Moving towards EU membership and away from liberal democracy

ABSTRACT

The article concludes the Special Issue, Illiberal Politics in Southeast Europe, on the retreat of liberal democracy in the region. It focuses on the central themes that link all the papers together: free and fair elections, media freedom, judicial independence, privileged access to public resources and the role of civil society. It seeks to disentangle the causes and consequences of illiberal politics in the region and explores the similarities in the illiberal practices and strategies incumbents use with the aim of staying in power indefinitely. The main argument is that democratic backsliding in Southeast Europe is deeply rooted in the unfinished transitions of the 1990s, which gave rise to new political and economic elites and that blending those two into one resulted in the dominance of the executive over the judiciary and legislature. These new elites became entrenched during the wars and conflicts that affected the region. The enabling factors were of societal origin – clientelist practices, corruption, nepotism and mistrust in politics accompanied by external factors – as well as international pull and push factors (from the EU and Russia) along with a domino effect of democratic backsliding in the region.     

Subnational competitive authoritarianism and power-sharing in Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Incremental democratic decline is evident in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), but measures of democracy conceal an uneven subnational distribution of autocratization. So far there has been limited research on the drivers and constraints to subnational autocratization. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on power-sharing by exploring instances of illiberal politics enacted by parties in government at the subnational level in BiH. Evidence is gathered through semi-structured interviews and analysis of three specific cases of illiberal politics. We find that the political contest in BiH is purposefully contained within ethnic and subnational boundaries and constrained through several layers of institutionalized multilevel and ethnic checks and balances. The main drivers of subnational autocratization are opportunities that arise from the institutional framework established during early democratization and postwar structures that blend executive dominance with economic power and informal party networks, and occasionally from an individual actor’s perceptions of threat. Democratization in BiH will need to address subnational politics and deep-rooted power structures if it is to be successful.     

The rise of illiberal politics in Southeast Europe

ABSTRACT

Democracy is backsliding throughout Southeast Europe but there are no signs of full democratic breakdown. Instead, political parties and their leaders incrementally undermine challenges to governmental authority while keeping electoral contest largely intact. This article introduces a special issue that aims to examine and explain democratic decline by looking at the prevalence of illiberal politics across countries and issues. In order to overcome the limitations of fixed regime classification we adopt a procedural lens and look into governing practices that gradually tilt the electoral playing field. Utilizing the concept of Illiberal politics allows us to examine sets of policies enacted by political parties in government with the aim to remain in power indefinitely. By tracing democratic decline in Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania, and Croatia we observe different patterns of weakness, but also common causes arising from weak institutions and inherited governance practices that preserve executive dominance, patronage, and informality.     

Precarity,Cognitive (Non-)Resistance and the Conservative Working Class in China

ABSTRACT

Workers’ resistance is crucial to understanding how the working class respond to the growing labour precarity in post-socialist China. The labour studies literature posits that inequality and volatile capital movements increase workers’ precarity and lead to stronger labour resistance, such as strikes. However, workers’ cognition as an integral part of resistance has been rarely studied. This article examines cognitive resistance by Chinese workers from different tier cities by looking at their social trust, class identity, understanding of policies and class solidarity. Despite capital movements and precarity causing more labour unrest, it does not necessarily lead to a stronger cognitive resistance. While inequality and precarity are greater in the more developed megacities with a shifting capital favourability, workers in megacities display a more conservative cognitive resistance than those from the lower-tier cities. This study of workers’ cognitive resistance provides insight into the future of the Chinese labour movement. It argues that the working class’s current cognitive non-resistance suggests that even if a window of opportunity were to appear in the wall of state oppression, workers are not cognitively prepared to coalesce into a coherent social movement that would bring about transformative changes.     

Over the centuries: a history of Wollstonecraft reception

ABSTRACT

Both Wollstonecraft’s fame and infamy are attributable to her lived experience as the woman author of the only radical republican feminist text published in the pamphlet war of the 1790s. Yet, her radical republican politics were divorced from her gender politics in the early reception. This paper argues that this separation was subsequently sustained in part by interpretive practices that rest on the suppression of the original split. It shows that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both outside and within academia, the dominant interpretive tendency of neglecting Wollstonecraft’s radical republican politics has deradicalized both her historical political thought and her iconic image. This conventional reception has both enabled and limited the resources made available through Wollstonecraft to feminists throughout history.     

