Nation States (nation + states)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


Sovereignty, Migration and the Rule of Law in Global Times

THE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 4 2004
Catherine Dauvergne
This article argues that in the present era of globalisation, control over the movement of people has become the last bastion of sovereignty. This is important both to theoretical accounts of globalisation and to policy decisions by governments. Nation states threatened with loss of control in other realms are implementing a variety of ,crackdown' measures in questions of immigration. Issues of refugee law, illegal migration and skilled migration each challenge sovereignty in specific ways. While international human rights standards have made few inroads in questions of migration, recent decisions in England and Australia suggest that the rule of law may be emerging as a counter to traditional executive free reign in matters of migration law. [source]


The ,Iranian Diaspora' and the New Media: From Political Action to Humanitarian Help

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2009
Halleh Ghorashi
ABSTRACT This article looks at the shifting position of the ,Iranian diaspora' in relation to Iran as it is influenced by online and offline transnational networks. In the 1980s the exilic identity of a large part of the Iranian diaspora was the core factor in establishing an extended, yet exclusive form of transnational network. Since then, the patterns of identity within this community have shifted towards a more inclusive network as a result of those transnational connections, leading to more extensive and intense connections and activities between the Iranian diaspora and Iranians in Iran. The main concern of the article is to examine how the narratives of identity are constructed and transformed within Iranian (charity) networks and to identify the factors that contribute to this transformation. The authors use the transnational lens to view diasporic positioning as linked to development issues. New technological sources help diaspora groups, in this case Iranians, to build virtual embedded ties that transcend nation states and borders. Yet, the study also shows that these transnational connections can still be challenged by the nation state, as has been the case with recent developments in Iran. [source]


Sustainable development and the ,governance challenge': the French experience with Natura 2000

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND GOVERNANCE, Issue 3 2008
Darren McCauley
Abstract Sustainable development is conceptualized in this paper as a serious challenge for governance structures and processes in nation states. Global and European agreements have placed the inclusion of civil society actors in policy-making at the heart of the sustainability agenda. This commitment is particularly evident in the Commission's White Paper on Governance and the EU Sustainable Development Strategy. From this perspective, the European Commission has consistently underlined the integral role of dialogue with social partners in any sustainability agenda. In contrast, there is a clear mismatch between these principles of civil society inclusion and policy-making in France. Long-standing traditions of meso-corporatism have struggled to adapt to extending participation to civil society actors. This paper assesses the implementation of sustainable development as civil society inclusion with reference to the French experience in dealing with EU biodiversity policy. It is argued that this governance challenge has effectively presented nation states with an ,interpretation dilemma' with regards to sustainable development. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]


Legal Diversity and Regulatory Competition: Which Model for Europe?

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 4 2006
Simon Deakin
In the European context, harmonisation of corporate and labour law, contrary to its critics, has been a force for the preservation of diversity, and of an approach to regulatory interaction based on mutual learning between nation states. It is thus paradoxical, and arguably antithetical to the goal of European integration, that this approach is in danger of being undermined by attempts, following the Centros case, to introduce a Delaware-type form of inter-jurisdictional competition into European company law. [source]


Delegation of Regulatory Powers in a Mixed Polity

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 3 2002
Giandomenico Majone
It is a common place of academic and political discourse that the EC/EU, being neither a parliamentary democracy nor a separation-of-powers system, must be a sui generis polity. Tocqueville reminds us that the pool of original and historically tested constitutional models is fairly limited. But however limited, it contains more than the two systems of rule found among today's democratic nation states. During the three centuries preceding the rise of monarchical absolutism in Europe, the prevalent constitutional arrangement was ,mixed government',a system characterised by the presence in the legislature of the territorial rulers and of the ,estates' representing the main social and political interests in the polity. This paper argues that this model is applicable to the EC, as shown by the isomorphism of the central tenets of the mixed polity and the three basic Community principles: institutional balance, institutional autonomy and loyal cooperation among European institutions and Member States. The model is then applied to gain a better understanding of the delegation problem. As is well known, a crucial normative obstacle to the delegation of regulatory powers to independent European agencies is the principle of institutional balance. By way of contrast, separation-of-powers has not prevented the US Congress from delegating extensive rule-making powers to independent commissions and agencies. Comparison with the philosophy of mixed government explains this difference. The same philosophy suggests the direction of regulatory reform. The growing complexity of EC policy making should be matched by greater functional differentiation, and in particular by the explicit acknowledgement of an autonomous ,regulatory estate'. At a time when the Commission aspires to become the sole European executive, as in a parliamentary system, it is particularly important to stress the importance of separating the regulatory function from general executive power. The notion of a regulatory estate is meant to emphasise this need. [source]


