From national identity to national security: China's changing responses toward India in 1962 and 1998

This article examines Russian Government policy towards Northeast Asia as an interplay between aspirations, which have been expressed by government leaders, parliamentary figures and prominent academics and journalists and actual results. The article uses three levels, global, regional and bilateral, as a basis for the analysis. In terms of global interests the Russian leadership has sought diplomatic balance against the US, in terms of regional interests the leadership has pursued the aim of economic and security integration while at the bilateral level Russian leadership has sought specific benefits from particular relations with China, Japan and South Korea. The article notes that Russia has obtained certain diplomatic benefits from the relationship with China which serve its interests at the global level. At the regional level policy aspirations have been frustrated by Russia's dire economic condition and the tendency to be treated as an ‘outsider’. Russia has benefited from an improvement of bilateral relations with China, Japan and South Korea but these gains do not translate into an improved position at the regional level yet. while the Russian leadership has been nurturing the development of bilateral relationships problems particular to those relationships hinder its wider regional acceptance.     

Identity beyond borders: national identity and the post-colonial alternative

The study examines national identity in school curricula against the backdrop of globalization and its forces to create a universal global identity beyond particular affiliations. To that end, the study examines the problematic nature of Western notion of identity formation, and simultaneously asks whether political socialization in the nation-state school system is conducive of the development of cosmopolitan identity, an identity beyond national borders. Jordan, Israel, and Palestine are the three-case studies discussed in this article. Theoretically, the study contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate concerning the question of identity, political socialization, globalization, and nationalism. I make use of postcolonial theories to demonstrate the shortcomings of the logocentric way of theorizing identity as a binary twin, rooted in the relational formation between Self and Other, and search for alternative strategies to identity formation.     

Facing the European challenge: Finnish parties adjust to the integration process

Membership in the European Union (EU) has introduced a new significant cleavage to the Finnish political system. The membership referendum held in 1994 showed that most parties were internally divided over integration. This article analyses the positions of Finnish parties on European integration. The empirical material consists primarily of party documents issued up to June 1998. Particular attention is paid to party positions on the future development of the EU. The analysis highlights the elite‐led nature of intra‐party opinion formation on integration, and argues that EU issues have the potential of destabilising the Finnish party system.     

Models of citizenship: Defining European identity and citizenship

Citizenship implies membership of a political community and is internally defined by rights, duties, participation, and identity. It has traditionally been subordinate to nationality, which defines the territorial limits of citizenship. In order to theorize forms of citizenship that go beyond the spatial domain of nationality, citizenship must be seen as multilayered, operating on the regional, national and supranational levels. European citizenship as postnational citizenship is compatible with other forms of citizenship and could become an important dimension to the integration of European society in the twenty first century. At the moment, however, the tendency is to define European citizenship in terms of, on the one hand, a formal and derivative citizenship based on rights and which is mostly supplementary to national citizenship and, on the other hand, a European supranationality defined by reference to an exclusivist conception of European cultural identity. This conception of European identity and citizenship neglects other possibilities which European integration offers.     

From capacity to sovereignty: Legislative politics and differentiated integration in the European Union

The literature suggests that legislative politics among European Union Member States is characterised by economic exchanges, and constrained by the social norms of a European community of legislators. Both views draw a clear line between the legislative process and the conflicts over sovereignty that have left their mark on treaty making and European public opinion since the 1990s. This article suggests revisiting this view, based on an analysis of why Member States have opted out of legislation from the 1970s to today. It argues that differentiation, while once a response to capacity problems of relatively poor countries, has recently become driven by sovereignty concerns of the Union's wealthy and nationally oriented Members that oppose the EU's intrusion into core state powers. The article presents evidence for the impact on legislative outcomes of factors so far thought not to matter. The results indicate greater European‐level legislative responsiveness towards national sovereignty demands than previously recognised. They underline that the nature of European politics has been changing with the EU's push into core state powers.     

分离与弥合:西方民主的本义和实践

民主,在西方历史上受到持久而漫长的批评,并在近代以来也曾不断地被仿冒.但民主一词的西方本义是"人民的统治",近代以来西方学者和政治操作者也都受到这一理解的影响.但是,西方民主的理论和实践,同西方的民主本义之间却一直存在着人们试图弥合而又始终难以弥合的背离、矛盾和冲突,如:谁是人民?人民能够直接统治吗?民主是多数人的统治吗?怎样的"多数"才算"有效的多数"?代议机构及其成员能充分代表和体现民意吗?近代以来的西方社会正是在主动或被动地破解这些诸多难题中,形成各种民主理论流派,并在总体上推动民主实践的不断发展.     

