CIAO DATE: 10/2011
Volume: 6, Issue: 3
September 2011
Sonila Danaj
This article investigates the political controversies related to the role the international community plays and should play in contemporary Albanian politics through an analysis of the media accounts of the January 21, 2011 demonstration. We analyse opinion articles in the mainstream media and find that there are two representations of the political reality that compete for legitimacy: one in favour of the government and the other against it. The picture that emerges from the media accounts is that events, political action and political personalities are subject to the perceived judgement of external actors, whose confirmation or support is taken as the legitimizing factor. Thus, the accepted patterns of power put the international community at the top, from where they control, monitor, confirm or refute political elites. The alternative representation criticizes international intervention as a deterrent to the democratization processes in Albania.
Internet forums in Lithuania: a new stimulus for social capital? (PDF)
Austėj Trinkūnait
This article analyzes the process of social capital formation in internet forums. It investigates whether this social phenomenon can originate in online environments and to uncover the steps of its development. Three Lithuanian internet forums are chosen for the analysis according to their discussion topics: professional, family and leisure. The methodology used is participant observation, surveys, and interviews with members of these message boards. Data analysis indicates that interactions in internet forums can contribute to formation of social capital and bridging social capital is the predominant type among Lithuanian message boards. Moreover, there exists a “middle ground” of interaction between online and offline environments and leisure forums contribute to the formation of social capital less than other discussion groups.
Ieva Gruzina
This article will analyze the role of history and sense of belonging development for integration and naturalization efforts in Latvia. In establishing the significance of history in national identity formation, theoretical literature analysis will explain why belonging is a fundamental need and how history and historic celebrations become tools in the process. Data from 1998-2008 will be used to illustrate the theoretical analysis and explain the dramatic drop in belonging amongst Russian speaking noncitizens. The article will argue that nation building in Latvia is based on ethnicity and culture, emphasizing collective memory and interpretation of history, as the basis of national identity. For non-members of the ethnic titular, belonging has depended on assimilation into the predefined ethnic and cultural community. The demands have alienated a significant portion of the population and opened doors for identification with Russia as the external homeland, encouraging a Diaspora identity and complicating further integration efforts.
Democracy, pluralism and the idea of public reason: Rawls and Habermas in comparative perspective (PDF)
Funda Gencoglu-Onbasi
The notion of public reason, developed by two of the most influential contemporary political thinkers - Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls - as well as the contemporary discussions on the concepts of citizenship, civil society and the public sphere, among others, are all manifestations of the attempt to handle the thorny issue of the relationship between difference and equality. This article analyzes these two conceptualizations of public reason in a comparative perspective and its main contention is that the point where they depart each other is too important to be neglected. Although Habermas himself described his criticism of Rawls as a “familial dispute” and stated that he is engaged in a “friendly and provocative” critique in such a way that Rawls’s theory can reveal its strengths, this article insists that the use of public reason is conceptualized radically differently by Rawls and Haberma
Distributive justice in crisis (PDF)
Eldar Sarajlic
The paper tries to examine the effects of economic crisis on philosophical considerations of distributive justice. It tackles the problem of a radical increase in scarcity as a condition of justice. Instead of assuming a relatively fixed (“moderate”) level of scarcity as a background against which justice in distribution obtains, the paper examines what happens when this level risks falling below and how does that change our views of distributive justice. It takes upon the recent events in the United States to construe a specific philosophical model and ask how crisis distribution, where that favors wealthier actors, can be justified. By analyzing the crisis distribution principle, it ultimately aims to suggest that moderate scarcity should not be seen as a mere condition, but an important and vital object of justice. As such it falls within, not beyond legitimate obligations of democratic governance.
Rory McVeigh, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan - Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Adriana Marinescu
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) often appears to the European reader as a spectacular source of racial violence. The Invisible Empire, the hooded people, and the fiery crosses seem just another eccentricity in the land of the mighty rule of law and civil rights. However, through a sharp analysis of the mobilization of the Klan as social movement, Rory McVeigh conveys a deeper insight into the roots of the KKK’s growth and decline. As a professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, he has continuously delved into right-wing mobilization and the echoes of the Ku Klux Klan. His latest book provides an analysis on how social theories can explain this kind of mobilization and thus develop strategies for preventing the harm that right-wing extremism can cause to individuals and to the social fabric of the communities. Moreover, what makes this research more than an explanatory flashback is the existence of yet common situations such as vigilante groups patrolling the border between the United States and Mexico or neo-Nazis boldly marching through European cities
Ana Dinescu
More than six decades after the end of the Second World War it is hard to imagine the political, social, and human landscapes of Europe in the aftermath of hostilities. In reconstructing this recent past, we can rely on a large bibliography regarding the events from the Western part of the continent. But for what concerns the territory to the east of the Iron Curtain, the appropriate and single case-study documentation remains problematic and thus, topics such as the political, economic and social effects of the first year of the Cold War reconfigurations are still insufficiently explored. It is, for example, the everyday life of the displaced person or the consequences of displacement on the identity reconfiguration of ethnic minorities.
Willem Oosterveld
David Ekbladh’s first book, The Great American Mission, deals with the role of development policy in American foreign relations during the Cold War. More specifically, it discusses modernization as a developmental approach, tracing its rise and fall over a period of about forty years. In Ekbladh’s view, modernization theory fused political, ideological and strategic objectives at a time when the United States waged what was, in essence, a global struggle over ideas. Yet ideas about modernization did not emerge as a consequence of the Cold War, Ekbladh argues. Rather they were an outgrowth of liberal ideas that germinated in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression and the rise of fascist and communist ideologies. The Depression brought state planning into fashion but the onset of ideologies that rivalled American liberalism saw that, in the United States, an approach to planning devoid of ideology was sought. This came to be called modernization. The approach was undergirded by a belief in technology, reflected a superiority of Western values and could trace its roots back to Reconstruction in the 1860s. In its early days, it was mostly pushed by Christian missionaries and non-governmental groups, one target being the turn-of-the-century Philippines.
