Suchergebnisse

At the annual session in Edinburgh in 2004, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly called on the High Commissioner on National Minorities to 'initiate a comparative study of the integration policies of established democracies & analyse the effect on the position of new minorities'. The High Commissioner followed up this request, & asked the Migration Policy Group (hereafter MPG) to draft a paper. The present article ~analyses the difference between 'old' & 'new' minorities & the ensuing consequences. Secondly, the difficulty of combining the concepts of integration & diversity, as follows also from the MPG report, are addressed. Lastly, the role of the High Commissioner with regard to issues pertaining to 'new' minorities is examined. The article concludes, among other things, that it would be recommendable to bring together a group of experts from different fields who would be entrusted with the task of drafting specific guidelines or recommendations (following the earlier practice of the High Commissioner's Office to initiate the drafting of thematic recommendations) on how to combine the concepts of integration & diversity resulting in concrete policy measures or instruments, taking into account the needs of governments, as well as the majority & minority groups (thereby also addressing justifiable differences between 'old' & 'new' minorities). Adapted from the source document.

"Advancing arguments from his earlier book, Blacks, Medical Schools, and Society, Curtis evaluates the outcomes of affirmative action efforts over the past thirty years. He describes formidable barriers to minority access to medical-education opportunities and the resulting problems faced by minority patients in receiving medical treatment. His progress report includes a review of two thousand minority students admitted to U.S. medical schools in 1969, following them through graduation and their careers and comparing them with two thousand of their nonminority peers. These samples provide an important look at medical schools that, while heralding dramatic progress in physician education and training opportunity, indicates much room for further improvement."--Jacket

Abstract
Constitutional courts are portrayed as counter-majoritarian institutions empowered to strike down ordinary legislation that is inconsistent with the constitution. This power is to be used sparingly, since it is seen as being in tension with basic democratic principles. Judicial review in these circumstances should be limited to minority rights protection and the enforcement of structural limitations that prevent majority rule excess. But this is only half the story. Depending on the democratic credentials of the particular constitution, courts that strike down legislation as inconsistent with the constitution can also be said to be engaging in majoritarian action. The characterization of constitutional courts as counter-majoritarian institutions is premised on: (1) the status of ordinary legislation as the quintessential majoritarian instrument, (2) the un-elected nature of judges, (3) a narrow understanding of the concept of the 'negative legislator', and (4) the democratic deficit that results when judges impose their views over those enacted by parliament. This Article challenges these assumptions. First, this Article demonstrates that ordinary statutes adopted by elected legislatures are not necessarily the superior articulation of popular will. On the contrary, the democratization of modern constitution-making allows the constitution to acquire ultimate majoritarian status. Because of popular skepticism about the ability of ordinary politics to adequately reflect society's views on important substantive policy matters, the People have repeatedly decided to bypass the legislative process and directly entrench these policy views in the constitutional text. As a result, it is the constitution that embodies popular will. Second, this Article dissects the so-called counter-majoritarian difficulty, in order to distinguish between illegitimate counter-majoritarian review and legitimate counter-majoritarian review. The former occurs when the constitutional court substitutes the legislature's policy views with its own, thus generating an impermissible democratic deficit. The latter occurs when the constitutional court invalidates ordinary legislation that violates minority rights or exceeds the structural limits imposed by the constitution. In both instances, counter-majoritarian intervention is warranted, precisely, to make sure that democratic self-government through ordinary politics can be adequately carried out. Third, this Article suggest the existence of a third class of judicial review: legitimate majoritarian review. This is when a constitutional court invalidates ordinary statutes because the legislature attempted to substitute the will of the constitutional drafters with their own. In other words, in instances when the legislative body carries out an anti-majoritarian act by ignoring the policy choices made by the People and entrenched in the constitutional text. When a court strikes down legislation of this sort, it is actually re-establishing majoritarian self-rule by making sure that the constitution's policy commands are respected. In that sense, the court is not exercising independent judgment. Instead, it becomes the enforcement instrument of the majoritarian constitution to avoid legislative usurpation. This makes the un-elected nature of courts an almost irrelevant factor. Finally, this Article explores how the majoritarian potential of judicial review on constitutional matters interacts with the 'negative legislator' role of constitutional courts. In particular, how the 'negative legislator' should not be characterized, necessarily, as a limited one.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. "All human beings have unlimited potential, unlimited capacity, unlimited creative energy" -- 2. "Minority rights are a part of human rights" -- 3. "We can have faster economic growth if we reduce inequality" -- 4. "If you make consistent, gradual changes, they can add up to something enormous" -- 5. "The new order is being born, but the old order is still strong" -- 6. "This is not Planet Earth; it's Planet Ocean" -- 7. "We need to become a planet of gardeners . . . to make our cities function as integral parts of nature" -- 8. "We are all interdependent on this earth" -- 9. "Think communally" -- 10. "Recognize the structural crisis of the world-system" -- 11. "Re-create the social state" -- 12. "Create global social policy" -- 13. "Understand that power is diffuse and change is constant" -- 14. "People want and need solidarity and social reproduction" -- 15. "It is increasingly difficult to anticipate the future of democracy by looking back at its past" -- 16. "Genuine dialogue requires not only talking but a great deal of listening" -- 17. "People who want to change things must keep pushing for change" -- 18. "Capitalism as a mode of power" -- 19. "The best approach to economic development is pragmatism" -- 20. "Developing countries can bring in advanced technology and actively catch up with developed countries" -- 21. "Because the Chinese growth model became so successful in ensuring catch-up development it has become extremely appealing in the developing world" -- 22. "Developing countries are in an unprecedentedly strong position in the world economy" -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Contributors -- Index

