Suchergebnisse

The quinquennial Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference represents a highly important event from the perspective of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Though not a party to the treaty itself, the EU has made a consistent effort since the 1990s to coordinate the positions of its member states and achieve higher visibility in the NPT review process. The aim of this article is to examine the role of the EU in the 2015 NPT Review Conference deliberations. Drawing on on-site observations, statements and in-depth research interviews, it argues that the recent institutional changes notwithstanding, the influence of the EU as a distinct actor in the NPT context remains very limited, and the EU's common position is in bigger disarray than ever before. This year's Review Conference demonstrated the widening rift between the member states, in particular in the area of nuclear disarmament and the related issues. The inability to maintain a coherent common position limits the EU 'actorness' and impedes its striving for relevance in the NPT forums. The dynamics outlined in this article further highlight the limits of the EU CFSP in security matters in which the national positions of individual member states are as divergent as in the case of nuclear disarmament. (International Affairs (Oxford) / SWP)

Although the Iraq crisis and the flood disaster largely determined the political agenda at the end of the 2002 federal election campaign, the economic situation was, once again, one of the most important themes in the context of the election itself. This article examines for the period of 1994 to 2002 whether, and in what measure, the electorate's perception of economic conditions played a role in voters' decisions. Empirical results show that judgements of the economic situation in 2002 were noticeably worse than prior to the last two national elections. Few East-West differences are recognisable in perceptions of current general and individual economic conditions. Differences in retrospective or prospective assessments of the economic situation have also fallen. Regarding the attribution of economic problem solving ability, considerable gains are noted for the CDU/CSU, while the trust in the economic competence of the SPD has decreased. Multivariate analyses show that in 2002 the influence of economic variables on individual voting behaviour was not very strong. Significant effects only occurred in West Germany. Besides the evaluation of the general economic situation, perceived economic competence had the most clearly visible electoral impact. (German Politics / FUB)

For an introduction to this article see SA 0206/E9423. The article is a reprint from Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 1944, 25, 2, 100-117. Res is presented which inquired into the readjustments that have taken place in Negro fam life as 'a result of war emergency (WWII), & to what entent these readjustments may have been conditioned by the factor of minority group status. 1, 000 Tex Negro fam's were selected from various towns & cities in East Tex according to the proportional representation of the Negro pop in these areas. 50 Negro fam heads were asked to write letters giving an account of how the present war has affected their fam's. The following aspects are dealt with: (1) changes in fam formation; (2) changes in place of residence; (3) changes in econ functions of fam members; (4) relation of fam readjustment & minority group status. Data show that under the influence of WWII Amer fam's come into existence more rapidly & become dissolved more rapidly than in peace time. Negro fam's are no exception. Fam's had an abnormally high rate of mobility during the 3-yr period immediately following 1941, & their reasons for moving were based upon attempted adjustment to the labor demands of the US war economy. Responding to the expanded labor demand in specific industries, members of these fam's shifted from a group of agri'al & domestic service workers to a mass of factory labor. Although this shift intensified racial friction, it resulted in a change of the position of these fam's & the establishment of a new pattern of life which they defined as better than the old. The att's of white & Negro Coll students revealed a willingness of whites to tolerate this change in ES as long as the traditional SR of the races are maintained. 4 Tables, 5 Charts. Henry A. Bullock, SOME READJUSTMENTS OF THE NEGRO FAMILY IN 1944 AND 1970-offers an explanation of how the author viewed Negro fam readjustment in the first instance & how he views it now. In 1944 the concern was with the degree & manner in which an instit accommodates to new circumstances imposed upon it by the external environment in which it is enmeshed. Then the quality of black fam's was judged in terms of how they deviated from WASP norms. Now the Amer assimilation ideal is being abandoned. Blacks want to be black. Negro fam's could now be observed in terms of the efficiency with which they are org'ed to meet needs generated by conditions under which black people have to live. In a ghetto, a WASP style of fam org would be a poor tool for fam survival. Today's res'er should probe beyond the structural horizon & into the dynamics of fam org itself. This will lead to a further & beneficial fading of the demarcation line between pure & applied res. M. Maxfield.

