Complexity, Coupling, and the Future of European Integration

Why is there more integration in some areas of the European Union than others? Analyzing the dynamics of the integration process at the “normal politics” level, I specify two conditions, complexity and coupling, that make integration in Europe more likely in specific policy domains. Integration is more likely under conditions of low complexity and tight coupling. Using these two hypotheses, I probe tendencies toward more integration in four areas: competition policy, social policy, agriculture, and foreign and security policy. Integration need not be just a matter of conscious design or bargain, but also the perhaps unintended consequence of interaction between the various actors at the EU level. I conclude that European integration is segmented and that a more integrated Europe is necessarily a more expensive Europe.     

Globalization is What We Make of It: Contemporary Globalization Theory and the Future Construction of Global Interconnection

There are four perennial questions that preoccupy globalization theory. For those who write about globalization, there is a constant attempt to discover what globalization is, when it may have started, what benefits and burdens it offers for global cohabitation and whether globalization is ultimately a good thing or a bad thing. The purpose of this article is to review several new works in contemporary globalization theory and to assess what new answers they offer to these questions. Through this examination it will be argued that although these recent works provide significant improvements to former discussions on globalization, they still tend to lack an obvious insight. Namely, they fail to highlight fully the fact that whatever globalization is, it is as important to think normatively about directing its future as it is to understand its past. In other words, globalization is entirely what we make of it, both in how we cognitively come to understand it, but also in how we decide to shape its future.     

Trusting,Happy, Religious,and Giving: Explaining Volunteering in the Context of Nordic Exceptionalism

Abstract

Using data from the European Values Study, this article examines the mechanisms through which social capital facilitates volunteering in Nordic countries. Three specific mechanisms are examined as drivers of volunteering: Generalized trust, subjective well-being, and religious activity. We find that trust bridges social capital and that people volunteer more as their level of generalized and institutional trust increases. Our results also indicate that individuals with higher levels of well-being and those who attend religious services regularly are more likely to volunteer.     

全球化、文化全球化与文化主权

全球化是一个现实问题。在经济全球化的同时,文化全球化也是必然的。以正确的态度看待这种趋势,处理好各种文化之间的关系,对于维护文化主权,发展民族文化具有重要的意义。一、全球化及文化全球化“全球化”作为超越国家和跨越民族界限的概念,其内容应包括政治、经济、社会、文化等许多方面,所以对它的含义就有不同的理解。由于这一概念最早被应用于国际经济学,是由“一体化”转化而来,所以,有人认为全球化就是西化,是自由化。实际上,自七十年代石油危机后,全球化概念不仅在国际经济学,而且在国际政治学和国际文化学中越来越多…     

Ideas, Paradigms and Institutions: Agricultural Exceptionalism in the European Union and the United States

The differing trajectory of agricultural policy reforms in the 1990s in the world's two most important agricultural powers, the United States and the European Community/Union (EC/EU), can only be fully understood by appreciating the role that ideas play in policy outcomes. The idea of agricultural exceptionalism underwrote a paradigm of state assistance in the US and the EC/EU. By the mid-1980s, the state assistance paradigm was under stress, and subject to a number of anomalies in both the US and the EC. But while the paradigm was overthrown and replaced with a market liberal model in the US grain sector in the 1990s, it remained intact in the European Union. Explaining why agricultural exceptionalism and the state assistance paradigm has endured in the EU while it has withered in the US highlights three factors: the importance of the political institutional framework in locking in—or not—policy principles and instruments; the degree of fit of a sectoral policy paradigm with the broader societal ideational framework regarding appropriate relations between the state, the market, and the individual; and the capacity of a paradigm to adjust in the face of challenges and anomalies.     

Globalization, secessionism, and autonomy

This paper analyzes the relationship between the persistence and growth of secessionist parties in democratic countries and economic globalization, controlling for political and economic factors. The implications of secessionist persistence for decentralization are also examined. The paper finds that globalization is positively related to secessionist vote growth, while there is some evidence that economic conditions also impact secessionist parties in systematic ways. Secessionist support is also substantially affected by policy changes. Central governments have offered autonomy more often to regions with secessionist parties than to regions without such parties, though often the offers take the form of symmetrical countrywide decentralization.     

