Our Take: Sex and Swastikas
If this is the Polish leadership's idea of a moral revolution, bring back sleaze.
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If this is the Polish leadership's idea of a moral revolution, bring back sleaze.
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The EU's tepid response to its ardent Balkan suitors would frustrate anyone. But they can't give up.
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Three Ukrainians retell how they became caught up in the changes that swept the country two years ago.
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Every country in the world is characterised by a heterogeneous spatial structure and the existence of regional disparities, and the aim of regional policy is to moderate these inequalities in the spatial development of economic activities. There are certain countries where spatial disparities are extremely large and areas lagging behind belong to one specific geographic area which feature a dual economic structure. There are, specifically, two large areas amongst the developed countries of the European Union whose economic performance lags behind the EU average and whose development paths are unique in many ways. An investigation into the unique development specifics of these two large, but coherent, territories – the regions of Southern Italy (the Mezzogiorno) and Eastern Germany – has attracted the interest of regional scientists for a long time. Today, the name “Mezzogiorno” is synonymous with long-term underdevelopment, whilst the other large area in question was reintegrated into the “mother country” after half a century of separation. Underdevelopment can be detected in almost all elements of the economy, the infrastructure and living conditions. Post-WW2, political constraints forced the German states to strike out along new paths. Five East German Länder and East Berlin were under Soviet occupation, and the planned economy of the German Democratic Republic created in 1949 gave rise to specific patterns of socio-economic development. The development rate of the previously advanced German provinces was considerably lower in the newly formed state than in West German Länder, and in the year of German reunification, labour productivity indices of East German areas were one-third of the West German average. Nevertheless, in the first years of the 2000s, the East German states showed more rapid convergence with the developed regions’ average values than did the Southern Italian regions. The present paper aims to explore how various eras have left their mark on the recent regional development of East German states (Länder), what kinds of spatial transformation have occurred, what factors can be detected behind these changes and how spatial disparities have evolved in this vast, but backward, area in the developed Europe.
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At the examination of geographical distribution of economic activities mainly two fundamental approaches and their adequate mapping methods can be found. One of them treats spatial units as separate units, the other takes into consideration also spatial relationships. The present paper outlines the theoretical background of these two methods in short, then it introduces a new approach by combining the two methods, in a way which makes it possible to research the two aspects of spatial structure of economic activity simultaneously at the level of mapping and analysis. The author shows the method through selected knowledge- intensive branches of Hungary.
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In recent years, the problem of regionalization, economic, geographic and demographic research has been an important and interesting field of research, in particular in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is small in size, but large in regional disparities. The regional development is influenced not only by macro-economic factors (GDP, investment, employment, unemployment, income), but by the country's geography and natural features, as well as the demographic, social and political elements. Regionalization is more than a physical designation of space, it is a tool for political, economic, social, ethnic and development issues. Adequately regionalization of Bosnia and Herzegovina means a perspective for the revitalisation of a country destroyed by the war, its sustainable development, ensuring better living conditions for the population, as well as the possibility of EU accession.
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Report on the Conference of Green Growth Knowledge Platform
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After years of Czech politicians accusing each other of big-time graft, a U.S. diplomat-businessman’s accusation may finally push them into doing something about it.
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As a Chinese dissident wins the Nobel Peace Prize, Moscow nurtures its ties with Beijing by skipping the ceremony.
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One man has taken as his mission changing the way Lithuanians see their ethnic Polish countrymen.
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Autocracy survives in Belarus in part because its citizens cannot agree on who they really are. Struggle Over Identity: The Official and the Alternative “Belarusianness,” by Nelly Bekus. Central European University Press, 2010.
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Signs of a new innovation-friendly mood are appearing in Kazakhstan’s highly centralized, resource-dependent economy.
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The problem of Kaliningrad, in the form it has emerged after the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, stems from the region’s ambivalent economic position of being simultaneously inside and outside the EU territory, with no international regulations existing to reconcile this conflict. However, according to the author, this situation looks puzzling only regarding historical retrospective. In the context of post-modern realities and rapid erosion of the Westphalia system of world order, Kaliningrad just fits into the new type of regionalization based on transborder cooperation and translocal networking. As commonly recognized by experts, the only true perspective for Kaliningrad is its export-oriented integration into the EU economic space.
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The article examines limitations of the predominant theorizing on the relationship among politics, popular culture and the mass media. It aims to set up landmarks for the meaningful extension of the idea of the public sphere by mapping political relevance of hybrid entertainment media genres based on the seriocomic mode of communication. Ambivalences of such communication are discussed to raise the argument that aesthetic elements do not preclude the cognitive and political value of seriocomic television discourse on the side of the viewers as citizens, and the issue asks for further research.
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When studying party system formation in unstable party systems such as postcommunist Lithuania, the Western European theoretical framework is a useful although not sufficient tool to understand this process. The problem relates to the very high level of instability. In addition to unstable electoral support for the established parties, new parties successfully emerge, but disappear, then change name, splinter and merge with other parties. This article introduces the reversed cleavage model which is an attempt to study cleavages in a post-communist setting, exemplified with the urban–rural cleavage in Lithuania. Instead of focusing upon continuous representation of political parties, the reversed cleavage model applies cleavage continuity as a point of departure. The unstable party system in Lithuania is thereby not related to voters’ missing perception of cleavages, but to the parties’ inability to establish long-lasting alignments with the electorate. Party system formation along the urban–rural cleavage in post-communist Lithuania, is explained by shifting parties and a constant cleavage.
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The main question of this article is what does democracy become in Russia, i.e. what conception of democracy, invoking the idea of “sovereign democracy”, is being constructed in Russia? Attention is focused on the ideological level – on the conception and not on the actual implementation of democracy in Russia. It is analysed in detail what the idea of “sovereign democracy” offers in general and its perspectives in Russia in particular. By invoking public opinion polls it is shown how adequate the proposed concept of democracy is to Russia’s cultural particularities. Also, the role of “sovereign democracy” in domestic and foreign policy of Russia is commented on. The conclusion is that although in the rhetorical battleground the idea of “sovereign democracy” deprives the West of the opportunity to criticize Russia, the potential of the idea of “sovereign democracy” in the international arena should be treated critically. A far greater influence it could make on domestic politics. Also, it is concluded that acceptance of democracy by Russian society can be achieved only with the help of a peculiar concept of democracy, while the idea of “sovereign democracy” just constructs this peculiar concept of democracy. It does not only mention traditional attributes of liberal democracy like elections, the rule of law, political rights, but also encourages restricting some of them.
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