Showing papers on "State (polity) published in 2006"

American Nightmare Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization

Abstract: Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are two distinct political rationalities in the contemporary United States. They have few overlapping formal characteristics, and even appear contradictory in many respects. Yet they converge not only in the current presidential administration but also in their de-democratizing effects. Their respective devaluation of political liberty, equality, substantive citizenship, and the rule of law in favor of governance according to market criteria on the one side, and valorization of state power for putatively moral ends on the other, undermines both the culture and institutions of constitutional democracy. Above all, the two rationalities work symbiotically to produce a subject relatively indifferent to veracity and accountability in government and to political freedom and equality among the citizenry.

The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power

Abstract: This article provides a fresh theoretical perspective on the most important development in immigration law today: the convergence of immigration and criminal law. It proposes a unifying theory membership theory for why these two areas of law recently have become so connected, and why that convergence is troubling. Membership theory restricts individual rights and privileges to those who are members of a social contract between the government and the people. Membership theory provides decisionmakers with justification for excluding individuals from society, using immigration and criminal law as the means of exclusion. It operates in the intersection between criminal and immigration law to mark an ever-expanding group of outsiders by denying them the privileges that citizens hold, such as the right to vote or to remain in the United States. Membership theory manifests in this new area through certain powers of the sovereign state: the power to punish, and the power to express moral condemnation. This use of membership theory places the law on the edge of a crimmigration crisis. Only the harshest elements of each area of law make their way into the criminalization of immigration law, and the apparatus of the state is used to expel from society those deemed criminally alien. The result is an ever-expanding population of the excluded and alienated. The article begins with a dystopia, narrating a future in which criminal and immigration law have completely merged, and membership theory has resulted in extreme divisions in our society between insiders and outsiders between the included and the alienated. The rest of the article describes the seeds of that future in the past and present. Part II describes the present confluence of immigration and criminal law. Part III sets out the role of membership theory in those areas in excluding noncitizens and ex-offenders from society. It details the role of sovereign power in drawing and enforcing those lines of exclusion. The article concludes by describing the potential consequences of the convergence of these two areas and the use of membership theory to justify decisions to exclude.

Maybe it is time to rediscover bureaucracy

Abstract: This article questions the fashionable ideas that bureaucratic organization is an obsolescent, undesirable, and non-viable form of administration and that there is an inevitable and irreversible paradigmatic shift towards marketor network-organization. In contrast, the paper argues that contemporary democracies are involved in another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what are desirable forms of administration and government: that is, a struggle over institutional identities and institutional balances. The argument is not that bureaucratic organization is a panacea and the answer to all challenges of public administration. Rather, bureaucratic organization is part of a repertoire of overlapping, supplementary, and competing forms coexisting in contemporary democracies, and so are market-organization and network-organization. Rediscovering Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic organization, then, enriches our understanding of public administration. This is in particular true when we (a) include bureaucracy as an institution, not only an instrument; (b) look at the empirical studies in their time and context, not only at Weber’s ideal-types and predictions; and (c) take into account the political and normative order bureaucracy is part of, not only the internal characteristics of ‘‘the bureau.’’ MAKING SENSE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Is ‘‘bureaucracy’’ an organizational dinosaur helplessly involved in its death struggle? Is it an undesirable and nonviable form of administration developed in a legalistic and authoritarian society and now inevitably withering away because it is incompatible with complex, individualistic, and dynamic societies? Are, therefore, the term bureaucracy and the theoretical ideas and empirical observations associated with it, irrelevant or deceptive when it comes to making sense of public administration and government in contemporary democracies? Or are the mobilization of antibureaucratic sentiments and the claim that it is time to say good-bye to bureaucracies and bureaucrats just another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what desirable forms of administration and government are—that An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote speech at the Ninth International Congress of Centro Lationoamericano de Administracion Para el Desarrollo (CLAD) on State and Public Administration Reform, Madrid, 4 November 2004. The original version will be printed in Spanish in Revista del CLAD Reforma y Democracia (Caracas). I thank H. George Frederickson, Robert E. Goodin, Morten Egeberg, James G. March, Jon Pierre, Christopher Pollitt, R. A. W. Rhodes, Ulf I. Sverdrup, and Hellmut Wollmann for constructive comments. Address correspondence to the author at j.p.olsen@arena.uio.no. doi:10.1093/jopart/mui027 Advance Access publication on March 1, 2005 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory a 2005 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc.; all rights reserved. JPART 16:1–24