Perez Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). (PDF)
Ester Bertrand
Hobbes and the Law of Nature constitutes the final monograph by the late historian Perez Zagorin, who was a specialist in the field of early modern European and English political thought. Zagorin died in April 2009 at the age of 88 and in this last work he presents his assessment of Thomas Hobbes as a political and CEU Political Science Journal. Vol. 6, No. 3 495 moral philosopher. Zagorin’s analysis is based on Hobbes’ three major political works - The Elements of Law (1640), De cive (1641), and Leviathan (1651) – which were written during the English Civil War that resulted in the temporary defeat of the British monarchy. As is explained in the preface, Zagorin’s twofold intention is to analyse Hobbes’ concept of natural law within its historical context, and to demonstrate his significance “as a humane moral philosopher and theorist of natural law’”(p.x). For this purpose Zagorin repeatedly contradicts scholars who place a one-sided focus on the role of selfpreservation, calculation, and unbridled absolutism, while instead he presents an image of ‘Hobbes the moral philosopher’
Stithorn Thananithichot
Most of the previous studies tend to understand the Internetdemocracy relationship through theory, observation or prescription. Moving beyond those studies, Stephen Coleman and Jay G. Blumler’s book examines the relationship between the Internet and democratic citizenship from three of theoretical, empirical, and policy perspectives. In other words, the authors aim to explore how the contemporary notion of e-democracy could be theorised, investigated, and implemented. In order to explain e-democracy more clearly, Coleman and Blumler, in the first three chapters, discuss three major approaches that give public communication; and direct democracy. Supported by empirical findings which demonstrate widespread public disengagement due to the lack of communicative connections of today’s liberal democracies, they argue that there is a requirement for “a more deliberative democracy” (p.38) which would be done by utilizing new media technologies to create a more effective and direct form of democratic interaction
Nicoleta Adelina Stanescu
With a rate of about 1 percent incarceration per capita (i.e. the highest in the world) and damage from crime reaching 10 percent of GDP, the US allocates large budget resources to tackle this issue and faces serious deadlocks in the crime control domain. Starting from these facts, Mark Kleiman’s “When Brute Force Fails” raises awareness of the need to alleviate both the damages caused by crime and the burden that its control exercises on taxpayers. The analysis is based on the US experiences with crime and crime control, and that is neither a disadvantage, nor a weakness, but an almost exhaustive presentation of the evolution of crime rate, incarceration and public costs.
Arolda Elbasani
Stable Outside, Fragile Inside is one of the newest books in search of the distinctive development, erratic trends and widely perceived failure of Central Asian republics to make a successful transition to democracy after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The volume seeks to explain the region’s specific trajectory to independent statehood, focusing on processes of socialization with competing external norms, emanating not only the main protagonists of the Cold War, Russia and US, but also an increasingly influential EU, a myriad of international organizations and European countries, as well as regional powers such as Turkey, China, Iran, and Pakistan. At the same time, the book draws attention to the specific domestic context of awkward statehood of Central Asian polities – a set of authority structures and state society relations as well as unpredictable international behavior – which makes it difficult for the conventional frameworks to capture the current state of affairs. Opting for a flexible and comprehensive analysis of practices of statehood, the analysis claims to go beyond mainstream understanding of compliance and delve into intricate processes of ‘localization’, which unfold at the intersection of local conditions and the larger world system (p.8).
Simone Selva
Global Electrification pulls together a cohort of leading experts in the fields of industrial and financial history of power and light enterprises to offer a global history of electric utility companies since the early steps in the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the late twentieth century from the vantage point of international business history and transnational financial history. The authors do investigate the early beginnings and evolution of the electric utility industry in the background of both the rise to globalism of multinational corporations and the worldwide spread of international investments to crisscross private-sector activities and government-run initiatives, national and transnational concerns and capital flows. They adopt a two-fold research perspective: foreign portfolio investments and foreign direct investments are brought into focus alongside to pinpoint the changing balance between the level of internationalization and the degree of domestication – to borrow from the book’s vocabulary – featuring the history of the electricity industry since the early technological innovations (chapter 1), down into the recent attempts over the last twenty years to revive the role of multinational corporations after half a century trend toward either private-sector or state-owned national control (chapter 7)
Oana-Elena Brânda
Vassilis Nitsiakos’ book is part of the Balkan Border Crossings’ series, a larger research project concerning the evolution of the Greek and Albanian minorities after the fall of Communism in the 1990’s and this volume focuses more on the Albanians living next to the border with Greece. On the Border is about the frontier populations sharing one common element: the border itself. The nature and character of the Albanian-Greek border is the topic of this book, with Nitsiakos focusing on the “secret” doors of the Albanian identities around that area. It is a travel diary, kept while visiting some border areas between Albania and Greece, a diary marvelously combining narratives of people, places and facts with a soft analysis of the sociological and anthropological issues that characterize the area. What is Nitsiakos actually doing? He documents one-sided transborder migration from Albania to Greece in the light of the changes occurring after the brutal fall of Communism in Albania. His case studies are numerous, since every stop along the border holds a particular case and every town provides new data and issues to reveal and analyze.