This text is a polemical contribution to the debate on positivism & postpositivism in the study of international relations. It focuses on four aspects rendering Louzek's defense of positivism rather flimsy: first, the untenability of the positivism-normativism dichotomy. Second, a more detailed analysis of theories incorrectly grouped with normativism. Third is an analogous analysis of positivistic theories, & particularly their claims to an epistemologically neutral access to reality, & fourth, we discuss Louzek's ambivalent attitude to modernity, particularly to the notion of progress. Adapted from the source document.
Drawing upon earlier work by the author, the text seeks to help answering the question of the sources of fear regarding the future integration of Slovakia. By looking at the roots & substance of this fear, the author aims to evaluate whether it has become unsubstantiated since the 2002 general election. Even though Dzurinda's 1998 government has fallen short of the voters' expectations, this has never been true in the foreign & security policy where the government delivered on its promises. The first chapter aims to identify the key factors, having the greatest effect on the policy- & decision-making of Slovakia's political elite between 1998 & 2002. These factors have been crucial in extending the country's image as being the most problematic out of the Visegrad group. The second chapter deals with Slovakia's internal political watershed: the 1998 general election. The problems weakening & ultimately threatening the ruling coalition from within are analyzed as well. The third chapter discusses economic & social aspects of Slovakia's post-1998 domestic development. The rather unbalanced performance & the lack of achievements are examined as the causes of doubts about the translation of Slovakia's integration ambitions into practical outcomes. Finally, the last chapter describes the societal perceptions in Slovakia as reflected in public opinion polls prior to the 2002 general election, summing up the election results. In answer to the question posed at the beginning, the author closes his analysis claiming that the current level of preparations for Slovakia's integration into both the European & Trans-Atlantic structures guarantees that the country will successfully join both. Despite the lack of any bulletproof guarantee of the stability of the country's post-2002 political scene, & in spite of potential change of the government or early elections, Slovakia's full integration into the European & Euro-Atlantic institutional structures in mid-2004 cannot be prevented. Slovakia will join along with its Visegrad partners. References. Adapted from the source document.
While the causes of war constitute one of the most often studied phenomena within the IR discipline, surprisingly little attention has so far been paid to their explanations through either traditional or modern IR theories. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the causes of war by exploring the major IR theories and attempting to identify what causes of war they prevailingly identify. Primarily, we aspire to present a comprehensive framework for such an analysis, discussing various realist and liberalist approaches so as to follow with the elaboration of views represented by social constructivism and some critical theories. As it turns out, there are significant overlaps in the ways these theories treat the possible causes of wars and their aspects; consequently, we try to identify the possibilities of achieving a synthesis of various theories in terms of their understanding of the causes of war, while taking into account the most recent developments including evolutionary approaches and other influences coming from outside the IR field. Adapted from the source document.
This paper provides a framework for the analysis of social movements, drawing on political process theory (PPT). The author argues that the concept of political opportunity structure is still adequate, although it has to be re-conceptualized at various points. Firstly, when analyzing contentious politics or collective action, it is much more suitable to handle the social movement as the unit of analysis rather then the protest event. Attention should also be paid to how the concept is applied. Finally, cultural aspects & the context of multilevel governance are implemented into PPT. This framework is used in the second part of the paper to analyze the Czech women's movement between 1989 & 2006. Adapted from the source document.
One of the brand new areas of historiography is analyzed. Availing of the research of historical conscience launched in Germany, the author explores the possibility of applying this new practice to the analysis of Lithuanians' historical conscience. The perspectives, theoretical-methodological objectives & tasks are analyzed. Special attention is drawn to the ideological aspect of a historical conscience & to the problem of "left" & "right" in the Lithuanians' mass conscience during the last decade. A relationship between the "left" & "right" identity & a specific version of the past being defended, an attempt by Lithuania's politicians to manipulate the historical perspectives, a tendency toward mythologization as evident in Lithuania's contemporary historical conscience is emphasized. Adapted from the source document.
The breakup of Yugoslavia & especially the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina made many people ask a simple question: Why did this happen? The main goal of this article is to give an answer to this question. More specifically, the article asks: Why did the "eastern" concept of nationalism prove to be more successful than the "western" one during the time of social & political changes in Yugoslavia? Although the article focuses on the end of the 1980s & the beginning of the 1990s, it also touches on some aspects of the historical background. Before explaining the ideological fragmentation in Yugoslavia & Bosnia & Herzegovina, the article defines the term nationalism with a special focus on the differentiation between "eastern" & "western" versions of this ideology/doctrine. References. Adapted from the source document.