European integration and electoral democracy: How the European Union constrains party competition in the Member States

The assignment of policy competencies to the European Union has reduced the divergence of party policy positions nationally, leaving the electorate with fewer policy options. Building upon insights from spatial proximity theories of party competition, the convergence argument predicts convergence particularly in policy domains with increasing EU competence. As the policy commitments that derive from EU membership increase, parties become more constrained in terms of the feasible policy alternative they can implement when in office. The analysis uses manifesto data at the country‐party system level for nine policy domains. It uses ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation with country fixed effects, a lagged dependent variable and country corrected standard errors. Controlling for other factors that could plausibly explain policy convergence, the models also assess whether the convergent effect of party positions varies across different types of parties. The main finding is that in policy domains where the involvement of the EU has increased, the distance between parties' positions tends to decrease. The constraining impact of EU policy decisions differs between Member and non‐Member States. This effect is more apparent for the policy agendas of larger, mainstream and pro‐EU parties in the Member States.     

Perceptions,fear, and economic loss: an application of prospect theory to environmental decision making

Most of the analysis of costs associated with the introduction of risky prospects has concerned contingent costs amenable to insurance programs. An important missing element is the current cost associated with changes in uncertainty. These costs are not amenable to insurance plans and require compensation in order to prevent transfers. In a novel approach, this paper develops an application of prospect theory to such questions, in an intergenerational context. The importance of such an application is demonstrated in a case study of the high-level nuclear waste repository (HNWR) siting decision. As a case study, the costliness of obtaining some elements of the analysis leads to a simulation approach, comparing prospect costs at the three sites that were under consideration by the U.S. Department of Energy. Finding that such costs can be large, we argue for a reassessment of current risk analysis approaches. On a policy note, on the basis of the prospect cost analysis here, the choice of the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, HNWR site seems ill-advised.     

Good governance and differentiated integration: Graded membership in the European Union

The study of European integration has traditionally focused on organisational growth: the deepening and widening of the European Union (EU). By contrast, this article analyses organisational differentiation, a process in which states refuse, or are being refused, full integration but find value in establishing in‐between grades of membership. It describes how the EU's system of graded membership has developed, and it explains the positioning of states in this system. The core countries of the EU set a standard of ‘good governance’. The closer European countries are to this standard, the closer their membership grade is to the core. Some countries fall short of this standard and are refused further integration by the core: their membership grade increases with better governance. Other countries refuse further integration because they outperform the standards of the core countries: their membership grade decreases as governance improves. These conjectures are corroborated in a panel analysis of European countries.     

Immigration and French national identity under neoliberalism: Sarkozy's selective immigration politics as a performance of sovereignty

In 2007 then French president Nicolas Sarkozy established the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Cooperative Development. Ocak investigates what the ministry wanted to achieve by promoting national identity and linking it with immigration. Focusing on the so-called selective immigration policies and the national identity debate, she examines the ways in which neoliberalization hollows out the nation-state and transforms its relations vis-à-vis citizens and, as a result, increases the need to perform sovereignty to counterbalance the crisis of the welfare state. The articulation of the undesired immigrant figure and the project to engage French citizens in the management of the immigrant operate, she suggests, as tactics to smooth this transformation and compensate for the losses that the French citizens experience as a result of the reign of neoliberal policies.     

Political leadership and European integration: The case of Jacques Delors

European Community politics created new opportunities for political leadership. Leadership of the integration process was provided first and foremost by national political leaders, with the EC's supranational institution — the Commission — playing a supporting role. Jacques Delors was the first Commission president (1985–1995) significantly to redefine his role, and consequently to create a model for European, supranational political leadership. Analysing Jacques Delors’ discourse provides us with a methodological tool for understanding how he politicised the leadership role of the Commission, and to what effect.     

Globalization and the transformation of the national political space: Six European countries compared

Abstract.  This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' and 'losers' is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.     