History, however, is not Phillips's strong suit. Moreover, his peculiar take on the country's cyclical experience with wealth and democracy is a telling commentary on his own oddly inflected populism. His is the populism of the 'silent majority,' which first made his reputation back in the days of Richard Nixon's 'southern strategy.' Phillips's lingering Republican past leads him to fantasize about some underground tradition of progressive middle-class Republicanism, which in Phillips's quirky narrative confection embraces the governments of William McKinley, Richard Nixon, and Abraham Lincoln. Phillips imagines these regimes as all suspicious of unsupervised wealth and mildly friendly to labor, while nonetheless operating under the dominating influence of the economic elites of their day. The characterization might loosely apply to Lincoln's new party, although the great merchant bankers of the antebellum North were the Great Emancipator's loyal opposition, not his natural constituency. When applied to McKinley and Nixon the notion verges on the preposterous--industrial workers in 1896 were terrorized into voting for the Ohio governor or staying away from the polls, while the whole tenor of the Republican campaign and the McKinley presidency that followed entailed an explicit repudiation of any suggestion of wealth redistribution or government regulation of big business. The evidence for Nixon's labor sympathies seems to consist of presidential invitations extended to the ossified leadership of the AFL-CIO to visit the White House. Phillips himself acknowledges that in every case--even in the one that most robustly supports his argument, namely Teddy Roosevelt's reign--the Republicans soon gave themselves over to the most self-interested, money-mad, socially irresponsible fat cats who always peopled the party's inner sanctums. As the author demonstrates, only during the Progressive Era, which was half Democratic, and during the New Deal order did the apportionment of national income and wealth swing the other way and were the commanding institutions of the private sector subject to some serious public surveillance and discipline. The Clinton interregnum, conversely, was the outcome of what Phillips calls the first white-collar recession of the early nineties-itself a fitting epitaph to the extreme 'financialization' of the Gordon Gekko years--conjoined to the rapidly inflating Internet bubble. The atmosphere of sixties' cultural liberation that hovered over the Clinton administration had more to do with the borrowed anti-hierarchical argot and upscale designer egalitarianism of the new dot-com billionaires than it did with any sixties-era political engagement with the lower orders. While the New Deal welfare state was wrapping up its affairs, the new information-age elites were busy putting in place a global corporate welfare system of 'financial mercantilism.' Wall Street quickly acclimated itself to the new environment. It became heavily invested not only financially and not only because the microprocessor transformed the way it conducted its own high-velocity speculations. Psychologically and culturally as well, the Street became vested in new-era hype. Phillips talks about 'grinds and globalists' supplanting the old skull-and-bones elites, committed to a relentless, de-regulated 'securitization' of the universe, transforming customary signs of distress into market-cheering acts of 'downsizing,' deepening the chasm between the haves and the have-nots at home and abroad.

