Democracy-Speak: Party Manifestos and Democratic Values in Britain,France and Germany

This article analyses changes in party-manifesto references to democracy in post-war Britain, the French Fifth Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in order to explore changes in political parties' statements about democracy. It finds that in recent decades parties in all three countries have generally become more supportive of and more vocal in their calls for citizen participation in political decision-making, with a related increase in expressed support for direct democracy and other opportunities for participation. It also finds that left-wing parties have tended to be more enthusiastic than right-wing parties. The article suggests that changes are most likely parties' responses to wider shifts in societal values, and it concludes with a discussion of the significance of democracy-speak for both parties and citizens.     

Introduction to Neumann: law and socialist political theory

Abstract

Regulators attempt to understand financial markets and their risks in terms of categories of knowledge and datasets that are defined and produced by the markets. However, regulators cannot adequately interpret or utilize such knowledge, for reasons including their social distance from the sites of knowledge production, the diversity of financial firms’ proprietary risk models, firms’ abilities to game the rules thus rendering the ‘metrics’ meaningless and several backfiring aspects of global regulatory networking and reform. Calls for yet more information about trading, posed in terms of the merits of transparency, result in information swamping of regulators. Meanwhile, while policy-makers tinker with regulatory structures (‘architecture’), political reaction to the crisis de-legitimizes public regulation as a project. Yet there is one positive aspect of the reforms – enhancing powers for ‘resolution’ of financial firms in ways that impact upon investors while minimizing wider destabilization – upon which the regulatory information requirement can and should be refocused. To protect the public interest, legal transparency is required, trading transparency is not. This paper introduces these issues by drawing on critical work on transparency and markets.     

The Production of Culprits: From Deportability to Detainability in the Aftermath of “Homeland Security”

In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, the virtually instantaneous hegemony of a metaphysics of antiterrorism has radically reconfigured the politics of race, immigration, and citizenship in the United States. In the extended historical moment beginning with the United States' proclamation of a planetary “War on Terrorism” and encompassing our (global) political present, the US sociopolitical order has been racked by several interlocking crises—convulsively careening between heightened demands on citizenship and the erosion of civil liberties, imperial ambition and nativist parochialism, extravagant domestic law enforcement and global lawlessness. In relation to the parallel but contradictory hegemonic projects of “American” national identity and attachment, on the one hand, and the expansion or refortification of US empire, on the other, the cumulative crisis-as-opportunity for US nationalism that has ensued is replete with unpredictable dilemmas and unresolved possibilities for both citizens and denizens alike. This essay examines significant new deployments of migrant “illegality” as this sociopolitical condition has been significantly reconfigured in the United States in the aftermath of the proclamation of a purported War on Terrorism, and the concomitant implementation of draconian police powers domestically that the author calls the Homeland Security State.     

Book reviews

Ennio Di Nolfo (ed.), Power in Europe?II. Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy and the Origins of the EEC, 1952-1957. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), DM238.

Simon J. Nuttall, European Political Cooperation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 343pp. £30, ISBN 0 19 827318 5.

Michael Smith and Stephen Woolcock, The United States and the European Community in a Transformed World (London: Pinter publishers for Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1993), 120 pp., £22.50 hb, £9.95 pb. ISBN 086187 0972/086187 0980.

Richard H. Ullman, Securing Europe (London: Adamantine Press, 1991), 175pp., £12.95. ISBN 0 7449 0036 0.

Cornelia Navari (ed.), The Condition of States: A Study in International Political Theory (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 238pp.

Francine Friedman, (comp. and ed.) Yugoslavia: A Comprehensive English-Language Bibliography (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1993), xv + 547 pp., indices, US$ 120.

Richard Dean Burns (ed.), Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), three vols., 1692 pp. inch index, US$280, ISBN 0 684 19281 0.     

Patents holders are not protected from US Government infringement by the Fifth Amendment

In a patent infringement action against the government, theUnited States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit interpreted28 USC section 1498 as rendering the government liable for theinfringement of a method patent only when every step of theclaimed method is practised in the United States and furtherheld that a plaintiff cannot allege patent infringement againstthe government as a Fifth Amendment taking.     

Strategic Coordination and the Law

We re-examine the relationship between coordination, legal sanctions, and free-riding in light of the recent controversy regarding the applicability of the coordination problem paradigm of law-making. We argue that legal sanctions can help solve coordination problems by eliminating socially suboptimal equilibrium outcomes. Once coordination has taken place, however, free-riding can not lead to the breakdown of coordination outcomes, even if sanctions may still be effective at increasing the equity of such outcomes. Finally, we argue that it is the choice of a legal or constitutional system rather than the choice of law that is paradigmatic of the coordination problem. This view requires a re-assessment of the normative status of sanctions attached to individual laws. We thank Catherine Hafer and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Wide Awake With Anxiety

The Poetry of Petrarch, translated by David Young
Petrarch's Guide to the Holy Land: Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ, with an introductory essay, translation, and notes by Theodore J. Cachey, Jr
My Secret Book, by Francis Petrarch, translated by J. G. Nichols, foreword by Germaine Greer     

TIPPINS AND WITTMANN ASKED THE WRONG QUESTION:

Tippins and Wittmann (2005) provide an important analysis of the limitations of child custody evaluations, but they are wrong to propose that court-appointed evaluators should be precluded from making recommendations about best interests decisions. While some of the evidence of evaluators may fail to meet the high standard of reliability expected for "expert evidence," the role of court-appointed evaluators in child-related cases is not the same as the role of party-retained experts in other types of litigation, and the legal basis for their involvement in the family law dispute resolution process is very different. The family courts should not apply the "expert evidence" standard when deciding how to use the evidence of a court-appointed evaluator, but rather should use a more flexible standard that takes account of the family law context. If the Tippins and Wittmann proposal is adopted, it will have negative implications for the resolution of family law cases, including making settlements less common, thereby deleteriously affecting children.     

Ties that bind: DfID and the emerging security and development agenda

The security and development nexus is on the public agenda of policy-makers and analysts as never before. It is becoming an article of faith that security and development are ‘inextricably linked’. The content and confines of the security and development agenda, however, are contested and confused. As one interviewee put it, ‘it's as if security is the new development and development is the new security’. This paper sets out to map the landscape of the development and security agenda in order that it might be navigated better. The focus is on how policy debates in this area are shifting, rather than on how these shifts are being implemented on the ground. Particular reference is made to the Department for International Development and its Strategy for Security and Development—an analysis of which throws into relief the tensions between the two spheres. It is argued that understanding the linkages between security and development must involve more than simply asserting that either one necessarily encompasses, requires or reinforces the other. Statements on security and development must be scrutinised against basic questions, not least whose security is at issue.