Convincing the World of China’s Tradition to Pursue Universal Harmony

As China??s comprehensive national power grows, its efforts to reduce the ??China threat?? perception have become more challenging. In line with the Chinese leadership??s current theme of peace and harmony in China??s foreign policy line, Chinese scholars have been highlighting the same theme in their research on China??s traditional strategic culture. Their research criticizes Western cosmopolitanism and praises the peaceful nature of China??s traditional ??tianxia?? concept. The exploitation of traditional strategic culture to provide re-assurance to the international community has now been raised to the official level, as reflected by the White Paper on ??China??s Peaceful Development?? released by the State Council??s Information Office on September 6, 2011. This probably means that it will be a major element of China??s public diplomacy for the foreseeable future. These efforts, however, may not have a significant impact because of rising nationalism in the region and the moderate escalation of existing territorial disputes involving China and its neighbors.     

William Talbott’s Which Rights Should be Universal?

In this review essay, I first set out and then subject to criticism the main claims advanced by William Talbott in his excellent recent book, “Which Rights Should be Universal?”. Talbott offers a conception of basic universal human rights as the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy. I argue that his conception is at once too robustly liberal and democratic and too inattentive to key features of the rule of law to play this role. I suggest that John Rawls’s conception of human rights comes closer to hitting the mark Talbott sets for himself and that Talbott incorrectly rejects Rawls’s view. I conclude that what likely divides Talbott and Rawls is that Rawls, but not Talbott, explicitly frames the inquiry into the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy in terms of a liberal democratic people attempting to determine, as a matter of its just foreign policy, whether or not to recognize other organized polities as independent and self-determining within the international order.     

The Ethical Deficit of the United Kingdom's Proposed Universal Credit: Pimping the Precariat?

Universal Credit is a proposed means‐tested cash benefit scheme in the UK that will serve, inter alia, to top‐up the wages of low‐paid workers. This article will argue first, that the moral justification for the scheme that is offered by the UK government is specious; second that the reconfiguration of existing wage top‐ups may be counterproductive and will in any event do little, if anything, to promote the work ethic; third, that the new scheme will not relieve but add to the injustices borne by the ‘precariat’ (the workers engaged in low‐paid precarious employment); finally, that far from having a justifiable moral purpose, Universal Credit is ethically flawed.     

Are There Universal Collective Rights?

The first part of the paper focuses on the current debate over the universality of human rights. After conceptually distinguishing between different types of universality, it employs Sen’s definition that the claim of a universal value is the one that people anywhere may have reason to see as valuable. When applied to human rights, this standard implies “thin” (relative, contingent) universality, which might be operationally worked-out as in Donnelly’s three-tiered scheme of concepts–conceptions–implementations. The second part is devoted to collective rights, which have recently become a new topic of the human rights debate. This part provides the basis of political–philosophical justification and legal–theoretical conceptualization of collective rights, as rights directly vested in collective entities. The third part dwells on the problem of universality of collective rights. It differentiates between the three main collective entities in international law—peoples, minorities, and indigenous peoples—and investigates whether certain rights vested in these collectives might, according to Sen’s standard, acquire the status of the universal ones. After determining that some rights are, in principle, plausible candidates for such a status in international law, this paper concludes by taking notice of a number of the open issues that still need to be settled, primarily by the cooperative endeavor of international legal scholars and legal theorists.     

Intervention and Statebuilding Beyond the Human: From the ‘Black Box’ to the ‘Great Outdoors’

This article analyses intervention and statebuilding as shifting towards a posthuman discursive regime. It seeks to explore how the shift to ‘bottom-up’ or post-liberal approaches has evolved into a focus upon epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It attempts to describe a process of reflection upon intervention as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations – in order to take problems seriously – begins to further undermine confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the bottom-up approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of intervention, seems to further intensify it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis seems to be found in the rejection of the aspiration to know from a position of a ‘problem-solving’ external authority and instead to learn from the opportunities opened up through the practices of intervention. However, what is learnt does not seem to be able to fit into traditional modes and categories of expertise.     

