Citizen response to regional integration in the Americas: The cases of Costa Rica and El Salvador

This study examines public opinion in Costa Rica and El Salvador regarding regional integration in Central America. Recent efforts at regional integration as well as the response of the governments of the above countries to those efforts are reviewed. Public opinion toward regional integration is significantly more positive but less structured in El Salvador than in Costa Rica. Differences in the international and domestic contexts help to explain the differential responses in these two countries. Likewise, contextual factors help to account for differences between Central American and European publics in attitudes toward regional integration. Charles L. Davis is associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. His interests are Latin American politics and comparative political behavior. Matthew J. Gabel is assistant professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. His interests are European politics and the politics of regional integration. Kenneth M. Coleman is a former professor at the University of Kentucky, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the University of New Mexico. His interests are Latin American politics and public opinion.     

Constitutionalizing Employment Relations: Sinzheimer, Kahn-Freund, and the Role of Labour Law

Hugo Sinzheimer and his one-time student Otto Kahn-Freund are widely regarded as the founding fathers of German and British labour law respectively. While, at first glance, the two scholars might appear to have advocated rather different approaches to the regulation of employment relations, a review of their work reveals that both argued, in essence, for the 'constitutionalization' of those relations. Both argued, in other words, for the removal from the economic sphere of the otherwise inequitable consequences of the functioning of private law, so that collectivized labour might participate with capital, on a parity basis, in the autonomous regulation of the economy.     

‘Austria First’ revisited: a diachronic cross-sectional analysis of the gender and body politics of the extreme right

ABSTRACT

In this paper, Rheindorf and Wodak provide a discourse-historical analysis of extreme-right cultural politics in Austria, ranging from the blatant racism in the speeches of Vienna’s former Deputy Mayor Johann Gudenus (now MP in the Austrian parliament) to the construction of an idealized national body in the election campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), its programmatic agenda in handbooks and pamphlets, and the performances of far-right pop singer Andreas Gabalier. Rheindorf and Wodak argue that such cultural politics use a wide spectrum of discursive strategies both inside and outside established party politics and that the accompanying production of an ideal extreme-right subject is informed by nativist ideology. The cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that the cultural politics of the Austrian extreme right ranges from appropriated national symbols to coded National Socialist iconography. These politics pervasively construct a gendered and racialized national body, policed by a ‘strict father’ and nurtured by a ‘self-sacrificing mother’, vis-à-vis an apocalyptic threat scenario identified with migration, intellectual and political elites, cosmopolitanism and progressive gender politics.     

The primacy of self-development in Chris Argyis writings

This paper critically explores Chris Argyris’ concern for human development as found in his organizational writings. Specifically, his focus on a personl development approach to human growth in organization is critically assessed as to its prospects to facilitate behavior needed for “public” organization. Argyris’ theoretical emphasis upon “self-development” as explicated is unlikely to provide for social consciousness and political action by everyday participants of organization. His mode of “self-development” is a perspective which is fundamentally grounded in the psychological and moral subjectively of the individual. As such, Argyris’ developmental mode is one which primarily promotes consciousness and action of self-interest rather than social involvement. A more authentically public type of organization requires a developmental mode which engenders democratic action toward the shared problems and common needs experienced in everyday organizational reality.     

The Uses of Sovereignty in Twenty-first Century Russian Foreign Policy

Contemporary Russian foreign policy demonstrates a dual approach to state sovereignty, using a Westphalian model of sovereignty outside the former Soviet region and a post-Soviet model inside it. This approach performs three functions in contemporary Russian foreign policy: securing Russian national interests at domestic, regional, and international levels; balancing against the United States; and acting as a marker of ‘non-Western’ power identity in an emergent multipolar order. The conflict between these two models increasingly appears to threaten the last of these objectives, however, and as a means of advancing foreign policy objectives the approach thus appears caught in a self-defeating logic.