Comparing the Australian and Scandinavian Welfare States

This paper Compares and Contrasts the Australian and Scandinavian welfare states with a view to demonstrating that, whilst the extent of welfare expenditures and the instruments of social policy vary quite markedly in these countria, policy outcomes in terms of levels of inequality and poverty and social protection are much more similar. In the course of this comparison. the paper casts serious doubts on the usefulness of both the prevailing paradigms for evaluating welfare state performance: measures of expenditure effort and measures of welfare decommodification. Instead. it is argued that welfare state performance can only be properly assessed, as Richard Titmuss pointed out many years ago, by evaluating the impact of fiscal and occupational welfare in addition to the extent and character of the explicit expenditures of the state. When we broaden our conception of social policy in this way. Australia appears much less of a welfare state laggard than it is often taken to be and the oft mooted Scandinavian claim to welfare superiority is. perhaps. rather less compelling than is sometimes argued.     

Globalization,Cultural Critique,and China

In this essay, I illustrate a way of following discussions of economic globalization into discussions of domestic national issues involving cultural critique, arguing that the character and interests of local sites for transnational exchange are key aspects of analysis and closely associated with the logic of globalization theories. The essay begins with a summary of Saskia Sassen's place-based view of globalization, while in the second section, I consider five aspects of this place-based view in light of Chinese contexts for the international exchange of cultural critique. In the final section, I offer a broader sketch of three commonly discussed views of globalized, transnational forces and their relationships to domestic issues of cultural critique.     

Globalization,International Organizations,and Telecommunications

Since the 1990s over 158 countries established pro‐market reforms in telecommunications—a fast pace for such a drastic change. For example, Sweden and Botswana, two nations vastly different across multiple dimensions, both liberalized their telecom sectors. Why did so many countries adopt liberal reforms in such a short period of time? Conventional wisdom highlights the role of global markets and technology, powerful states, global diffusion, and domestic politics. I argue that contrary to these claims, diffusion through key international organizations is the critical and overlooked factor in explaining rapid global convergence of pro‐market telecom reforms. Using an original dataset for 189 countries between 1970 and 2003 and event history analysis, I demonstrate that membership in key liberal trading organizations, especially the WTO and the OECD, increases the likelihood that countries will adopt liberal pro‐market reforms in telecommunications. These results speak directly to current public policy debates about the reregulation of global markets and bridges the literatures of policy diffusion, institutional design, and regulatory regimes.     

Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity

This paper asks if globalization is simply the latest reticulation of the regional, class, and cultural struggles embedded at the core of worldwide capitalist exchange. As practices of transnational businesses, national state authorities, and regional growth coalitions turn to globalization rhetorics to promote on-going commercial expansion, new networks of local activists, international migrants, and progressive intellectuals are developing their own anti-global rhetorics and practices to defend themselves, their localities, and the environment. This paper investigates how these conflicts arise, in part, out of the modes of organization at work in the world economy. That is, professional-technical experts with vested interests in the corporate groups or state offices that now organize most forms of production and consumption find their expert authority contested by popular resistances. These essentially populist movements seek to defend the discretion of ordinary people against trained expertise in choosing how localities and individuals attain valued goals, like economic equality, democratic participation, environmental balance, or cultural integrity.     

从经济全球化与世界社会主义低潮的关联看当代社会主义命运

正视和全面认识 2 0世纪 90年代以来经济全球化迅猛发展与国际范围内社会主义出现严重挫折的关联 ,至关重要。可以肯定地说 ,社会主义的发展与命运同经济全球化之间确有着内在、复杂的关联。从发展趋势看 ,经济全球化是社会主义发展的物质与经济前提。但在目前的世界历史环境中和现实进程中 ,它对社会主义的作用明显具有双向性。 2 0世纪末世界社会主义遭受重大挫折 ,是在当前世界历史特定条件下经济全球化过程中两种力量、进程的碰撞和交汇的结果。必须清醒看到全球化进程对当前社会主义发展和命运的双刃作用。执政党能否恰当地判断和把握 ,关乎社会主义在当代的命运。