Besprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Trilateral relations in a globalizing world. ASEM and the United States

Europe, the United States and East Asia are linked together through bilateral relations as well as a kind of trilateral relationship. There are three legs: Looking from a European perspective, the strongest relationship is the transatlantic relationship; secondly, there is a growing relationship between the United States and East Asia; and thirdly, the weakest link is the European-East Asian relationship.In this article I will focus, first, on this global triangle between East Asia, Europe and the United States. Secondly, I will discuss the question whether ASEM, APEC and ASEAN are competing or cooperating. Thirdly, I will analyze the question how the US looks at ASEM. Concluding I will argue that the US should take ASEM more seriously – not least because of US interests.This paper was written as part of a project on Backlash against Globalization that is supported by the Otto Wolff Foundation, Cologne, and The German Marshall Fund of the United States, Washington, DC.     

Who Should Govern Political Parties? Organizational Values in Norwegian and Danish Political Parties

The article explores party member attitudes towards internal party democracy and party leadership in Danish and Norwegian parties. The focus is on the relationship between party members' public policy values (measured by means of 'old politics' and 'new politics' value dimensions) and their organizational values (i.e. ideas about internal democracy), but the members' educational and activism levels as well as indicators capturing factors specific to individual parties are also applied to explain party members' organizational values. We find that positions on the two policy value dimensions are related to party members' organizational values. But the relationships are not particularly strong, and their signs are contrary to expectations. One explanation may be that the 'new politics' literature draws a misleading picture of the organizational values of New Left and New Right party members – at least in the Danish and Norwegian cases. We also find that the social democratic parties in both countries differ considerably from the other parties in the sense that the dissatisfaction with the leadership was much stronger in these parties.