The article explores positivism-postpositivism debate in social sciences that has been lasting already for many years. The author does not suppose this debate will end soon since it raises fundamental questions concerning the aims, tasks and methods of social sciences. Though representatives of these sciences differ significantly in views on these questions, the most of them and, in particular, evident majority of representatives of political science virtually holds positivist views. Such questions, which may be called conceptual, are essentially disputable, so they cannot be resolved by any empirical research. When examining positivism-postpositivism debate the author singles out, paying tribute to tradition, three aspects of debate: (1) ontological, (2) epistemological, and (3) methodological. Yet he presents the arguments to support his claim that because of its antimetaphysical character positivism can have no ontology at all. Therefore an ontological dispute between positivists and postpositivists is simply impossible. Postpositivists, in discussing epistemological questions, would be inclined to reject positivist viewpoint that our statements and theories about social life can be true (though according to modern positivists, we can never know it for sure). They also would reject the positivist distinction between facts and values, which likewise can be considered as epistemological. But the most serious dispute that is taking place in social sciences concerns methodological questions. The author, in analyzing it, pays most attention to two most influential forms of postpositivism, namely to critical theory and postmodernism. Having discussed genealogy and deconstruction which, though with serious reservations, may be considered as postpositivist methods, the author claims that postpositivism lacks the main part of methodology, i.e. rules of accepting scientific statements and theories. And that is why postpositivism cannot win the methodological debate over positivism which has such rules. Adapted from the source document.
The article deals with socio-economic aspects of responsible behaviour of owners, entrepreneurs & managers in practice of economic transformation. As the starting point of defining the concept of responsibility serves the elaboration of basic theoretical economic, juristic, philosophical & ethical approaches. The validity of the hypothesis that private owner is invariably the responsible owner is examined. The article argues, that social responsibility isn't the bare result of private property & that it heavily depends on appropriate institutions. The study proceeds to the institution of liability as realized in basic forms of business organizations. The liability is studied & viewed upon as a constitutive element of the market order. The responsibility is examined in the framework of rights & liabilities of entrepreneurs, partners, shareholders, managers & directors of corporations & business organizations. References. Adapted from the source document.
The article addresses issues related to the growing importance of non-governmental organizations & social movements in world politics. The key question that the article deals with is whether there are structures of global political activism in the making? In other words, is a "global civil society" being constituted? If yes, how does this "global civil society" relate to local actors? Are global actors partners in the building of local activism? In addition, how do the actors of the "global civil society" relate to states? Do they transcend the confines of the state? In order to answer these questions, the article first describes the evolving debate around the issue of transnational relations. During the last decade this issue has become an important research problem in at least two social scientific disciplines -the theory of international relations & the theory of collective action. Moreover, the attention paid to transnational social movements & net-works of non-governmental organizations has influenced debates in certain fields of political theory where actors described as "global civil society" came to be perceived as the manifestation of reformist hopes associated with globally organized civic activism. This activism is believed to hold the promise of future global democratization. In sum, the issue of transnational relations & transnational political action is an interdisciplinary problem. The aim of this article is to answer the specified questions above. It reflects the most important aspects of the debate on transnational political action. The ambition of the article is to critically assess both empirically oriented approaches & normatively motivated explorations of the possibilities for global democratization through political involvement of transnational movements & non-governmental organizations. The paper maintains that the concept of "global civil society" is applicable for the description of political action "beyond borders" only under the condition that it is not understood as an alternative to the institutions of the modern state & that it is not used in an ideological way. References. Adapted from the source document.
The article presents the survey, comparison & evaluation of the concepts of individual & social well-being used in the contemporary social science, with the main attention paid to their value assumptions & problems of measurement. In the neoclassical economics, presently predominant in the economic science, individual well-being is identified with welfare & is defined as satisfaction of informed preferences of an actor. This "welfarist" idea of well-being, accepted also by liberal social philosophy, is consequently subjectivist & formalist. According to the critics of welfarism, this idea is erroneous because it neglects the influence exercised by the production & advertising upon the consumer's desires, & because of its minimalist idea of social welfare, reduced to the concept of Pareto optimum. According to anti-welfarists, the evaluation of well-being should take as its point of departure not individual's wants, but objective human needs, providing the foundation for the substantive (content-rich) concept of well-being as individual's or society's high quality life. However, according to welfarists, the enriching of the idea of "good life" with substance goes hand in hand with the increasing danger of its instrumentalization to legitimate the paternalist suppression of the experiments with the alternative projects of the good life. On the article author's opinion, the reformed welfarist concept of well-being is most acceptable. In this concept, well-being is defined as the satisfaction of agent's informed preferences, which are compatible with her metapreferences. In this definition, values are conceived as wants of wants or metapreferences. Normally, human beings prefer do not have many of those wants, which they have as a matter of fact; they prefer to have some other wants instead of them. Advertising & pop culture do harm for individual well-being inasmuch as they "pollute" agent's wants, "seducing" them to satisfy the wants which they (meta)want do not have. The article closes by advancing a hypothesis, how non-linear character of the relation between the objective & subjective aspects of well-being which was discovered by Ronald F. Inglehart in his research on the value change in the developed countries, could be explained, This hypothesis ex-plains "Inglehart's effect" by the differences in the temporal dynamics & risk of failure characteristic for the consumption & self-realization activities. Adapted from the source document.
