Cooperative justice and English as a lingua franca: the tension between optimism and Anglophones free riding

In Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World, Philippe Van Parijs proposes three principles of linguistic justice. The first one applies to the fair conditions of the creation of a lingua franca understood as a common good enabling global communication. According to Van Parijs, the actual situation is unfair. The benefits are distributed evenly among speakers mastering English, but the costs are born entirely by those investing resources in learning English as a second language. I want to challenge this argument and point to a dilemma in Van Parijs’ proposition. He can either accept that English as global lingua franca (EGLF) is a done deal such that only ‘‘apocalyptical events’’ could prevent English from becoming the first global lingua franca, in which case he will have to make peace with the fact that Anglophones can enjoy the benefits this produces without having to make any kind of contribution. Or, he can temper his optimism, find reasons why natural interactions could fail at producing EGLF so as to convince native Anglophones that without their contribution, without some form of an investment in the creation of EGLF, it will not happen, or at least, it will not happen in a way that is maximally beneficial to them. I propose some arguments pointing to some benefits that would only be accessible to native Anglophones through cooperation and therefore through contributing to the creation of EGLF. Without such an argument, native Anglophones are free to benefit from the impressive by-product of the decisions to learn English of all those interested to improve their social and economic prospects: a global lingua franca.     

Progressive Responses to Populism: A Polanyian Critique of Liberal Discourse

This article explores the recent rise of populist politics from the perspective of Karl Polanyi's theory of the ‘double movement’. It firstly introduces Polanyi's understanding of interwar populism, and relates this to his broader critique of liberal economic thought. This framework is then used to analyse three prominent explanations for populism which emerged in the wake of the UK's 2016 EU referendum: globalisation; cultural reaction; and social media. I show how each of these explanations exogenises contemporary populist movements, narrating them as something external to the liberal economic restructuring pursued globally since the 1980s. Failing to diagnose adequately the causes of contemporary populist movements, which lie in this utopian attempt to treat labour as a commodity, they cannot support an intellectually coherent progressive response to Brexit. Finally, I outline a political agenda centred on labour de‐commodification, which could directly address populist grievances and reclaim the discourse of ‘taking back control’ for the left.     

Connecting Intelligence and Theory: Intelligence Liaison and International Relations

Intelligence liaison increased exponentially during the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Today it continues as the most significant dimension of intelligence, including impacting on accountability and oversight considerations. Nevertheless, the intelligence liaison phenomenon remains largely under-studied and substantially under-theorized. In this article, preliminary suggestions are offered concerning how this dearth of theory can be addressed. Firstly, the relevance of international relations theory and other bodies of theory, together with significant approaches concerning how international relations – extending to how intelligence and intelligence-related phenomena (such as, in this article, intelligence co-operation) – can be studied, are explored. These theories, and equally, approaches, are arguably most appropriate when deployed in an arrangement of ‘complex co-existence plurality’ across the different interrelated levels of experience and analysis, and they offer more effective explanations when intelligence liaison is disaggregated into at least eight systemic attributes or variables. More broadly, the suggestion that international relations theory, and indeed theory generally, is ‘irrelevant’ to intelligence studies is simultaneously challenged.     

The Key Role of Selbstgefühl in Philosophy's Aesthetic and Historical Turns

Abstract

In Selbstgefühl, Manfred Frank provides a detailed study of the eighteenth century origins and contemporary philosophical implications of a unique kind of direct self-awareness. The growing significance of this phenomenon is closely related to three interconnected developments in modern philosophy, which I describe as the ‘subjective turn’, the ‘aesthetic turn’, and the ‘historical turn’. While following Frank in emphasising key concepts in the first of these two turns, I add a stress on the historical turn in post-Kantian philosophical writing.     

The Quiet Revolution? The Labour Party and Welfare Conditionality

Labour's 2017 general election manifesto contained a pledge to ‘end the punitive sanctions regime’ in the British welfare state. Whilst the specific implications of this pledge were not elaborated, such a policy would nevertheless constitute a profound break with a welfare consensus spanning over twenty years. The depth of the suggested changes on welfare are also evident in the scale of reform proposed to disability benefits, as well as plans—confirmed in August 2018 by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell—to pilot universal basic income. Collectively, these policies would seemingly be deeply at odds with public opinion on the benefits system, which over the course of the last two decades has significantly hardened. Yet despite the seemingly radical and controversial nature of the policy, it received very little media or public attention during the election campaign. This article explores Labour's ‘quiet revolution’ on welfare, examining whether Labour's new welfare approach is indeed a bold attempt to reshape public opinion on welfare or, alternatively, a mostly pragmatic reaction to changing social attitudes. The argument presented is that whilst there are persuasive explanations that Labour is responding to a change in the public mood, there is also evidence of a more ambitious goal at stake: the aim of reshaping, not simply responding to, public opinion on the welfare state.     

