欧盟法的基本自由与劳工权利保护

欧盟法规定的基本自由包括共同市场内的商品流通自由、劳动力迁徙自由、服务业流通自由和资本流动自由四个部分,可以直接适用于欧盟国家的公民。这种规定为欧盟范围内劳工权的保护提供了全面、深入的法律保障,并赋予国际人权保护新的思想内涵。同时,对劳工权的保护促进了基本自由的完善。欧盟法基本自由对中国劳工权利保护也有一定的借鉴意义。     

论中央苏区反“围剿”期间的毛泽东

中央苏区反“围剿”时期是毛泽东一生中的重要阶段，这期间，他的军事战略思想、政权建设思想得到了丰富和发展，他个人也经历了艰苦的磨难。他纵横捭阖，出奇制胜，彰显其杰出的军事才能；他发展苏区经济，加强苏区政权建设，彰显其卓越的治国才能；他大起大落的人生经历，彰显其超凡的人格魅力。     

改革开放与社会主义发展新模式的形成

改革开放是决定当代中国命运的关键选择。当代中国共产党人在坚持马克思主义普遍原理的基础上，大胆实行改革开放。改革开放突破了马克思主义经典作家设计的社会主义发展模式、苏联模式和自身的历史模式，开辟了中国特色社会主义发展道路，实现了社会主义发展模式的新突破。     

私法自治原则的缺失——以前苏联时期民事立法为考察背景

前苏联时期,私法自治原则基于特定的理论基础,在民事立法中出现了制度性缺失,进而影响了当时民事立法基本制度的面貌。这一特定时期发生的这一法律现象,为丰富私法自治原则的理解提供了一个极具理论意义的解读标本。     

工会工作与构建和谐企业

全面落实科学发展观,构建和谐社会,是建设具有中国特色社会主义的重大问题。工会作为党联系职工群众的桥梁和纽带,义不容辞地肩负着协调企业与职工多方面利益关系的重任。因此,工会组织要充分发挥在构建和谐企业中的作用。     

What does Brexit Tell Us about Our Understanding of European Identity?

This paper reports on a number of Eurobarometer surveys undertaken by the European Commission as a way of reflecting on Brexit and the challenges it poses to European identity. Our work with the surveys has been undertaken in the context of developing an educational game (RU EU?) which will explore European identity. European citizenship and identity have been strongly promoted by the EU but, while they appear to have been accepted at an elite level, the EU—and the UK in particular—have so far not constructed a narrative which has been supported by ‘ordinary’ citizens. Brexit has therefore exposed the failings of European elites in this regard. That said, there is some evidence that the complexities of Brexit have led to a strengthening of European identity in the other EU 27 countries.     

From Merkel to Kramp‐Karrenbauer: Can German Christian Democracy Reinvent Itself?

Germany's Christian Democrats have started preparing for the time after Angela Merkel. After ten years as German chancellor facing a weak opposition, Merkel unexpectedly split the country in late 2015 and early 2016 because of her ‘open border’ policies that allowed more than 1 million refugees and migrants to rapidly enter Germany. Her management of the subsequent crisis was largely considered a failure and her party suffered a series of dramatic election defeats. Reacting to the negative electoral feedback, and in particular the breakthrough of the rightist and anti‐immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Christian Democratic Union organised an intra‐party contest to replace Merkel as party leader. Three candidates with different political profiles, Annegret Kramp‐Karrenbauer, Friedrich Merz and Jens Spahn, contested the election. By voting for Kramp‐Karrenbauer, the CDU membership voiced support for maintaining a large‐scale political coalition based on efforts to find compromises between different party wings and social and cultural interests.     

National parliamentary control and voting in the Council of the European Union

This article explores the different ways governments express dissent in the Council of the European Union (EU) through ‘No’ votes, abstentions and recorded negative statements. A game-theoretical model is presented that studies voting behaviour and analyses how the national parliaments’ levels of control over their governments’ EU policies affect it. It is concluded that governments that are strongly controlled by their parliaments are not more likely to express dissent. However, when they do express dissent, they vote ‘No’ more often. Parliamentary control depends on the presence of formal oversight institutions as well as the motivation of parliamentarians to hold their governments accountable. Empirical support is found in an analysis of votes on 1,387 legislative proposals that represent more than a decade of Council decision making in the period 2004–2014. This article contributes to the discussion on the involvement of national parliaments in EU affairs, and clearly distinguishes the different forms of dissent in Council decision making.     

Responding to the crisis: Eurosceptic parties of the left and right and their changing position towards the European Union

At the time of the election of the European Parliament (EP) in 2014, the European Union (EU) was heavily affected by a multifaceted crisis that had – and still has – far-reaching implications for the political system of its member countries, but also for the European level of governance. Against the background of the strong Eurosceptic vote in the 2014 EP elections, this study aims to investigate in which way Eurosceptic parties of the left and the right respond to the multiple crises of the EU. Using data from the Euromanifesto Project from 2004/2009 and 2014, changes in the party positions towards the EU are analysed in the shadow of the multiple crises and the reasons thereof are explored. The findings show a general anti-European shift among the two types of Eurosceptic parties. Nevertheless, the changes in the EU polity tone are not determined by issue-based repercussions of the multiple crises, but by the EU-related evaluation – the polity mood – of the national citizenry. For far-right Eurosceptic parties, the shift is moderated by the level of public support for EU integration in their national environment. Among far-left Eurosceptic parties, by contrast, it is moderated by the more specific public attitudes about the monetary union policy of the EU. Consequently, political parties when drafting their manifestos for EP elections are not so much guided by the objective severity of political problems or by the evaluations of these problems by the citizenry. What matters in the end is the link that citizens themselves are able to establish between the severity of political problems, on the one hand, and the responsibility of the EU for these problems on the other. This has important consequences for understanding of the nature and substance of political responsiveness within the EU system of multilevel governance.     

United in diversity? The convergence of cultural values among EU member states and candidates

The European Union (EU) is considered to be a unique economic and political union that integrates most European countries. This article focuses on the cultural aspect of European integration, which has been increasingly debated over the course of deepening and widening integration and in the context of the legitimation crisis of the EU. Among the main goals of the EU is to promote certain values, which raises the question of whether it has been efficient in (or enabled) reducing cultural value gaps among the participating countries. World polity and institutional isomorphism theories suggest that cultural values may trickle down in a vertical manner from the institutions of the EU to its member states and candidates. Furthermore, hybridisation theory postulates that values diffuse horizontally through intensified interactions enabled by the EU. These two perspectives imply the possibility of cultural convergence among countries associated with the EU. By contrast, the culture clash thesis assumes that differences in cultural identity prevent value convergence across countries; growing awareness of such differences may even increase the pre-existing cultural value distances. To test these different scenarios, distances in emancipative and secular values are compared across pairs of countries using combined repeated cross-sectional data from the European Values Study and the World Values Survey gathered between 1992 and 2011. This study finds that the longer a country has been part of the EU, the more closely its values approximate those of the EU founding countries, which in turn are the most homogenous. Initial cultural distance to the founders’ average values appears irrelevant to acquiring membership or candidacy status. However, new member states experienced substantial cultural convergence with old member states after 1992, as did current candidates between 2001 and 2008. Since 1992, nations not participating in the integration process have diverged substantially from EU members, essentially leading to cultural polarisation in Europe. The findings are independent of (changes in) economic disparities and suggest the importance of cultural diffusion as one of the fundamental mechanisms of cultural change. This empirical study contributes to the literature on European integration, political and sociological theories of globalisation, and cross-cultural theories of societal value change.