Power Resources and Employer-Centered Approaches in Explanations of Welfare States and Varieties of Capitalism: Protagonists, Consenters, and Antagonists

Abstract: The power resources approach, underlining the relevance of socioeconomic class and partisan politics in distributive conflict within capitalist economies, is challenged by employer-centered approaches claiming employers and cross-class alliances to have been crucial in advancing the development of welfare states and varieties of capitalism. Theoretically and empirically these claims are problematic. In welfare state expansion, employers have often been antagonists, under specific conditions consenters, but very rarely protagonists. Well-developed welfare states and coordinated market economies have emerged in countries with strong left parties in long-term cabinet participation or in countries with state corporatist institutional traditions and confessional parties in intensive competition with left parties.

Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immigration

Abstract: This article explores the reasons for the acceptance of unwanted immigration among Western countries. This author distinguishes between sovereignty as formal rule-making authority and empirical capacity to implement rules. Freemans analysis indicates that there is little evidence of a decline in sovereignty. States are interdependent and expulsion or nonadmittance practices against an alien would be unacceptable. Western states respect the rights of persons and not just citizens. Economic globalization and the rise of international human rights issues may force states to accept unwanted immigration and reduce the autonomy of the state in immigration policy-making but these reasons are unlikely. The author argues that liberal states accept unwanted immigration because of self-limited sovereignty and client politics. The author modifies Freemans model by explaining that Europes acceptance is due to the statutory and constitutional residence and family rights legal issues rather than elitist client politics or popular national interest politics. European countries vary in the processing of unwanted immigration. The author discusses two cases of illegal immigration in the US and family immigration in Europe. The US accepts unwanted immigration because of client politics a strong antipopulist normative view that the US is a nation of immigrants and civil rights imperatives of strict nondiscrimination. The cases of Germany and Britain illustrate that acceptance is due to legal constraints and moral obligations that are unevenly distributed across Europe due to different views of guestworkers and postcolonial regimes.

The anthropology of the state : a reader

Abstract: Acknowledgements. Organization of the Book. Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization. Part I: Theoretical Maps: The "Classics". Section Introduction. 1. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation): Louis Althusser. 2. Selections from the Prison Notebooks: Antonio Gramsci. 3. Bureaucracy: Max Weber. 4. Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State: Philip Abrams. 5. Governmentality: Michel Foucault. 6. Governing "Advanced" Liberal Democracies: Nikolas Rose. Part II: Ethnographic Mappings. Section I: Bureaucracy/Governmentality. 7. Finding the Man in the State: Wendy Brown. 8. Society, Economy, and the State Effect: Timothy Mitchell. 9. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State: Akhil Gupta. Section II: Development/Planning. 10. Cities, People, and Language: James Scott. 11. The Anti-Politics Machine: Jim Ferguson. Section III: Welfare/Warfare/Law/Citizenship. 12. The Public/Private Mirage: Mapping Homes and Undomesticating Violence Work in the South Asian Immigrant Community: Ananya Bhattarcharjee. 13. Cultural Logics of Belonging and Movement: Transnationalism, Naturalization, and U.S. Immigration Politics: Susan Bibler Coutin. 14. Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis: Catherine Lutz. Section IV: Popular Culture. 15. Popular Culture and the State: Stuart Hall. 16. The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony: Achille Mbembe. Index

Global rules and private actors: Toward a new role of the transnational corporation in global governance