Winning the ‘losers’ but losing the ‘winners’? The electoral consequences of the radical right moving to the economic left

Voters with lower socio-economic status are now consistently overrepresented among the radical right electorate. According to the ‘new winning formula’, many radical right parties increasingly move to the left on socio-economic issues to cater to these voters. This study tests a crucial assumption underlying this formula: whether radical right parties with socio-economically left-leaning positions actually attract more working class voters. By mapping class characteristics of the electorate of 10 radical right parties at three time points (based on surveys) against these parties' positions on the economic dimension (according to experts), this study shows that the ‘class gap’ - the extent to which class indicators predict voters' propensity to vote for the radical right - is significantly larger for socio-economically leftwing parties.     

Keeping the ‘Ism’ in ‘cosmopolitanism’ – Wieland and the origins of cosmopolitan discourse

ABSTRACT

After having been dormant for much of the 20th century, the concept of cosmopolitanism has regained some of its former rhetorical power in current academic and political debates. Taking Kwame Anthony Appiah and Robert Fine as key interlocutors, the article argues that a historically informed analysis of the linguistic context, in which the language of cosmopolitanism first emerged, can help us understand better the political and ideological underpinnings of the concept. In the first part of the article, I discuss the emergence of cosmopolitanism in the context of what I shall refer to as the ‘ismatization’ of political language in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the second part, I turn to what I consider to be a key text for understanding the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism: the essay Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens (‘The Secret of the Order of the Cosmopolitans’), published by the German novelist, poet and publicist Christoph Martin Wieland in the journal Teutscher Merkur in 1788. At the end of the 18th century, I argue, Wieland makes a similar observation to Fine, namely that the ‘ism’ connotes something doctrinal, even sectarian, and steeped in secrecy and conspiracy.     

Democratization in the ‘miracle’ economies

Michael R.J. Vatikiotis Political Change in Southeast Asia: Trimming the Banyan Tree London: Routledge, 1996. 230 pp. ISBN 0–415–13484–6.

Garry Rodan (ed.) Political Oppositions in Industrialising Asia London: Routledge, 1996. 338 pp. ISBN 0–415–14865–0.     

Missing the overlap between theory and practice: Patten’s ‘equal recognition’ in the face of the Catalan case

Drawing on the particularities of Catalonia (and related cases), the general point of this contribution is to argue that Patten’s equal recognition theory is modeled upon a too-restricted set of empirical assumptions, a circumstance that might harm its value as a tool for the orientation, evaluation, and reform of public policy. What is absent in Patten’s account – or at least not properly inserted into it – are four built-in modules that we have named ‘history’, ‘democracy’, ‘international relations’, and ‘migration’. When it comes to recognition of minorities, the past matters more often than Patten is willing to accept; democracy can lead to permanent departures from equal recognition on the part of self-governing national minorities; in the recognition game, there are other relevant players than simply states and their minorities; and one of these players, namely immigrant groups, can (albeit involuntarily) distort equal recognition schemes.     

Addressing Workers’ Freedom of Association and its Dispute Resolution in the Context of the Shari’ah

Freedom of association for trade union has been generally accepted as part of basic human rights in Islam. Freedom of association, which include the right to join and participate in trade union activities, can be susceptible to disputes between employers and employees as well as trade unions. Islam provides freedom of association in labour relations and also mechanisms to settle disputes pertaining to such freedom. Conciliation (sulh) and arbitration (tahkim) are both used methods in the inception of Islam, which have similarities with the modern sense. We shall discuss in this article the right to dispute resolution between employers and trade unions in the context of freedom of association in labour relations as based on Shari’ah law and using modern legal systems of Islamic countries such as Iran, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia as examples.     

