Suchergebnisse

Relations between Russia and the Baltic States — the weakest link in the Baltic Rim — have significantly improved since 2000. One of the explanations for this improvement is the fact that in contemporary Russian political discourse national identity is desecuritized. The role of the Baltic states has radically changed: they are no longer considered as an embodiment of the 'false', anti-Russian Europe. However, despite the desecuritization of national identity, security as the model of structuring and governing the 'external' world still dominates political discourse. The preponderance of the war against terrorism as discursive articulation, as well as the modernist nature of President Putin's political project, leads to the marginalization of the Baltic Sea area on the political agenda. Some new departures in Russia's policy as regards the Baltic Sea area are possible, however, once Russia has gone through its election campaign, and the enlargements of NATO and the EU are complete.

Significant changes in the political management of local authorities in the United Kingdom are now taking place as a result of legislation passed by the Labour government since 1997. The new political management models aim to modernize local governance by strengthening local leadership, streamlining decision making, and enhancing local accountability. These changes owe much to U.S. experience: They involve the introduction of a separation of powers between an executive and an assembly, and they allow local authorities to introduce directly elected mayors for the first time ever. Is U.K. local government beginning to adopt what might be described as U.S.‐style approaches to local governance? The evidence suggests the new institutional designs for U.K. local authorities represent a radical shift toward U.S.‐style local leadership and decision making. However, the U.K. central state remains heavily involved in the details of local decision making, to an extent that would be unthinkable in the United States.

By examining connections between recent federal and state elections in Germany, we evaluate whether German elections seem to be maintaining some interesting preunification patterns broadly reminiscent of American elections, even as the re-absorption of the East has made the German party system more chaotic. Regional partisan stability does persist and there is continuity by way of a robust 'moderating elections' phenomenon: all parties suffer in state polls when holding power nationally, the big parties quite substantially. The evidence for retrospective economic voting of late, though mixed, is actually stronger than was the comparable evidence for the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The larger goal is to begin to explore how one might develop a cross-national analysis of whether there are general patterns consistent with actors in parliamentary democracies exploiting multiple occasions to vote - as created by bicameralism, federalism, mixed proportional-plural electoral rules, and local government - systematically in an effort to rein in governments or finetune policy.

Why are judicial review mechanisms being incorporated into so many democratizing states? This study analyzes why politicians create an independent judicial institution with the authority to overrule their own decisions. It sheds light on the role constitutional courts play in the consolidation phase of a democratic transition, focusing on one of those countries with no tradition of independent judicial review or of democratic forms of governance—Russia. Past practices and historical precedent do not support the formation of an independent judiciary in Russia, and yet a potentially powerful constitutional court now exists. Moreover, during the course of the transition from the Soviet state to the Russian Republic, there were three attempts to create an independent judicial review mechanism only one of which could be termed a success. This analysis focuses on the self-interested calculations of politicians in forming each of these three institutions, demonstrating that political actors establish a constitutional court to enhance their democratic credibility.

Softwood lumber has been, and continues to be, the most contentious trade issue dividing the United States and Canada. This article examines the economic issues surrounding the dispute and considers possible resolutions to it. Specifically, the article reviews the recently expired Softwood Lumber Agreement, which restricted exports from four Canadian provinces to the United States between 1996and2001.The authors describe this voluntary export restraint agreement (VER), explain how it created windfall gains for Canadian holders of export quotas, discuss how these gains were partly dissipated, and use this analysis to consider a reformed VER. The authors also review other feasible policy alternatives. They compare the likely effects on various Canadian and U.S. interest groups of a reformed VER, an export tax, and an import tariff. They rank these policies from the point of view of each country's national welfare as well as from an aggregate North American perspective.

Growing evidence points to the pivotal role of framing processes in the mobilization of social movements. Our study contributes to framing theory by drawing on data from state-level woman suffrage movements in the U.S. to provide a systematic comparison of the mobilizing capacities of different collective action frames. Specifically, we examine the differential impact of the justice, societal reform, and home protection frames. Rather than assuming that all frames deployed by movements contribute equally to successful mobilization, we distinguish between effective and ineffective frames. Results of cross-sectional time series analyses suggest that the use of the reform frame positively influenced membership growth in state suffrage organizations, while the use of the justice and home protection frames had no effect. We conclude that there are three key determinants of a frame's mobilizing capacity: a balanced (i.e., culturally resonant and oppositional) message, the range of issues addressed, and the effective neutralization of counterframes

In 1947 S. Y. Agnon responded to the daily bloodshed incurred in defense of the soon-to-be-declared State of Israel with a composition entitled Introduction (Petiha) to the Kaddish: After the Funerals of Those Murdered in the Land of Israel. Under the guise of a seemingly innocuous introduction to a prominently pious text lies a subtext that, in its artful and ironic weaves of the language of tradition, subverts the core kaddish text. Agnon's use of a classic rabbinic literary convention, the petiha, as its structural model is a striking example of his "revolutionary traditionalism." Agnon has reenvisioned a kaddish which straddles both the traditional world of Buczacz and the post-Holocaust embryonic Zionist state with language drawn from the former yet transfigured to meet the tragic dimensions of the latter. A new kaddish emerges out of a hermeneutic that has been identified as "mad midrash."

