Space Situational Awareness in Europe: The Fractures and the Federative Aspects of European Space Efforts

ABSTRACT

One part of the massive US intelligence effort to learn about Soviet missile and space programs during the Cold War was acquiring and analyzing Soviet space debris that had returned to Earth. Equally important was retrieving US fragments that had landed in foreign nations to prevent the Soviets from recovering and exploiting them. At times bitter jurisdictional battles among the interested government agencies plagued the undertaking. Additionally the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 limited the ability to obtain foreign debris in some circumstances. Despite these problems, however, the available record shows that in many cases the United States acquired and tested important Soviet fragments and also was able to retrieve its own.     

The Impact of Technology and Communications upon International and Transnational Terrorism

The purpose of this inquiry is to examine the nature of terrorism, primarily in European and Western industrial nations. Specifically the article (1) examines the impact that has resulted from technological advances in communication and weapons and (2) discusses the necessity of international cooperation in the effort to defeat terrorism. The article documents that terrorism is a serious threat to Western democracies including the United States as well as an international threat. The conclusion of the article is that it has become more difficult to counter terrorism due to technological advances which have delivered greater destructive power into the hands of a few fanatics. The primary technological effects discussed are (1) those relating to communication which has enabled terrorists to establish a “world-wide network” and (2) the addition of toxins and nuclear weapons to the arsenal of the terrorist. As an international problem, however, the difficulty of countering terrorism is not rooted in the technological sophistication of the terrorist but in international disputes about the question, “what is terrorism”. Nations appear to be unable to mount an international assault against terrorism due to the great difficulty of arriving at a commonly accepted definition of terrorism. This article discusses the obstacles to defining terrorism encountered by the international community and the role that bilateral and multinational agreements have played in countering terrorism.     

The Integration of Women into West German and United States Police Service

This article describes the West German attitudes toward full employment of women in police service and the results of an experimental study of the successful integration of women into the uniformed police in Hamburg, West Germany. It compares experiences in the United States and concludes that the West German acceptance and use of women in the uniformed service is five to ten years behind the United States but that the German Police have very deliberately sought to create equal opportunities for women over the past decade. Expectations are that more women will be recruited into the German police service, but that it will be eight to ten years before large numbers of females are employed in the uniformed service or in the higher ranks of the German police forces.     

THE FRENCH STATE AND ITS TERRITORIAL CHALLENGES

This article focuses upon the territorial challenges to the French state. There is a genuine policy puzzle in terms of how to join up separate agencies of the state that is far from unique to France. Introducing new evidence based on interviews with high ranking officials, politicians and representatives of territorial policy communities in 2010, the main body of the article focuses upon the two main territorial reforms of the Sarkozy presidency, the reform of the territorial state, and the local government reform. These cases reveal an original attempt to craft a political discourse based on public sector productivity and state puissance. The article explores the tension between synoptic models of reform, focused on the expectation of rapid and quantifiable macro‐level change that suits the short‐term returns of the political cycle; and institutionalized processes of meso‐level implementation, with different timescales, logics of appropriateness and configurations of actors.     

Political Meritocracy and Direct Democracy: A Hybrid Experiment

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well. The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons. In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.     

Comparing NOMINATE and IDEAL: Points of Difference and Monte Carlo Tests

Empirical models of spatial voting allow us to infer legislators' locations in an abstract policy or ideological space using their roll‐call votes. Over the past 25 years, these models have provided new insights about the U.S. Congress, and legislative behavior more generally. There are now a number of alternative models, estimators, and software packages that researchers can use to recover latent issue or ideological spaces from voting data. These different tools usually produce substantively similar estimates, but important differences also arise. We investigated the sources of observed differences between two leading methods, NOMINATE and IDEAL. Using data from the 1994 to 1997 Supreme Court and the 109th Senate, we determined that while some observed differences in the estimates produced by each model stem from fundamental differences in the models' underlying behavioral assumptions, others arise from arbitrary differences in implementation. Our Monte Carlo experiments revealed that neither model has a clear advantage over the other in the recovery of legislator locations or roll‐call midpoints in either large or small legislatures.