Equality and Constitutional Indeterminacy An Interpretative Perspective on the European Economic Constitution

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 2 2001
Alexander Somek
It is claimed that European supranationalism represents an unprecedented mode of political association whose point is to maintain what is good about nationality and the nation state by stripping the latter of its adverse effects. In this article, this claim is submitted to a test by examining how different ways of conceiving of anti-discrimination in the context of intra-Community trading law give rise to two different conceptions of the European economic constitution. While the first one is married to the ideal of behavioural anti-discrimination,that is, of affording protection against discriminatory acts by Member States,whose application would seemingly leave the nation state in its place, the other one takes a system of nation states as something that in and of itself engenders systematically discriminatory effects on international trade. According to the latter, effective anti-discrimination presupposes overcoming such a system altogether. Both conceptions of the economic constitution are manifest in Community law, and at first glance it appears as if adherence to the first one would be consonant with supranationality as a special mode of political association. However, owing to internal predicaments arising from the application of the equality principle (understood as a principle protecting against discrimination), the difference between both conceptions cannot be upheld in practice. Since the first conception is constantly undermined by the second in the course of its application, it remains uncertain, at least in this context, whether or not the European nation state is left in place by the European Economic Constitution. [source]


Labour Mobility: An Adjustment Mechanism in Euroland?

GERMAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 2 2001
Empirical Evidence for Western Germany, France, Italy
We evaluate whether labour mobility is likely to act as a sufficient adjustment mechanism in the face of asymmetric shocks in Euroland. As no adequate data on cross-border migration are available, migration elasticities within nation states (Western Germany, France and Italy) are estimated and interpreted as upper bounds for cross-border migration elasticities between European nation states. Labour mobility is highest in Germany, followed by France and Italy. However, the accommodation of a shock to unemployment by migration takes several years. We conclude that labour mobility is unlikely to act as a sufficient adjustment mechanism to asymmetric shocks in Euroland. [source]


Space, Boundaries, and the Problem of Order: A View from Systems Theory

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2007
Jan Helmig
The idea our global polity is chiefly divided by territorially organized nation-states captures contemporary constellations of power and authority only insufficiently. Through a decoupling of power and the state, political spaces no longer match geographical spaces. Instead of simply acknowledging a challenge to the state, there is the need to rethink the changing meaning of space for political processes. The paper identifies three aspects, a reconceptualization of the spatial assumptions that IR needs to address: the production of space, the constitutive role of boundaries, and the problem of order. With this contribution, we argue that one avenue in understanding the production of space and the following questions of order is by converging systems theory and critical geopolitics. While the latter has already developed a conceptual apparatus to analyze the production of space, the former comes with an encompassing theoretical background, which takes "world society" as the starting point of analysis. In this respect, nation states are understood as a form of internal differentiation of a wider system, namely world society. [source]


Subverting Orthodoxy, Making Law Central: A View of Sociolegal Studies

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 4 2002
Roger Cotterrell
The promise of sociolegal research varies for different constituencies. For some legal scholars it has been a promise of sustained commitment to moral and political critique of law and to theoretical and empirical analysis of law's social consequences and origins. To continue to deliver on that promise today, sociolegal studies should develop theory in new forms emphasizing the variety of forms of regulation and the moral foundations on which that regulation ultimately depends. It should demonstrate and explore law's roles in the routine structuring of all aspects of social life and its changing character as it faces the challenge of regulating relations of community not bounded solely by the jurisdictional reach of nation states. [source]


International political marketing: a case study of United States soft power and public diplomacy

