Suchergebnisse

To what extent do Euroskeptic parties in Eastern and Central Europe have viable alternatives to the European Union and the broad basket of liberal policies promoted by the EU? In recent years, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has used his overwhelming parliamentary majorities to chart a partially new course, and this article inventories one aspect of this new course. The article asks whether Hungary can gain any potential benefits from closer links to China as a partial replacement for resources that might not be available (or that might be lost) from its more conventional European partners to the west. Orbán has often justified both radical constitutional change and economic nationalism as powerful medicines to push back against Hungary's vulnerability at the hands of its foreign and domestic enemies. In this context, China emerged as both a potential source of new revenue and rhetorical trope that seemed to fit in a broader Fidesz discourse of an "Eastern opening." This article makes a first attempt to separate rhetoric and reality. It first explores how the ongoing consolidation of illiberalism in Hungary has now also sparked a geopolitical repositioning through the "Eastern opening" during Fidesz's second term. Second, it seeks to understand the theoretical proposition that new sources of external funding—including FDI and government bond purchases—can help enable a state to execute such a broad geopolitical shift. To do so, it develops empirical material from the fascinating Hungarian efforts to position themselves as a major beneficiary of Chinese engagement with Europe. The article concludes that Orbán's policies have indeed been broadly consistent with his party's new rhetoric, but it also concludes that the amount of Chinese investment is, in aggregate, still modest to date.

To what extent do Euroskeptic parties in Eastern and Central Europe have viable alternatives to the European Union and the broad basket of liberal policies promoted by the EU? In recent years, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has used his overwhelming parliamentary majorities to chart a partially new course, and this article inventories one aspect of this new course. The article asks whether Hungary can gain any potential benefits from closer links to China as a partial replacement for resources that might not be available (or that might be lost) from its more conventional European partners to the west. Orbán has often justified both radical constitutional change and economic nationalism as powerful medicines to push back against Hungary's vulnerability at the hands of its foreign and domestic enemies. In this context, China emerged as both a potential source of new revenue and rhetorical trope that seemed to fit in a broader Fidesz discourse of an "Eastern opening." This article makes a first attempt to separate rhetoric and reality. It first explores how the ongoing consolidation of illiberalism in Hungary has now also sparked a geopolitical repositioning through the "Eastern opening" during Fidesz's second term. Second, it seeks to understand the theoretical proposition that new sources of external funding—including FDI and government bond purchases—can help enable a state to execute such a broad geopolitical shift. To do so, it develops empirical material from the fascinating Hungarian efforts to position themselves as a major beneficiary of Chinese engagement with Europe. The article concludes that Orbán's policies have indeed been broadly consistent with his party's new rhetoric, but it also concludes that the amount of Chinese investment is, in aggregate, still modest to date.

By discussing the variety and variability of urban neoliberal governmentality and its limits in the semi-periphery of the advanced capitalist world, the article aims to explore the embeddedness of neoliberalism at the dawn of the new millennium. Cities that are increasingly becoming parts of the global economy, despite being on the periphery of advanced capitalism, host a myriad of diverse forms of neoliberal governmentality in terms of spatial change. Although responding with enthusiasm to the increasing mobility of capital and the internationalization of investments through gentrification plans, the current transformative efforts of Istanbul and Budapest under two conservative governments indicate, for instance, the re-invention of authoritarianism so that these cities serve the purposes of their national leaders. This development signals a hybrid form of governmentality that combines neoliberalism with illiberal logics and manifests similar processes in different locations despite disparities in scale, local needs and characteristics. The article further argues that since such urban transformations take place within the neo-conservative leaders' battles to acquire cultural and social capital, they create potential to make both metropolises the new rebel cities of Europe, albeit with divergent levels of resistance. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Starting from the empirical observation of high levels of absorption of EU cohesion funds but strikingly low levels of substantive change in regional cohesion, this essay offers a contextual analysis of regional development policies in Hungary. Based on theoretical frameworks dealing with Europeanisation, new regionalism and participative development, it explores the reasons for this observation by analysing the role of administrative and planning structures and of development discourses. The essay shows that the Europeanisation of regional development policy triggered several changes in the planning process and led to the partial inclusion of new actors. However, the main effect of this was a growing centralisation of development policy making. The essay explains this by pointing to the domestic political context and the historical foundations of regional development discourses of the conservative and leftist liberal parties. While there are overlaps between the discourses on both sides of the ideological divide, they are perceived as incompatible by political actors. Thus, it is argued that considerations of political power, rather than ideological nature, shape Hungarian regional and development policy and explain the incremental reform process. Adapted from the source document.

In this article we examine two research questions. The first is how states use their membership in international organizations to attain foreign policy goals, enhance their political visibility, exercise strategic influence in global political affairs, and obtain advantageous policy outcomes. Recently Turkey successfully sought to use international fora, such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the African Union (AU), with which Turkey has a strategic partnership, to launch initiatives with African states to galvanize action on policy matters of common concern among Turkey and African countries. It would be wrong, however, to claim that Turkey seeks a form of hegemony in Africa, as is widely stated about China, India, and other regional powers in the continent. Instead, following Sandra Destradi, we prefer to view Turkey's presence in Africa as an effort to involve African states in Turkey's pursuit of material gains by convincing those states of their shared values and goals with Turkey. Material gains consist broadly of economic advantages, such as increased trade opportunities and investment, as well as political visibility in global affairs. Economic advantages are easily demonstrable through trade figures, which we present. Political visibility can be qualified on a case-by-case basis, and we examine two such cases. The first is the role of Turkey in the Cotton Forum of the OIC since 2007; the second is Turkey's recent establishment of multilateral and bilateral relations with African states. Adapted from the source document.

Moral politics, neoliberal governmentality, and gender -- Discourse to emotion framework: how to read hutbes as data sources? -- How do public narratives serve for neoliberal governmentality? -- Manipulation, discipline and regulation: the discursive construction of expertise and social policy -- Deliberation, contestation, and the boundaries of neoliberal governmentality.

This article investigates the puzzle of the emergence of Turkish politicians' discourse on population stagnation and growth despite healthy population growth and an above-replacement-level birth rate. We understand this emergence through considering how politicians link national identity and economic value to population increase. Empirically, our article traces the slogans that then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan and the governing party politicians used to frame the "population issue" in Turkey from 2008 to 2013. Drawing from the Ajans Press database of over 5,000 newspaper articles, we selected 120 of the news items including politicians' slogans: the terms children, women, economy, family, morality, and birth. We grouped them in four clusters: youth/young couples, children, population control/ abortion, and prosperity. This allowed us to depict how politicians' slogans sustain the dimensions of population politics that we inductively generated. We show that the "three children" slogan of the current President Erdoǧan preceded and replaced population policy deliberations, and affected the public discursively. Thanks to a media that is only semi-free, this discourse has acquired an existence beyond the context where it was initially expressed. We argue that the norms embedded in political discourse and circulated for public deliberation generate the discursive governance of population politics. Thereby, politicians advance governance even without introducing major policy changes.