core democratic values in the ASEAN Charter as the pre-stage of regional-democracy promotion. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

President Lyndon Johnson declared the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 to be "the most farsighted, the most comprehensive, the most massive housing program in all American history." To replaceeveryslum dwelling in the country within ten years, the act turned from public housing, the government-run program started in the 1930s, toward private-sector programs using both nonprofit and for-profit companies. As a result, since its passage, for-profit businesses have developed the great majority of low-income residences in the United States. The law also helped popularize the idea of "public-private partnerships," collaborations of government agencies and non-government entities—including for-profit companies—for social and urban improvements. Remarkably, political liberals supported the idea that private enterprise carry out social-welfare programs. This article examines the reasons that Democratic officials, liberals, and housing industry leaders united to create a decentralized, ideologically pluralistic, and redundant system for low-income housing. It shows that frustrations with the public housing program, the response to widespread violence in the nation's cities, and the popularity of corporate America pushed the turn toward the private sector. The changes in housing and urban policy made in the late 1960s, the article concludes, helped further distinguish the American welfare state and encourage the rise of neoliberalism in the United States.

Few question the "right turn" America took after 1966, when liberal political power began to wane. But if they did, No Right Turn suggests, they might discover that all was not really "right" with the conservative golden age. A provocative overview of a half century of American politics, the book takes a hard look at the counterrevolutionary dreams of liberalism's enemies -- to overturn people's reliance on expanding government, reverse the moral and sexual revolutions, and win the Culture War -- and finds them largely unfulfilled. David Courtwright deftly profiles celebrated and controversial figures, from Clare Booth Luce, Barry Goldwater, and the Kennedy brothers to Jerry Falwell, David Stockman, and Lee Atwater. He shows us Richard Nixon's keen talent for turning popular anxieties about morality and federal meddling to Republican advantage -- and his inability to translate this advantage into reactionary policies. Corporate interests, boomer lifestyles, and the media weighed heavily against Nixon and his successors, who placated their base with high-profile attacks on crime, drugs, and welfare dependency. Meanwhile, religious conservatives floundered on abortion and school prayer, obscenity, gay rights, and legalized vices like gambling, and fiscal conservatives watched in dismay as the bills mounted. We see how President Reagan's melange of big government, strong defense, lower taxes, higher deficits, mass imprisonment, and patriotic symbolism proved an illusory form of conservatism. Ultimately, conservatives themselves rebelled against George W. Bush's profligate brand of Reaganism. Courtwright's account is both surprising and compelling, a bracing argument against some of our most cherished cliches about recent American history. - Publisher

The struggle versus the song - the local turn in peacebuilding: an introduction / Caroline Hughes, Joakim Öjendal and Isabell Schierenbeck 1-8. - 1. The 'local turn' in peacebuilding: a literature review of effective and emancipatory local peacebuilding / Hanna Leonardsson and Gustav Rudd 9-23. - 2. Where is the local? Critical localism and peacebuilding, Roger Mac Ginty 24-40. - 3. Unpacking the local turn in peacebuilding: a critical assessment towards an agenda for future research / Thania Paffenholz 41-58. - 4. The dynamic local: delocalisation and (re-)localisation in the search for peacebuilding identity / Stefanie Kappler 59-73. - 5. Palestinian unity and everyday state formation: subaltern 'ungovernmentality' versus elite interests / Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond 74-91. - 6. Poor people's politics in East Timor / Caroline Hughes 92-112. - 7. The 'local turn' saving liberal peacebuilding? Unpacking virtual peace in Cambodia / Joakim Öjendal and Sivhouch Ou 113-133. - 8. National policy in local practice: the case of Rwanda / Malin Hasselskog and Isabell Schierenbeck 134-150. - 9. Local violence and politics in KwaZulu-Natal: perceptions of agency in a post-conflict society / Anna K. Jarstad and Kristine Höglund 151-168. - 10. Reducing fragility through strengthening local governance in Guinea / Christian Arandel, Derick W. Brinkerhoff and Marissa M. Bell 169-190. - 11. Rethinking justice and institutions in African peacebuilding / Goran Hyden 191-206. - 12. Beyond the local turn divide: lessons learnt, relearnt and unlearnt / Isabell Schierenbeck 207-216

This article revisits the principal argument Will Kymlicka has developed for a marriage between liberalism and multiculturalism: that the liberal value of freedom requires a cultural context of choice. I show that this freedom argument rests on a romantic philosophy of language. Critics of this freedom argument have pointed out that it is not necessarily an individual's own culture that provides freedom: any culture could do so. I articulate a romantic-Kymlickean response to this critique by showing how individuals' life choices come to be entwined with the particular culture that provides their context of choice. But while that safeguards existing individuals from assimilation, it does not block future generations from being introduced into the life-world of an additional cultural context. Such slow intergenerational assimilation projects are not necessarily worrisome, however. They can sometimes have the virtue of realizing non-identity values in addition to freedom.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- 1. How to Think about the Culture War -- 2. Like It Was When I Was a Boy -- 3. Overcome -- 4. Twenty Percent of What the Nuts Want -- 5. Cheerleaders for the Rev -- 6. Babe in Christ -- 7. Act Right -- 8. Robert Bork's America -- 9. Like Battling the Devil -- 10. Referendum on the 1960s -- 11. The Illusion of Conservatism -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Illustration Credits -- Index