Abstract: Economic activities require the existence of rules and their enforcement as preconditions that the market cannot generate itself. Property rights, and contractual rights and obligations, are minimal prerequisites for modern societies that are provided and enforced by the state. Without such prerequisites, the market cannot flourish. The state thus determines regulations and delineates the sphere of private freedom, within which individual citizens and private institutions are entitled to conclude contracts with one another, to which the system of property and contractual rights compels obedience. In the development of modern nation states, the state has not only been the guarantor of civil rights, e. g. the right to own property, to enter into private contracts, and to engage in market activity. In its role as a democratic constitutional state, it has also been the guarantor of political participation rights, the right of the citizen to take part in the processes that determine public rules and issues of public concern. Finally, in its role as a welfare state, it has provided social rights for citizens, such as the right to education, to health care, and to other forms of welfare (Marshall 1965). The combination of state-guaranteed civil, political, and social rights has provided legitimacy, solidarity, and welfare to modern society, thereby contributing to peaceful, stable communities of anonymous individuals (Habermas 2001). Following Matten and Crane (Matten/Crane 2005) we refer to this triad of rights as citizenship rights.

War in Human Civilization

Abstract: PART 1: WARFARE IN THE FIRST TWO MILLION YEARS: ENVIRONMENT, GENES, AND CULTURE 1. Introduction: The Human 'State of Nature' 2. Peaceful or War-like: Did Hunter-Gatherers Fight? 3. Why Fighting? The Evolutionary Perspective 4. Motivation: Food and Sex 5. Motivation: the Web of Desire 6. 'Primitive Warfare': How Was It Done? 7. Conclusion: Fighting in the Evolutionary State of Nature PART 2: AGRICULTURE, CIVILIZATION, AND WAR 8. Introduction: Evolving Cultural Complexity 9. Tribal Warfare in Agraria and Pastoralia 10. Armed Force in the Emergence of the State 11. The Eurasian Spearhead: East, West, and the Steppe 12. Conclusion: War, the Leviathan, and the Pleasures and Miseries of Civilization PART 3: MODERNITY: THE DUAL FACE OF JANUS 13. Introduction: the Explosion of Wealth and Power 14. Guns and Markets: the New European States and a Global World 15. Unbound and Bound Prometheus: Machine Age War 16. Affluent Liberal Democracies, Ultimate Weapons, and the World 17. Conclusion: Unravelling the Riddle of War Endnotes Index

Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities

Abstract: Introduction: Democracy in Europe 1. The European Union as Regional State 2. The European Union and National Institutions 3. The European Union and National Policymaking 4. The European Union and National Polities 5. Theorizing Democracy in Europe Conclusion: The Prospects for Democracy in Europe

Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey

Abstract: Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Elderly Children of the Republic: The Public History in the Private Story 29 2. Wedded to the Republic: Displaying Transformations in Private Lives 65 3. Miniaturizing Ataturk: The Commodification of State Iconography 93 4. Hand in Hand with the Republic: Civilian Celebration of the Turkish State 125 5. Public Memory as Political Battleground: Kemalist and Islamist Versions of the Early Republic 151 Conclusion 178 Notes 183 References 199 Index 217

The Sustainability and Future of Unrecognized Quasi-States

Abstract: The study of quasi-states has been marred by an unfortunate terminological confusion. Sometimes, this term is taken to mean recognized states that fail to develop the necessary state structures to function as fully fledged, real' states. At other times, quasi-states' is a designation given to regions that secede from another state, gain de facto control over the territory they lay claim to, but fail to achieve international recognition. The author proposes that, in order to clear up this confusion, recognized but ineffectual states ought to be referred as failed states', while the term quasi-states' ought to be reserved for unrecognized, de facto states. Since quasi-states are not supported by international recognition, they must be sustained by something else. In contrast to researchers who maintain that the majority of these quasi-states are quite strong, this article argues that their modal tendency is weak economy and weak state structures. The main reasons why these states nevertheless have not collapsed seem to be that they have managed to build up internal support from the local population through propaganda and identity-building; channel a disproportionately large part of their meager resources into military defense; enjoy the support of a strong patron; and, in most cases, have seceded from a state that is itself very weak.

Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era: The Struggle of the Sans-Papiers

Abstract: This article argues that political belonging should be understood in the context of diverse spatial imaginaries which encompass but are not confined to the state. Engin Isin's approach to citizenship provides a theoretical grounding for this claim. By way of demonstration, the article focuses on the spatially reconfigured practices of the neoliberal state in relation to irregular migration. It shows how the policing of irregular migration sustains a logic of political belonging based on connections between state, citizen and territory. This logic is simultaneously compromised by transnational state practices including the exploitation of irregular migrant labour. Irregular migrants are contesting their positioning within these multidimensional statist frameworks that posit them as outsiders even while they are integrated into local sites of a global political economy. The struggle of the Sans-Papiers, a collective of irregular migrants in France, provides an example in this context. Their claims to entitl...

