Should the EU Protect Democracy and the Rule of Law inside Member States?

Against the background of recent developments in Hungary, the article discusses the question whether the European Union ought to play a role in protecting liberal democracy in Member States. First, it is argued that the EU has the authority to do so, both in a broad normative sense and in a narrower legal sense (though the latter is more likely to be disputed). The article then asks whether the EU has the capacity to establish a supranational militant democracy; here it is argued that at the moment both appropriate legal instruments and plausible political strategies are missing. To remedy this situation, the article proposes a new democracy watchdog, analogous to, but more powerful than, the Venice Commission. Finally, it is asked whether EU interventions would provoke a nationalist backlash. There is insufficient evidence to decide this question, but the danger of such a backlash probably tend to be overestimated.     

Getting to Sweden,Part I: War and Malfeasance, 1720–1850

How and why some countries were able to make the historical transition from a patrimonial, nepotistic and corrupt bureaucracy to a clean, Weberian and professionalised one is still an under‐studied topic in the literature on corruption. This article presents original data on such a transition in the case of Sweden, drawing on court hearings of cases of malfeasance among public officials in the period 1720–1850. It is argued, theoretically, that an important explanation for why the Swedish bureaucracy was able to break out of the collective action trap of corruption relates to Charles Tilly's theory of the importance of war for state‐making. Rather than viewing war‐making in itself as a driver of change, however, this article pinpoints the importance of having lost a significant war – in the Swedish case, the war against Russia in 1808–9 – and the constitutional and regime changes this set in motion. Drawing on comparative data on malfeasance, the similarities in this regard between the Swedish and Danish cases are highlighted.     

Email Fraud: Language,Technology, and the Indexicals of Globalisation

This paper investigates a corpus of email messages known as “419 scams”: a form of financial fraud in which huge offers of money are being made to people provided they pass on bank details and other personal information to the perpetrators. This kind of message presents us with a typical instance of “globalized” communication: they are produced in the margins of the world (the term “419 scam” is Nigerian) and sent to other places; they are electronically mediated; and they are written in varieties of “world languages”, mostly English. In the messages, authors claim particular identities and relationships, and have to do so using specific, generically regimented forms of communication. Investigating such forms yields a complex view of what it takes to communicate in a globalized environment: at least three different forms of communicative competence seem to be blended. First, authors require technological competence, the capacity to control, explore and exploit the communicative opportunities offered by global email systems. Second, they require cultural competence: they need some awareness of genres and genre expectations among their addressees in order to stand a chance of success. And thirdly, they need linguistic competence: the capacity to actually produce linguistic messages that are congruent with the projected identities and relationships in the transaction. We see that whereas the first two forms of competence appear to be well developed, the third is often problematic, yielding rich indexical signals pointing towards fraud. The genre of email fraud thus yields insights into the changing nature of communication in the age of globalization.     

Book Reviews

Throughout the twentieth century, the city of Khartoum was the subject of analyses and knowledge produced by diverse actors, such as scholars, urban planners, government agents and institutions, urban dwellers and, more recently, actors from the humanitarian and private sectors. The aim of this article is to offer a critical analysis of Sudan urban studies from the 1970s onwards, and to illustrate their strengths and shortcomings. A revisitation of the work of anthropologist Richard Lobban on Tuti Island, where I recently conducted ethnographic fieldwork, will allow me to comment on Marxist anthropology as the theoretical framework used by Sudanist scholars in the early decades of urban studies, to focus on methodological strategies for data collection, and to analyse the use of concepts such as “urbanisation” and “community”. These reflections will be used to suggest a research agenda for urban studies in Sudan, as well as recent academic approaches to the treatment of the urban question.     

Beyond ‘Terrorism’ and ‘State Hegemony’: assessing the Islamist mainstream in Egypt and Malaysia

International networks of Islamic ‘terrorism’ have served as the most popular explanation to describe the phenomenon of political Islam since the 11 September attacks. This paper argues that both the self-proclaimed doctrinal Islam of the militants and Western perceptions of a homogeneous Islamist threat need to be deconstructed in order to discover the often ambiguous manifestations of ‘official’ and ‘opposition’ Islam, of modernity and conservatism. As a comparison of two Islamic countries, Egypt and Malaysia, which both claim a leading role in their respective regions, shows, moderate Islamic groups have had a considerable impact on processes of democratisation and the emergence of civil society during the quarter century since the ‘Islamic resurgence’. Shared experiences like coalition building and active participation within the political system demonstrate the influence and importance of groups such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Youth Movement of Malaysia (abim) or the Islamic Party of Malaysia (pas). These groups have shaped the political landscape to a much larger extent than the current pre-occupation with the ‘terrorist threat’ suggests. The gradual development of a ‘culture of dialogue’ has rather revealed new approaches towards political participation and democracy at the grassroots level.     

