Search results
As the globalization of democracy becomes increasingly palpable, the political obstacles to its achievement become overshadowed by more vexing questions concerning the very nature of democracy itself. This book examines some of the philosophical and theoretical debates underlying the 'democratic project' which increasingly dominates the field of comparative development. The first concern presented is normative and epistemological: as democracy becomes widely accepted as the political currency of legitimacy, the more broadly it is defined. The second issue examined refers to the claims being made regarding how best to secure a democratic system in developing states. The book shows how 'democracy' has quickly become, both academically and politically, all things to all people: it represents a philosophical ideal, a political strategy, and an instrument of economic well-being. It looks at some of the philosophical debates underlying democracy in order to explain why it has evolved into such an ambiguous concept. The book surveys the arguments supporting the expansion of 'democracy' from its individualistic orientations to an account more able to accommodate the concerns and aspirations of groups. Critical assessments of these new trends in democratic theory are presented. The book examines the political contexts within which debates about democratization are centred. A discussion on the claim that a robust democracy depends upon our ability to 'strengthen civil society', follows. The book situates the debate over democracy and development more closely by examining the political context surrounding the inflation of democratic meaning. It examines the consequences of the globalization of democratic norms.
? Both the US President and the almost forgotten law professor from Czernowitz, Bukowina, who developed his idea of a ‘living law’ in the far east of the Austrian Empire, have a utopian vision of a global legal order. But they do not agree on how to get to this global legal order. In Bill Clinton's New World Order it is the Pax Americana which will globalise the rule of law. His global law will be
powerful foreign policy bureaucracy. The French Foreign Affairs Ministry comprises a vast, extensive network of career diplomats and diplomatic representations, second only to that of the US in global coverage. The foreign affairs and defence ministers are actively involved in foreign policy, as is the prime minister (for example Edouard Philippe under Macron). But the French president incarnates French foreign policy grandeur more than any of his European counterparts or other potential domestic rivals, a point repeatedly made in presidential memoirs (most recently
2 The Global Democrat The new era of human relationships in which we live is one marked by mass production for remote markets, by cable and telephone, by cheap printing, by railway and steam navigation. Only geographically did Columbus discover a new world. The actual new world has been generated in the last hundred years. (LW2: 323) As the last chapter made clear, John Dewey’s conception of creative democracy points towards the perpetual adaption of social institutions, including democratic institutions and practices themselves, as new publics are engendered
5217P GLOBAL JUSTICE-PT/lb.qxd 13/1/09 19:59 Page 76 4 Global justice networks: geographical dynamics and convergence spaces This chapter is concerned with analysing how the operational dynamics of GJNs are acted out across geographic space. The spatiality of GJNs concerns both the geographical context in which they operate (e.g. the conditions, opportunities and constraints that they face) and the strategies that they employ. It concerns the myriad ongoing connections that combine different parts of the world together (by connecting different place
culture. He believed that, by including performances at Montréal’s Festival de Théâtre des Amériques (FTA) in the Cycle tour, he was allowing ‘the French-speaking public [to] discover a repertoire that it virtually never gets to see’, and was thus bringing global culture to Québec through Shakespeare ( Robert Lepage 117). At the same time, by touring the Cycle to numerous countries, he
destruction but acknowledging the need for development and industry in the country. Whether interpreted as an aberration or a sacrifice, though, the crushing of a mountain is viewed inevitably as a modern phenomenon, made possible only by the harnessing of technology and fossil fuels which has come so completely and rapidly to reshape the natural world. This is an understandable assumption. After all, the pace of environmental destruction has accelerated to alarming levels in the last few decades. Global material
88 Comparison with the United Nations In addition to the UN, there are about twenty other global organisations. These may differ from the UN in the following areas: Functional specialisation: for example, there are organisations for postal traffic, nuclear energy, food and agriculture, and
4 Making global warming policy This chapter gives background information on policy-making to tackle the global warming problem in Japan and Britain. In Chapter 3, I briefly explained that Japan could be considered corporatist and Britain pluralist in terms of government–industry relations, patterns of interest representation, and the norm of decision-making. I will elaborate how these differences are actually reflected in the traditionally dominant environmental policy styles of the two countries. Those industrial structural contexts that have important
Research and scholarly debates focus on refugees as the Other, always kept at arm's length, at a distant site somewhere in a Global South, usually trying to get into the Global North. They are perceived as people fleeing from a supra-local site of crisis, either as internally displaced people (IDPs) within their local nation, or on to an external host and then further onwards into the global arena – moving from dystopic local to utopian global in a unilineal motion, between local to national via transnational spaces. Somewhere in between, they