How did the euro area survive the crisis?

Six recent books differ in their explanations as to how the euro area survived the crisis. In this review it is concluded that strong supranational institutions rather than German or Franco-German leadership, shared identity or the popular legitimacy of central institutions have been the crucial condition. Popular support for the euro has remained relatively high in many member states. While the crisis led to some expansion of the intergovernmental method, survival of the euro area required a great expansion in the powers of supranational institutions.     

De-Europeanisation in Turkey: The Case of the Rule of Law

Abstract

This article investigates the political dynamics shaping the post-2010 ‘de-Europeanisation’ of Turkey’s judicial system, particularly regarding judicial independence and rule of law. The analysis suggests the limits of conventional Europeanisation accounts emphasising causal factors such as European Union (EU) conditionality and the ‘lock-in effects’ of liberal reforms due to the benefits of EU accession. The article argues that the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP’s) bid for political hegemony resulted in the reversal of rule of law reforms. De-Europeanisation is discussed in terms of both legislative changes and the government’s observed discourse shift.     

信息化进程中国际体系与秩序特征探析

人类文明正在从工业化社会迈向信息化社会,世界各国立足于不同的国情,秉持迥异的发展理念与施政方略,在国际舞台上共同演奏了民族国家竞争角逐、合作互惠、兴衰失衡并存的交响曲,共同造就了当代国际战略格局与世界秩序的全新态势.美国作为信息化浪潮的发源地与最为积极踊跃的推动者,赢得了信息化时代全球博弈的最大红利,依托厚重的经济基础和强大的军事实力,成为短期内难以逾越的单极霸权;而其他从两极格局中分离出来的诸强国以及为信息化、全球化浪潮所催生的多种国际行为体在把握机遇、发展实力、蓄势待发的同时,也于不同的领域与层次上对美国霸权形成一定的平衡与制约.单极主导、多元并存无疑成为步入信息化时代之初国际政治体系最显著的标志,但随着信息化浪潮在深度与广度上进一步拓展,在飞跃与调整的交替中不断前行,世界格局多极化、国际关系民主化、国际社会行为体多元化、从传统的"国家间政治"向世界政治乃至"全球政治"转变等趋势初现端倪,作为未来世界的可能性蓝图正逐渐呈现于世人眼前.从美国全球扩张战略的周期看,从20世纪80年代以来经过近30年持续的攻势态势,已经呈现出疲惫的征兆,在次贷危机和金融危机的影响下,美国很可能要进入一个战略休整期,美国在国际体系中的主导地位也将受到一定程度的削弱.     

Global political leadership in the twenty-first century: problems and prospects

While issues of political leadership have recently powerfully reclaimed ground in international political science, global political leadership has remained strikingly understudied. This article starts with a reconstruction of the diffusive leadership debate in international relations and eventually arrives at the fundamental distinction between structural leadership, relating to the material power capabilities of an actor, and behavioural leadership which refers to the concrete actions of a possible leader. It then inquires what collective actors – from major states via international organizations to transnational movements – could possibly exert global political leadership (structural, behavioural, or both). Overall, the major states would appear to hold the most favourable position, though their relative superiority in terms of material capabilities alone does not turn them into genuine leaders. The most radical visions, such as global leadership by transnational networks of civil society, are also the most vulnerable empirically. Given their explicit focus on ‘real change’, they correspond however more closely to established notions of genuine leadership than the order- and stability-oriented agendas of most other players.     

Food for Thought: Reflections on a Counter-hegemonic Food-related Intervention in a South African University

Currently the Academy operates primarily as a space that helps to create and cement neoliberal hegemony in the Gramscian sense. However, since hegemony is never complete, universities are a site of struggle and the opportunity exists to engage in a “war of position” within them. This must necessarily involve allowing space for counter-hegemonic discourses to emerge through critical reflection on “common sense” discourses, as well as the deliberate inclusion of counter-hegemonic thinking and theory from below. This article reflects on an attempt to do this in a South African university, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in relation to the issue of food. The Food Festival was an attempt to subvert interlocking hegemonic discourses, including that of food security, by “reading the world” (à la Freire) in order to understand the actual nature of existing food systems as inherently oppressive, and “inserting” the concept of food sovereignty as developed by the global peasants’ movement La Via Campesina. After considering the counter-hegemonic intentions of the Festival, the article reflects on its uneven success.     

