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.     

Queer Rights and the Triangulation of Western Exceptionalism

Given recent advances in queer visibility and rights within Western countries and internationally, the assumption around sexual issues is one of progress. Conversely, resistance to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning (LGBTIQ) rights is understood as a lack of progress in the modernization of the relevant society or population. This article suggests that one must understand resistance in a more complex framework, focusing on the opposition between Muslim cultures and LGBTIQ politics to illustrate this argument. This article argues that one should understand the dialectic of Islam versus queer rights as a process of triangulation and should describe how the positioning of queer rights and Muslim homophobia within a triangulated model invokes a sense of Western exceptionalism. Consequently, this article argues that the deployment of queer rights both at “home” and “abroad” operates in a “homocolonialist” fashion that renders resistant populations inferior in relation to superior Western values, rather than as simply “lagging behind” the West.     

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…     

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.     

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,Governance, and the Future of Public Administration: Can We Make Sense Out of the Fog of Rhetoric Surrounding the Terminology?

Books reviewed in this article:
Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World
Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents
Miles Kahler and David Lake, eds., Governance in a Global Economy
Joseph Nye, Jr. and John Donahue, eds., Governance in a Globalizing World     

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.     

Compliance and Conflict Management in the European Union: Nordic Exceptionalism

Why and to what extent do states differ in their implementation of international norms? Furthermore, why and to what extent do states differ in their mode of resolving conflicts regarding non‐implementation of international norms? In this article the empirical focus is on implementation of Community legislation by the member states of the European Union (EU) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The analysis shows that over time there has been an overall reduction in the deficit in transposition, but the number of conflicts regarding non‐implementation has increased in the same period. While states converge on transposition, they diverge regarding their mode of handling conflicts related to non‐implementation. In general, the larger member states more frequently use court rulings to settle such conflicts. By contrast, the smaller states, and in particular the Nordic states, pursue a more consensus‐seeking approach, with limited use of courts. These observations indicate that domestic traditions and styles of decision making are more important for explaining variation than the enforcement capacity of the European institutions, and the extent of participation and power in decision making at the European level.     

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.     

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.