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 3 2008
Henry H. Sun
Political marketing can be categorized with three aspects: the election campaign as the origin of political marketing, the permanent campaign as a governing tool and international political marketing (IPM) which covers the areas of public diplomacy, marketing of nations, international political communication, national image, soft power and the cross-cultural studies of political marketing. IPM and the application of soft power have been practiced by nation-states throughout the modern history of international relations starting with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Nation-states promote the image of their country worldwide through public diplomacy, exchange mutual interests in their bilateral or multilateral relation with other countries, lobby for their national interests in international organizations and apply cultural and political communication strategies internationally to build up their soft power. In modern international relations, nation-states achieve their foreign policy goals by applying both hard power and soft power. Public diplomacy as part of IPM is a method in the creation of soft power, as well as, in the application of soft power. This paper starts with the definitional and conceptual review of political marketing. For the first time in publication, it establishes a theoretical model which provides a framework of the three aspects of political marketing, that is electoral political marketing (EPM), governmental political marketing (GPM) and IPM. This model covers all the main political exchanges among six inter-related components in the three pairs of political exchange process, that is candidates and party versus voters and interest groups in EPM ; governments, leaders and public servants versus citizens and interest groups in GPM, including political public relations and lobbying which have been categorized as the third aspect of political marketing in some related studies; and governments, interest group and activists versus international organizations and foreign subjects in IPM. This study further develops a model of IPM, which covers its strategy and marketing mix on the secondary level of the general political marketing model, and then, the third level model of international political choice behaviour based the theory of political choice behaviour in EPM. This paper continues to review the concepts of soft power and public diplomacy and defines their relation with IPM. It then reports a case study on the soft power and public diplomacy of the United States from the perspectives of applying IPM and soft power. Under the framework of IPM, it looks at the traditional principles of US foreign policy, that is Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, and the application of US soft power in the Iraq War since 2003. The paper advances the argument that generally all nation states apply IPM to increase their soft power. The decline of US soft power is caused mainly by its foreign policy. The unilateralism Jacksonians and realism Hamiltonians have a historical trend to emphasize hard power while neglecting soft power. Numerous reports and studies have been conducted on the pros and cons of US foreign policy in the Iraq War, which are not the focus of this paper. From the aspect of IPM, this paper studies the case of US soft power and public diplomacy, and their effects in the Iraq War. It attempts to exam the application of US public diplomacy with the key concept of political exchange, political choice behaviour, the long-term approach and the non-government operation principles of public diplomacy which is a part of IPM. The case study confirms the relations among IPM, soft power and public diplomacy and finds that lessons can be learned from these practices of IPM. The paper concludes that there is a great demand for research both at a theoretical as well as practical level for IPM and soft power. It calls for further study on this subject. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


International political marketing: a case study of its application in China

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 4 2007
Henry H. Sun
The practice of International Political Marketing can be seen increasingly in the foreign relations of independent states. A review of relevant Political Marketing and International Relations publications reveals close linkage between the two. Based on the review, this paper categorizes political marketing into three aspects: the election aspect, the governing aspect (permanent campaign) and the international aspect of political marketing. The focus of this study is on international political marketing which was defined based on the review. This paper then reports a case study of the utilization of International Political Marketing by the government of the People's Republic of China. It looks at the recent events of China's accession of the WTO in 2001, China's hosting of Sino-African Summit in 2006 and the on going promotion of China's image of ,Peaceful Development and Cooperation'. The paper advances the argument that practically all nation states and international organizations apply International Political Marketing to both their strategic planning as well as conduct of day-to-day affairs. The paper concludes that there is a great demand both at a theoretical as well as practical level for International Political Marketing, requiring further study. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Government, corporate or social power?

