Sovereignty

About: Sovereignty is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25909 publications have been published within this topic receiving 410148 citations.

Culture, Communication and National Identity: The Case of Canadian Television

Abstract: ?There can be no political sovereignty without culture sovereignty.? So argued the CBC in 1985 in its evidence to the Caplan/Sauvageau Task Force on Broadcasting Policy. Richard Collins challenges this assumption. He argues in this study of nationalism and Canadian television policy that Canada?s political sovereignty depends much less on Canadian content in television than has generally been accepted. His analysis focuses on television drama, at the centre of television policy in the 1980s. Collins questions the conventional image of Canada as a weak national entity undermined by its population?s predilection for foreign television. Rather, he argues, Canada is held together, not by a shared repertoire of symbols, a national culture, but by other social forces, notably political institutions. Collins maintains that important advantages actually and potentially flow from Canada?s wear national symbolic culture. Rethinking the relationships between television and society in Canada may yield a more successful broadcasting policy, more popular television programming, and a better understanding of the links between culture and the body politic. As the European Community moves closer to political unity, the Canadian case may become more relevant to Europe, which, Collins suggests, already fears the ?Canadianization? of its television. He maintains that a European multilingual society, without a shared culture or common European audio-visual sphere and with viewers watching foreign television, can survive successfully as a political entity ? just as Canada has.

Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism: National Identity and Status in International Society

Abstract: For China, Taiwan is next in line to be unified with the People's Republic after Hong Kong in 1997. China's claim on Taiwan is of great importance to the politics of Chinese Nationalism, and is central to the dynamics of power in this most volatile of regions. The democratic challenge from Taiwan is very potent and its status and identity within the international community is crucial to its survival. Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism explores how Taiwan's status has come to be a symbol for the legitimacy of the Chinese regime in the evolution of Chinese nationalism. It also demonstrates how this view has been challenged by demands for democratization in Taiwan. The KMT regime is shown to have allowed sovereignty to be practised by the population of the island while maintaining the claim that it is a part of China. The result is a "post-nationalist" identity for the island in an intermediate state between independence and unification with the PRC.

European Integration and National Social Citizenship: Changing Boundaries, New Structuring?

Abstract: With the creation of EMU, European Welfare States have entered a new phase of development. The margins for manoeuvring public budgets have substantially decreased, while the unfolding of the four freedoms of movement within the EU have seriously weakened the traditional coercive monopoly of the state on actors and resources that are crucial for the stability of redistributive institutions. The article explores these issues adopting a Rokkanian perspective, i.e. building on Rokkan’s pioneering insights on the nexus between boundary building and internal structuring. The first part of the paper briefly presents the theoretical perspective. The second part sketches the development of national welfare institutions from their origin up to the early 1970s, discussing their implications in terms of boundary building and internal structuring. The third part describes the challenges that have emerged in the last couple of decades to the “social sovereignty” of the nation state: challenges that are largely linked to the process of European integration, but that are partly reinforced by endogenous developments as well. The final part offers some more speculative remarks of the potential de-structuring of the traditional architecture of social protection, with some hints at cross-national variations and possible developments at the EU level.