Introduction. The article considers the processes of resettlement of the Mennonites in the Black Sea region in the 19th century and solving the land issue which is closely connected with it.

Methods and materials. The archival documents of funds of the State archive of the Republic of Crimea and published materials from collections, first of all the acts devoted to the issue of foreign colonization in the Russian Empire formed the source base of the research. The general historical principles of historicism and objectivity and also specific methods are the methodological basis of the research: historical and comparative, historical and genetic, historical and system methods.

Analysis. The analysis of the colonization legislation concerning foreign immigrants shows high interest of the government in involving the Mennonites to settling of Novorossiysk region. The land issue was resolved differently: till the 1840s all lands were given to the Mennonites to "eternal" possession of the whole colony, without the right of alienation to third parties; also because of the shortage of free state lands the colonists were granted the permission to buy lands; the government also bought comfortable lands to treasury for its distribution among the Mennonites.

Results. The authors underline the following features of land management in Mennonite settlements: land plots were distributed by household and family, without splitting (sixty five tithes per family); there was a minority right, which led to an increase in the number of landless. In the second half of the 19th century resettlement of the Mennonites went due to the land purchase or long-term rent with the subsequent repayment, land plots began to be split.

SRI, socially responsible investing, has its roots in a so-called financial 'ethics', whose precursors were in the eighteenth century the Quakers in the United States. For these great merchants, it was important to adopt a coherent attitude between doing business and personal ethics. Later, in the early twentieth century, a new social order articulated around the moralization of customs mobilizes Americans socially responsible investors. This is the age of the crusades against alcohol and tobacco. In 1928 is launched the Pioneer Fund, the first fund that filters the famous 'sin stocks' ('sin stocks') of the investment universe. In the 1960s, the US civil rights movement, on the bottom of the Vietnam War and racial tensions, changed the concept of SRI. The exclusions from the scope is gradually spreading to other, often linked to political activities such themes minority rights and ecology. The years 1969-1971 constitute a turning point and see the advent of the modern form of SRI. Social shareholder activism is born thanks to the action of Ralph Nader, a lawyer who tackles General Motors. In 1971, the first fund focused on the exclusion of weapons-related values and apartheid was born. The Brundtland Report (1987) and the first Earth Summit (Rio, 1992) contribute to strengthening the development of the SRI concept in a broader sense and more secular. SRI becomes a tool to contribute to sustainable development of society by taking into account both the Environmental dimensions, social and good governance (ESG). Today, it is often preferred to speak also of 'IDR' Sustainable and Responsible Investment SRI that, although in France the term is spent. Adapted from the source document.

1\. Introduction 5 2\. Overview of the Literature 7 2.1 Credible EU Conditionality 7 2.2 Liberal Ruling Parties (or Low Political Compliance Costs) 10 3\. Data and Argument 11 3.1 Measurement of Conditionality 11 3.2 Measurement of Compliance 14 3.3 AKP's Political Identity Reconsidered 15 3.4 Argument on AKP's Compliance Trends 21 4\. Conclusion 26 Literature 27 Appendix 30 ; What explains the EU compliance of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)? Since it came to power in 2002, AKP has launched legislative reforms in order to meet the European Union's political membership criteria (i.e., democracy, rule of law, human rights and minority rights). These reforms are puzzling since they happened in the absence of the two conditions of compliance argued in the literature: (1) credible EU political conditionality, (2) liberal ruling parties in EU candidate states. I argue that AKP's pro-EU reform agenda is explained by neither a belief in the possibility of membership via democratization (credible conditionality) nor liberal political identity. Rather, democratic measures under AKP are instrumentally induced. Two broad political motivations have guided AKP's reform commitment: (1) the electoral incentive to please Turkey's pro-EU membership electorate as well as AKP's conservative/religious constituency eager to see freedom of religion expanded under EU conditionality, (2) the motive to use reforms to weaken domestic secular forces (i.e. the military and high courts) and "survive" as a party with Islamist roots in Turkey's secular political system. The paper supports the argument with evidence gathered from original coding data for both conditionality and compliance as well as process-tracing.