Neoliberalism and the Politics of Alternatives: Community Forestry in British Columbia and the United States

Abstract: Calls for community forestry on public forests grew in strength in both British Columbia and the United States during the 1990s, as part of a global movement touting the advantages of community control over centralized state administration of forests. Despite structural similarities, the trajectories of community forestry in the two locations diverged sharply, with community forests rapidly becoming a reality in British Columbia while similar proposals in the United States were blocked. This article explains these divergent trajectories by examining the differences in property relations, state institutions, stakeholder interests, and environmental social-movement strategies that led to nearly opposite outcomes in initially similar situations. It also analyzes community forestry in British Columbia relative to current debates over neoliberalism and alternative economies, arguing that detailed examination of such empirical examples demonstrates the utility of neoliberalism as an analytical concept.

Political ecology: where is the policy?

Abstract: To political ecologists today, it might seem odd – ridiculous perhaps – to ask whether political ecology is sufficiently political. It has been the better part of two decades since Michael Watts complained that the dominant expressions of political ecology of the 1980s displayed ‘a remarkable lack of politics . . . There is almost no sense of contest, struggle, and conflict and how the rough and tumble of everyday life’ shapes human relations with the environment (Watts, 1990: 128–29). Since then, there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship (far too numerous to cite) in political ecology that has taken up the challenge to deal in a more sophisticated way with the role of politics in shaping humanenvironment relations. In comparing political ecology to other intellectual traditions that attempt to explain environmental problems (such as ecoscarcity and environmental modernization), Robbins (2004) notes that the defining characteristic of the field today is ‘the difference between a political and an apolitical ecology’. So central has politics become in the field that serious critiques have been made that political ecology has become ‘politics without ecology’ (Vayda and Walters, 1999). Yet, it is possible to question whether, by its own definitions of the word ‘politics’, political ecology fully lives up to its promise to take politics seriously. In their article ‘Locating the political in political ecology’, Paulson et al. (2003: 209, emphasis added), define politics as ‘the practices and processes through which power, in its multiple forms, is wielded and negotiated’. The authors observe that one of the key challenges of political ecology is ‘to develop ways to apply the methods and findings [from political ecology research] in addressing social-environmental concerns’ (p. 208). Indeed, this concern to make politics not only a research subject but a practice has long been an explicit and central goal of political ecology. Peet and Watts (1996: xi), for example, state that political ecology ‘is driven naturally in our case by a normative and political commitment to the liberatory potential of environmental concerns’. Similarly, Robbins (2004: 13) observes that political ecology is explicitly and unapologetically normative, seeking ‘to plant the seeds for reclaiming and asserting alternative ways of managing [resources] . . . The goal . . . is preserving Progress reports

Building a Republican Peace: Stabilizing States after War

Abstract: Although peacebuilders do not operate from a common template, liberal values so define their activities that their efforts can be called “liberal peacebuilding.” Many postconflict operations aspire to create a state that contains the rule of law, markets, and democracy. Growing evidence suggests, however, that liberal peacebuilding is re-creating the conditions of conflict; states emerging from war do not have the necessary institutions or civic culture to absorb the pressures associated with political and market competition. In recognition of these problems and dangers, there is an emerging call for greater attention to the state and institutionalization before liberalization. These critiques, and lessons learned from recent operations, point to an alternative—republican peacebuilding. Drawing from republican political theory, this article argues that the republican principles of deliberation, constitutionalism, and representation can help states after war address the threats to stability that derive fro...

