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"As it investigates the European Union's legitimacy problems, this book shows how European integration is debated in the mass media, and how this affects democratic inclusiveness. Based on a wealth of unique data from seven European countries, it is a far-reaching, empirically grounded study on the Europeanization of media discourse and political contention"--Provided by publisher

In recent debates on "race" and "racism", a broad definition has emerged that encompasses phenotypic appearance as well as ethnicity and religion. In addition, the "intersectional" interactions between these different characteristics are a core element of this holistic concept of racism. On the basis of labor market and survey experiments, this article shows that such a concept of racism is not very helpful in understanding actual patterns of discrimination. Phenotype, ethnicity and religion each have independent effects on discrimination. Tendencies towards discrimination differ greatly between social and political groups and are not limited to the majority population. ; In jüngeren Diskussionen zu "Rasse" und "Rassismus" hat sich eine breite Definition durchgesetzt, die sowohl phänotypisches Aussehen als auch Ethnizität und Religion umfasst. Außerdem werden in dieser ganzheitlichen Rassismuskonzeption die "intersektionellen" Wechselwirkungen zwischen diesen verschiedenen Merkmalen betont. Auf der Grundlage eines Arbeitsmarktexperiments sowie eines Umfrageexperiments zeigt dieser Beitrag, dass ein solcher Rassismusbegriff wenig hilfreich ist, um tatsächliche Diskriminierungsmuster zu verstehen. Phänotyp, Ethnizität und Religion üben jeweils voneinander unabhängige Effekte auf Diskriminierung aus. Diskriminierungstendenzen unterscheiden sich stark zwischen sozialen und politischen Gruppen und sind nicht auf die Mehrheitsbevölkerung begrenzt.

"Closing borders is naive, the virus will come regardless" - this was the policy assumption that was repeatedly stated until mid-March by the WHO, the EU, as well as responsible authorities in Germany and other countries. Meanwhile, other states had started closing their borders to travellers from high-risk countries or to introduce mandatory quarantines. On 17 March, the EU did what it had previously argued against, and closed its borders to travellers from outside the EU and the Schengen Area. Germany, too, changed its line, and closed its borders to France, Switzerland, and Austria and on 18 March also to travellers from Italy. Who was right? Those who initially rejected travel restrictions as useless or those countries that decided to introduce them early on? Results from a global analysis of travel restrictions and cross-national differences in mortality rates as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that the belief that the spread of the virus could not be significantly slowed down by entry restrictions was fatally mistaken. The paper also shows that exposure of a country to international travel, as indicated by centrality in air travel networks and tourist numbers is strongly associated with higher COVID-19 mortality rates. By contrast, island states, which have lower exposure to international travel because of their lack of land borders, have much lower mortality. The results are robust across a wide variety of model specifications and controls, including domestic COVID-19 containment measures. The findings have important policy implications and suggest that in containing upcoming waves of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as similar pandemics in the future, the risks of exposure to international travel and the advantages of early travel restrictions should be given much greater weight. Among various types of travel restrictions, the findings suggest prioritizing targeted restrictions over global ones, and mandatory quarantines for travellers over entry bans. ; "Grenzen zu schließen ist naiv, das Virus wird trotzdem kommen" - das war die politische Annahme, die bis Mitte März wiederholt von der WHO, der EU sowie den zuständigen Behörden in Deutschland und anderen Ländern vertreten wurde. In der Zwischenzeit hatten andere Staaten begonnen, ihre Grenzen für Reisende aus Hochrisikoländern zu schließen oder obligatorische Quarantänen einzuführen. Am 17. März tat die EU das, wogegen sie zuvor argumentiert hatte, und schloss ihre Grenzen für Reisende von außerhalb der EU und des Schengen-Raums. Auch Deutschland änderte seine Linie und schloss seine Grenzen zu Frankreich, der Schweiz und Österreich und am 18. März auch für Reisende aus Italien. Wer hatte Recht? Diejenigen, die die Reisebeschränkungen zunächst als nutzlos ablehnten, oder die Länder, die sich frühzeitig zu ihrer Einführung entschlossen hatten? Die Ergebnisse einer globalen Analyse von Reisebeschränkungen und der internationalen Unterschiede in der Sterblichkeitsrate infolge der COVID-19-Pandemie legen den Schluss nahe, dass die Annahme, die Ausbreitung des Virus könne durch Einreisebeschränkungen nicht wesentlich verlangsamt werden, ein fataler Irrtum war. Das Papier zeigt auch, dass die Exposition eines Landes gegenüber dem internationalen Reiseverkehr, wie sie sich aus der Zentralität in Flugverkehrsnetzwerken und den Touristenzahlen ergibt, stark mit höheren COVID-19-Mortalitätsraten verbunden ist. Im Gegensatz dazu haben Inselstaaten, die aufgrund fehlender Landgrenzen dem internationalen Reiseverkehr weniger ausgesetzt sind, eine viel geringere Sterblichkeit. Die Ergebnisse sind für eine Vielzahl von Modellspezifikationen und Kontrollen, einschließlich inländischer COVID-19-Eindämmungsmaßnahmen, robust. Die Ergebnisse haben wichtige politische Implikationen und deuten darauf hin, dass bei der Eindämmung bevorstehender Wellen der COVID-19-Pandemie sowie ähnlicher Pandemien in der Zukunft den Risiken der Exposition gegenüber dem internationalen Reiseverkehr und den Vorteilen frühzeitiger Reisebeschränkungen viel größeres Gewicht beigemessen werden sollte. Unter den verschiedenen Arten von Reisebeschränkungen deuten die Ergebnisse darauf hin, dass gezielte Beschränkungen für Hochrisikoländer über globale Einschränkungen zu bevorzugen sind und dass obligatorische Quarantänen für Einreisende effizienter sind als Einreisebeschränkungen.

