Chinese investment and European labor: should and do workers fear Chinese FDI?

The rapid increase in Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) into Europe raises important questions about the implications of such for workers and organized labor in Europe: (1) does Chinese FDI flow more or less to regulated labor markets than do other investment sources?; (2) what are the strategies of works councilors and union representatives in dealing with real or expected investment from China?; and (3) how do individual workers view the propriety of Chinese FDI given China’s low-wage, labor-unfriendly profile in the global economy? Quantitative and qualitative data on Chinese FDI, individual opinions about China and globalization, and on strategies of labor representatives provide some leverage to preliminarily answer these questions. First, Chinese FDI does not seem to be more (or less) focused on investing in the least regulated labor markets than other sources of FDI. Second, interviews with works councilors and union representatives in Germany, France and the Netherlands affirm a cautiously optimistic view of Chinese investors as no more or less threatening to organized labor than other investors. Third, analysis of attitudes about Chinese and European interests in managing globalization suggest that less-skilled, more vulnerable, pro-labor-union workers in Europe tend to be more rather than less enthusiastic about Chinese management than their fellow citizens. These patterns suggest a surprising, if tentative, embrace by workers and their representatives in Europe of that investment.     

How legislatures work – and should work – as public space

In a democracy, legislatures are not only stages for performances by elected representatives; they are also stages for performances by other players in the public sphere. This article argues that while many legislatures are designed and built as spaces for the public to engage with politics, and while democratic norms require some degree of access, increasingly what are termed “purposive publics” are being superseded by groups who are only publics in an aggregative, accidental sense. The article begins with a conceptual analysis of the ways in which legislatures can be thought of as public spaces, and the in-principle access requirements that follow from them. It then draws on interviews and observational fieldwork in eleven capital cities to discover whether the theoretical requirements are met in practice, revealing further tensions. The conclusions are that accessibility is important; is being downgraded in important ways; but also that access norms stand in tension with the requirement that legislatures function as working buildings if they are to retain their symbolic value. The article ends with two “modest proposals”, one concerning the design of the plazas in front of legislatures, the other concerning a role for the wider public in legislative procedure.     

People-to-People Exchange and Building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind

In major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics for the new era,people-to-people exchange,political and security cooperation,and economic cooperation are the three pillars of China’s foreign policy.With a people-centered approach as its core,people-to-people exchange focuses on equality and mutual learning and aims at achieving win-win cooperation.Promoting people-to-people exchange is vital to cement the social foundation and public support for China’s foreign relations and promote a higher level of opening-up.1 As pointed out in the 19th CPC National Congress report,in handling relations among civilizations,estrangement should be replaced with exchange,clashes with mutual learning,and superiority with coexistence.Deepening people-to-people exchange is of major theoretical and practical importance to building a community with a shared future for mankind.     

Body and experiment – reflecting Kawabata Yasunari's counter-aesthetics

Abstract

From his earliest works, Kawabata, known as an explicit aestheticist, deals in his works with flawed and disabled bodies in contrast to beautiful ones, evoking feelings of revulsion, awkwardness, disgust and premonitions of decay and death. The dynamism created out of these tensions and ruptures in the aestheticized world is scrutizined as hidden counter-aesthetics through questions such as: Which kinds of impairments are to be observed? Can they be classified according to grades? Are there gender specificities? How are these tensions and ruptures organized, and which categories (semantic, biological, political, moral) are concerned? Which narratorial and other functions are served through the counter-image of the flawed (impaired) body? And finally, how do the findings from these investigations into the flipside, the ‘Other’ of Kawabata's aesthetic universe, contribute to complementary or alternative ways of reading and understanding his literature? In a final section, Kawabata's treatment of female bodies as a site of experimenting with extreme situations of passivity and agency is highlighted, challenging more conventional readings of this and other works. The works discussed are from a deliberately broad chronological and generic range, including canonical and popular works. They range from the newspaper novels ‘Utsukushii!’ (1927) and ‘Maihime’ (1950/1), the novel ‘Senbazuru’ (1952) to the stories and palm-of-the-hand stories ‘Ningen no ashioto’ (1925),’Izu no odoriko’ (1926), ‘Mekura to shōjo’ (1928), ‘Utsukushiki haka’ (1929) ‘Hokuro no tegami’ (1940), ‘Sasabune’ (1950), and, in the final section, ‘Kataude’ (1963/4) and ‘Nemureru bijo’ (1960/1).     

Poverty reduction and democratization – new cross-country evidence

The rapid decrease in absolute poverty across the developing world has received much attention. However, there have been few systematic attempts to analyse the political consequences of these developments. This article builds on the improved availability of household income data from developing countries to document a small but statistically significant impact of lagged poverty rates on a range of democracy indicators. The results hold across a battery of sensitivity and robustness tests. I also show that poverty reduction has a stronger effect on democracy than alternative predictors that are more widely used in the democratic regime transition and consolidation literature, such as average income and relative inequality (the Gini index). However, I find weaker effects of poverty on indicators of government quality and a declining influence of poverty reduction on democracy over time. These results point to more structural obstacles to democratic consolidation in lower-income regions, such as a tendency by populist leaders to exploit the economic grievances of vulnerable lower-middle classes.     

New threats – different response: EU and NATO and Somali piracy

When the European Union (EU) launched its first military naval mission, EU NAVFOR Somalia, Atalanta, the states who are members of both the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made a political choice: to prioritize the EU over NATO in their multilateral military efforts to fight piracy and its consequences. Thereby, Atalanta challenges the conventional assumption that EU security cooperation will remain limited. It also challenges the widely held belief that the European states will chose to act through NATO if dealing multilaterally with international security issues. How can we explain this decision? This analysis suggests that it can be explained in two phases where different mechanisms were at work. In the first phase, which can be accounted for from a neo-realist perspective, France, who held the Presidency, used particular favorable geopolitical conditions to put an autonomous EU operation on the agenda. However, agreement on the EU option cannot be explained as a result of strategic bargaining. Instead, in a second phase and in line with an alternative hypothesis building on the theory of communicative action, the EU member states came to support the French suggestion due to legitimacy considerations regarding the legal framework of the two operations.     

