CIAO DATE: 2/08
Journal of International Relations and Development
Volume 9, Issue 4 (December 2006)
Articles
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Caught between cooperation and democratization: the Barcelona Process and the EU's double-discursive approach
Helle Malmvig
The European Union (EU) has for a decade sought to strengthen democracy and human rights in the Mediterranean/Middle East within the framework of the Barcelona Process. Yet, it has done so in a reluctant and inconsistent manner. This is often explained through references to prior distinctions and conflicts between practice and principle, security and democracy, interest and values, thereby overlooking tensions and ambiguities in the very meaning of security itself. On the basis of a Foucauldian inspired and analytically informed discourse analysis, this article shows how the Union at the same time (re)produces two conflicting versions of how security is to be achieved, what the Mediterranean is, and which types of threats the Union face. The EU is caught in a continuous and paradoxical practice of reproducing two simultaneous and conflicting versions of security. This practice does not only make prioritization between and implementation of contradictory goals difficult, but also contributes to enhance prevalent feeling of fear and mistrust in the region.
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Institutionalizing societal activism within global governance structures: Amnesty International and the United Nations system
Kerstin Martens
Since the 1990s, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have increasingly participated within the forums of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Whereas most studies have focused on demonstrating that NGOs shape the processes and programmes of IGOs, little research has been conducted to examine how they accomplish this. Applying social movement theory, I develop an approach for examining NGO institutionalization within structures of global governance as provided by IGOs. This angle emphasizes the professionalization of NGOs on one hand and the formalization of regulations with intergovernmental institutions on the other as the factors explaining changes in their pattern of activities as regards IGOs. In the empirical part, the theoretical propositions are evaluated in relation to one of the most prominent and active NGOs in the United Nations (UN) context: Amnesty International. The paper is based on semi-structured expert interviews held with NGO representatives to the UN.
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Imagine the EU: the metaphorical construction of a supra-nationalist identity
Rainer Hlsse
The European Union (EU) is a novel political entity in many respects. For example, instead of the monolithic political structure of nation-states, it features a layered structure and a 'variable geometry'. This institutional complexity has been interpreted as an indicator of the EU being a post-modern political system. This article inquires whether the EU's institutional post-modernness is accompanied by a post-modern identity. I argue that an investigation of collective identity requires a reconstruction of how a community is imagined. As metaphors are the principal linguistic means of our imagination, I reconstruct the imaginations of the European community by analyzing its metaphorizations. How do the metaphors of EU enlargement construct European identity? It can be shown that in the German EU-enlargement discourse of the 1990s, European identity was hardly constructed in a post-national/post-modern way. Rather, European identity was imagined much like a modern national identity.
Book Review
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In Defense of Globalization
Pamela Blackmon
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, 320pp.
ISBN: 0-19-517025-3
Jagdish Bhagwati
Index
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Index to volume 9, 2006
Acknowledgement of external reviewers
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Acknowledgement of external reviewers