Bureaucracy in a Democratic State: A Governance Perspective

Abstract: Here, Kenneth J. Meier and Laurence J. O'Toole Jr. present a timely analysis of working democracy, arguing that bureaucracy—often considered antithetical to fundamental democratic principles—can actually promote democracy. Drawing from both the empirical work of political scientists and the qualitative work of public administration scholars, the authors employ a "governance approach" that considers broad, institutionally complex systems of governance as well as the nitty-gritty details of bureaucracy management. They examine the results of bureaucratic and political interactions in specific government settings, locally and nationally, to determine whether bureaucratic systems strengthen or weaken the connections between public preferences and actual policies. They find that bureaucracies are part of complex intergovernmental and interorganizational networks that limit a single bureaucracy's institutional control over the implementation of public policy. Further, they conclude that top-down political control of bureaucracy has only modest impact on the activities of bureaucracy in the U.S. and that shared values and commitments to democratic norms, along with political control, produce a bureaucracy that is responsive to the American people.

The politics of free markets : the rise of neoliberal economic policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States

Abstract: The attempt to reduce the role of the state in the market through tax cuts, decreases in social spending, deregulation, and privatization - "neoliberalism" - took firm root in the United States under Ronald Reagan and in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. But why did neoliberal policies gain such prominence in these two countries and not in similarly industrialized Western countries such as France and Germany? A comparative-historical analysis of the development of neoliberal politics in these four countries, "The Politics of Free Markets" argues that neoliberalism was made possible in the United States and Britain not because the Left in these countries was too weak, but because it was in many respects too strong. At the time of the oil crisis in the 1970s, American and British tax policies were more progressive, their industrial policy more adversarial to business, and their welfare states more redistributive than those of France and West Germany. Monica Prasad shows that these adversarial structures created opportunities for politicians to find and mobilize dissatisfaction with the status quo. In France and West Germany, where tax structures were more regressive, industrial policy more pro-growth, and welfare states universal and even reverse-redistributive, neoliberalism could not be anchored in electoral dissatisfaction, and therefore it stalled.

Explaining Commitment: States and the Convention against Torture

Abstract: Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that may limit state sovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democratic instability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in three kinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintended consequences, and limited flexibility. We use a discrete time-duration model to test all of these explanations on state commitment to the international Convention Against Torture, one of the most important international human rights treaties. We find strong evidence for the importance of norms and all three types of costs, but no evidence supporting state desires to lock in the benefits of democracy in the face of domestic democratic instability.

Women's Organisations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority

Abstract: The transition to democracy in South Africa was one of the defining events in twentieth-century political history. The South African women's movement is one of the most celebrated on the African continent. Shireen Hassim examines interactions between the two as she explores the gendered nature of liberation and regime change. Her work reveals how women's political organizations both shaped, and were shaped by the broader democratic movement. Alternately asserting their political independence and giving precedence to the democratic movement as a whole, women activists proved flexible and remarkably successful in influencing policy. At the same time, their feminism was profoundly shaped by the context of democratic and nationalist ideologies. In reading the last twenty-five years of South African history through a feminist framework, Hassim offers fresh insights into the interactions between civil society, political parties, and the state. Hassim boldly confronts sensitive issues such as the tensions between autonomy and political dependency in feminists' engagement with the African National Congress (ANC) and other democratic movements, and black-white relations within women's organizations. She offers a historically informed discussion of the challenges facing feminist activists during a time of nationalist struggle and democratization.

No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005

Abstract: Education is intimately connected to many of the most important and contentious questions confronting American society, from race to jobs to taxes, and the competitive pressures of the global economy have only enhanced its significance. Elementary and secondary schooling has long been the province of state and local governments; but when George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, it signaled an unprecedented expansion of the federal role in public education. This book provides the first balanced, in-depth analysis of how No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became law. Patrick McGuinn, a political scientist with hands-on experience in secondary education, explains how this happened despite the country's long history of decentralized school governance and the longstanding opposition of both liberals and conservatives to an active, reform-oriented federal role in schools. His book provides the essential political context for understanding NCLB, the controversies surrounding its implementation, and forthcoming debates over its reauthorization. Using education as a case study of national policymaking, McGuinn also shows how the struggle to define the federal role in school reform took center stage in debates over the appropriate role of the government in promoting opportunity and social welfare. He places the evolution of the federal role in schools within the context of broader institutional, ideological, and political changes that have swept the nation since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, chronicles the concerns raised by the 1983 report "A Nation at Risk", and shows how education became a major campaign issue for both parties in the 1990s. McGuinn argues that the emergence of swing issues such as education can facilitate major policy change even as they influence the direction of wider political debates and partisan conflict. McGuinn traces the Republican shift from seeking to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education to embracing federal leadership in school reform, then details the negotiations over NCLB, the forces that shaped its final provisions, and the ways in which the law constitutes a new federal education policy regime - against which states have now begun to rebel. He argues that the expanded federal role in schools is probably here to stay and that only by understanding the unique dynamics of national education politics will reformers be able to craft a more effective national role in school reform.

