Manifestations of delegative democracy in Russian local politics: what does it mean for the future of Russia?

In attempts to describe post-communist politics adequately, this paper employs the concept of delegative democracy for analyzing Russia's local politics. It argues that the election rather than appointment by the President of local governors in Russia has facilitated the establishment of a system which can be generally described as delegative democracy. This regime inherits free and contested elections from the democratic system and non-democratic methods of power consolidation from the authoritarian system. As a mixture of those two hardly reconcilable types of political system, delegative democracy in Russia has gained a shape and reached a certain degree of stability during 1993–95. This gain may delay the consolidation of representative democracy in Russia for an indefinite time and eventually lead to a new level of economic stagnation and a return to authoritarianism.     

The Post-Soviet States

The author argues that despite important differences among the post-Soviet states it still makes sense to regard them as constituting a single region because they share the corrupt and stagnant social system of "post-Soviet capitalism." He describes the distinguishing marks of this system and considers how it can be overcome.     

Pyongyang: Rules of engagement

The article attempts to re-construct the motivation behind the current North Korean policies, especially in the domestic sphere. It is argued tht North Korean leaders have valid political reasons not to imitate the Chinese-style reform, and are likely to limit themselves to moderate changes which would not jeopardize political stability and the domination of the present-day elite. The most critical factor is the maintenance of control over the access to information.     

Collective memory and dyadic relations: The different qualities of power in the interaction of democratic states and civil societies∗

Abstract

Relations between—and among—countries that share democratic attributes, practice capitalism, exhibit high degrees of economic integration with each other, and have a significant understanding of each other's culture and history may nevertheless remain conflictual, even antagonistic. The source of this continued lack of empathy lies in the very factors ignored by contemporary liberal and realist theorists alike: the lenses of perception through which both elites and masses operate, lenses that we label “collective memory” and that link history (as objective reality) to ideology (as subjective world view). The acuity of this collective memory is analyzed and described in the dyadic relationship between Germany and the Netherlands on the one hand, and Germany and Austria on the other.     

The Rule of Law and its Limits

Law and Philosophy -     

Two Rights of Free Speech

My main argument in this paper is that the right to freedom of expression is not a single right, complex as it may be, but spans two separate rights that I label the right to speak and the right to hear. Roughly, the right to speak stands for the right of a person to express freely whatever they wish to communicate to some other persons or to the public at large. The right to hear stands for the right to have free and unfettered access to any kind of content that has been communicated by others. The right to speak and the right to hear are two separate rights, grounded in different kinds of interests. I try to show that this division of rights and their respective rationales can be utilized to explain how we think about some of the limits of the right to freedom of expression, particularly in the context of conflicts between the right to speak and the right to hear, conflicts that are rather pervasive. I also argue, though perhaps less conclusively, that in thinking about the limits of freedom of expression, an exclusive focus on the harm principle would be misguided. There is no reason to deny that speech is often harmful, sometimes very much so, but the prevention of harm is not sufficient to justify legal prohibition, at least not in this case.     

In the Shadow of Nikolai Danilevskii: Universalism,Particularism, and Russian Geopolitical Theory

In order to contribute to our understanding of Russian geopolitical theory, this article investigates closely the figure of Nikolai Danilevskii. The article pays special attention to the thinker’s increased influence on contemporary Russian geopolitical thought, by presenting qualitative and quantitative evidence of this influence. It explains Danilevskii’s rise by looking at Western pressures on Russia and the country’s internal vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities emerged from the breakup of the Tsarist and the Soviet state, respectively, by providing the required context for the emergence of defensive nationalist ideas.