Democratization after Civil Wars – Key Problems and Experiences

Democratization and peace-building in post-civil war situations are closely interlinked. To analyse the difficulties of post-war democratization, and especially democratization as attempted by external and international actors, this article deals with the problem in several stages: first, it will provide a brief overview of the recent discourse on the topic, to place the discussion into the political and academic context. Second, it will focus on the reasons for and the types of civil wars, and the actors involved, because these provide the starting points of any attempt of post-war democratization and will determine the conditions for success and failure. Third, the key structural problems for post-civil war democratization will be explored, including ethnic fragmentation, followed by a brief analysis of the specific role, opportunities and limits of external actors in democratization. Finally, we will try to formulate a few hypotheses and conclusions to help explain the limited success of external democracy building in post-war societies, concentrating on the cases of Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The account concludes that without the necessary preconditions for democratization in post-conflict societies, external attempts will be of little success. Among the key requirements is the need for a strong and organized social base for democratization to build on. On the other hand, contradictions in the policies of intervening powers are a major hindrance.     

Do new democracies deliver social welfare? Political regimes and health policy in Ghana and Cameroon

Democratic reform processes often go hand in hand with expectations of social welfare improvements. While the connection between the emergence of democracy and the development of welfare states in the West has been the object of several studies, however, there is a scant empirical literature on the effects of recent democratization processes on welfare policies in developing countries. This is particularly true for Africa. In a dramatically poor environment, Africans often anticipated that the democratic reforms many sub-Saharan states undertook during the early 1990s would deliver welfare dividends. This article investigates whether and how the advent of democracy affected social policies – focusing, in particular, on health policy – by examining one of the continent's most successful cases of recent democratization (Ghana) and comparing it with developments in a country of enduring authoritarian rule (Cameroon). Evidence shows that democracy can indeed be instrumental to the expansion and strengthening of social policies. In Ghana, new participatory and competitive pressures pushed the government towards devising and adopting an ambitious health reform. Despite façade elections, no similar pressures could be detected in undemocratic Cameroon and health policy remained almost entirely dictated by foreign donors.     

Intersectionality – A challenge for development research and practice?

“Intersectionality” as a concept is increasingly finding its way into development work. In order to develop an understanding of the concept, this article shows how intersectionality can be used as a conceptual framework to analyse identity-based development claims. The article builds on qualitative research with people living in the countryside in northwest Pakistan to develop an intersectional methodology to engage with development claims. It uses a three-step analytical model to identify subject positions from which different people negotiate “eligibility for development'' and ‘‘responsibility to develop”. The paper shows how frequently used categorisations such as gender and class should be complicated by development practitioners and worked with in a more nuanced way.     

Promoting NGO–academic partnerships for population,health, and environment learning

Population, health, and environment (PHE) projects integrate family planning, community health, conservation, and livelihoods activities into a single effort. Despite growing calls for integrated services, relatively little academic research on PHE has been published, which has hampered the development of the approach. This article argues that additional partnerships between academics and NGOs are necessary to further advance learning around PHE. However, such partnerships need not be approached in the same way. The article discusses barriers that currently impede the development of stronger partnerships and adapts (Roper, L. 2002. “Achieving Successful Academic-Practitioner Research Collaborations.” Development in Practice 12 (3–4): 338–345) typology of NGO–academic partnership models to describe how different relationship types are currently leveraged within the PHE community.     

Sunset over the swamp – the independence and dependence of Belarus

The Federal Republic of Germany has since the end of the Cold War been at a crossroad in defining its role in European security. On the one hand, its contribution to democratic reform and economic stabilization in North Central Europe has enhanced enormously the prospects of representative government there; on the other, Germany remains wed to an outdated concept of military security and is reluctant to commit either the fiscal resources or the political capital to assume a role commensurate with Germany's importance in the development of a European Security and Defense Identity. Moreover, Bonn's precipitous diplomacy in the recognition of the breakaway Yugoslav states of Croatia and Slovenia betrays a willingness to permit Germany's allies to assume the less profitable burdens of hard security.     

Whose practice counts? Experiences in using indigenous health practices from Ethiopia and Uganda

There is considerable focus nowadays on the involvement of communities in planning their own projects. Much of this involvement is in the form of verbal communication whereby villagers inform development workers of their problems and how they propose to solve them. Drawing on experience from two projects in Uganda and Ethiopia, this article argues that the starting point for any project planning in a community context is the current practice of that community. It is argued that if one looks at the community's practice, beliefs, and knowledge, one has a firmer foundation on which to build a project.     

Governing after crisis – the politics of investigation,accountability and learning Emergency politics – paradox,law, democracy

Sarkozy's decision to bring France back into NATO's integrated military structure in 2009 represents in some ways a break with French exceptionalism. But how deep is this change? This article examines whether the decision has led to a real integration of France along various dimensions of integration; whether the decision represents a continuation or a break with the traditional French approach and the effects of this reintegration on NATO/EU cooperation. The empirical analysis of French political and military practices in NATO combines a focus on macro-level foreign policy formulations with a micro-level study of how French officials and representatives communicate and interact on a day-to-day basis. The analysis shows that France has become increasingly integrated into NATO since 2009 on most dimensions except with regard to cultural integration. Thus, France may be reintegrated in practice, but not yet in principle.