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 3 2002
The internet as a tool in the struggle for dominance in public policy
Abstract This paper sets out to demonstrate to corporations the need to monitor closely and to respond genuinely to public opinion. It predicts a rise in the power of citizens and a government response to that power that will include regulation to protect social and environmental interests. The paper gives an overview of the ways in which the economic sector, embodied in corporations, has risen to and maintained a position of dominance both within nation states and globally. It provides a model that illustrates the power relationship between corporations, governments and the public, noting in particular that the fundamental key to corporate dominance is the positioning of the public as consumers. Using the framework of legitimation, the paper then demonstrates and theorises the rise of opposition to the dominant order and the corporate and government responses to such opposition. It is proposed that these responses may be insufficient to maintain corporate dominance and that a new model is likely to gain ascendance. In this new model the public make a shift from consumers to citizens in order to reassert their role in governance. Internet sites of activist groups are examined in order to determine the ways in which the sites are used as a tool to facilitate a shift towards the second model. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications [source]


Investment Rules and the New Constitutionalism

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 3 2000
David Schneiderman
The new model for economic and political renovation mandates the entrenchment, beyond the reach of majoritarian control, of rules for the free movement of transnational capital. This "new constitutionalism" removes key aspects of economic life from the influence of domestic politics within nation states. A manifestation of this new orthodoxy is the network of bilateral investment treaties designed to ensure foreign investors security from "discrimination" and "expropriation," and conferring standing on investors to sue in the event that their investment interests are impaired. This paper examines the agency of the state in promoting this self-binding regime of investment rules and its potential impact on domestic constitutional regimes. Of particular concern here are constitutional arrangements that protect property, such as that recently enacted in the Republic of South Africa, that deviate from the norms expressed in the transnational investment-rules regime. [source]


New Worlds in Political Science

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2010
Patrick Dunleavy
,Political science' is a ,vanguard' field concerned with advancing generic knowledge of political processes, while a wider ,political scholarship' utilising eclectic approaches has more modest or varied ambitions. Political science nonetheless necessarily depends upon and is epistemologically comparable with political scholarship. I deploy Boyer's distinctions between discovery, integration, application and renewing the profession to show that these connections are close woven. Two sets of key challenges need to be tackled if contemporary political science is to develop positively. The first is to ditch the current unworkable and restrictive comparative politics approach, in favour of a genuinely global analysis framework. Instead of obsessively looking at data on nation states, we need to seek data completeness on the whole (multi-level) world we have. A second cluster of challenges involves looking far more deeply into political phenomena; reaping the benefits of ,digital-era' developments; moving from sample methods to online census methods in organisational analysis; analysing massive transactional databases and real-time political processes (again, instead of depending on surveys); and devising new forms of ,instrumentation', informed by post-rational choice theoretical perspectives. [source]


An American Perspective on the EU's Constitutional Treaty

POLITICS, Issue 1 2007
Alberta Sbragia
This article argues that the American experience can help illuminate some of the tensions surrounding the European Union's embattled Constitutional Treaty. I want to emphasise, however, that I am not trying to make any rigorous comparative statement here. I am not arguing that the United States and the EU are similar. They have developed in very different historical periods: the 13 colonies were certainly not equivalent to the old and well-established nation states which form the EU. Nonetheless, I am saying that some aspects of the American experience may be useful in thinking about the current state of tension which surrounds the process of European integration. In this article, therefore, I shall very schematically contrast the American and the European experience of integration and use that contrast to help illuminate the tensions which are now at work in the EU. [source]


Europe at the Millennium

POLITICS, Issue 2 2000
Mary Kaldor
This article argues that the future of the European project depends on the capacity to maintain security. It traces the link between security and political institutions in the case of nation states and, subsequently, blocs. The security of nation states and blocs was defined in terms of the defence of borders against an external enemy and the preservation of law and order within borders. Today, the distinction between internal and external has broken down; ,new wars' are a mixture of war, organised crime and violations of human rights. Security can only be maintained through the extension of law and order beyond borders , through enlargement, migration and citizenship policies, and effective humanitarian intervention. Any other approach could lead to a reversal of the process of integration. This type of security policy is likely to be associated with a very different type of polity. [source]


The Institutional Context of Market Ideology: A Comparative Analysis of the Values and Perceptions of Local Government CEOs in 14 OECD Countries