‘New dissidents are but old Provisionals writ large’? The Dynamics of Dissident Republicanism in the New Northern Ireland

This article discusses recent developments in dissident Irish republicanism and some of the arguments advanced to explain its emergence as a factor in Northern Irish politics. In particular it considers those explanations which define these new armed groups as either the latest manifestation of a historically determined Irish republican tradition or simply as ‘residual terrorist groups’ left behind by Provisional republicanism's movement into the constitutional mainstream in the 1990s. It rejects these arguments as ahistorical and schematic, and instead suggests that the dynamics and trajectory of dissident republicanism are shaped instead by the inherent tensions and structures of ‘the new Northern Ireland’. It goes on to compare the contemporary political, social and economic forces that produce the dissidents with the conditions that created the Provisionals as in the early 1970s and concludes that whilst these new groups will continue to pose a threat to the ‘normalization’ of the new dispensation they will not be successful as their republican forebears in mobilizing a significant and sustained challenge to the Northern Irish state.     

The new institutionalism and the study of the European union: The case of the social dialogue

This article applies new institutionalist perspectives on institutional change to the inclusion in the Maastricht Treaty of social dialogue provisions giving the social partners the right to participate in social policy‐making. It concludes that the new institutionalism cannot explain institutional change. By relying on exogenous variables such as ‘critical junctures’, ‘leadership’ or ‘ideas’, new institutionalist analyses resort to a collection of explanations that proponents of almost any theoretical perspective could use. The new institutionalisin's failure to develop an institutionalist account of change is a serious weakness that brings into question its use as an analytical tool in EU studies.     

Political Marketing

Abstract

This paper examines the emerging practices and literature of what has been termed ‘political marketing.’ It attempts, through an investigation of underlying theoretical frameworks, to shed light on the impact and implications of this ‘new’ phenomenon. Specifically, it examines whether the above mentioned practices can rightfully be seen as transforming political parties into professional market-oriented organizations, as has been claimed in some recent academic studies. It does so by introducing and examining an increasingly strong-positioned marketing paradigm, services/relationship marketing. This paradigm's focus on the organizational perspective of marketing is discussed as is its applicability to analysis of politics and democracy. Furthermore the paper links this discussion to the wider concern over the ‘crisis in democracy’ resulting from a decline in civic engagement, decreasing voter turnouts and declining party-membership.     

Under Construction: ESDP and the ‘Fight Against Organized Crime’

Abstract

This essay discusses the phenomenon of ‘organized crime’ as a matter for EU foreign and security policy. Primarily aimed at searching for conceptual guidance, it draws on literature on criminology and policing, presenting two different theoretical perspectives for analyzing the phenomenon of ‘organized-crime fighting’, a utilitarian and a critical one. Against this backdrop, the essay discusses how ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy) has developed and engaged the issue of organized crime. Specifically, it outlines the character of ESDP as a mechanism for ‘civilian crisis management’ and illustrates its ‘working’ through the case of the EU's police mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUPM) by placing it in the two different theoretical frames. Deciding in favour of a social constructivist approach, the essay concludes by suggesting that a successful strategy must focus on the dissemination of the EU's understanding of ‘organized crime’ abroad.     

The selling of the President 2004: a marketing perspective

• George W. Bush won the 2004 US Presidential election despite the facts of one thousand people losing their life in the Iraq war, the highest rate of increase in unemployment in 70 years and a vitriolic propaganda campaign (Michael Moore, etc.) against him. This case study seeks to explain the success through the prism of marketing theory and conceptual structures, that is, that the Bush team had a superior communications strategy and, within those parameters, superior marketing elements. Thus we seek to surface and integrate a number of causal explanations for his victory that arose from a political marketing orientation, specifically the offer of a ‘coherent narrative’; the conduct of a ‘permanent campaign’; more effective negative advertising (especially by pro‐Bush 527 groups), targeting and packaging; the success of the late campaign ‘big tent’ ploy. None of this however seeks to exclude the more purely political explanations for his success (located in such phenomena as the mobilization of the ‘Christian Right’ and the continuity to the aura attached to the ‘911 President’); nor is the application of marketing thought to political contexts treated uncritically.
• A further aim is to introduce political marketing modes of analysis to a political science audience—not to present them as a new ‘correctness’, for they are certainly vulnerable to challenge, but rather to precipitate more of an intellectual exchange between these two disciplines.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Islamism,secularization, secularity: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a phenomenon of a secular age