South African foreign policy in the post-Mbeki period

President Thabo Mbeki's resignation in September 2008 six months before the expected end of his term was triggered by the recall issued by the ANC National Executive Committee. It is highly unlikely that any major changes in foreign policy will be made by the caretaker government of President Kgalema Motlanthe before the 2009 elections. However, the significant changes in the domestic political environment signal the start of a new era in South Africa's transformation — what might be called the ‘post post-apartheid period’. This paper explores what those changes might entail, especially in the realm of foreign policy. After reflecting on the legacy of Mbeki's foreign policy, the paper considers the potential implications of the relevant resolutions agreed at the December 2007 ANC National Conference in Polokwane. Constraints on South African foreign policy towards the African continent are considered, especially with regard to perception versus reality of its economic and political hegemony as well as its complex identity as a nation. In light of this analysis and the inevitable impact of the current global economic crisis, the paper concludes with a series of recommendations for a new vision and agenda for South Africa's foreign policy under the government to be elected in 2009.     

The hegemonic work of automated election technology in the Philippines

This article addresses the political role of information technology in the Philippines. It uses a theoretical framework inspired by Antonio Gramsci to examine the discourse surrounding automated elections in two major daily papers, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Business World Philippines. It argues that this discourse strengthens current conceptions of the development process by appealing to the interests not only of the dominant fraction of capital in the country today, but also to the middle class. Such operations are essential for the creation of an historic bloc capable of exercising hegemony.     

Cracking Hegemony in Thailand: Gramsci,Bourdieu and the Dialectics of Rebellion

Gramsci's notion of “hegemony,” like Bourdieu's concept of “habitus,” seems designed to explain accommodation to existing social structures, rather than resistance. In this paper, however, I draw from the Prison Notebooks some arguments that contribute to a Gramscian understanding of how hegemony may break apart under the weight of the same uneven development processes central to hegemony. Drawing also from Bourdieu, I argue that the conceptions of “hegemony” and “habitus” inscribe the possibility of resistance within the embodied experience of accommodation to class rule. I then elaborate a dialectical, Gramscian-Bourdieusian account of the Red Shirt movement in Thailand, showing that the seeds for the destruction of royalist hegemony in Thailand have been sown in the embodied processes of accommodation to ruling class hegemony. The breadth and depth of challenges to this hegemony, moreover, are evident not only from the activities of the Red Shirt movement and regional discontent in Northern and Northeast Thailand but from the resistance of working class women to attempts to police their sexuality and limit their consumerism. The refusal of Thai elites to accept the breadth and depth of Thailand's dispositional transformation has legitimised – in their eyes – the brutal crackdown on Red Shirt protestors that resulted in the April-May 2010 massacres. Yet repression can only kill off political leaders and specific parties; it will not likely derail the growing resentment of ordinary Thais over elitist class rule.     

The limits of feminist political intervention in Singapore

This article uncovers the strongly ideological quality in Singapore's theory and practice of pragmatism. It also points to a strongly pragmatic quality in the ideological negotiations that play out within the dynamics of hegemony. In this complex relationship, the combination of ideological and pragmatic manoeuvring over the decades has resulted in the historic political dominance of the People's Action Party (PAP) government in partnership with global capital. But in an evolving, diversifying and globalising society, this manoeuvring has also engendered a number of mismatched expectations. It has also seen a greater sensitivity and attention to the inherent ideological contradictions and socio-economic inequalities that may erode what has been a relatively stable partnership between state and capital. This article argues that Singapore's one-party dominant state is the result of continuous ideological work that deploys the rhetoric of pragmatism to link the notion of Singapore's impressive success and future prospects to its ability to attract global capital. In turn, this relies on maintaining a stable political system dominated by an experienced, meritocratic and technocratic PAP government. While this Singaporean conventional wisdom has supported the political and economic interests of the state and global capital in a period of neo-liberal globalisation, its internal contradictions and external pressures have also begun to challenge its hegemonic pre-eminence.     

Notes on recent dissertations

The growing popularity and use of news Web sites around the world provides new possibilities for studying the position of the United States in the world system charted by digital news items. In this article, we look at 35 popular news sites in 10 different languages over a 2-year period, in order to assess the position of the United States in world news as well as to identify possible explanations for it. Our findings show that the United States is by far the most prominent country in the news sites that we studied from around the world, except for the French and Arabic ones. The network structure of news links clearly exhibits its key position as the centerpiece of a global system. Economic factors better explain America's news prominence than political, social, and geographical factors. Yet, none of the many variables we examined could explain the large gap between the news prominence of the United States and that of the rest of the world. We discuss possible reasons for these findings and suggest directions for further studies in the field.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource: network data.]