Global citizenship as a national project: the evolution of segye shimin in South Korean public discourse

The idea of global citizenship in contemporary South Korean public discourse has revolved mainly around a national endeavor to boost the county's stature and competitiveness amid economic globalization. Based on a review of two decades of published media references to segye shimin (‘global citizen’ in the Korean language), this article shows that the specific usages of segye shimin – mainly by elites from government, academia, and journalism – underscore how the ‘developmental citizenship’ that marked South Korea's past authoritarian military regimes has carried on since the transition to civilian-led democracy. In contrast with the burgeoning academic discourse on cosmopolitanism that focuses heavily on moral responsibilities to humanity and the planet, South Korea's discourse of global citizenship has been closely aligned with neoliberalism and filled with exhortations to the domestic population to overcome numerous perceived liabilities seen as impeding the country's advancement. While global citizenship discourse in South Korea has emphasized top-down national strategic imperatives, a bottom-up approach to cosmopolitanism is also emerging as the country gains confidence and the notion of segye shimin gradually gains traction across the wider society.     

The nature of regional and national identity in Catalonia: problems of measuring multiple identities

Abstract. National identity learning processes become quite problematic in multiple identity territories. In the case of Spain, bilinguism and conflictual identities in the periphery is often opposed to the unilinguism and majoritarian culture of the centre. The contents of actual Catalan identity and the political behaviour that it entails can perhaps be explained by the perception that today's Catalan and immigrant adolescents have of what it means to 'be a catalan'. The view of the political arena by the young depends mainly on the language approach.     

Voting strength in the European Parliament: The influence of national and of partisan actors

Abstract. Most decisions by the European Parliament are taken by an absolute majority of its members. Some decisions however – such as the approval of the budget of the European Union – require a two-thirds majority. The paper analyzes the a priori voting strength of the member states when their representatives vote coherently. It is shown that the increase in votes for Germany in the 1994 reallocation enhanced its position. A less favourable effect, however, can be seen for the other large members (France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Spain). However, since votes in the EP tend to be cast according to partisan rather than national affiliation, the relative voting power of the political groups with respect to the two quotas is also analyzed. The tool to measure this is the (normalized) Banzhaf power index, partially extended to account for connected coalitions. The paper demonstrates that the distribution of votes between the present EU member states as allocated in proportion to their population size indeed roughly corresponds to their a priori voting power. However, the relative influence of the largest political groups, the European Socialists and the European People's Party, tends to be overestimated by their share of seats in the framework of the simple majority rule, but it is considerable if the quota is two-thirds. Finally, under the two-thirds majority rule, the European Liberal, Democratic and Reformist Party as well as the small groups appear to be almost powerless. The more the EP gains political leverage – a further increase in its institutional powers is to be expected in the framework of the ongoing Intergovernmental Conference – the more the distribution of voting power between the member states and between the political groups will be a crucial factor in the shaping of EU policies.     

Ideology as blocked mourning: Greek national identity in times of economic crisis and austerity

This article approaches the 2010–2014 economic crisis in Greece from the perspective of loss and mourning, critically exploring what questions and insights this provokes. We argue first that the rhetoric of mainstream political and media elites has been instrumental in framing responses to the Greek economic crisis in patriotic terms, a frame subsequently adopted by groups from across the entire political spectrum, whether part of the establishment or not. We then draw on discourse theory and psychoanalysis to argue that attachments to the dominant austerity and anti-austerity responses to the crisis can be understood—at least in part—in terms of a failure (or not) to properly articulate and thus mourn the nationalist-inflected loss associated with economic dislocation. We sketch out two ideological pathways in the discourses of austerity and anti-austerity, which we designate as symptomatic of ‘blocked mourning’: a melancholic pathway that seeks to contain loss through self-blame; and a pathway of ressentiment that seeks to contain loss by attributing its cause to a series of ‘others’. We argue that blocked mourning bears a direct relation to the ideological grip of the austerity and anti-austerity discourses, and that we can better appreciate the character and strength of their affective pull by drawing out the fantasmatic aspects of the narratives expressing Greek national and economic identity. Conversely, we argue that a critique of ideology can be understood in terms of the preconditions for mourning, whose satisfaction would make possible a less invested relation to the fantasmatic guarantees underpinning the austerity/anti-austerity narratives. In this view, a critique of ideology proceeds by bringing to light those factors that could facilitate a more open and deliberative articulation of loss, so as to transform and pluralize collective responses to the economic crisis.