(1) The emergence of nations is not a historical deviation, but a normal and cocomitant occurrence of the positive historical development. The establishment of democracy created some elbowroom for the affirmation of nations in post- communism. The role of the nationalist activity in these events was not central. The disintegration of the former communist federations was not a fortuitous event and had a common cause. The redefinition of the nationality issue, though inevitable, produces conflicts. (2) International conflicts are potentially dangerous and violence-laden. (3) Conflicts cannot be avoided by denying national identities and national rights, by ignoring real or imagined problems, but by confronting them. (4) Nationality issues cannot be eliminated but regulated. Political theory and practice have developed numerous mechanisms for the accommodation of conflicting rights. Their recognition and implementation can only help in the non- violent resolution of disputes. Ignorance is not only harmful, but can be dangerous as well, because it stimulates exaggerated and biased expectations which may produce volatile and baleful outcomes. (5) Concrete solutions will always depend on the balance of political powers in each case. International practice, universally accepted principles, international community's pressures and its early direct involvement can contribute to the finding of the solution and the avoidance of violent options. (6) Demanding more rights than implied by rational standards means cruising for a bruising, asking for trouble, which can get the conflicting parties the short end of a stick. Extremism and chauvinism are dangerous not only for the other side, but affect negatively the nation which generates it. This rule applies both to the dominant nation in a state and to the minority nations. (7) Democracy and tolerance make a positive environment for a successful regulation of international disputes. Violent and unilateral imposition of solutions only worsens the situation and makes it explosive in the long run. A democratic society reduced to a dominant nation is not feasible unless national rights are recognised and implemented for all those who live in that state. Minority nations cannot realise their rights unless they take into consideration the democratic system on the whole and democratic rights for everybody. Democratic societies are nationally tolerant societies. And vice versa. (8) Democracy and nation-building are not incompatible notions. They are immanent to post-communist societies. Nation-building, despite everything, creates the conditions for the emergence of stable states, the only stable framework of the political and the economic transition (Jahn, 1992, 68). (9) The unresolved and undecided nationality issues significantly aggravate the consolidation of democracy. (SOI : PM: S. 151; 176f.) + The author's starting point is the claim that, despite integrative tendencies, the number of national states in the world is on the increase. The opposing national interests and conflicts may be mitigated or avoided if the central concepts and issues, tie ways of the accommodation of interests and the features of the postcommunist transitions are known: The author explains the concepts and issues such as nation, ethnic group, national state, nationalism, protection of minorities, the right to self-determination, decentralisation, autonomy, federalism, consociational democracy, non-territorial autonomy. He focuses on the issues that reflect the current controversies of the global and the national policies. He concludes that, among other things the national issues are central to the process of transition and that they cannot be ignored (since nations are a reality which must be coped with), that there are principles and mechanisms of the regulation of the conflicting national interests

When Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States first appeared in bookstores in March 1962, its author had modest hopes for its success, expecting to sell at most a few thousand copies. Instead, the book proved a publishing phenomenon, garnering substantial sales (seventy thousand in several editions within its first year and over a million in paperback since then), wide and respectful critical attention, and a significant influence over the direction of social welfare policy in the United States during the decade that followed. By February 1964, Business Week noted, "The Other America is already regarded as a classic work on poverty." Time magazine later offered even more sweeping praise, listing The Other America in a 1998 article entitled "Required Reading" as one of the twentieth century's ten most influential books, putting it in such distinguished company as Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Harrington's own knowledge of poverty was, for the most part, acquired secondhand, as he would recount in two memoirs, Fragments of the Century (1973) and The Long Distance Runner: An Autobiography (1988). Born in 1928 in St. Louis, the only child of loving and moderately prosperous parents of sturdy Irish-Catholic lineage, educated at Holy Cross, Yale Law School, and the University of Chicago, he moved to New York City in 1949 to become a writer. In 1951, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement as a volunteer at its soup kitchen; there he got to know a small subset of the nation's poor, the homeless male alcoholics of New York City's Bowery district. Within a few years he left the Catholic Worker (and the Catholic Church) and joined the Young People's Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the battered remnants of the American Socialist Party, a party then led by Norman Thomas. A tireless organizer, prolific writer, skillful debater, and charismatic orator, Harrington succeeded Thomas as America's best-known socialist in the 1960s, just as Thomas had succeeded Eugene Debs in that role in the 1920s. Socialism was never the road to power in the United States, but socialist leaders like Debs, Thomas, and Harrington were, from time to time, able to play the role of America's social conscience. In the years since Harrington's death from cancer in 1989, at the age of sixty-one, no obvious successor to the post of socialist tribune in the Debs-Thomas-Harrington tradition has emerged. Harrington's most famous appeal to the American conscience, The Other America, was a short work (one hundred and eighty-six pages in the original edition) with a simple thesis: poverty in the affluent society of the United States was both more extensive and more tenacious than most Americans assumed. The extent of poverty could be calculated by counting the number of American households that survived on an annual income of less than $3,000. These figures were readily available in the census data, but until Harrington published The Other America they were rarely considered. Harrington revealed to his readers that an "invisible land" of the poor, over forty million strong, or one in four Americans at the time, fell below the poverty line. For the most part this Other America existed in rural isolation and in crowded slums where middle-class visitors seldom ventured. "That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them," Harrington wrote in his introduction in 1962. "They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen." That was then. Fifty years since the publication of The Other America the poor are still among us -- and in a testament to the lasting significance of Harrington's work, not at all invisible. Whether or not the poor exist is thus no longer a matter of debate; what if anything can be done to improve their condition remains at issue. Adapted from the source document.

The protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle marked a turning point in trade politics. The size and depth of the international coalition that came together to protest the WTO was striking. And then there were the television images and the stunning denouement: Teamsters marching with 'turtles,' tear gas and police charges in the darkness, the collapse of the negotiations. The author of one of the books reviewed here, Jagdish Bhagwati, was in Seattle as an adviser to the WTO's director. While trying to get to the meeting, he found himself 'confronting a tough Chinese Red Guards-style female demonstrator who was blocking my way illegally.' A colleague then 'drew me away from a confrontation that would surely have left me bloodied, saying, `You are the foremost free trader today; we cannot afford to lose you!" Bhagwati's story speaks to several things, including his considerable ego. Most important, though, it captures the embattled state in which mainstream trade economists loyal to free trade doctrines now believe they exist: 'there are not too many out there, fighting the fight for free trade,' Bhagwati worries, 'We need to change that.' Do Irwin and Bhagwati understand that this is what most of the critics believe? I'm afraid not. Both authors characterize the critics as 'anti-globalization.' Although this accurately describes some, it is not true for the majority. Both authors seem to think that the main reason critics are against globalization is that they are anticapitalist and antimarket. Irwin, for example, tells us that for many of these groups, 'Free markets and capitalism are seen as embodying and furthering environmental destruction, male dominance, class oppression, racial intolerance and colonial exploitation.' To characterize most environmental organizations, or most contemporary trade unions, as 'anticapitalist' is absurd, if that means that they are committed to the abolition of capitalism. If the term means that they are critical of the way that capitalism currently operates, the characterization is accurate, but then the authors' summary dismissal of that position becomes puzzling. The critics insist that there are better and worse forms of market economy, that the neoliberal model of regulation toward which we are currently moving (one that expands property rights while ignoring human rights) is worse than feasible alternatives, and therefore, that the current model of global economic regulation can and ought to be changed. Unfortunately, Irwin and Bhagwati, by tilting at anticapitalist windmills, fail to join the real argument. IN THEIR EFFORT to extract free trade from the wider matrix of economic globalization, the authors downplay the degree to which trade deals such as NAFTA and the WTO shape the character of the larger economic system. For example, some of the most novel and important provisions in NAFTA and the WTO--pertaining to investor property rights and the deregulation of financial services--undoubtedly increase international capital mobility. Dani Rodrik has argued that increased international capital mobility could significantly increase the 'price elasticity of the demand for labor.' That is, firms will shift production to other countries in response to smaller and smaller differences in labor costs, other things being equal. This could dampen wage growth not only in the North, but in the South as well. Bhagwati and Irwin both devote considerable effort to exploring how free trade affects wages, yet neither so much as mentions Rodrik's well-known argument. Why not? Free capital mobility is one thing, Bhagwati says, free trade is another. He favors considerably less of the former than we have today, and much more of the latter. But while conceptually distinct, the fact is that both principles are promoted in NAFTA and the WTO. If we want to assess the impacts of these international agreements, we must consider how they affect capital mobility, and how it in turn affects workers, the environment, and so on. Slippage in the way the concept of 'free trade' is employed permits Bhagwati and Irwin to evade this challenge.