The Geopolitics of Water in the Middle East: fantasies and realities

Most expert and public discourse on Middle Eastern water politics holds that water scarcities are of great, if often under-recognised, geopolitical importance. Pessimists and optimists alike tend to assume that water has, or soon will have, profound geopolitical implications. In this paper I argue to the contrary. Specifically, I contend that water problems should neither be understood in naturalistic nor in liberal?–?technical terms, but instead as questions of political economy; that water is structurally insignificant within the political economy of the modern Middle East; that in consequence water is generally unimportant as a source of inter-state conflict and co-operation; and that, notwithstanding this, water supplies are a crucial site and cause of local conflicts in many parts of the region. I submit also that given the worsening state of economic development within the Middle East, these local conflict dynamics are likely to further deteriorate.     

Identities and the Indian state: An overview

The importance that IR theorists have traditionally given to sovereign statehood has decreased their ability to explain new issues of global heterogeneity and diversity. The need to explain the end of the cold war, the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the revival of old identities as well as the eruption of ethnic conflict in various parts of the world has, therefore, led to the return of culture and identity in IR theory. The concept of nation-state in international relations is based on the assumption that humanity is divided into nations and each nation is entitled to a state of its own. Although a state can exist without a nation it does not have the same legitimacy as a nation-state. Thus post colonial states like India, which are often considered to have artificial boundaries and are made up of many ethnic groups, feel obliged to embark on nation-building and prove that they are a nation-state even though homogeneous nation-states are a dwindling minority. The rise of the BJP in India emphasises the importance of religious and cultural identities but still does not prove that India is a nation. There has always been a tension between national and subnational identities in India. Not everyone who lives within the territorial borders of India considers him/herself to be an Indian nationalist-for example, Kashmiris seeking independence. The central government has always been aware of this and has always given priority to the preservation of the unity and integrity of the country. Indeed the constitution of India, while giving recognition to the fact that India is a multi-ethnic state, does not given anyone the right to secede from the Union. However, it is difficult to say how far India has progressed in the past 50 years beyond mere political integration and towards the creation of a nation-state through the transfer of loyalties from regional or ethnic groups to the nation, whose legal expression is the Indian Union. In the long run this is the only thing that will preserve the Indian state as it exists today.     

Public Administration Reform in a Challenging Environment: A Review of the Establishment of the Health Economics and Financing Directorate (HEFD) within the Afghanistan Ministry of Public Health

The purpose of this article is to provide an example of recent public administration reform in Afghanistan. In 2003, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) established the Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS) and other health services. To date, service delivery has been conducted largely by NGOs, funded by the main international donors, and managed by the Grant and Contracts Management Unit (GCMU) of the MoPH. Despite these advancements, Afghanistan continues to face significant challenges in health service provision and policy. In 2009, the GCMU was restructured into the Health Economics and Financing Directorate (HEFD), which broadened the scope of the Unit to conduct important economic analyses. This article examines the MoPH's role in health financing as a developing institution engaged in applied health economics and policy analysis. This development will allow the MoPH to build evidence for policy-making and further establish its stewardship role in the health sector.     

How Nation States 'Hit' Europe: Ambiguity and Representation in the European Union

This article analyses how differences in domestic institutional constellations shape the representational roles of member state officials when attending the EU Council of Ministers. The conceptual framework used draws on theories of political representation, institutional theories and the Europeanisation literature. Our primary argument is that role perceptions are considerably conditioned by actors' domestic institutional embeddedness. Comparing Belgian and Swedish officials attending working groups within the Council of Ministers substantiates this argument. Belgian officials are more supranationally oriented than their Swedish counterparts. This difference is related to varying levels of vertical and horizontal specialisation, federalism, competition among veto-players, the role of the Foreign Ministry, and the level of trust in domestic government compared to the level of trust in the EU.     

From Vlaams Blok to Vlaams Belang: The Belgian Far-Right Renames Itself

On 14 November 2004, the Belgian far-right party Vlaams Blok changed its name to Vlaams Belang and instituted a number of changes in its programme. This was a response to the earlier decision of the Court of Cassation which had found Vlaams Blok to be in violation of the law against racism. As a result, some of the more extreme positions of Vlaams Blok have been dropped from the new statute of Vlaams Belang. Opinion is divided concerning whether or not the law against racism has worked by effectively setting the parameters for legally acceptable propaganda, or whether the recent changes would help the far-right expand its voter base by making it more mainstream. This article seeks to contrast these two points of view.