The unseen hands: Collaborative instrumental leadership in the British renegotiation case

The article contends that an important but overlooked explanation for the European Union's resilience in the past decade in the face of several existential crises has been the informal instrumental leadership roles played by EU institutional actors collaborating with each other. In this article, a theoretical framework is developed that can explain why EU governments, facing a crisis, would choose to informally delegate leadership tasks to a set of EU institutional actors. A three-part mechanism of collaborative instrumental leadership provided by institutions is devised that explains why governments informally delegate leadership tasks to EU institutions, and the effects of this informal delegation. The core of the article is a process-tracing case study that explores how collaborative instrumental leadership actually works. The case selected is the British renegotiation of their terms of membership in 2015–2016. While the case has become more-or-less forgotten because the shock ‘no’ vote in the June 2016 Brexit referendum made its terms moot, the deal included quite exceptional reform proposals in which the EU bent over backwards to accommodate the United Kingdom, perhaps even going beyond the bounds of the EU Treaties themselves in the issue of immigration. Given this, analysing how collaborative instrumental leadership supplied by institutions contributed to producing the ambitious deal can shed light on the processes whereby intractable problems in the EU have been solved in the past decade.     

《舞论》对印度戏剧的历史影响:以库迪亚旦剧为例

婆罗多的《舞论》是印度古代著名的梵语文艺理论著作。它不仅深刻地影响了后世梵语文学与艺术理论的建构,也对一些重要的印度古代传统艺术如婆罗多舞、卡塔卡利舞和库迪亚旦剧等产生了重要的影响。与中国的昆曲一道,库迪亚旦剧于2001年被联合国教科文组织(UNESCO)列入首批人类非物质文化遗产代表作名录。库迪亚旦剧也是深受《舞论》影响的南印度喀拉拉邦的地方传统戏剧,它在漫长的历史岁月中,为了适合本土观众的欣赏情趣,大量吸纳了当地文化要素,从而为自己的长期流传打下了坚实的基础。《舞论》对其剧场建造、戏剧表演类型、戏剧人物塑造、形体与语言表演、舞蹈和音乐等各个方面均产生了积极的理论影响。库迪亚旦剧的表演至少涉及《舞论》提及的10种戏剧中的4种。库迪亚旦剧遵循《舞论》所规定的面部神态表演论、眼神表演论、手势论和步伐表演论等。《舞论》强调戏剧表演与舞蹈表演、音乐表演的三位一体,这一点在库迪亚旦剧中也有体现。库迪亚旦剧运用源自《舞论》音阶论和调式论的21种拉格和10种节奏类型。由于喀拉拉邦处在南印度达罗毗茶文化区,《舞论》基本原理和表演规范对库迪亚旦剧的影响,是后者的一种选择性或变异性接受。例如,库迪亚旦剧的服饰、化装与舞台布景,遵循与《舞论》所载区别极大的一种模式。     

英语教育的劳动市场回报及英语教育政策调整 —— 基于 2016年问卷调查数据

中国的英语教育近年来受到越来越多的重视。无论是国家还是个人都投入了大量资源用于英语教育,如此巨额的投入所带来的劳动市场回报值得关注。英语教育的劳动市场回报可以分为人力资本投入回报和信号作用回报。研究发现,英语在实际工作中使用越多,工资收入越高,是为英语教育作为人力资本投入回报的证据。但在工作中很少用到英语的人,通过英语四六级考试对其工资也有显著影响,反映了英语教育具有信号作用的功能。调查显示,英语教育的信号作用是英语教育劳动市场回报的主要方面。因此,中国的英语教育有过度教育从而导致资源配置低效率之嫌,建议及时调整国家的英语教育政策。     

Small winners and big losers: strategic party behaviour in the 2017 Dutch general election

Abstract

This article analyses party strategies during the campaign for the Dutch general election of March 2017, making use of issue-yield theory. It investigates whether parties strategically emphasise high-yield issues, by juxtaposing the issue opportunities provided by voters with parties’ issue emphasis during the campaign. More specifically, it asks whether parties strategically emphasised issues that were expected to reward them electorally. Analysing voter preferences and party campaign data, it is found that parties and most of their constituencies show high ideological consistency, that parties emphasise mostly positional issues and thus choose a conflict-mobilising strategy, and that most parties emphasise high-yield issues rather than following the general political agenda. Four small parties that won significantly behaved strategically while the social democrats – who severely lost – hardly did. The findings imply that the issue-yield framework can help to explain the election result in the fragmented Dutch multi-party context.     

