Suchergebnisse

Polazeći od postmodernih teorija diferencije (Luhman, Derrida, Castells) autor ustvrđuje da se pitanje europske budućnosti i demokracije ne može razumjeti preko bilo koje vrste projekta višeg jedinstva, već kao proces političkog djelovanja uz koji se ne može vezati perspektiva unaprijed određenog ustrojstva Europe. Ishodište takve ocjene autor pronalazi u oprečnosti dvaju nesumjerljivih pluralizama: povijesno proizvedenog, koji se očituje u specifi čnim nacionalnim ili religijskim svojstvima i onog koji je određen demokratskom procedurom, koji ne polazi od specifi čnih svojstava pripadnika neke zajednice nego od načela pravne jednakosti. Upravo zbog spomenute razlike, demokracija, pravo, politika ili pak religija su naprosto auotopoietični sustavi, koji se ne integriraju u viša jedinstva, već funkcioniraju kao funkcionalno limitirane cjeline, koje uključuju i isključuju iz sustava različite segmente okoline. Ako nema tog višeg cilja prema kojem Europa treba ići, čemu treba težiti Europa, pa onda i europska demokracija? Odgovor je, smatra autor, u dekonstrukciji europskih vizija, iluzija i projekata, pri čemu kritički potencijal teorija diferencije nije u njihovoj praktičkoj primjeni, nego u njihovom drugačijem razumijevanju stanja stvari. ; Proceeding from postmodern theories of diff erence (Luhman, Derrida, Castells), the author concludes that the issue of the European future and democracy cannot be understood through any kind of project of higher unity, but as a process of political action which cannot be tied with a perspective of a predetermined structure of Europe. The author fi nds the origin of such an assessment in the oppositeness of two incommensurate pluralisms: a historically produced one, manifested in specifi c national or religious properties, and the one determined by a democratic procedure, which does not proceed from specifi c properties of members of a community, but from a principle of legal equality. It is because of the mentioned diff erence that democracy, law, politics or religion are ...

Socialist and Social Democratic parties leave few political observers and citizens indifferent. For several years, a certain number of actors on the political scene have presented it as a political family in crisis, lacking in imagination and dynamism, incapable of renewal and doomed to fade into insignificance. Others, on the contrary, describe it as a grouping with a promising, even brilliant future.This book does not set out to confirm either of those two visions. Its aim is to analyse in-depth the transformations which are affecting, at the current time, the different aspects of Social Democracy: new organisational models, changes in political and electoral performance, changing relations with the trade unions and civil society associations, reactions to the emergence of new political rivais and new values, new ideological trends and political programmes, etc. For the first time, the analysis does not concern exclusively Western Europe, but also deals with the Social Democratic parties of the consolidated democracies and the organisations that claim to be part of democratic socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, and highlights the specific characteristics and points in common. At the dawn of the 21st century, it is therefore the challenges and the different responses to those challenges that are analysed by several of the leading European specialists in Social Democratic parties in Europe.

Typologies of political regimes in general and of democracy in particular proliferate in the literature. However, few efforts have been devoted to systematically scrutinizing the empirical relationship between the constitutive components of liberal democracy. In this article, we reassess the most promising such attempt, namely, the research agenda on "defective democracies." Doing so, we identify a more general problem, which we term the "radial delusion." This problem has to do with discarding the notion of a hierarchy among the attributes, thus creating empirically empty, diminished subtypes. We solve this by constructing an alternative typology that embraces well-established theoretical constructs and assigns referents to all relevant types. Furthermore, the empirical distribution virtually conforms to the hierarchical logic of a perfect simple order scale which justifies the construction of a democracy scale.

In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argued that people in a just society would have rights to some forms of personal property, whatever the best way to organise the economy. Without being explicit about it, he also seems to have believed that protection for at least some forms of privacy are included in the Basic Liberties, to which all are entitled. Thus, Rawls assumes that people are entitled to form families, as well as personal associations which reflect their tastes as well as their beliefs and interests. He seems also to have assumed that people are entitled to seclude themselves, as well as to associate with others, and to keep some of their beliefs, knowledge, feelings and ideas to themselves, rather than having to share them with others. So, thinking of privacy as an amalgam of claims to seclusion, solitude, anonymity and intimate association, we can say that Rawls appears to include at least some forms of privacy in his account of the liberties protected by the first principle of justice. However, Rawls did not say very much about how he understands people's claims to privacy, or how those claims relate to his ideas about property-ownership. This is unfortunate, because two familiar objections to privacy seem particularly pertinent to his conception of the basic liberties. The first was articulated with customary panache by Judith Thomson, in a famous article on the moral right to privacy, in which she argued that talk of a moral right to privacy is confused and confusing, because privacy rights are really just property rights in disguise. The second objection has long been a staple of leftist politics, and is that the association of privacy with private property means that privacy rights are just a mask for coercive and exploitative relationships, and therefore at odds with democratic freedom, equality and solidarity. If the first objection implies that Rawls is wrong to think that protection for privacy can be distinguished from protection of personal property, the second objection implies that Rawls cannot hope to protect privacy without thereby committing himself to the grossest forms of capitalist inequality. In this paper I will not discuss Rawls' views of property-owning democracy. However, by clarifying the relationship between claims to privacy and claims to property-ownership, I hope to illuminate some of the conceptual, moral and political issues raised by Rawls' ideas, and by work on the concept of a property-owning democracy, which he inspired. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing, and privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership. The conclusion draws out the significance of these claims for the idea of a property-owning democracy.

This article examines the extent of Palestinian public support for democracy through the time period from 1997 to 2016. The analysis is based on data collected from five public surveys launched in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Our findings show that evidently the Palestinians support almost all elements of democracy, measured in these surveys, and support moderately few others, especially freedom of establishing parties and not using violent means to overthrow a 'bad' government. Our findings also reveal that this support is nearly constant and has not changed significantly since the early years of the Oslo accords era until recently. Based on these findings, and a few others revealed by using multiple regression analysis, we argue that Palestinian public opinion is not fully democratic, but rather is semi (or nearly) democratic. We also argue that the cultural hypothesis, claiming that Muslim Arab culture is incompatible with democracy, has no support according to the empirical evidence of this study.

"Cultural Democracy", like many cultural policy themes, has different meanings, relevance and importance depending on the political, economic, cultural and social contexts in which it is applied. "Democratising culture" - implementing strategies to increase access to and the dissemination of ideas and values - has certainly been aided by the arrival of the internet, but it remains those with resources, with networks, with expertise and historical privilege, who are best able to assert their values, ideas, beliefs and ideological assumptions: what hopes then, for a more democratic world order, in which everyone - or at least the majority of people - may be able to project their views, traditions, values and perspectives into the "global market of ideas"? My reflections on this theme will be informed by my South African experience, by my serving as part of UNESCO's technical facility on the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, and my work within cultural policy across the African continent. I will begin this reflection with reference to my home country, South Africa, as a metaphor for the world.