The British Labour Party and monetary union

The real test of the British Labour Party's new orientation to Europe will be its policy on economic and monetary union (EMU). This article analyses Labours political economy in relation to European integration and to the management of the currency, and how the intersection of these two have produced four distinctive approaches to EMU within the party. It assesses the stance of new Labour towards EMU in the context of this internal Labour Party debate as well as in the wider context of European social democracy.     

First or Second Order Referendums? Understanding the Votes on the EU Constitutional Treaty in Four EU Member States

This article uses post-referendum Flash-Eurobarometer surveys to analyse empirically voter attitudes towards the EU Constitution in four member states. The theoretical model used incorporates first and second order variables for voting to ascertain whether the outcome of the vote was a reflection of either first or second order voting behaviour. It is hypothesised that the cleavage politics over integration in the European arena had a major impact on the four votes, as captured by three first order variables: ‘Europhile’ and ‘Constitution-phile’ attitudes and ‘Egocentric Europeanness’, respectively. The quantitative analyses – controlling for a number of dimensions – strongly supports the hypothesis when compared with a model using solely second order party identification variables. These findings establish that how voters understood the EU polity, in particular whether membership is beneficial to one's own country, was a crucial factor in all the referendums. Implications for future research include the need to discover the cues or proxies influencing first order voting within domestic politics.     

Political Information, Political Involvement, and Reliance on Ideology in Political Evaluation

Many studies have focused on the relationship between political information and the use of ideology. Here, we argue that two “evaluative motivations”—general investment of the self in politics and extremity of partisanship—serve as moderators of this relationship. Specifically, we use data from two recent national surveys to test whether the possession of information is more strongly associated with a tendency to approach politics in an ideological fashion among individuals high in both types of evaluative motivation. Results supported this hypothesis, revealing that information was more strongly associated with ideological constraint and with a tendency to give polarized evaluations of conservatives and liberals among those who highly invest the self in politics and those with more extreme partisanship. As such, this study suggests that information and involvement interact to shape the use of ideology.     

Politics like any other? Comparative politics,international relations and the study of the EU

This article disputes the claim made by Simon Hix (WEP January 1994) that ‘politics in the EC is not inherently different to the practice of government in any democratic system’ and argues against a rigid division between international relations and comparative politics. It contends first, that EU politics cannot be broken up into two categories: ‘politics’ and ‘integration'; second, that the nature of the EU system, the centrality of states and the continued importance of power considerations precludes explanations of EU ‘politics’ through the use of comparative government approaches alone; and third, that public policy cannot in general be studied without reference to international factors.     

Oxytocin and the Biological Basis for Interpersonal and Political Trust

Political scientists have documented the many ways in which trust influences attitudes and behaviors that are important for the legitimacy and stability of democratic political systems. They have also explored the social, economic, and political factors that tend to increase levels of trust in others, in political figures, and in government. Neuroeconomic studies have shown that the neuroactive hormone oxytocin, a peptide that plays a key role in social attachment and affiliation in non-human mammals, is associated with trust and reciprocity in humans (e.g., Kosfeld et al., Nature 435:673–676, 2005; Zak et al., Horm Beh 48:522–527, 2005). While oxytocin has been linked to indicators of interpersonal trust, we do not know if it extends to trust in government actors and institutions. In order to explore these relationships, we conducted an experiment in which subjects were randomly assigned to receive a placebo or 40 IU of oxytocin administered intranasally. We show that manipulating oxytocin increases individuals’ interpersonal trust. It also has effects on trust in political figures and in government, though only for certain partisan groups and for those low in levels of interpersonal trust.     

Cold War Pioneers in Combined Intelligence and Analysis

From its inception in 1947 until the late 1970s the primary missions of the United States Military Liaison Mission (USMLM) involved maintaining a presence in East Germany for confidence building measures and reporting on items related to indicators and warnings of hostilities initiated by the Soviet Army. While not abandoning its traditional missions, the unit underwent a major transformation in the early 1980s and became the first Humint integrated collection, analysis and production center. Through a combination of factors, USMLM was able to link targeting, single-source collection and analysis while providing insights in a wide range of areas, from nuclear weapons, troop morale, equipment production, technical data, health and ethnic issues and literacy. Most significantly, USMLM confirmed severely reduced manning levels in GSFG combat arms units.

‘Intelligence is best done by a minimum number of men and women of the greatest possible ability.’ (R.V. Jones, the ‘father’ of modern scientific and technical intelligence)     

Japanese foreign intelligence‐related activities

John J. Fialka, War by Other Means: Economic Espionage in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). Pp.242, index. $25 (cloth); $15 (paper). ISBN 0–393–31821–4 and ‐04014–3.

James H. Hansen, Japanese Intelligence: The Competitive Edge (Washington DC: NIBC Press, 1996). Pp.222, index. $29.95. ISBN 1–878–29216–1.

Larry Kahaner, Competitive Intelligence: From Black Ops to Boardrooms ‐ How Businesses Gather, Analyze, and Use Information to Succeed in the Global Marketplace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Pp.300, index. $24 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). ISBN 0–684–81074–3 and ‐84404–4.

Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Pp.307, index. $42.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8014–14326–0 and ‐8332–8.

Richard J. Samuels, ‘Rich Nation, Strong Army’: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Pp.455, index. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8014–9994–1.

Peter Schweizer, Friendly Spies: How America's Allies Are Using Economic Espionage to Steal Our Secrets (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993). Pp.342, index (out of print). ISBN 0–871–13497–7.     

Liberalism,neo-liberalism and governmentality: introduction

This paper concerns the emergence of a specifically 'economic' way of governing poverty at the start of this century, an event which is to be accounted for, though by no means exhaustively, by the discovery of 'unemployment'. The latter will make it possible to relate the nineteenth-century 'problem of the unemployed' to an object domain that is primarily economic, rather than cultural or moral. A new object of regulation will emerge from this economic problematization of the 'social question': the labour market. The paper pays particular attention to the national labour exchange system, the political technology that will visibilize the labour market in new ways. Together with unemployment insurance, it will suggest new ways of governing poverty and a new course for social policy.     

Escaping the resource curse: The case of Indonesia

Abstract

Numerous studies have suggested that natural resource abundance is bad for development. In this context, Indonesia's rapid growth during the 1970s and 1980s seems remarkable. Why was Indonesia able to grow strongly and what are the implications of its experience for other resource abundant countries? I argue that its rapid growth was not simply a matter of policy elites making rational economic policy choices, but rather reflected two more fundamental factors: (i) the political victory of counter-revolutionary social forces over radical nationalist and communist social forces in Indonesia during the 1960s; and (ii) the country's strategic Cold War location and proximity to Japan. Accordingly, the main implication of its experience is that improved economic performance in resource abundant countries requires shifts in structures of power and interest and the emergence of external political and economic conditions that provide opportunities for growth.