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2 2004
Morten Balle Hansen
During recent decades, various versions of market practices have, in most nation states, diffused into the public sector. We analyse variations in the adoption of market ideologies and examine plausible explanations for these variations. Four managerial ideal types are constructed, based on their attitudes towards two dimensions of market ideology. Managerial attitudes and perceptions are conceived as embedded in a global process of diffusion highly affected by varying institutional preconditions. The impact of five types of institutional contexts is examined: the national context, the organizational context, the context of interaction, the context of socialization and the norms of the manager. [source]


Multiple Sovereignty: On Europe's Self-Constitutionalization and Legal Self-Reference

RATIO JURIS, Issue 1 2010

This article focuses on theoretical reflections on sovereignty and constitutionalism in the context of the globalization and Europeanisation of the nation states, their politics, and legal systems. Starting from a critical assessment of the Kelsen-Schmitt polemic, the author claims that sovereignty needs to be analysed by the sociological method in order to disclose its current structural differentiation. The constitution of society may be imagined as the multitude of self-constituted and functionally differentiated social subsystems. The constitutional pluralism argument subsequently reconceptualizes sovereignty as socially differentiated and divided between specific subsystems. The EU's differentiated constitutional domain and the paradox of divided sovereignty are used as examples of profound structural and semantic changes in contemporary national and transnational societies. While the sovereign nation-state institutions have become marginalized in political structures of European societies, the self-constitutionalization of the functionally differentiated EU legal system proceeds by internalizing the concept of divided sovereignty and using it semantically as its mode of self-reference. [source]


Cross-cultural estimation of the human generation interval for use in genetics-based population divergence studies

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2005
Jack N. Fenner
Abstract The length of the human generation interval is a key parameter when using genetics to date population divergence events. However, no consensus exists regarding the generation interval length, and a wide variety of interval lengths have been used in recent studies. This makes comparison between studies difficult, and questions the accuracy of divergence date estimations. Recent genealogy-based research suggests that the male generation interval is substantially longer than the female interval, and that both are greater than the values commonly used in genetics studies. This study evaluates each of these hypotheses in a broader cross-cultural context, using data from both nation states and recent hunter-gatherer societies. Both hypotheses are supported by this study; therefore, revised estimates of male, female, and overall human generation interval lengths are proposed. The nearly universal, cross-cultural nature of the evidence justifies using these proposed estimates in Y-chromosomal, mitochondrial, and autosomal DNA-based population divergence studies. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2005. © 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


MOSAICS OF MAYA LIVELIHOODS: READJUSTING TO GLOBAL AND LOCAL FOOD CRISES

ANNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRACTICE, Issue 1 2009
Rebecca K. Zarger
The particularities of how residents in Southern Belize encounter the vagaries of what is commonly referred to as a "global food crisis" (between 2006 and 2008) are explored in this paper. Belize, like many other nation states around the globe, has been structurally (and sequentially) "readjusted" by transnational lending institutions over the last several decades. Cyclical shifts in agricultural practices have taken place in many Maya communities in Southern Belize in the last decade, partly in response to migration, a severe hurricane, land tenure conflicts, and within the last year, skyrocketing staple prices and food scarcity. The costs of basic staples such as corn, wheat, and rice have nearly doubled, in parallel with much of the rest of the globe during the same time frame. Shifts in subsistence strategies have significant implications for the power and politics of land use, access, and mobility. Furthermore, they reflect centuries-old ways of adjusting to changing circumstances in global markets and colonial and postcolonial realities. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of incorporating political and historical ecologies of land use and food production when considering the local impacts of global food crises. [source]


Felt tip pens and school councils: children's participation rights in four English schools

CHILDREN & SOCIETY, Issue 4 2001
Dominic Wyse
The United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child has created practical challenges for nation states and institutions particularly in relation to children's rights to participation. The limited research that is available has tended to use survey methodology; qualitative accounts of children's daily lives are rare. The present study investigated the nature of children's participation in their education in two primary and two secondary schools; in particular the right to express views freely in all matters affecting the child. The study found that children's opportunities to express their views were extremely limited even when school councils were in place. It is concluded that the goal of active citizenship espoused by recent national curriculum developments will remain illusive unless educational practice changes to a focus on school processes rather than products. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]