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Neo-liberalism is, undoubtedly, today’s dominant economical and political ideology. This paper is an attempt to give a general outline of where it derived from, what was it based on, and how it became the leading driving force in the field of economy and politics.
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The paper analyzes the concept of collective improvisation and draws out its potentials for social and political theory. Translating the ideas of collective improvisation from their original context in the theatre into the field of political thought, I argue that they offer a new understanding of political action by reevaluating the concepts of dissensus (Rancière) and community (Nancy), as well as the ways in which politics as a system needs to produce collectively binding decisions (Luhmann). I conclude that the ideas inherent in the practice of collective improvisation, as it has been developed within the tradition of modern theatre improvisation, subvert our intuitive ways of thinking about politics and thereby offer an alternative model of being and acting together.
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Adam Smith considered poverty and unemployment as push factors for migration and wages high enough to provide for a worker and his family as a pull factor. Migration as a free mobility of labour leads to an optimal allocation of the factor commodity labour as well as changes of employment which necessary to equalise wages between different geographical entities. The consequences are not only promoting economic growth and prosperity, but also reducing poverty. Smith has no contemporary empirical support for his theory.
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The article examines the concept of the political, and it’s relationship to the Late Soviet Socialism, adressed in the Sovietology oeuvre of Proffesor Alexei Yurchak. The question is raised whether the claim about inner paradoxes of the late Soviet system as a single discursive formation can be substantiated without addressing the probability of more fundamental discursive divisions, splits and multiplicities structuring life of the post-Stalinist epoch. The critical analysis of such concepts as „authoritative discourse“ and discursive „performative shift“ reveals contradictions of author‘s conceptual attempt to explain the legitimacy of the late Soviet system, as well as elucidates why the issue of the Soviet as the political remains suspended in the analytical shema of Yurchak.
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The right of audience, in common law, is the right of a lawyer to represent a client in a court. Royalty, the Pope and some Presidents grant audiences. What does the power to grant an audience consist in? And what does it mean to demand an audience (with)? Through a reading of the way in which the vocabulary of theatre, acting and audience is involved in the generation of a theory of state by Hobbes and Rousseau, this paper looks to reopen these questions as a political resource for us to re-imagine and refigure our ways of being together. Through readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, it looks at the ways in which the performance of politics creates the public, the representative and the sovereign and the ways these figures interact. It proposes an alternative role for theatre as places of affective learning and a civic ethics of playfulness, in which the auto-institution of the state as an imagined collectivity is fully assumed.
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During the nineteen months when Minister Anna Fotyga was in office, Polish foreign policy underwent significant changes. The style of politics also changed. Unlike her predecessors, Fotyga did not aspire to the role of chief architect of foreign policy – the president and prime minister played the leading roles in this regard. There was close cooperation between the main authorities with responsibility for foreign policy. At the same time, divisions between the ruling camp and the opposition were deepening.Fotyga’s approach to international challenges remained in line with the programme of the Law and Justice (PiS) party. The EU’s support for Polish demands on the embargo imposed by Moscow at the summit in Samara can be considered a success. In contrast, Fotyga’s attempts to increase energy security through closer cooperation with the countries of Central Asia, bypassing Russia, failed. The mission of Fotyga as head of diplomacy was interrupted as a result of early parliamentary elections.Fotyga’s biggest problem, as a politician rather than as a foreign minister, was her negative media image, which was a result of the political rivalry between PiS and the Civic Platform (PO) party.The activity of Minister Fotyga is examined in the context of the conditions of the international system, internal policies and her role as an individual decision-maker. The internal conditions – i.e., the strong polarization of the political scene due to the rivalry between PiS and PO – were the most important factor in her activity.
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This article is an attempt to present historical development of the concept of the political. Through positions of Carl Schmitt, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, this article demonstrates three different understandings of the relations between politics and the political. While Carl Schmitt understands the political as the precondition of a state and defines it through the antagonistic relation friend/enemy, Mouffe and Laclau determine the political as agonistic, transforming at the same time the enmity into the relations between adversaries. Instead of Schmitt’s idea of enmity, as well as Habermas’s deliberative definition of democracy, the two theoreticians suggest a concept of agonistic pluralism should be introduced which would, along with the agreement, necessarily include disagreement on political matters. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, similarly to Mouffe and Laclau, and following Heidegger, bring the political into relation with philosophical and define it as a constant questioning of current politics. They believe that every agreement necessarily leads to totalitarianism so that the political thus always needs to be opposed to power and government.
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Postalo je besmisleno naglašavati da je socijaldemokracija u krizi. Takvo stanje traje od osamdesetih godina i to je njena, kako se kaže, ‘normalnost’. Antun Vujić koji je zaštitni znak hrvatske socijaldemokracije u svojoj publicističkoj knjizi Hrvatska i ljevica kaže: »Prikrivanje ne pomaže. Socijaldemokracija kao politička organizacija je u krizi. Ono što nije u krizi je potreba za socijalnom demokracijom, usporediva i sa samom krizom« (2014: 342). Vujić se u knjizi posvetio rekonstrukciji ‘normalnosti’ koja razara današnju socijaldemokraciju, ali i društveno tkivo Hrvatske. Odbacio je ideološke i policy intervencije Giddensa, Blairea i Schrödera, tj. njihov Third Way, jer je to učenje samo formalno produljilo život socijaldemokraciji do početka globalne krize 2008.
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In over 2,000 years of existence, approaches in political science evolved from philosophical and normative reflections on various forms of organization of the ancient world to contemporary interdisciplinary approaches based on refining concepts and theories accumulated over time and the use of complex research methodologies, own or borrowed from related fields of studies such as sociology, political psychology, econometrics, advanced statistics. Although quantitative approaches prevails in contemporary research, does not lack political philosophy studies, theoretical and ideological approaches, inspired by everyday realities and empirical research results.