Hochmobile Weltbürger wurden zuerst angesteckt. Inzwischen trifft das Virus alle gleich - aber nicht alle gleich hart.

Minorities' claims for rights increasingly clash with majorities who wish to retain and defend "national" cultural and religious traditions. Debates around minarets in Switzerland, burqas in France, Saint Nicolas' companion "Black Pete" in the Netherlands, and about freedom of speech versus respect for minorities in several countries are cases in point. Such issues are highly salient and offer a major mobilization potential for populist parties. However, while publications about minority rights abound, the normative literature is remarkably silent on the issue of the normative legitimacy of rights claims by autochthonous cultural majorities. The reason for this negligence is the assumption that majorities can, by definition, impose their will by electoral force. But in the postwar rights regime in which protection for minority rights has proliferated, there are many situations in which parliamentary majorities have been trumped by court decisions or obligations derived from international treaties. Moreover, even if electoral majorities prevail, this does not solve the normative problem and leads to situations in which claims of minorities, legitimated by national and supranational minority protection norms, stand against majorities backed by the electoral power of numbers but lacking normative legitimacy. The paper argues that it is this dynamic of "right" versus "might" that is an important structural factor behind the rise of nationalist populism across Western countries. This confrontation has a tendency to polarize and to escalate, because there is no common normative ground on which the legitimacy and limits of majority rights claims can be negotiated. For one side in such debates, majorities have no legitimate right whatsoever to claim privileges for their language or culture over others, for the other side, this right is absolute because in the populist view democratic legitimacy is reduced to whatever the majority decides. A normative elaboration of the legitimacy and limits of cultural majority claims is necessary to escape from this confrontation that increasingly poisons the political debate in Western democracies. An additional reason to take cultural majority rights more strongly into consideration is that the idea that majority cultures are not in need of any special protection is less and less tenable. In a more and more globalized world where Anglo-Saxon culture has become the norm in many domains, the distinction between "dominant" and "minority cultures" can no longer be exclusively seen as applying to relationships within nation-states, but increasingly also applies to the unequal balance of power between the cultures of nation-states.