The paper outlines parallels between the processes of secularization and secularity in the West, as interpreted by José Casanova and Charles Taylor, and Islamism as a modern social and political phenomenon. It focuses on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s history and ideas and specifically on a number of public documents detailing its social and political vision. I argue that if we define ‘secularization’ not only as the weakening of religious belief, but as the institutional differentiation of modern state structures and the marginalization of religion, and ‘secularity’ as the process whereby faith becomes one option among others and religion becomes an identifiable set of beliefs seen as guidelines for reform, the Brotherhood, similarly to other Islamist entities, is a phenomenon of a ‘secular age’.     

The Strength of Far-Right AfD in Eastern Germany: The East-West Divide and the Multiple Causes behind ‘Populism’

This article sheds light on one of the key developments in recent German politics and relates it to the broader debate on the electoral success of the far right. The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) is also a story about Germany’s internal political divide three decades after reunification, as the party has roughly twice as much support in the east than in the west. The article analyses the country’s east-west divide, strongly visible in widespread sentiments of societal marginalisation among eastern Germans. The key socio-structural differences between the east and the west relate to matters of economics, migration, and representation—and provide a setting suitable to AfD strength in the east. In explaining the party’s electoral success in eastern Germany, the article echoes recent scholarship which rejects narrow explanations for the strength of ‘populism’, and instead highlights its multiple causes.     

Tensions in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Musolff's study applies methods of cognitive metaphor analysis to Hitler's antisemitic imagery in Mein Kampf, especially to the conceptualization of the German nation as a (human) body that had to be cured from a deadly disease caused by Jewish parasites. The relevant expressions from the conceptual domains of biological and medical categories form a partly narrative, partly inferential-argumentative source ‘scenario’, which centred on a notion of blood poisoning that was understood in three ways: a) as a supposedly real act of blood defilement, i.e. rape; b) as a part of the source scenario of illness-cure; and c) as an allegorical element of an apocalyptic narrative of a devilish conspiracy against the ‘grand design of the creator’. The conceptual differences of source and target levels were thus short-circuited to form a belief-system that was no longer open to criticism. The results cast new light on central topics of Holocaust research, such as the debates between more ‘intentionalist’ and more ‘functionalist’ explanations of the origins of the Holocaust, and the question of how the Nazi metaphor system helped gradually to ‘initiate’ wider parts of the German populace into the implications of the illness-cure scenario as a blueprint for genocide. The Nazi antisemitic metaphor system thus provides a unique example of the cognitive forces that can be unleashed in the service of racist stigmatization and dehumanization.     

The ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Political Economy of Hedge Fund Regulation in the European Union

The traditional literature on interest group behaviour presumes that private interests develop lobbying strategies based on the principle of effective allocation of resources. However, nearly 400 private interest groups actively lobby the Council of Europe, a classical intergovernmental organisation with weak decision-making powers, where no significant policy pay-off is expected to occur. This analysis aims to explain the seeming puzzle of private interest groups seeking to influence an institution which is generally perceived as having no strong decision-making powers in European political space. It does so by exploring three explanations from the existing literature, namely ‘policy overlap’, ‘venue shopping’ and ‘epistemic community’, and considers another explanation not hitherto fully developed, suggesting that the ‘ideological motivation’ of interest groups helps to explain their behaviour. Taking the ideological motivation of interest groups into account when analysing lobbying strategies can in fact shed light on certain lobbying preferences that would otherwise appear to defy the logic of interest representation. This paper therefore suggests that an ‘ideological motivation’ explanation potentially plays a crucial role in the analysis of the behaviour of any interest group.     