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The Czech Republic is a rarity in lacking a common one-word form of its full name.
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Transfer of Donbas region to Ukraine was ‘nonsense,’ Russian leader says.
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It is often claimed that states have territorial rights, and that these rights include the right to exclude people who seek admission to their territory. In this paper I will examine whether the most defensible account of territorial rights can provide support to the right to exclude. I will discuss three types of theories of territorial rights. The first account links the right of states to exclude to the prior right of individuals to freedom of association, which is said to include the right not to associate and to dissociate. The second is a Lockean theory that grounds the territorial rights of states, and hence their right to exclude, in the prior right of individuals to private property in the land that constitutes the territory of the state. I argue that these accounts have independently implausible implications, regardless of their implications for the immigration debate. The third account is a Kantian theory that bases the territorial jurisdiction of states on individuals’ duty to create, sustain and submit themselves to a shared system of law that is a necessary condition of guaranteeing their rights and of discharging their duties towards one another. I will argue that the Kantian account is superior to its current alternatives. However, I also suggest that it cannot ground a broad right to exclude.
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What are we referring to when we speak about the history of Romanian ethnology or anthropology? It seems easy, even obvious, but the very field(s) of what we are referring to by these academic labels do not just exist “out there” waiting to be approached and understood. As a matter of fact, „ethnology” was a term used only incidentally in Romanian professional jargon before 1990, whereas the term „anthropology” found use alone in the field of physical anthropology. What is more: beyond the institutional borders (which took time to emerge and achieve legitimacy), one might question where the limits of „ethnological thinking” lie in the broad context of the social thinking of early modern times, where the involved elites shared an interest in „the being of the people” and most approaches were conceived as „national sciences”? Contrary to what one might think, there is not an easy and ready-made answer to this question. Let us then ask what we should refer to when we speak about the history of Romanian ethnology? We might begin with the classical couple of folklore studies and ethnography, which both have a long and rich tradition in Romanian modern culture. The next step would be to link them in a mutually comprehensive approach, despite the general practice of presenting them independently in specifi c histories. In doing so, we could adopt the recommendation of an international conference of European “folk ethnographers” held in 1955 in Arnhem to use the general term of “national ethnology” when referring to all kinds of scholars of “folk culture” within a national realm (see Tamás, 1968). But to frame the question in this fashion would be misleading to some extent. Folk studies and ethnography transcend the “academic” realm in their claim to have the last word on “the being of the people”, as Pârvan explicitly states when defi ning ethnography. Folkloric species and categories, as defi ned by the different schools and approaches, have as their only common point “their documentary value, all the goods of the fi eld [of folk studies, n.n.] being documents of popular mentality” (Bîrlea, 1969:7). Thus, the two disciplines share, in fact, their object of interest; but in doing so, they also share it with many other disciplines and approaches. Indeed, “the being of the people” is a general concern of the national elites during this entire period, most of them contributing in a more or less specialized way to its investigation. [...]
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Although neo-liberalism has not been able to offer any lasting solution to the profound economic crisis and long-run stagnation of the European Union (EU), its ideological supremacy (non-hegemonic in Gramscian terms) has still proceeded in the EU. This article reviews the historical evolution of neo-liberal restructuring in the European integration from the perspective of neo-Gramscian International Political Economy (IPE) literature. The majority of the recent critical IPE studies in the political economy of European integration is based on Robert Cox’s “World Order” theory with neo-Gramscian foundations. Neo-Gramscian IPE emphasizes the significance of transnational relations from a historical materialist perspective and perceives that European integration process is the outcome of a struggle between transnational social forces. In addition, this article analyzes the crisis of neo-liberal hegemony in the EU, the changes in the political economy of the EU after the euro crisis, and the model of authoritarian neo-liberalism from a neo-Gramscian perspective.
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Ilonszki Gabriella (szerk.): Pártok, jelöltek, képviselők. Budapest, Szabad Kéz, 2015. 220 oldal.
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This paper examines the mnemonic battle fought over the Romanian communist past between the active forces of intellectual democratic elites and the passive resistance of the majority of the population. The former try to impose a narrative of cultural trauma regarding the communist past against the latter`s popular resistance expressed by strong nostalgic attachments towards the same communist past. The paper investigate the formation of the new official consensus on the communist legacy as cultural trauma, proposing a three stage sequence of its articulation: i) the breakthrough made by detention memorialistic literature in the aftermath of 1989 Revolution; ii) the officialization of 'communism-as-cultural-trauma' narrative by the Tismăneanu Report condemning the communist regime; iii) the institutionalization of the cultural trauma narrative in the educational system. All these struggles over the memory of communism from the part of the anticommunist political elites are tacitly countered by strong popular nostalgia, as revealed by extensive survey data.
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This article is aimed at revealing structural characteristics of blat networks during late soviet period in Lithuanian society. Blat is understood as a form of informal exchange particular for Soviet society. It was oriented at satisfaction of needs of personal consumption and it reorganized state system of distribution of material resources. The article starts from brief review of institutional conditions that facilitated formation and spread of blat exchange and defines consequences of blat for functioning of Soviet system. The article goes on presenting results of the data analysis of representative survey of Lithuanian population conducted in 2014. It is concluded that during Late Soviet period blat networks in Lithuanian society mainly consisted of strong ties, however, material well-being of individuals was associated with their abilities to use not only strong, but also weak ties. Data analysis also reveal that blat practices were frequently misrecognized as such by those who used them.
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