HISTORICAL LEGACIES IN RISING POWERS

This articles emanates from the observation that realms like theory and broad comparison have typically focused onWestern concerns and geography while actors such as China and Turkey have been relegated to the undervalued field of areas studies. Noting that this inhibits our ability to uncover important cross-regional comparisons, the author suggests that “former empires/rising powers” (FERPs) across (Eur)Asia are a promising unit of analysis. To make the case for the FERPs, the author embeds four cases—Turkey, Iran, Russia, and China—in a common problematique, showing that their encounter with Western hegemony/ modernity engendered three waves of confrontation vis-à-vis the legacies of empire. These confrontations entailed Eurocentric denial as well as Occidentalist reification of native pasts, both of which are being superseded by what the author calls “authenticist” histories empowered by the crystallization of multiple modernities. The author then develops a theoretical framework to capture how reinvented pasts serve as sources of identity, normativity, and action. This approach enables an in-depth account of the Turkish case to show that both official and market actors claim continuity with an Ottoman-Islamic heritage from which a homegrown humanism is said to emanate. These narratives—and the tools through which they are promoted from the cultural industries to public diplomacy—may be helping Turkey and other erstwhile (Eur)Asian empires recalibrate national identity and international purpose at a time of global transformation.     

Separable but not separate forces: NATO's development of the combined joint task force

This article argues that the Combined Joint Task Force has profoundly affected the European security architecture. The CJTF structure shifted the terms of the European security debate from whether NATO should have a role in the post‐Cold War world to how NATO should act in this new security environment. The CJTF therefore helped NATO to survive its post‐Cold War existential dilemma, and to emerge with the same level of cohesion and cooperation that it possessed during the Cold War.     

Who is willing to participate? Dissatisfied democrats,stealth democrats and populists in the United Kingdom

This article demonstrates that two quite distinctive types of political disaffection – ‘dissatisfied democratic’ and ‘stealth democratic’ – exist among British citizens, with the former being more prevalent. While both types manifest low trust in political elites, the dissatisfied democrat is politically interested, efficacious and desires greater political participation, while the contrary is generally true of the stealth democrat. However, stealth democrats are favourably disposed towards direct democracy, which can be attributed to the populist nature of stealth democratic attitudes. Even so, when given the opportunity to take part in a national referendum, neither stealth democrats nor dissatisfied democrats showed much inclination to vote.     

Economic discourse and the capitalist order

This paper uses the concepts of business model and financial ecosystem to analyse the relation between the US capital market and corporate business. Under a capital market double standard, from 1995 to 2000, new companies with digital prospects could recover their costs from the capital market; but, after the tech stock crash in 2000, all companies were required to generate profits from the product market. This encourages a blurring of old and new firm identities, because sectoral power is increasingly necessary to secure cost recovery. But this does not imply any return to business as usual when the financial ecosystem for new technology survives the crash and large-scale venture capital investment continues. From this point of view,the new economy illustrated, concretely, the determining role of finance in the broader processes of financialization.