From vanguard to laggard: Germany in European security and defence policy

Guided by a federalist vision of European integration, Germany used to be a staunch supporter of a European security and defence policy. Whereas Germany's rhetorical support has remained unchanged, it has turned into a laggard in implementing the commitments arising from a European Rapid Reaction Force. Drawing on an interactionist framework, this article demonstrates that Germany's change of course is neither in line with a Europeanised identity nor a result of any deliberate grand strategy to renationalise defence policy. Rather, Germany's failure to live up to its commitments is best understood as an unintended consequence of its integrationist policies in the early 1990s.     

Mapping Legal Semiotics

The essay seeks to harness the diverse and innovative work to date of legal semiotics. It seeks to bring together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a preclusion to identifying fertile avenues for research.     

British Intelligence and the ‘Fifth’ Occupying Power: The Secret Struggle to Prevent Jewish Illegal Immigration to Palestine

At the end of the Second World War, British intelligence struggled to enforce strict limits imposed on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Holocaust survivors and Jews wishing to escape communism in Eastern Europe flooded the western Zones of occupation in Germany and Austria, while the Zionist movement worked to bring them to Palestine. Illegal immigration to Palestine was the key policy dispute between Britain and the Zionist movement, and a focus for British intelligence. Britain sought both overt and covert means to prevent the boarding of ships at European ports which were destined for Palestine, and even to prevent the entry of Jewish refugees into the American zones. This article highlights Britain's secret intelligence-gathering efforts as well as its covert action aimed to prevent this movement. It highlights a peculiar episode in the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States, during which cooperation and partnership was lacking. British intelligence promoted a rumour that Soviet agents were using Jewish escape lines to penetrate Western Europe and the Middle East in order to persuade American authorities to prevent the movement of Jewish refugees. Instead, this article argues, American intelligence secretly cooperated with the Zionist organizers of the escape routes so to expose Soviet agents. Britain's attempt at deception backfired, and provided effective cover for the movement of hundreds of thousands of Jews during a critical period. Meanwhile its intelligence had dramatically improved, but policymakers failed to reassess Britain's ability to sustain immigration restrictions and the indefinite detention of tens of thousands of illegal migrants.     

Voting at 16: Turnout and the quality of vote choice

Critics of giving citizens under 18 the right to vote argue that such teenagers lack the ability and motivation to participate effectively in elections. If this argument is true, lowering the voting age would have negative consequences for the quality of democracy. We test the argument using survey data from Austria, the only European country with a voting age of 16 in nation-wide elections. While the turnout levels of young people under 18 are relatively low, their failure to vote cannot be explained by a lower ability or motivation to participate. In addition, the quality of these citizens' choices is similar to that of older voters, so they do cast votes in ways that enable their interests to be represented equally well. These results are encouraging for supporters of a lower voting age.     

Recreating Cities as Bodies of Power,Knowledge and Space

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

A Comparison of Acculturation Measures Among Hispanic/Latino Adolescents

Acculturation has been associated with numerous health and social outcomes among Hispanic/Latino adolescents. Various self-report scales have been used to measure acculturation, making comparisons of results across studies difficult. This study administered several commonly-used acculturation scales to 221 Hispanic/Latino 9th grade students in Los Angeles. Although all of these scales purport to measure acculturation, the correlations among the scales, and their correlations with language usage measures, were modest. As expected, higher scores on Hispanic/Latino orientation scales (or lower scores on U.S./White orientation scales) were associated with higher levels of ethnic identity formation. Results indicate that these acculturation scales may measure different aspects of the complex phenomenon of acculturation. For example, purely language-based measures shared only small amounts of variance with more comprehensive measures. Additional research is needed to create and validate acculturation measures for adolescents. Jennifer B. Unger, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. She is the principal investigator of Project RED, which is examining parent-child acculturation patterns and substance use among Hispanic adolescents. Anamara Ritt-Olson, Ph.D. is a Research Associate in Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. Karla Wagner, MA is a predoctoral student and research assistant in Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. Daniel Soto, BA is the project manager on Project RED. Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and a co-investigator on Project RED.     

Interviewing Children about Real and Fictitious Events: Revisiting the Narrative Elaboration Procedure

Elementary school children participated in a staged event. Two weeks later they were randomly assigned to three interview conditions: (a) a streamlined version of the Narrative Elaboration (NE) procedure involving training in the use of reminder cue cards, (b) exposure to reminder cue cards without training in their use (cue card control group), and (c) a standard interview including no NE training or exposure to reminder cue cards (standard-interview control group). Children in each interview condition were questioned about the staged event and a fictitious event to determine whether children trained in the streamlined NE procedure would provide more information about a staged event than would children in the two control groups and whether the NE interview would result in increased reporting of false information when questioned about a fictitious event. Results indicated that children questioned with the NE interview reported a greater amount of accurate, but not a greater amount of inaccurate, information during cue-card presentation for the staged event than did the cue-card control group. Analyses further indicated that the NE-interview group did not report significantly more false information about the fictitious event than did children in the two control groups. Large standard deviations for the NE-interview children's cue-card recall indicate that the streamlined NE procedure was useful for many children in reporting the staged event, but may have contributed to a small number of children providing false information for the fictitious event. Further research is being conducted to determine which children may be more likely to be helped and which children may be more likely to provide false information regarding a fictitious event.