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necessary in order fully to understand what resources states might realistically rely on today to deal with the internal pressures of conflict and social fragmentation, on the one hand, and the external pressures stemming from globalisation and transnational governance, on the other. The complex relation between internal divisions, external strategic constraints, and collective political resources for coping with tensions is complicated further by the fact that the national and international dimensions of state authority have not been neatly separable for some time now
were limited. Necessity was its driving force. The weakness of the commitment to international cooperation and the return to traditional ideas of sovereign self-sufficiency after the war quickly showed that the experience of 1914 through 1918 was not enough to constitute a rupture. As Monnet himself admitted, ‘[A]t the time I did not see the pooling of sovereignty as a way of solving international problems. Nobody did, even if their words seem to imply an appeal to some authority that would be above nations.’ 10 While the events of the Great War had a large
each other – i.e. it is not a specific individual that stands ‘before the law’, but legal discourse, and the law for its part is not a generalised and distant authority, but (at a much more trivial level) the positive law of the land – then we have to address the question: What happens within the mysterious relationship between ‘Law AND law’ when that relationship is subjected to the
account, democratic law is not imposed by elites in a top-down, vertically structured direction. On the contrary, the law is believed to develop according to a far more horizontally structured, civic dynamic, in which the citizens are the legislative protagonists in a twofold sense. In the first instance, they are protagonists in formal processes linking them to legally binding decisions with macro-level political authority in the guise of party political representation in parliaments and legislatures. In the second, they are at the heart of the more informal
family caravan on the land she owned. The local authorities refused the permit. The statistics presented in the case showed that whilst 80 per cent of non-Roma applicants got permits to build their houses on their land, only 20 per cent of Romani applicants were allowed to place caravans on their land. As Clements ( 2001 ) argued, the case was not primarily about the special rights of a specific Romani group, but about the right not to be discriminated against under supposedly neutral laws that do not take the special position of Romani minorities into account
– for example, to reduce racial discrimination, reduce the suicide rate in Scotland, increase female political participation, or whatever it may be – cannot be achieved simply through a chain of commands running from treaty body to State party to domestic public authorities and private actors and, finally, to individuals. Achieving any societal goal is, it should go without saying, hardly that simple. A fire station cannot operate simply on the basis of a set of operational rules, no matter how complicated and detailed they might be, and the “putting out of unwanted
paradoxical sense relating to the reality of a historically unique example of institutional form (the early modern state in Europe and North America, subsequently imposed or adopted elsewhere) which is capable, to significantly differing extents depending on the country in question, of reconciling countervailing tendencies. That is, differentiation and de-centralisation unfold within a framework that in prin ciple remains centralised with regard to the key domains of taxation, military authority, public courts, and questions of justice. One is thus trying to explain a
Populism, neoliberalism, and globalisation are just three of the many terms used to analyse the challenges facing democracies around the world. Critical Theory and Sociological Theory examines those challenges by investigating how the conditions of democratic statehood have been altered at several key historical intervals since 1945. The author explains why the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood, such as elections, have always been complemented by civic, cultural, educational, socio-economic, and, perhaps most importantly, constitutional institutions mediating between citizens and state authority. Critical theory is rearticulated with a contemporary focus in order to show how the mediations between citizens and statehood are once again rapidly changing. The book looks at the ways in which modern societies have developed mixed constitutions in several senses that go beyond the official separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. In addition to that separation, one also witnesses a complex set of conflicts, agreements, and precarious compromises that are not adequately defined by the existing conceptual vocabulary on the subject. Darrow Schecter shows why a sociological approach to critical theory is urgently needed to address prevailing conceptual deficits and to explain how the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood need to be complemented and updated in new ways today.
the two separate ways in which we can be free. The first, as Rousseau sets out in Émile , is through one-to-one instruction with a tutor, a person of authority. The second, as he discusses in The Social Contract , is as a citizen of a republic where we pursue the general will. Through the former, we strive for freedom in private, as an individual member of a household; in the latter, we do so in the public sphere, as part of a community of equals. In each case, we can be forced to be free because freedom is obedience to a law one
that creates the fringes of citizenship. The fringes of citizenship are not merely a location – that is, they are not simply ‘out there’ – but can be understood as a dynamic relationship, almost a power struggle, between states’ authorities enacting legislation on one side and those who have this legislation enacted upon them on the other. I chose the perspective of citizenship studies to reflect upon the position of Roma because focusing only on ethnic discrimination and socio-economic disadvantage can imply that Romani minorities are an