Globalization and Postcolonial States

Abstract: The experiences of two programs aimed at poor rural women in India suggest that postcolonial contexts might give us reason to reconsider commonly accepted characterizations of neoliberal states. An anthropological approach to the state differs from that of other disciplines by according centrality to the meanings of the everyday practices of bureaucracies and their relation to representations of the state. Such a perspective is strengthened when it integrates those meanings with political economic, social structural, and institutional approaches. Although the two programs examined here originated in different time periods (one before and the other after neoliberal reforms) and embodied very different ideologies and goals (the earlier one being a welfare program that provided tangible services and assets and the later one an empowerment program aimed at helping rural women to become autonomous rather than dependent clients of the state waiting for the redistribution of resources), they were surprisingly al...

Migrant Membership as an Instituted Process: Transnationalization, the State and The Extra‐Territorial Conduct of Mexican Politics1

Abstract: How should we conceptualize membership, citizenship and political community in a world where migrants and their home states increasingly maintain and cultivate their formal and informal ties? This study analyzes the extra-territorial conduct of Mexican. politics and the emergence of new migrant membership practices and relations between migrants and home states. Standard globalist, transnationalist or citizenship theories cannot properly contextualize and analyze such practices. I propose that we rethink the concept of membership in a political community not only as a Marshallian status granted by states, but also as an instituted process embedded within four other institutions and processes: home state domestic politics; the home state's relationship to the world system; a semi-autonomous transnational civil society created in part by migration; and the context of reception of migrants in the United States. A main conclusion is that the state itself plays a key role in creating transnational political action by migrants and new migrant membership practices. The article draws on printed sources and interviews and ethnography done since 1990.

Give and take : Arendt and the nomos of political community

Abstract: Appealing to the original meaning of the Greek term nomos, Hannah Arendt claims that a bounded legal space is constitutive for political community. Can this seemingly anachronistic claim be substantiated in the conceptually strong sense that every polity - the Greek city-state as much as a hypothetical world state - must constitute itself as a nomos? It is argued that whereas Arendt falls short of justifying this claim, a reflexive reading of nomos can do the trick: the space of political community is necessarily bounded because no polity is imaginable that does not raise a claim to an inside as the community’s own space. A world state, were it ever to be founded, would globalize nomos, not suppress it. Whence the political problem: how does a polity deal with its outside? This problem is particularly pressing because Carl Schmitt’s defense of nomos radically challenges Arendt’s position. A reinterpretation of her analyses of the foundation of a political community suggests how the representational struct...

Small States in the European Union: What Do We Know and What Would We Like to Know?

Abstract: Recent developments in the European Union have created new opportunities and challenges for small member states, increasing the demand from policy-makers and diplomats for coherent and accessible analyses of the conditions and potential strategies of small states in the EU. Unfortunately, the academic literature on small states in the EU appears both diverse and fragmented: there is no agreement on how we should define a small state, what similarities we would expect to find in their foreign policies, or how they influence international relations. However, if we are to understand the challenges and possibilities currently faced by small EU member states, we need to systematise what we already know and to identify what we need to know. This article makes a modest contribution towards this goal by answering three simple questions: What is a small state in the European Union? How can we explain the behaviour of small EU member states? How do small states influence the European Union?

State Building for Future Wars: Neoclassical Realism and the Resource-Extractive State

Abstract: Neorealist theory holds that the international system compels states to adopt similar adaptive strategies—namely, balancing and emulation—or risk elimination as independent entities. Yet states do not always emulate the successful practices of the system's leading states in a timely and uniform fashion. Explaining this requires a theory that integrates systemic-level and unit-level variables: a “resource-extraction” model of the state in neoclassical realism. External vulnerability provides incentives for states to emulate the practices of the system's leading states or to counter such practices through innovation. Neoclassical realism, however, suggests that state power—the relative ability of the state to extract and mobilize resources from domestic society—shapes the types of internal balancing strategies that countries are likely to pursue. State power, in turn, is a function of the institutions of the state, as well as of nationalism and ideology. The experiences of six rising or declining great powe...

