The ICC,Peacekeepers And Resolution 1422: Will The Court Defer To The Council?

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Mainstreaming of Racist Anti-Roma Discourses in the Media in Hungary

The article focuses on the rise and spread of racist language in public debate in Hungary. It investigates how radical right discourses—that is, the relegitimating of the racist idea of “Gypsy crime”—have been transmitted by the mainstream media thus contributing to the decline of a short-lived political correctness in Hungary. The analysis explores how racism has become more and more accepted and how the mainstream has embraced the radical right's propositions, turning them into a “digestible” rhetoric while “breaking the taboos” of antiracism.     

Is transition experience enough? The donor-side effectiveness of Czech and Polish democracy aid to Georgia

The article examines the democracy aid practices of the Czech Republic and Poland in Georgia. These two countries have recently emerged as promoters of democracy, and have argued that their own transition experience puts them in a unique position to support democratization and the consolidation of democracy in the European Union’s eastern neighbourhood. The article evaluates how these two countries provide democracy aid to Georgia along three criteria, derived from the aid effectiveness literature: supporting locally driven change, learning from results, and coordination. The results indicate that both countries have plenty of space to improve the way their democracy aid is delivered. Neither country has formal systems in place to ensure that they actually support Georgian priorities; evaluations are ad hoc and feedback loops missing; and there is significant scope to improve coordination with other donors. Nonetheless, there seems to be a general perception among stakeholders that the democracy aid provided by the Czech Republic and Poland is relevant to Georgia’s needs.     

Spatializing the future: financial expectations,EU convergence and the Eastern European Forex mortgage crisis

Existing accounts of failure to predict the financial crisis focus on the complexity of the financial system, and are less useful for understanding crises in non-securitized markets. We examine the roots of optimism leading up to the Eastern European mortgage crisis through the case of Hungary, and use recent theories of expectations, which understand them as both pragmatic and fictional practices that commonly incorporate narratives. Based on archival research and interviews with bankers, regulators and legislators, we demonstrate how the EU convergence narrative was central in forming optimistic expectations. Fusing the underspecified convergence process with an orientalist geographical imaginary, this narrative and its associated measures translated growing indebtedness as ‘catching up’ with Europe, de-emphasized exchange rate risk through a belief in European convergence and precluded crisis scenarios originating in the European Union. Our findings contribute to theories of how economic expectations are formed, stabilized and maintained by developing the concept of ‘spatializing the future’, denoting practices that handle uncertainty by charting the future as movement in concrete geographical or abstract space, along externally verifiable pathways.     

Hungary's punitive turn: The shift from welfare to workfare

The Hungarian post-communist welfare state was created under the neoliberal influence of international organisations while retaining lots of elements of solidarity. The growing social tensions in the mid-2000s due to a second economic crisis in the new millennium led first the left then the right wing governments to shift the post-communist welfare state into a punitive type of workfare system. The article concludes that the political populism of the mid-2000s leading to an undemocratic governance by the 2010s better explains this paradigm shift than – as many authors argue - the neoliberal influence frame.     

Y-chromosome STR haplotype in Szekely population

Eight Y-chromosome STR markers (DYS19, DYS389/I, DYS389/II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393, DYS385) were examined in an isolated Szekely (known as old Hungarian) population living in Corund, Romania. Ninety different haplotypes were obtained from 99 unrelated Szekely males.     

Accountability or Countability? Performance Measurement in the New Zealand Public Service, 1992–2002

This article examines how output classes and performance indicators have changed between 1992 and 2002 in five selected departments of the New Zealand Public Service. Process, output and largely artificial service quality performance measures have crowded out outcome, efficiency and effectiveness indicators, across the board. Both output classes and performance indicators have been highly labile, though the reasons for this remain speculative in the meantime. The New Zealand state sector is currently implementing a ‘managing for outcomes’ strategy, intended to overcome too strong a preoccupation with the production of outputs. However, because output classes remain the key feature of the Public Finance Act 1989 the means of ensuring and demonstrating policy effectiveness must be more broadly based than a reliance on the countability of organisational output classes and performance measures.