What are the relative merits of the American and European socioeconomic systems? Long-standing debates have heated up in recent years with the expansion of the European Union and increasingly sharp ...political and cultural differences between the United States and Europe. In Inequality and Prosperity, Jonas Pontusson provides a comparative overview of the two major models of labor markets and welfare systems in the advanced industrial world: the "liberal capitalist" system of the United States and Britain and the "social market" capitalism of northern Europe. These two models balance concerns of efficiency and equity in fundamentally different ways. In the 1990s the much-heralded forces of globalization (together with demographic changes and attendant political pressures) seemed to threaten the very existence of the social-market economies of Europe. Were the social compacts of Sweden and Germany outmoded? Would varieties of capitalism remain possible, or were labor-market and social-welfare arrangements converging on the U.S. norm?
Pontusson opposes the notion of inevitable convergence: he believes that social-market economies can survive and indeed flourish in the contemporary world economy. He bases his argument on an enormous amount of highly specialized research on eighteen countries, using national-level data for the last thirty years. Among the areas he explores are labor-market dynamics, income distribution, employment performance, wage bargaining, firm-level performance, and the changing possibilities for the welfare state.
Written by Joong-Seok Seo, an eminent Korean historian and a thinker of rare originality, this book examines the tumultuous history of modern Korea from the perspective of nationalism. The book goes ...to the heart of critical questioning about the political uses and abuses of nationalism by the ruling elites of post-liberation Korea.
Epic Encounters examines how popular culture has shaped the ways Americans define their "interests" in the Middle East. In this innovative book—now brought up-to-date to include 9/11 and the Iraq ...war—Melani McAlister argues that U.S. foreign policy, while grounded in material and military realities, is also developed in a cultural context. American understandings of the region are framed by narratives that draw on religious belief, news media accounts, and popular culture. This remarkable and pathbreaking book skillfully weaves lively and accessible readings of film, media, and music with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy, race politics, and religious history. The new chapter, titled "9/11 and After: Snapshots on the Road to Empire," considers and brilliantly analyzes five images that have become iconic: (1) New York City firemen raising the American flag out of the rubble of the World Trade Center, (2) the televised image of Osama bin-Laden, (3) Afghani women in burqas, (4) the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in Baghdad, and (5) the hooded and wired prisoner in Abu Ghraib. McAlister's singular achievement is to illuminate the contexts of these five images both at the time they were taken and as they relate to current events, an accomplishment all the more remarkable since—to paraphrase her new preface—we are today struggling to look backward at something that is still rushing ahead.
Korean endgame Harrison, Selig S
2002., 20090210, 2009, 2002-01-01
eBook
Nearly half a century after the fighting stopped, the 1953 Armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. While Russia and China withdrew the last of their ...forces in 1958, the United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea and is pledged to defend it with nuclear weapons. In Korean Endgame, Selig Harrison mounts the first authoritative challenge to this long-standing U.S. policy. Harrison shows why North Korea is not--as many policymakers expect--about to collapse. And he explains why existing U.S. policies hamper North-South reconciliation and reunification. Assessing North Korean capabilities and the motivations that have led to its forward deployments, he spells out the arms control concessions by North Korea, South Korea, and the United States necessary to ease the dangers of confrontation, centering on reciprocal U.S. force redeployments and U.S. withdrawals in return for North Korean pullbacks from the thirty-eighth parallel.
What do we really mean when we say a political party has changed? And exactly what is it that drives that change? Political scientists working in the comparative tradition have come up with a general ...explanation that revolves around the role of election defeats and loss of office, and around changes of leader and factions. But how well does that explanation cope when subjected to a historically-grounded and therefore robust examination? This book attempts to answer that question by subjecting the common wisdom to a real-world, over-time test using half a century in the life of one of the world’s oldest and most successful political parties to provide a series of in-depth case studies. What do the periods spent in both opposition and government by the British Conservatives since 1945 tell us about what drives parties to change their sales-force, the way they organise, and the policies they come up with? Using internal papers, memos and minutes of meetings from party archives, along with historical and contemporary accounts, memoirs and interviews, this book maps the extent of change and then explores what may have driven it. The conventional wisdom, it turns out, is not necessarily wrong but incomplete, requiring both qualification and supplementation. This approachably-written book suggests when, how and why.
This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the many different facets of the Swiss political system and of the major developments in modern Swiss politics. It brings together a diverse set of ...more than 50 leading experts in their respective areas, who explore Switzerland's distinctive and sometimes intriguing politics at all levels and across multiple themes. In placing the topics in an international and comparative context and in conversation with the broaderscholarly literature, the contributors provide a much-needed counterpoint to the rather idealized and sometimes outdated perception of Swiss politics. The work is divided into thematic sections that represent the inherent diversity of the Swiss political sphere: following a detailed introduction fromthe editors, the parts of the volume explore foundations, institutions, cantons and municipalities, actors, elections and votes, decision-making processes, and public policies, with a three-chapter epilogue. Throughout, The Oxford Handbook of Swiss Politics presents new arguments, insights, and data, and offers analyses relevant not only to political science but also to international relations, European studies, history, sociology, law, and economics.
Offering a radical interpretation of a major political issue, Chris Gifford moves beyond existing narrative and institutional accounts of Britain and Europe to present a theoretically coherent and ...unique perspective on this troubled relationship. He acknowledges that populist Euroscepticism has become fundamental to constituting Britain and 'Britishness' in a post-imperial context, despite membership of the European Union. Organized chronologically, this interesting study provides lucid overviews of key periods in the British-European Union relationship. It combines political economy with political identity to illustrate how forms of Euroscepticism have become embedded across the British political class and culture. The book focuses not on outlining history or the impact of British integration on British institutions, but on the ways in which elite behaviour towards European integration should be analyzed as practices and discourses that use Euroesceptism to construct Britain and distinctive British political projects.
In Inglorious, Illegal
Bastards , Aaron Herald Skabelund examines
how the Self-Defense Force (SDF)-the post-World War II Japanese
military-and specifically the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF),
...struggled for legitimacy in a society at best indifferent to them
and often hostile to their very existence.
From the early iterations of the GSDF as the Police Reserve
Force and the National Safety Force, through its establishment as
the largest and most visible branch of the armed forces, the GSDF
deployed an array of public outreach and public service
initiatives, including off-base and on-base events, civil
engineering projects, and natural disaster relief operations.
Internally, the GSDF focused on indoctrination of its personnel to
fashion a reconfigured patriotism and esprit de corps. These
efforts to gain legitimacy achieved some success and influenced the
public over time, but they did not just change society. They also
transformed the force itself, as it assumed new priorities and
traditions and contributed to the making of a Cold War defense
identity, which came to be shared by wider society in Japan. As
Inglorious, Illegal Bastards demonstrates, this identity
endures today, several decades after the end of the Cold War.
In this account of an unusual episode in the Cold War, Audrey Kurth Cronin examines the negotiations over Austria and the Soviet Union's sudden and surprising decision to withdraw its troops and ...accept the country as a neutral Western state, after having rejected any settlement for eight years.
Equality of opportunity is about leveling the playing field so that circumstances such as gender, ethnicity, place of birth, or family background do not influence a persons life chances. Success in ...life should depend on peoples choices, effort and talents, not to their circumstances at birth. Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean introduces new methods for measuring inequality of opportunities and makes an assessment of its evolution in Latin America over a decade.An innovative Human Opportunity Index and other parametric and non-parametric techniques are presented for quantifying inequality based on circumstances exogenous to individual efforts. These methods are applied to gauge inequality of opportunities in access to basic services for children, learning achievement for youth, and income and consumption for adults.