The table of contents of the Proceedings is followed by an Introductory Note by John P. Robinson & Kurt Back which states that the 26th AAPOR Conference was held May 19-22, 1971 in Pasadena, Calif. 16 formal sessions & 8 luncheon round-table discussions were held under the general theme 'Public Opinion in a Society under Pressure.' The AAPOR Award for distinguished achievement was presented to Walter Lippmann. A brief history of the Award is given. Richard H. Baxter, A NEW GOAL FOR AAPOR: PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, discusses the relevancy of AAPOR as an org in the context of modern survey res & the increasing depersonalization & massive growth of the res community. The org has made 4 kinds of responses to recent developments of professional growth: (a) high-caliber annual conference programs; (b) the consistently dedicated activity of successive AAPOR Standing Committees on Standards; (c) the encouragement & development of young people having an interest in PO res through the Annual AAPOR Student Competition; (d) the establishment of an ad hoc committee chaired by Barbara Lee-on Soc Concerns. The role of individual AAPOR members as res ombudsmen in their communities is touched upon. The establishment of a professional consultation panel is proposed. ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS presents the following: (1) SOCIAL INDICATORS - Chairman: Raymond A. Bauer (Harvard U, Cambridge, Mass); Donald S. Shoup, 'Social Indicators: Some Possible Futures;' & Peter J. Henriot (Seattle U, Washington), 'Social Indicators: Some Practical Politics.' (2) IMPACT OF SOCIAL RESEARCH ON POLICY DECISIONS - Chairman: Hervert I. Abelson; John P. Robinson (U of Michigan, Ann Arbor), 'The Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior;' Nathan Caplan (U of Michigan, Ann Arbor), 'The National Commission on Civil Disorders;' Joseph T. Klapper (Columbia Broadcasting System, New York, NY), 'Observations on the Research Situation Faced by Commissions and Similar Bodies;' Sandar J. Ball-Rokeach (U of Western Ontarto,Toronto), 'The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.' (3) CONSUMERISM: DIRECTIONS AND ISSUES, Chairman: Robert Lavidge: Robert J. Lavidge, 'Introductory Remarks;' Raymond A. Bauer (Harvard U, Cambridge, Mass), 'Consumerism in Perspective;' John S. Coulson, 'A Response to Consumerists.' (4) ESTABLISHMENT ELITES IN A TIME OF CHANGE, Chairman: Robert E. Lee: Victor D. Beardsley, 'Local Leadership: Its Characteristics and Structure;' Ruth Clark, 'Top Corporate Leadership in a Time of Change.' (5) TRANSITIONS IN YOUTH CULTURE: A SPECULATIVE FRAMEWORK, Chairman: Luiz Simmons: Luiz Simmons, 'The Real Generation Gap: A Speculation on the Meaning and Implications of Youth Activism;' Elinor Luire (San Francisco Med Center, Calif), 'Son of the Silent Majority: Intergenerational Perceptions of Youthful Dissent;' David Gottlieb (Pennsylvania State U, University Park), 'Vista, Pepsi, and Poverty.' (8) PUBLIC OPINION RESEARCH IN A SOCIETY OF CHANGE AND CRISIS: A METHODOLOGICAL REVIEW, Chairman: Hope Klapper (New York U, NY) & Fred H. Goldner (Queens Coll, City U of New York), 'Public Opinion and Survey Research: A Poor Mix;' Eric Marder, 'The Five Stages of Survey Research.' (7) MOBILIZING PUBLIC OPINION, Chairman: Daniel Yankelovich: a Discussion between Yankelovich, Lowell Beck, & William Ruder. (8) THE SILENT MAJORITY AND SOCIAL ISSUES, Chairman: Mervin D. Field, 'Noisy Pluralism vs the Silent Majority;' William E. Bicker (U of California, Berkeley), 'Welfare-the Transition Issue;' Robert A. Levine, 'The Silent Majority: Neither Simple Nor Simple-Minded.' (9) PUBLIC OPINION RESEARCH AND THE MEDIA, Chairman: Herbert E. Krugman: Herbert E. Krugman, 'The Television Generation and the New Research Needs;' Scott