James Bond,Ian Fleming and intelligence: breaking down the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’

This article looks to answer the question of why the James Bond novels and films should matter to scholars of intelligence and national security. We argue that Bond is important because, rightly or wrongly, and not without inaccuracy, it has filled a public knowledge vacuum about intelligence agencies and security threats. On another level, this article explores the unexpected yet important interactions between Bond and the actual world of intelligence. We contend that the orthodoxy dictating that Bond and spying are diametric opposites—one is the stuff of fantasy, the other is reality—is problematic, for the worlds of Bond and real intelligence collide, overlap and intermesh in fascinating and significant ways. In short, Bond is important for scholars because he is an international cultural icon that continues to operate at the borders of fiction and reality, framing and constructing not only public perceptions but also to some degree intelligence practices. Core narratives of intelligence among not only the public but also policymakers and intelligence officers are imagined, sustained, deepened, produced and reproduced through and by Bond. We conclude that Bond and intelligence should be thought of as co-constitutive; the series shapes representations and perceptions of intelligence, but it also performs a productive role, influencing the behaviours of intelligence agencies themselves.     

Reconstructing the French ‘Etat’: Progress of the loi Defferre

French local government has been subjected to sweeping reforms since the Socialist Party took office. The numerous measures, not yet all finalised or implemented, are aimed at creating a decentralised administration with local democratic control, particularly through the creation of local civil service corps and the transfer of tax‐revenues to the localities. It is apparent that considerable administrative problems will arise, and the parties will also be affected, not least by the introduction of PR voting at the local level. Democratic control will be enhanced and there will be a greater apparent politicisation of the administration, but it is also to be expected that the bureaucracy will protect its own interests and priorities.     

Rethinking the ‘Cold War’ in the Asia‐Pacific*

Abstract

Whereas the Yalta System collapsed and the Cold War ended in the Euro‐Atlantic context, the basic structure of the Cold War remains in the Asia‐Pacific region, and still provides potential sources for future conflicts. This paper reconsiders the regional Cold War and its implications for current international politics in the Asia‐Pacific region. It argues that the relaxation of tensions seen since the late 1980s resembles the 1970s’ détente in the Euro‐Atlantic region, i.e. recognition of a Cold War political status quo, rather than the ‘end of the Cold War’. Along with political and ideological confrontations, significant elements within the Cold War structure in the Asia‐Pacific are regional conflicts among its major players. Their historical correlation within the San Francisco System has been neglected in past studies. The paper suggests that re‐examining the disputes within a multilateral framework may provide a key to a breakthrough in understanding the current status quo.     

Theorizing identity: beyond the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy

ABSTRACT

Yuval-Davis discusses three interconnected questions relating to identity. She first examines whether and in what ways the notion of identity should be theorized, on the one hand, and empirically researched, on the other, focusing on the opposing views of Stuart Hall and Robin Williams. She then examines the contested question of what is identity, positioning it in relation to notions of belonging and the politics of belonging, and in relation to several influential schools of thought, especially those that construct identity as a mode of narrative, as a mode of performativity or as a dialogical practice. Her third interrelated question concerns the boundaries of identity and the relationship between self and non-self. She explores both social psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to that question, and deals with questions such as reflexivity, identifications and forced identities. The last part of the article explores several types of relationships between self and non-self, such as: ‘me’ and ‘us’; ‘me/us’ and ‘them’; ‘me’ and other ‘others’; ‘me’ and the transversal ‘us/them’. Yuval-Davis's basic argument here is that dichotomous notions of identity and difference, when theorizing boundaries of individual and collective identities, are more misleading than explanatory.     

On the nature of voters’ coalition preferences

An expanding literature indicates that in multiparty systems with coalition governments, citizens consider the post-electoral bargaining process among parties when casting their vote. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the nature of voters’ coalition preferences. This paper uses data from the Austrian National Election Study to examine the determinants as well as the independence of preferences for coalitions as political object. We find that coalition preferences are strongly informed by spatial considerations; but additional non-ideological factors, such as party and leader preferences, also play a fundamental role. We also find that coalitions enjoy a certain degree of independence from other objects of vote choice and they do not always represent a simple average score on the feeling thermometer of the constituent parties. There are, however, substantial differences among voters, with party identifiers and those with extreme ideology being less likely to consider coalitions as separate entities from their component parties.