犯罪学Vs刑法学——刑法学话语霸权之终结

对这两门学科的定位所出现的偏颇,造成了对刑法学的过度尊崇和对犯罪学建设的边缘化趋势。从方法论的角度分析,犯罪学在全部刑事科学中的学科地位是处于基础学科和"前犯罪学科"的位置之上。犯罪学是一门实证与思辨相结合的学科,其所运用的科学方法论同刑法学的逻辑分析方法之间存在着根本的区别。刑法学需要以犯罪学的研究成果作为立法和司法的前提与基础。     

Trade Measures and Climate Compliance: Institutional Interplay Between WTO and the Marrakesh Accords

This article examines the potential of trade measures to induce more climate-friendly policies, focusing on the relationship between global trade rules and the Kyoto climate regime. At the core of this interplay is the normative consistency of trade-related rules in the two regimes and any hierarchical relationship between them. The stronger clout of the WTO and its compulsory dispute settlement system suggest that issues involving competing claims would be referred to WTO bodies. Such bodies have so far been restrictive regarding the exceptions in WTO agreements to the general ban on embargoes and discrimination. The normative compatibility of the two regimes will also depend on their participatory interplay, specifically how they differentiate groups of actors as to rights and obligations. Non-members of WTO receive the least protection, and their vulnerability to climate-related trade measures is largely determined by their interdependence with states that consider employment of such measures. Among WTO members, the findings of a dispute settlement body would presumably differ depending on the status of the target under the Kyoto Protocol. A non-complier with Kyoto commitments would be more shielded than a non-party, because by joining the Kyoto regime a non-complier has exposed itself to regime-internal and less trade intrusive measures that should be exhausted first. A third dimension of interplay is linkage, or efforts to influence the regime interplay. To date there has only been moderate cross-agency coordination, but considerable attention is paid within each regime, including in the Millennium Round of trade negotiations, to the desirability of avoiding conflict between them.     

Race, Caste, or Class? The Bunche–Myrdal Dispute Over An American Dilemma

Few observers doubt that Gunnar Myrdal and Ralph J. Bunche had sharp methodological disagreements and differing approaches to tactics for ending the Negro problem. Myrdal has been criticized as a statist liberal and utopian moralist by recent cultural historians defending progressive nationalism (multiculturalism), while Bunche has been characterized as a vulgar Marxist, and, with Myrdal, a denigrator of black culture. Inspection of An American Dilemma in contrast with Bunche's research memoranda suggests that Myrdal represented himself as a Burkean conservative, while Bunche's analyses transmit the radical puritan libertarian tradition, but without rejecting social democratic remedies en route to working-class control of industry. Their shared emphasis on class-based remedies to end poverty and powerlessness, however, renders them similarly unassimilable in a period where the progressive left has generally embraced racial or ethnic identity, not class power, as the source of individual emancipation, mental health, and economic betterment.     

江泽民对当代中国民主政治建设的卓越贡献

发展社会主义民主政治,是我们党始终不渝的奋斗目标,党的第三代领导核心江泽民强调高扬社会主义民主旗帜,反对西方民主;提出了把代表制民主和直接民主结合起来的推进战略;提出了“依法治国”方略,充分体现了社会主义民主的实质;提出了一系列民主建设的理论现点,从而丰富和发展了邓小平的民主思想,把当代中国的民主理论与实践推进到了一个新的阶段,     

论宪法在依法治国中的地位与作用

依法治国的核心是依宪治国,实现依法治国,建设社会主义法治国家,必须树立宪法的权威性,切实保障宪法实施。为发挥宪法在依法治国中的作用,要明确宪法和法律的关系,要大力宣传宪法,培养和增强全体公民的宪法意识和法治精神,强调国家机关及其工作人员要带头遵守和执行宪法,要健全和完善宪法监督制度,特别是建立违宪追究机制,把宪法的各项规定落到实处,以大力推进依法治国的进程。