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since its inception, being described as ahistorical, 6 simplistic, 7 Whiggish, facile and triumphalist, 8 dismissive of the roles played by actors in the developing world during the Cold War, 9 and so on. But what these criticisms do not dispute is the basic essence of the human rights story: that it represents a reification of the entitlements of the human individual where hitherto there was simply a humanitarian charitable concern for individual people where it existed at all. This has, accordingly, led critics of human rights of all stripes to
of fascism, retreat is not an option. The globalisation of economic interests, which have successfully moved beyond the nation-state and generated protectionist responses across Europe, have not been matched by an expansion of politics to a similar level. On the contrary, developments since the end of the Cold War show that the power of the state to control events within its borders, which is crucial to the traditional doctrine of sovereignty, is in decline. According to Matti Koskenneimi, ‘The pattern of influence and decision-making that rules the world has an
their schools. The discourse of the governments in question indicated how invisible edges of citizenship persist within the education system. Instead of offering equality of opportunity, it further cements the position of Roma at the fringes of citizenship. In all of these cases, the ECtHR decided there was ethnic discrimination in education. In discussing these court cases, it is important to highlight the broader contexts within which they occurred. The US cases were decisively affected by the Cold War context, as racial
McCarthy balloon. 76 Most accounts of the conflict with McCarthy tend to be Murrow-centric in the sense that Murrow's undoubted courage in openly challenging blacklisting and similar features of Cold War ‘McCarthyism’ are at the fore. Murrow emerges, in the title of one biographer, as the embodiment of ‘heroic truth’. 77 Such heroicization of Murrow
integration.’ The period of optimism following the end of the Cold War only increased interest in the Euro-polity. A united, more muscular and financially integrated continent that deployed power in a civil, ‘normative’ manner instead of focusing on its hard, military aspects, made ‘[t]he European Dream [into] a beacon of light in a troubled world.’ 5 With the accession of the first postcommunist states to the EU in 2004, its formula of community-based integration seemed to be ‘destined eventually to serve as a model for the nations of the world.’ Indeed, for a time the
with existential concerns. One measure of the current concatenation of crises that we confront is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ’ ‘Doomsday Clock’, currently set at 100 seconds to midnight – the closest to Armageddon that it has been since it was initially set up in 1947. The global situation, by this account, is more precarious or fragile than at any time during the Cold War. However, International Relations has a problem in that it is often perceived as ‘Western’, or more specifically an ‘American’ social science (Hoffmann, 1977 ; Smith, 2000 ) – one
reflects a more optimistic period in the immediate post-Cold War period. It is hard, for example, to imagine an ideal speech situation involving either former US president Donald Trump, or Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Habermas’ discourse ethics has been developed in the recent work of Rainer Forst. Forst has been centrally concerned with issues of justice and human rights and has speculated on these issues at a national and international level. 23 His central concern has been to develop a theory of
it is explained that the crucial task of dividing and sharing power, which was established at the level of the nation state and fortified by key institutions in various national civil societies in order to supplement formal democracy, is being reconfigured under conditions of global governance. It may be inaccurate or perhaps too early to characterise the situation as post-democratic. But a certain kind of democracy that was known and familiar until the end of the Cold War is slowly becoming more historical than actual. The transformations involved affect the
QUESTION 111 and proposals to make labour markets more flexible as an unfortunate but necessary response to excessive government spending during these years. It is certainly the case that many centre and centre-right political parties claim that international financial markets will not tolerate profligate governments or burgeoning welfare states. What is clear is that there has been an extensive re-structuring of government expenditure, labour markets, and welfare states since the end of the Cold War and, in a related vein, individual attitudes about household debt
the USA; instead, active translations of US biological and cultural racial thinking were already forming interpretive frames in Bulgaria for white Bulgarians' perceptions of Roma (Todorova 2006 : 6–7). Bulgarian Communists also worked Stalinist notions of racialised differentials in modernity, then Cold War state socialist views of race, culture and development, into their racial formations. These translations of racialisation and whiteness thus did not only reach Bulgarians on migrating to the USA, as mainstream US labour/migration histories would suggest, nor did