Media Priming in a Multi-Party Context: A Controlled Naturalistic Study in Political Communication

This study investigates media priming effects in the context of a Summit meeting of European Union (EU) leaders. It differs in four ways from most previous non-experimental priming studies: (1) it provides survey data accompanied by a content analysis of the news, (2) it compares priming effects on evaluations of a number of political leaders, who differed in their visibility in the news, (3) it involves an issue with low salience, and (4) it studies priming effects in the context of a European Parliamentary democracy. The study involves a two-wave panel study (before and after the Summit) on a representative sample of 817 Dutch adults, and a content analysis of the newspaper and television news in the 8 weeks leading up to the Summit meeting. The study shows that media priming effects occur only for the politicians who appeared visible in the news in connection with the issue. The media priming effects were not significantly moderated by political attentiveness or by political knowledge. We also explore the aggregate level consequences of priming for the popularity of leaders, and demonstrate that, as a result of media priming, two politicians became more popular, despite having received a bad press.

The Eurozone as a Flawed Currency Area

The European single currency system has come under unprecedented strain during the past three years and there is little reason to assume that this will diminish, in any significant way, in the near future. This article briefly explores the background to the current eurozone crisis before outlining a number of potential solutions. Specifically, we discuss how the credit crunch induced recession of 2008 triggered the problems within the eurozone regarding sovereign debt, looking at the issues of spill‐over and free‐rider effects, together with the implementation of EMU fiscal rules. The analysis is then extended by outlining a series of potential remedies. This consists of a critical evaluation of solutions that the EU has already instigated (i.e. moral persuasion, financial relief measures and debt default), together with a series of alternative propositions (i.e. fiscal federalism and a European Clearing Union) and even the collapse of the euro.     

冷战初期苏联的对外战略评析

从二战结束的1945年到1947年的两年间,由于大国关系、国际政治环境发生了重大变化,苏联的对外战略随之进行调整,即从"积极防御战略"向有限扩张战略转变。这种战略转变加剧了美苏的权力竞争和利益争夺。     

Lost Imperium: the European Liberation Front (1949-54)

In 1947, just two years after the fall of Nazi Germany, an American expatriate living in Ireland named Francis Parker Yockey wrote Imperium, a massive tome that advanced a new strategy for post-war European fascism. Yockey insisted that fascists abandon their narrow nationalist viewpoint and, instead, fight for a new European-wide fascist empire, which he dubbed the 'Imperium'. In 1948 Yockey and his closest collaborators left Oswald Mosley's Union Movement and founded the European Liberation Front (ELF), a British-based groupuscule that lasted until 1954. Rejecting the possibility of building a mass fascist movement in post-war Europe, the ELF defined its primary task as ideological: namely, the advancement of the 'Imperium' idea inside the ranks of Europe's 'fascist elite'. The ELF soon ran into stiff opposition from Mosley over Yockey's controversial identification of the United States, and not the Soviet Union, as Europe's 'main enemy'. The ELF also met with fierce resistance from Hitler worshippers inside the British right like Arnold Leese, who rejected the ELF's emphasis on 'culture' over 'race'. Despite the ELF's relatively brief existence as a groupuscule, its introduction of a new kind of 'Eurofascist' thinking has recently led to its rediscovery by contemporary European New Rightists now searching for a new political strategy following both the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the world's sole 'superpower'.     

‘Playing for fascism’: sportsmanship,antisemitism and the British Union of Fascists

Taking recent developments in the study of fascism as a cultural system as a starting point, Spurr examines the interrelationship between notions of race, sportsmanship and Britishness in the subculture of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). More specifically, by focusing on the BUF’s understandings of Britishness and sportsmanship, he highlights the self-reflexive qualities of the movement’s subculture in which a fascist world-view shaped not only explicitly political programmes but also the ways in which this variant of European fascism mirrored particularly English modes of defining national identity and cultural difference in the rhetoric of sportsmanship. In addition, Spurr outlines one of the many ways that this fascist culture shaped social practice in the fascist community, so reflecting an assumption that fascism was as much a lived experience as it was a world of ideas and political philosophy. In so doing, he examines the implications of the BUF’s distinctly English notion of sportsmanship for its followers’ self-definition as Britons, and how this understanding functioned in the construction of the counter-image of the Sporting Jew. As a metaphor, while seemingly rather innocuous, this characterization of the Jew enabled Mosleyites to express a multilayered critique of Jews in a manner that encapsulated their wider ideological concerns and in an idiom readily recognized in the wider context of British inter-war culture. In adopting this approach, Spurr rejects suggestions that the BUF mimicked Nazi models of antisemitism and moves beyond revisionist historiography’s concern with origins and forms to explore the cultural functions of racism in the movement’s subculture.     