European Union policymakers have taken a courageous step toward outlawing sexual harassment as a form of gender‐based discrimination throughout the EU with the recent passage of the amended equal treatment directive. While the edict seeks to harmonize member states' laws regarding the equal participation of men and women in the labor market, a number of public policy issues will arise as individual member states formally implement the directive. This article begins by identifying the principal components of the directive. It then focuses on two likely areas of intense public policy debate: operationalizing the definition of "sexual harassment," and protecting employers from liability under certain circumstances. Where appropriate, the article draws upon corollaries and parallels in US law that may provide guidance to policy makers on these issues. The article concludes by offering practical suggestions for employers who would like to take the initiative in creating workplace reforms consistent with the principles underlying the directive.

This article explores the impact of federalism on national party cohesion. Although credited with increasing economic growth and managing conflict in countries with diverse electorates, federal forms of government have also been blamed for weak party systems because national coalitions may be divided by interstate conflicts. This latter notion has been widely asserted, but there is virtually no empirical evidence of the relationship or even an effort to isolate and identify the specific features of federal systems that might weaken parties. In this article, I build and test a model of federal effects in national legislatures. I apply my framework to Brazil, whose weak party system is attributed, in part, to that country's federal form of government. I find that federalism does significantly reduce party cohesion and that this effect can be tied to multiple state‐level interests but that state‐level actors' impact on national party cohesion is surprisingly small.

The term 'crony capitalism' describes the close relationship between the state and big business in contemporary Southeast Asia. Yoshihara argued in 1988 that cronyism produced an entrepreneurially weak, ersatz capitalism. Crony capitalists were 'private-sector businessmen who benefit[ed] enormously from close relations' with leading officials and politicians, obtaining 'not only protection from foreign competition, but also concessions, licences, monopoly rights, and government subsidies'. Yoshihara's thesis has been subject to some criticism, but, in summarizing that debate, Ian Brown states that 'there are…substantial areas of the South-East Asian political-economic landscape where government and business remain bound to the protection of inefficient vested interest, to the defence of monopoly and preference, and where speculations and short-term profit-taking are rife'. Entrepreneurial weaknesses in Southeast Asia appeared fully exposed by the financial crisis of 1997, when the economies of the region could not withstand the cruel buffetings of the international economy.

The secretary-general's report was prepared in keeping with UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/13 of 21 October 2003, which ""demand[ed] that Israel stop and reverse the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, which is in departure of the Armistice Line of 1949 and is in contradiction to relevant provisions of international law."" The resolution had also called upon the secretary-general to report periodically on Israel's compliance with the demand of the resolution, which was approved by 144 member states (including all members of the European Union), with four votes against (Israel, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the United States) and twelve abstentions. The secretary-general's report covers the background, description, construction progress, and impact of the wall. Reproduced below are the secretary-general's concluding ""observations"" and the summary of Israel's legal position. The document is available on the International Court of Justice Web site at www.icj-cij.org.

Citizenship and human rights continue to play an important role in the evolution of Community law. Both sets of principles have appeared in the case law of the European Courts and in the creation of a Constitutional document for Europe. Part II of the draft Constitution incorporates the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union. Additionally, the first report from the independent network of experts in fundamental human rights details the various international human rights obligations which the Member States are subject to, analysing Member State policy in a number of areas in the light of the international obligations.1Paradoxically, at a time when greater emphasis is being paid to the constitutional recognition of human rights there are indications of divisions between some of the Advocates General, the Court of First Instance and the European Court of Justice (the Court) on the constitutional role of fundamental rights in relation to access to justice.

Abstract
This paper provides a summary measure of the possible new commitments in the area of agricultural market access undertaken by the European Union and the United States, using the Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) as the tariff aggregator. We take the 2001 bound tariffs as the starting point and attempt to assess how much liberalization in agriculture could be achieved in the European Union and the United States as a result of the present negotiations. We compute the index for 20 agricultural commodity aggregates under the actual commitments assuming a specific functional form for import demand. We compare the present levels of the TRI with three hypothetical cases: a repetition of the same set of tariff cuts commitments of the Uruguay Round according to a EU proposal prior to the 2003 WTO ministerial meeting, a uniform 36% reduction of each tariff, an harmonization ( "Swiss" ) formula based on the initial US proposal.

Much of the existing formal work on war models the decision to go to war as a game‐ending, costly lottery. This article relaxes this assumption by treating war as a costly process during which the states run the risk of military collapse. The model also allows for uncertainty over either the cost of fighting or the distribution of power. The analysis makes four contributions to the growing costly‐process literature: (i) the present model provides a more general treatment of the learning process that occurs when states are uncertain about the distribution of power, (ii) it explicitly compares the bargaining and learning processes for the two different sources of uncertainty, (iii) it suggests a way to empirically distinguish wars arising from these two sources, and (iv) it shows that the equilibrium dynamics of informational accounts of war may be quite sensitive to the underlying bargaining environment through which information is conveyed.

Integration of refugees and immigrants in Denmark has so far proved more difficult than expected. In international comparison, Denmark stands out as a laggard, especially when it comes to labor market integration of the new minorities. Xenophobia and prejudices in the majority population are often cited as the main reasons. But individuals from both minorities and the majority also face a collective action dilemma when it comes to integration. In principle a collective action dilemma can be overcome through the working of selective incentives. In the case of integration, however, such incentives are weakened by some of the institutions of the universalistic Danish welfare state. Nevertheless, so far there has been very little ethnicization of Danish social policies. One possible explanation is that such reforms would create a collective action dilemma of their own. Thus the collective action dilemma of welfare state reforms seems to be blocking the solution of the collective action dilemma of integration.