The article argues that many failures of economic policies, especially in the developing world, are accountable to the methodological biases of the underlying mainstream economic science. While the new institutional and development economics have substantially improved economic models, they still rely on the neoclassical assumptions of methodological individualism and utilitarism. Therefore, they cannot fully grasp the gender and cultural aspects of the societies living in developing countries, the dynamic character of their economies and their embedment in the natural, social and institutional environment. These scientific biases are analysed from the standpoint of four heterodox economic schools: those of feminist economics, evolutionary economics, ecological economics, and economic anthropology. The subsequent failure of the economic policies is documented by the cross-cutting example of the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the Bretton Woods institutions. The article concludes by emphasizing the common points of the heterodox schools and advocating for a methodological plurality in the Czech economic research and education. Adapted from the source document.
Security studies have survived a lot of transformations. Like any other social theory, security studies have gone through a number of consecutive development stages: the dominance of traditional theories (realism/neorealism), the rise of critical & discourse approaches as well as the attempts to modify the traditional theories & methodological frameworks & to search for the synthetic or universal theoretic models. Author reviews how the security studies developed in the last few decades. Further attention is devoted to the attempts of Barry Buzan to provide for a compromised frameworks for security analysis in his works People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era (1991), & Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998). The first work was an attempt to sum up the most valuable inputs for a widening security agenda; it includes the new aspects of security (economic, political, social & ecological), acknowledging that a state can be one of the many other subjects in the security studies. The greatest value of this work is a model of sectorization of security studies -- analytical proposition to classify threats by sectors. The second framework for analysis seeks to preserve the use of the security sectors' concept. However B. Buzan, 0. Waever & J. de Wilde propose to include a discursive theory of securitization into the framework. Authors suggest that security is not an objective condition -- it is about presenting issues as existential threats that require emergency measures. Some critiques (eg. J. Eriksson) argue, theories of securitization & sectonzation are incompatible in methodological meaning. The author of this article gives some suggestions that a model of sectorization of security studies should be supplemented by a new sector -- the communication sector. This expansion of the model could help fill some gaps left in the B. Buzan model -- i.e. the way threats emerge, the reason why one threat is considered differently from the other one as well as why they enjoy a specific influence on the other security sectors. 3 Schemas. Adapted from the source document.
The aim of this article is to analyze the attitudes of the main political parties in the Czech Republic towards the European Union. A special emphasis is put on the presentation of these attitudes in the pre-referendum period & on the levels of support for membership achieved among the parties' supporters. This topic is analysed through the theoretical lens of "europeanization," an approach which examines the impact on domestic (national) policies & political systems of EU policies & processes. This theoretical perspective is usually applied to current member states but has been increasingly extended to candidate countries in the pre-accession period as well. In the period after the first democratic elections of 1990, the "European" debate among Czech political parties has intensified & shifted from the clear initial "yes" to membership to more complex & qualitative questions. By the time of the national EU referendum, (June 2003) the impact of" europeanization" was manifested by the presence of a significant number of EU-related topics in the political parties' agenda. The authors have utilized a range of political geography, sociology, & political science methods to demonstrate a high correlation between the EU referendum results & the levels of the partisan support for the parties favoring membership in the EU. According to the available empirical data from various public opinion surveys, the support for membership among the voters of the Social Democratic Party (CSSD), Civic Democratic Party (ODS), Christian Democratic Party (KDU-CSL) & Freedom Union (US-DEU) ranged from 82 to 92 %. On the contrary, the position of the Communist Party (KSCM) was clearly the opposite. In addition to the political orientation of the voters, other factors which have influenced the voting results were examined. These included such factors as regional unemployment rate, education, wage levels as well as other political-geographical aspects. References. Adapted from the source document.
The aim of the article is to provide readers with general information on nanotechnology & possibilities of its use, as well as to refer to some of its relevant security risks. The author currently mentions claims of some scientists & NGOs warning against possible misuse of nanotechnology due to the insufficient control over the research & the application. So far, less anticipated consequences of nanotechnology, converging with genetics, robotics, informatics & cognitive science, on all branches of the economy & social & other relations require that sufficient information should be given not only to the Czech experts but to general society as well. The real threat of the misuse of nanotechnology towards the research, development & the production of the new types of chemical, biological & nuclear weapons & other security risks increase that need. In spite of the long-term knowledge of nanotechnology, the possibilities of its use in a revolutionary way increased from 80th of the last century. It was due to the new types of microscopes enabling for the first time precise manipulation of the nanoscale particles. Results of nanoscale exploration are more & more visible eg., in various consumer products & according to the views of some scientific circles we could witness dramatic transformation of the economy in the near future. The article points out the rapid increase of spending on basic nanoscience research, growing number of governmental, private & multinational corporations & various national nanoinitiatives dealing with this kind of research & development, accepted mainly in the high-industrialized countries. In the article there are mentioned some reservations & concerns of the prominent American scientists & NGOs in association with the important goal of the nanotechnology research focused on the process of self-reproduction, self-repair & self-assembly. Various arms control & disarmament experts pay attention to the connections of the nanotechnological research with the possibility of production of the new types of nuclear weapons of the 4th generation. In conclusion the author expresses his view on the usefulness to create efficient system of the governmental & public control of this sphere of the scientific research & the need to devote sufficient attention by the appropriate officials & experts to the security aspects of nanotechnology. Adapted from the source document.