Ward (Harvard U, Cambridge, Mass), 'Television Advertising and Children: Two Studies.' (10) PRE-ELECTION SURVEYS: HINDSIGHT AND OUTLOOK, Chairman: Sidney Hollander: Sidney Hollander, 'Implications of the 1970 British Fiasco;' Paul Perry, 'The Turnout Problem in Election Surveys;' Charles Kinsolving, 'Political Polling in a Primary: Sample Attrition and Turnout Prediction;' Lawrence Bown, Charles K. Atkin, Kenneth G. Sheinkopf, & Oguz B. Nayman (U of Wisconsin, Madison & Colorado State U, Fort Collins) 'How Voters React to Electronic Political Advertising: An Investigation of the 1970 Election Campaigns in Wisconsin and Colorado.' (11) HOW CAN THE PUBLIC OPINION PROFESSION AND COMMON CAUSE WORK TOGETHER? Chairman: Barbara Lee: A discussion exploring the role res'ers could play vs soc action org's. (12) THE DRUG SCENE: CURRENT RESEARCH, Chairman : Donald L. Kanter (U of Southern California, Los Angeles): Donald L. Kanter, 'Some Aspects of the Broadcast Anti-Drug Program;' David Checkman, 'A Review of Research on the Causes of Drug Abuse or How Not to Get Turned On;' Lawrence H. Geiger, 'Age, Reported Marijuana Use, and Belief in Some Assumed Negative Effects of the Drug;' Glen D. Mellinger, 'Psychotherapeutic Drug Use Among Adults: A Model for Young Drug Users?' Eric Josephson, Paul Haberman, & Anne Zanes (Columbia U, New York, NY), 'High School Drug Behavior: A Methodological Report.' (13) NEW DIREC- TIONS FOR SURVEY RESEARCH METHODS, Chairman: Ronald Gatty (City U of New York, NY): Ronald Gatty, 'New Directions for Survey Research Methods;' William Belson (London Sch of Econ's, England), 'New Perspectives on Traditional Forms of Survey Research and Analysis;' R. Richard Ritt (Pennsylvania State U, University Park), 'Drawing Actionable Inference from Survey Data.' (14) CHANGING IDEALS, VALUES AND BE- LIEFS, Chairman: Emanuel H. Demby, 'The Shock of Future Shock;' Stephen Pittel, 'The Shock Is Now;' George Harris, 'Psychology Today.' (15) SOCIAL RESEARCH TECHNIQUES IN DEFINING HEALTH PROBLEMS, Chairman: Raymond Fink: Raymond Fink, Sam Shapiro, & Conrad Rosenberg, 'Social Research Techniques in the Study of Poverty and Non-Poverty Groups in Multiphasic Health Testing;' Gerald Sparer & Louise Okada, 'Differential Patterns of Health Service Utilization by Poverty Levels in Eight Urban Neighborhoods;' Jorge Segovia & Jack Elinson (Columbia U, New York, NY) 'What Physicians Think about Physicians in Argentina.' (16) STUDENT AWARD PAPERS, Chairman: Harold H. Kassrjian (U of California, Los Angeles): 1st Prize: Marcus Felson (U of Michigan, Ann Arbor), 'The Social Basis of Political Protest: The Wallace Vote in Districts Outside the South;' 2nd Prize: Ted Bradshaw (U of California, Berkeley), 'The Robustness of Correlation in Survey Research: A Data Simulation.' (17) LUNCHEON ROUND TABLES, Chairman: William L. Nicholls II (U of California, Berkeley): Gene N. Levine (U of California, Los Angeles), 'Research on Ethnic and Racial Groups;' Karen E. Page (U of California, Davis), 'The Changing Role of Women in Society: Research in Progress and Prospect;' Thomas S. Robertson (U of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), 'Adolescent Consumer Socialization;' Joseph Zelan & Joseph Gusfield (U of California, Berkeley & U of California, San Diego), 'Equality and Authority in Higher Education: The Study of Student Power and Participation; Leo Crespi, 'Public Opinion and the Population Crisis;' Helen M. Crossley, 'Honesty with Respondents and Interviewers;' Matilda B. Paisley & William J. Paisley (Stanford U, Calif), 'Nonexperimental Causal Inference;' Francesco Nicosia (U of California, Berkeley), 'Buying Decision Processes by Consumers and Organizations.' Don Cahalan, ANNUAL ADVI- SORY AAPOR BUSINESS MEETING, concluded the convention. M. Maxfield.