Progressive Politics in a Changing World: Challenging the Fallacies of Blue Labour

In Britain and across Europe, the social alliances that sustained progressive politics for a century are disintegrating. The financial crisis of 2007–8 showed that Labour and its ‘third way’ European followers had got the economics of modern capitalism wrong. With the mainstream left compromised, it has been the nationalist right that has benefitted, re-defining politics around issues of nation, culture and identity. What is surprising is the number of influential voices across the centre and left of politics who have accepted much of this far-right analysis and adopted its language and terminology. These trends, especially post-Brexit, have crystallised in the UK around the label of ‘Blue Labour’. This article examines the fallacies and flaws of the Blue Labour tendency in four key areas—class, economy, family and race—and suggests alternative ways forward, which seek to forge rather than disrupt alliances between the working class and new social movements.     

Coming out of the shadow? Studies of local governments in Central and Eastern Europe in European academic research

This article is an analysis of the changing role of research on local governments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) within mainstream European studies. It refers to dependency theory (Wallerstein, Prebish) as applied to scientific research. It classifies CEE as being in the semi-periphery of academic research. The empirical analysis consists of two parts: (1) qualitative review of the most important of the comparative studies of European local governments. It includes a discussion on the role of local governments and researchers from CEE in these studies; (2) quantitative based on an analysis of articles published in international journals and citations for those articles in Scopus. The analysis covers 14 countries (all new member states who joined the EU from 2004 onwards, plus the Balkan countries: Albania, Macedonia, and Serbia).     

The star of David in a cedar tree: Jewish students and Zionism at the American University of Beirut (1908–1948)

The American University of Beirut's emergence as a hub of Arab national and cultural identity in the first half of the twentieth century has been well documented by historians. The simultaneous Zionist presence on campus has been largely overlooked. Zionist ideas were predominantly promoted by Palestinian Jewish students who formed a small but vocal minority at AUB prior to 1948. Faculty and non-Jewish students also regularly collaborated with and traveled to Zionist institutions in Palestine for academic, athletic, and leisure purposes. For Arab students on campus, therefore, Zionism was not an abstract concept, but rather a national identity embodied by fellow classmates and friends on campus. As the conflict in Palestine increased in the 1930s and 1940s, so too did political activism and tensions on campus between Zionist and Arab nationalist students. This article analyzes this unique period of exchange, collaboration, and friction at AUB, which came to a swift end with the outbreak of the 1948 War. By focusing on the interactions between Arab and Zionist Jewish students at AUB, I seek to extend the ‘relational’ approach towards Jewish-Arab contact beyond Palestine's borders.     

Russia’s ministry of ambivalence: the failure of civic nation-building in post-Soviet Russia

This article argues that the sources of official and societal ambivalence towards civic nationhood in today’s Russia are found in the institutional instability and personalist dynamics of hybrid regime politics in the 1990s. Successful civic nation-building should institutionalize inclusive criteria for citizenship as a basis for policymaking, which in turn should create incentives for dominant ethnicities to embrace civic nationhood. While the shifting views of Boris Yel’tsin on nationalities policy and the constant turmoil in the government’s nationalities ministry have received little scholarly attention, they illuminate the endogenous sources of regime instability in relation to civic nation-building. Russia’s experience thus challenges the traditional view of ethnic nationalism as fostering authoritarianism and civic nationalism as fostering democracy: rather, competitive authoritarianism in the 1990s confounded the regime’s own efforts toward civic nation-building and laid the groundwork for the “ethnic turn” in Russian politics under Vladimir Putin.     

The Public Management of Risk: The Case for Deliberating among Worldviews

This article argues that the public management of risk faces inherent "wicked issue" problems which are further accentuated in the context of the contemporary regulatory state. It is suggested that in order to overcome these limitations and inevitable trade-offs, there needs to be a more conscientious effort in setting out distinct components of any public management of risk, which should be considered and discussed through the lens of distinct worldviews contrasting interpretations and solutions, as well as potential "black-spots." It is only by acknowledging limitations of any one strategy and by considering plural solutions that there is less likelihood of disappointment when dealing with crises and disasters.     

进攻性联盟、模糊性威慑与AUKUS的战略性扩张

2021年9月15日,美国、英国和澳大利亚建立三边安全伙伴关系(AUKUS)。美英澳三国基于追求权力最大化、改变既有国际秩序的扩张性动机,构建进攻性联盟。美国企图巩固印太地区霸权;英国试图提升印太地区影响力,推动“全球英国”构想;澳大利亚希图扩张在印太地区的威慑力,强化南太平洋区域强国地位。AUKUS的威慑功能具有模糊性,主要体现在威慑对象及触发条件的模糊性。其模糊性威慑主要包括模糊性威慑的信号功能、震慑功能、作战功能、信息和情报共享功能、军工合作功能。AUKUS通过模糊性威慑功能实现美国在印太地区的战略性扩张;威胁中国国家安全和阻挠中国统一进程;诱使印度深化与三国战略合作;引发东盟国家意见分歧;加速欧盟防务自主进程;削弱国际核不扩散机制,恶化地区安全形势,对全球及地区安全局势产生消极影响。