Kenneth B. Clark and the problem of power

ABSTRACT

During the early 1960s African American psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, known primarily for his involvement in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court desegregation decision, began organizing an ambitious anti-poverty programme called Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. (HARYOU). Dissatisfied by the lack of progress in school desegregation in New York City and discouraged by the inability of traditional social welfare organizations to address the problems of race and poverty, Clark argued that a new approach had to be developed to mobilize the black poor to gain the political and economic power that would solve their problems. At the same time, he theorized that a new form of racial segregation was beginning to develop in urban areas that foreshadowed increasing social isolation, economic dependence and declining municipal services for many African Americans. He called this new development ‘internal colonialism’ and hoped that HARYOU would be a demonstration project in the Kennedy–Johnson administration's War on Poverty that would address these problems from multiple perspectives. Nonetheless, the plan aroused the political opposition of Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. The dispute with Powell drove Clark from HARYOU and caused him to re-evaluate his thinking regarding African American leadership. He increasingly viewed the ‘ghetto’ as both a prison and a cocoon that satisfied white and black social, economic, political and psychological needs. By the end of his HARYOU experience, Clark coined the term ‘the new American dilemma’ to describe and theorize about an increasingly isolated and powerless black population in many urban centres. The term also signified his belief that the problem of power was intricately tied up in, while also separate from, the problem of race.     

Young Turk Governance in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War

Abstract

The article analyses the system of government of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War by looking at three elements: the constitutional-parliamentarian monarchy, the Committee of Union and Progress and the army. The analysis takes place along two axes: one in which the functioning of, and the power relations between, the different institutional elements are analysed, and one based on a series of case studies of important decision-making moments of the years 1914–18.

The civil-military relations as they developed during the war years are studies in a comparative framework. The Ottoman situation is analysed against the backdrop of changes in the balance of power between military and civilian authorities in other belligerent countries in Europe.

The conclusion is that the Ottoman Empire was a constitutional and parliamentarian monarchy only in name, but that its governance did not turn into a form of military rule either. It was run by the Committee of Union and Progress, but within that, key decisions were taken by changing informal coalitions of power brokers in such a way as to make sure that the two dominant factions, the civilian one led by Talât and the military one led by Enver were in agreement.     

Persistence and change in Soviet and Russian relations with Afghanistan

This paper examines persistence and change in the Soviet Union's and then Russia's relations with Afghanistan with respect to development and security. First, a detailed analysis of the promise and reality of Soviet development assistance reveals conceptual shortcomings in their attempt to induce economic development in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union's heritage is then revealed in order to understand Russia's current perception of post-Taliban Afghanistan as well as Russia's emerging interests and commitment to Afghanistan's economic development. This paper argues that Russia will most likely replicate standard industrialization development approaches in contributing to Afghanistan's development. Therefore, Russia will probably run into problems similar to those that led to the failure of the Soviet modernization project, which consisted of large-scale development projects that were inappropriate to the country's institutions and the lives of most Afghans. It is questionable whether such reiteration will induce economic development now, in the complex setting of a fragmented and fragile state with a multitude of external players looking out for their own interests.     

Environment and Energy: The Baltic Sea Gas Pipeline

Germany and Russia have agreed to build the Nord Stream gas pipeline. The 1,200 kilometers-long structure will run from Vyborg, Russia to Greifswald, Germany traversing the Baltic Sea. The Baltic countries, Finland, Poland and Sweden, have expressed concerns about the project. At issue is the environmental impact of the project as well as the energy, political, and socioeconomic implications.