Between continuity and change: The EU's mechanism of differentiated value integration

How does the European Union integrate new values into the text of its treaties? A growing body of literature indicates that, in the past three decades, new norms and values have entered the EU's discourse, resulting in what is usually termed ‘normative power Europe’. Yet the research and knowledge to‐date about the EU's discursive assimilation of new values and norms is surprisingly poor. As any institutional change, such integration has the potential to undermine the coherence of the EU's identity and thus also its objective to ‘speak with one voice’. This article explores the EU's discursive management of the continuity‐versus‐change imperative by analysing the integration of new values into the text of its treaties. This issue is addressed based on a quantitative content analysis on the full texts of European founding treaties between the 1950s and 2009. Findings show that the distribution of the EU's values in the text is not uniform: while the language of market economy and democracy is pervasive, the values of peace, European identity, rights and social justice are mentioned less frequently and in restricted linguistic environments. To account for the differences in the integration of values into the EU's treaty discourse, the article develops the notion of a discursive mechanism of differentiated value integration (MDVI). This rationale echoes the logic of differentiation in policy implementation employed by the EU. It is claimed here that, applied in the European discursive arena, MDVI allows radically different readings of the same text. This helps the EU to maintain a coherent value identity while at the same time enabling change.     

U.S. Policy on Terrorism: In Search of an Answer

An analysis of three years of suicide bombing data in Israel reveals an increase in such attacks through March 2002 followed by a steep decline through the end of 2003. The authors propose a terror-stock model that treats the suicide bombing attack rate as a function of the number of terrorists available to plan and execute suicide bombings. The intent of Israeli tactics such as targeted killings and preemptive arrests is to reduce the capacity of terror organizations to commit attacks. When fit to the data, this model suggests that the targeted killing of terror suspects sparks estimated recruitment to the terror stock that increases rather than decreases the rate of suicide bombings. Surprisingly, only the deaths of suspected terrorists, and not Palestinian civilians, are associated with such estimated recruitment. Although Israeli actions have reduced the rate of suicide bombings over time, it is preventive arrests rather than targeted killings that seem more responsible for this outcome.     

Who Are the Palestinian Suicide Bombers?

The current study uses the content analysis method while focusing on identification of repeated patterns of behavior by suicide terrorists and the society within which they grow and develop. The present study presents a typology—a classification into categories, each represented by a prototype, of suicide terrorists in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also identifies prerequisite factors (as without these factors, there is little opportunity for a particular prototype to emerge) and supporting factors (which may assist in the emergence of the prototype, but are not essential) for each of the suicide terrorist prototypes. The suggested typology is based on a convenient sample: details which have been published in the literature describing suicide terrorists. The typology suggests four categories of suicide bombers: religious fanatic, exploited, avenger, and nationalist fanatic. This typology is based on the main motive of the perpetrator, and different trajectories which each suicide bomber undergoes from recruitment to detonating the bomb. The major difference among the four categories lies in the prerequisite factors and their relative importance in comparison to the supporting factors.