Government growth in the twenty-first century

Public choice explanations of government growth fall into three main categories: budget-maximization theories, rational-choice models, and path-dependent models like the “ratchet hypothesis”. The strengths and weaknesses of these theories as explanations for government growth are considered along with some facts about the actual growth of government to conjecture about its trajectory in the twenty-first century. Government size seems to have been constrained in the past primarily by its ability to raise revenue. Growth rates in the new century thus appear to depend on factors constraining government’s ability to continue to expand the tax base.     

Practical assessment of project performance: the ‘potential impact’ approach*

This article sets out an approach to assessing project performance, using ‘potential impact’ of the project. Its purpose is to assist project design and evaluation. In project design, potential impacts of alternative activities on the project objective are compared, in order to select activities with the greatest impact. In project evaluation, potential and actual impacts of a project are compared. Additional benefits of the approach are that it indicates ‘value for money’ of development assistance invested in projects, and easier tracing of reasons for underachievement in projects to weaknesses in their design or management. Limitations are that it relies on informed judgement of the planners or evaluators and the categories for rating performance may unavoidably be broad. It complements the logical framework approach by providing a practical design and evaluation tool. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Work,Leisure, and Care: A Gender Perspective on the Participation Income

In ‘The case for a participation income’, Anthony Atkinson identified unconditionality as an obstacle to support for a citizen's income. He advocated prioritising the universality and individuality of a citizen's income but replacing its unconditionality with a ‘participation’ requirement. At the time, Atkinson's critique read as political realism: to eliminate means‐testing, make a concession to the fear of free‐riding. Ironically, Atkinson remained opposed to unconditionality despite his own critical contributions to documenting the growing income and wealth inequality that have increased support for an unconditional basic income. In this article I consider the ‘participation’ requirement from a gender perspective in order to uncover the problematic notions of ‘dependence’, ‘independence’, reciprocity, and free‐riding that underlie normative arguments for conditional over unconditional benefits. Employing such a perspective demonstrates the superiority of unconditional benefits in achieving more efficient and effective income support and reducing inequality—Atkinson's core commitments throughout his distinguished career.     

From CAUR to EUR: Italian Fascism,the ‘myth of Rome’ and the pursuit of international primacy

ABSTRACT

The formation of Fascist Italy's international imaginary in the 1930s tells a fascinating story of growing global political ambition, of constant recalibration in the face of seismic geopolitical shifts and, in the end, a (frustrated) pursuit of symbolic primacy. Kallis discusses two different Fascist projects underpinned by this imaginary: first, the political project of internationalization promoted through instruments such as the Fasci Italiani all'Estero (Italian Fasci Abroad) and especially the Comitati d'Azione per l'Universalità di Roma (CAUR), as well as through direct diplomatic and political ties with an expanding circle of regimes in Europe and overseas; and, second, the pursuit of a deeper sense of historic-cultural primacy, linked to the idea of ‘Roman universality, which became the discursive lynchpin of the ill-fated plan to host a 1942 world’s fair in Rome (EUR/E42). The transformation of Fascism from a hyper-nationalist phenomenon into a force actively seeking international diffusion and finally ‘universality’ can be understood as a reflexive adjustment of Fascism’s ideological-political horizon, driven as much by new geopolitical opportunities and frustrations as by conquering ambition and ideological continuity. In fact, Italian Fascism’s trajectory from CAUR in the 1930s to EUR/E42 in the war-torn 1940s, unfolding against a backdrop of growing antagonism between Italy and Nazi Germany for global influence, retained a primary symbolic point of reference: the ideological, political and cultural-historic estate of the ‘myth of Rome’ as a symbolic discourse of trans-temporal and -spatial primacy.     

Ma’naviyat in Uzbekistan: an ideological extrication from its Soviet past?

The intensively propagated moral construct of ma’naviyat penetrates all fields of public life in present-day Uzbekistan. The originally religious term is used as the moral foundation of the state’s official ‘ideology of national independence’. Portrayed as a return of the Uzbek people to their pre-Soviet past and their innate values and traditions, the ideological concept is preached as the only effective remedy for overcoming the negative Soviet legacies. Yet the analysis of the phenomenon shows that both the conceptualization of ma’naviyat at large and the concept’s underlying rhetoric, ideas and structures reveal many analogies to Soviet times. By offering a detailed linguistic analysis of a range of official writings, I argue that the discourse about ma’naviyat works – similarly to Soviet ideological patterns – as a strong legitimizing factor of today’s authoritarian regime.