The Political Enforcement of Liberalism: Bargaining, Institutions, and Auto Multinationals in Hungary

The demise of communism triggered large flows of foreign direct investment into Eastern Europe. This article examines the impact of recent changes in the international environment—the transformation of world production systems and the rise of neoliberalism—on bargaining between multinational corporations and post-communist governments. It focuses on the Hungarian automobile industry, one of the region's largest recipients of FDI. The Hungarian case illustrates the ability of small, open, and geopolitically weak states to parlay shifts in the global environment into a bargaining asset. The ascent of lean production heightened pressure on auto MNCs to develop local supplier systems capable of fast delivery of components to East European subsidiaries. The pull of backward integration was particularly strong for Japanese producers, whose non-European status enabled Hungarian state authorities to secure commitments to raising domestic content. Transplanting Japanese-style production in Eastern Europe proved less vexing for European MNCs, whose status as EU-based companies freed them of local-content requirements and whose preexisting supplier networks obviated heavy investments in the Hungarian components industry. But while Western auto producers enjoyed highly favorable terms of entry into Eastern Europe, even they could not elude the paradoxical effects of global changes on MNC/host state relations. The very eastward extension of the European Union's nondiscriminatory rules that facilitated EU-based firms' entry into Hungary also permitted host state authorities to parry efforts by MNCs to obtain particularistic concessions after entry. The Hungarian case thus demonstrates that MNC/host state bargaining in the post–Cold War period hinges more on the global positions of multinationals than on the structural vulnerabilities of capital-importing states ( per dependency theory) or the internal capacity of host states ( per statist theories).     

Challenging Corporate 'Humanity': Legal Disembodiment, Embodiment and Human Rights

This article interrogates the corporate use of human rightsdiscourse. It does so in light of concern surrounding corporatedistortion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)paradigm,¹ and in light of the fact that corporations can claimshelter under human rights documents, particularly—asrecently discussed by Emberland²—the European Conventionof Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). The authoroffers a critical exploration of corporate human rights claims(and some arguments advanced in their favour), and identifiesthe phenomenon of legal disembodiment (or ‘quasi-disembodiment’),linking it to both a genealogical account of human rights andthe nature of liberal legal personality. This reading of humanrights genealogy invites the reader to focus on a series ofparadoxes surrounding human rights, including their nature asa form of sacral construct, and locates human rights at an entrenchedand challenging interface between historical and contemporarypatterns of inclusion and exclusion. Quasi-disembodiment emergesfrom the analysis as a key conceptual conduit for the legalreception of corporate human rights claims. Linking the ECHRto the liberal human rights tradition, the author suggests thatnotwithstanding judicial protection of corporations as beneficiariesof ECHR protection, it remains essential to engage in a normativecritique of the very notion of corporate human rights. Beneathhuman rights law (and the related closures of legal discourse)it is possible to trace a human rights-oriented critique thatadopts human embodiment (and its quintessential link with humanvulnerability) as the ethical foundation of human rights.³ Emphasisingembodied vulnerability as the foundation of human rights yieldsa significant and ethically relevant distinction between corporationsand human beings—a distinction with intriguing possibilitiesfor the future theorisation of human rights—and one thatarguably problematises the corporate use of human rights discourse.     

Analysis: (Big) business as usual. Sustainable development,NGOs and UK arms export policy

The UK government claims to exercise a responsible arms export policy and to be committed to considering sustainable development concerns in arms export licensing. Yet in December 2001, it granted BAe Systems a licence for the sale of a £28 million air-traffic-control system to Tanzania, one of the world's poorest countries. This export failed the conditions of UK export guidelines in three major ways. This article explores why the government ignored its commitments, arguing that the relationship between Labour and the arms industry lies at the heart of UK export policy. A critical analysis of the development agenda shows that the issue is not simply to get the government to stick to its declared commitments, difficult as this is, as the neo-liberal development agenda promoted by the Labour government is itself fundamentally flawed. Assessing the effectiveness of NGO activity on UK arms export issues thus requires an interrogation of their vision of sustainable development as well as their critique of government actions.     

OHIM procedure: provision of internet links in decisions is insufficient

The Court of First Instance of the European Communities hasheld that OHIM's practice of providing reasons in decisionsby way of internet links, without also providing hard copiesof the web pages, is a breach of the duty to give reasons underArticle 73 of Council Regulation 40/94.     

Victorious Transsexuals in the Courtroom: A Challenge for Feminist Legal Theory

Transsexual and transgendered people, despite their exclusion from most civil rights laws, nonetheless occasionally prevail as plaintiffs in litigation. What should feminist legal theorists make of these victories? The theory one uses to win has implications for future conceptions of gender and sexuality in the law as well as for understanding contemporary conflicts and alliances among sex and gender theorists, lawyers, and activists. Conflicting theories of how to ground law's liberation claims abound, however. Evidence suggests that transsexuals secure legal victories only through a disheartening process of medicalization, normalization, and demonstration of traditional sex and gender role adherence. Recent cases, however, reveal some interesting destabilizations in law's account of the transsexual, and they provide critical legal scholars with a new perspective on rights‐claiming as a liberation strategy. Attention to the diversity of transsexual and transgendered priorities as well as to the properties of the legal process shows feminist legal theorists how to navigate the problems of identity construction and legal protection raised here sympathetically but unromantically.     

The Politics of Beauty: The Effects of Partisan Bias on Physical Attractiveness

Does politics cause people to be perceived as more or less attractive? As a type of social identity, party identifiers often exhibit in-group bias, positively evaluating members of their own party and, especially under conditions of competition, negatively evaluating out-party members. The current experiment tests whether political in-party and out-party status affects perceptions of the physical attractiveness of target persons. In a nationally representative internet sample of U.S. adults during the 2012 presidential election, we presented participants with photos of individuals and varied information about their presidential candidate preference. Results indicate that partisans, regardless of gender, rate target individuals as less attractive if they hold a dissimilar candidate preference. Female partisans, however, were more likely to rate target persons as more physically attractive when they held a similar candidate preference whereas no such effect was found for male partisans.