Suchergebnisse

"The main purpose of this introductory chapter is to give an initial systematic overview of the information that is treated in the individual country studies. The authors do not attempt to anticipate the exhaustive comparative analysis now made possible by the free availability of relevant historical data on elections and electoral systems in Europe. In contrast to many publications on European elections and parties, where the East and the West are treated separately, and small and so-called micro states are often ignored, Elections in Europe comprise all European countries, from Albania to Vatican City, irrespective of their individual size, in alphabetical order. They do not deny that a grouping of 45 European states would have made sense. Among comparative scholars, a subregional approach is widespread. For example, Southern European countries are regularly treated as a distinct group-or area with common features; the same goes for the Central and Eastern European countries. Especially for comparative research, political scientists would certainly find some more criteria to systematize the large set of countries: regime type (authoritarian, democratic), state structure (centralist, federalist), form of government (parliamentarism, presidentialism), type of democracy (majoritarian, consensus), level of development (agrarian, industrialist), etc. For systematic reasons, the authors preferred an alphabetical order." (excerpt)

This chapter examines regional & domestic cleavages that have occurred as a result of responses to the Bush strategy of preventive war. The types of responses -- support, resistance, & internationalism -- are explored to assess the future of international relations. Tables. D. Miller

"The issue of a European identity is at the heart of the scholarly debate an the future of a European democracy. This chapter aims to contribute to this debate by examining the nature of multiple identities in Europe today. To understand the nature and development of a collective European identity, it is important to examine existing European identity patterns empirically and to consider the conditions under which different identities are evoked in social and political processes. Using data from the European Value Survey and the Eurobarometer surveys, this chapter seeks to provide an answer to the following questions: do people hold exclusive or nested geographical identities? How do supranational institutions shape people's beliefs about who they are and to which communities they belong? This comparative study of identities reveals that most people hold multiple and complementary identities, but that important variations exist between countries. Moreover, the empirical findings indicate that political institutions influence the development and nature of identity patterns in Europe." (author's abstract)

"The concept of resentment is inherently linked to the cultural criticism of Europe and the West. By way of this cultural criticism and affirmative reaction to it, the syndromes of resentment are widespread in non-European cultures. Thus resentment is also linked to the often diverse multiple formulations of the cultural programs of modernity. The conventional usage of the term would suggest that resentment means a sort of envy of the socially and culturally deprived or a psychological reactive attitude of the unjustly treated who are - morally or factually - deprived to act for revenge and justice. However, in Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, we are informed that Christian altruism and generalised morals of love produce a sort of self-distancing disinterestedness, a general value orientation which in itself remains non-interested in the fate of values in general and in the fate of the other in specific. For Nietzsche, it were priests and other office holders who with their own distancing attitude were - in the process of civilizational constitution of Europe - strongly involved in featuring the general laws of the 'morality of resentment' (i. e. the religious and intellectual formulations of restraint against immediate revengeful action) and in making it the most ambiguous and powerful cultural tool ('Kulturwerkzeug') in the construction of modernity. Since Max Weber the social philosophy of modernity and modernization was - in an affirmative turn - to a large extent engaged in developing science and rationality, as non-resentful components of modern self-construction, professionalism and individualism. The point is that the constitution and reconstitution of the cultural and institutional programs of modernity are as a whole fossils of the inherent struggle to come to grips with 'resentment' and the challenges of the cultural criticism of modernity. Moreover, and following this statement, the essential point is that modern dialogue - in as far as it is determined by the logic to overcome or even to suppress the 'Kulturkritik' on which it was originally built - remains at large inapt to understand the constitution and reconstitution of the non-modern, the non-European and the non-western in contemporary cross-civilizational exchange. I will develop this line of argument by looking closer to the conditions and potentials of dialogue between Muslims and Europeans in the contemporary scene which is so strongly marked by the 'resurgence' of religion and the new modes in which religious components enter or are re-entering today the cultural and political arenas of modernity." (author's abstract)