Abstract
This article analyses the development of national legislation in the field of language and minority-related policies and the subsequent public discussions in Latvia and Ukraine in 2018–2020. During this period, major reforms in the sphere of language policy and the protection of national minorities' rights were initiated in both countries. The analysis of these initiatives shows that despite somewhat different ways of implementing 'nationalizing' practices in Latvia and Ukraine since the restoration of their independence in 1991, the overall trend suggests that the trajectories of the development of the state language and minorities' policy are increasingly converging in the two countries. The central focus of this article concerns the amendments to education laws and the subsequent appeals to the Constitutional Court of Latvia in 2018–2020 and the adoption of the Law "On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language" in 2019, which have had a considerable impact on the development of minority-related policy.

Abstract
In the mid-1940s, Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press developed a proposal for Fisk University sociologist Charles S. Johnson to write a weekly column for daily newspapers. Had the plan succeeded as they imagined, Johnson's column, titled "A Minority View," would have integrated the opinion pages of the white press. This paper documents the three-year history of the column, which had the indirect backing of the General Education Board, a Rockefeller-endowed philanthropy.

What kind of country are we talking about when we speak of Poland from the perspective of the organized Jewish political leadership in Poland? What should the scope and characteristics of the new Polish state in their view be? What kind of relations should Poland have with neighbouring states, as well as within, among its various populations and societies? The paper explores the changing answers given by different political Jewish leadership in a period of liminality – the interval between two stages and two distinct situations: the imperial order (Austrian and Russian) and the Polish national state. It examines Galicia and the Congress Poland from 1914 to 1918 when the territory was disputed among different empires and nations and its fate was far from clear.
The article claims that the different visions of Poland presented by the Jewish leadership were grounded in two assumptions. The first was that the Jews as an integral part of society were legitimately entitled to express their own vision of the future state, the second – that the Jews, as an integral part of society, were entitled to equality on all levels of social life. That is the reason, the article claims, behind the demands for a fair distribution of the state's resources regardless the mother tongue, religion, or ethno-national identification. The efforts the leaders of the Polish Jewry made to include the Jews as a minority group equal to others in the Polish state took place in the framework of the ethno-national ethos as the constitutive principle of state-building. The changing political circumstances and the growing hegemonic discourse based on the nation and nationality brought, claims the article, to the raising of a new Jewish national leadership during World War I. This leadership became convinced that, in the light of the discriminatory policies and growing anti-Jewish violence, only a mechanism of minority rights could guarantee Jewish existence in Poland.

Disintegration of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the creation of new ethno-national states, armed conflicts and "ethnic cleansing", mass ethnocentric migrations of the population, as well as some socio-economic factors led to significant changes in the demographic and ethnic map of Serbia. Migrations of the population, voluntary of forced represent a phenomenon which by its range, intensity and characteristics undoubtedly marked the last decade of the 20th century. Having in mind their number and national structure (mainly Serbs), refugee migrations, as a specific aspect of migration movements, caused by the political and social circumstances, dominantly influenced the change of ethnic picture of Serbia towards homogenization and majorization of the population. In addition to this factor, changes when declaring one's national affiliation, both in the case of ethnic revivalism and ethnic mimicry, significantly determined population dynamics of particular nations, that is their position in the ethnic map of Srbia. Thus the data from the last census in 2002 indicate that - precisely due to the effect of the subjective factor - there appeared the increase in the number and share of some nationalities (the Roma, the Wallachians.), that is the significant decrease in some other (the Yugoslavs, the Montenegrins.) in the total population of Serbia. As a result of the mentioned, but also of many other historical, sociocultural and political factors, Serbia today represents a multiethnic multi-confessional and multicultural state in which - beside the majority nation - there also live numerous national minorities pronouncedly differentiated according to the demographic, socio-economic, religious and cultural characteristics. Therefore, the minority issue is undoubtedly of crucial significance, because good inter-ethnic relations, that is respect of the minority rights on the one hand, but also the loyalty of national minorities to the country in which they live on the other, are necessary for stability, peace and democratic development of every state.

Immigration policies are of great significance for minority nations, like the Basque Country. Basque nationalism is inclusive and civic; through regional institutions, it has created an informal citizenship with a strong social foundation. This regional citizenship, despite some limitations on regional powers, embraces immigrants by offering social rights to all in order to promote integration in a Basque nation in which identities are not clearly defined. From a technical and legal perspective, there is no specific or separate regional citizenship that could be created by regional institutions in the Basque Country. From a political perspective, however, the principle of inclusive citizenship incorporated by regional policies has played a significant role in the integration process. This trend is similar to the situation in Scotland although it differs slightly from the cases of Catalonia and Quebec, nations in which language is a strong marker of identity.