Whither the Responsibility to Protect? Humanitarian Intervention and the 2005 World Summit

Abstract: At the 2005 World Summit, the world's leaders committed themselves to the "responsibility to protect", recognizing both that all states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and that the UN should help states to discharge this responsibility using either peaceful means or enforcement action. This declaration ostensibly marks an important milestone in the relationship between sovereignty and human rights but its critics argue that it will make little difference in practice to the world's most threatened people. The purpose of this article is to ask how consensus was reached on the responsibility to protect, given continuing hostility to humanitarian intervention expressed by many (if not most) of the world's states and whether the consensus will contribute to avoiding future Kosovos (cases where the Security Council is deadlocked in the face of a humanitarian crises) and future Rwandas (cases where states lack the political will to intervene). It suggests that four key factors contributed to the consensus: pressure from proponents of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, its adoption by Kofi Annan and the UN's High Level Panel, an emerging consensus in the African Union, and the American position. Whilst these four factors contributed to consensus, each altered the meaning of the responsibility to protect in important ways, creating a doctrine that many states can sign up to but that does little to prevent future Kosovos and Rwandas and may actually inhibit attempts to build a consensus around intervention in future cases.

The state after statism : new state activities in the age of liberalization

Abstract: List of Tables and Figures Preface Introduction: The State also Rises: The Roots of Contemporary State Activism Jonah Levy I. VARIETIES OF STATISM 1. The Transformation of the British State: From Club Government to State-Administered High Modernism Michael Moran 2. The Forgotten Center: State Activism and Corporatist Adjustment in Holland and Germany Anton Hemerijck and Mark Vail 3. Exiting Etatisme? New Directions in State Policy in France and Japan Jonah Levy, Mari Miura, and Gene Park II. THE STATE AND SOCIAL GROUPS 4. The State and the Reconstruction of Industrial Relations Institutions after Fordism: Britain and France Compared Chris Howell 5. Building Finance Capitalism: The Regulatory Politics of Corporate Governance Reform in the United States and Germany John Cioffi 6. From Maternalism to "Employment for All": State Policies to Promote Women's Employment across the Affluent Democracies Ann Shola Orloff III. THE MARKET-MAKING STATE 7. The State in the Digital Economy John Zysman and Abraham Newman 8. Building Global Service Markets: Economic Structure and State Capacity Peter Cowhey and John Richards 9. The Transformation of European Trading States Richard Steinberg Conclusion: The State after Statism: From Market Direction to Market Support Jonah Levy Notes References Contributors Index

Integrating Islam: Political And Religious Challenges in Contemporary France

Abstract: Nearly five million Muslims call France home, the vast majority from former French colonies in North Africa. While France has successfully integrated waves of immigrants in the past, this new influx poses a new variety of challenges --much as it does in neighboring European countries. Alarmists view the growing role of Muslims in French society as a form of "reverse colonization"; they believe Muslim political and religious networks seek to undermine European rule of law or that fundamentalists are creating a society entirely separate from the mainstream. Integrating Islam portrays the more complex reality of integration's successes and failures in French politics and society. From intermarriage rates to economic indicators, the authors paint a comprehensive portrait of Muslims in France. Using original research, they devote special attention to the policies developed by successive French governments to encourage integration and discourage extremism. Because of the size of its Muslim population and its universalistic definition of citizenship, France is an especially good test case for the encounter of Islam and the West. Despite serious and sometimes spectacular problems, the authors see a "French Islam" slowly replacing "Islam in France"-in other words, the emergence of a religion and a culture that feels at home in, and is largely at peace with, its host society. Integrating Islam provides readers with a comprehensive view of the state of Muslim integration into French society that cannot be found anywhere else. It is essential reading for students of French politics and those studying the interaction of Islam and the West, as well as the general public.