The international relations of the Middle East have long been dominated by uncertainty and conflict. External intervention, interstate war, political upheaval and interethnic violence are compounded ...by the vagaries of oil prices and the claims of military, nationalist and religious movements. The purpose of this book is to set this region and its conflicts in context, providing on the one hand a historical introduction to its character and problems, and on the other a reasoned analysis of its politics. In an engagement with both the study of the Middle East and the theoretical analysis of international relations, the author, who is one of the best known and most authoritative scholars writing on the region today, offers a compelling and original interpretation. Written in a clear, accessible and interactive style, the book is designed for students, policymakers, and the general reader.
Few phenomena have been more disruptive to West European politics and society than the accumulative experience of post-WWII immigration. Against this backdrop spring two questions: Why have the ...immigrant-receiving states historically permitted high levels of immigration? To what degree can the social and political fallout precipitated by immigration be politically managed? Utilizing evidence from a variety of sources, this study explores the links between immigration and the surge of popular support for anti-immigrant groups; its implications for state sovereignty; its elevation to the policy agenda of the European Union; and its domestic legacies. It argues that post-WWII migration is primarily an interest-driven phenomenon that has historically served the macroeconomic and political interests of the receiving countries. Moreover, it is the role of politics in adjudicating the claims presented by domestic economic actors, foreign policy commitments, and humanitarian norms that creates a permissive environment for significant migration to Western Europe.
This is the first book to compare the distinctive welfare states of Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman trace the historical origins of social policy in ...these regions to crucial political changes in the mid-twentieth century, and show how the legacies of these early choices are influencing welfare reform following democratization and globalization. After World War II, communist regimes in Eastern Europe adopted wide-ranging socialist entitlements while conservative dictatorships in East Asia sharply limited social security but invested in education. In Latin America, where welfare systems were instituted earlier, unequal social-security systems favored formal sector workers and the middle class. Haggard and Kaufman compare the different welfare paths of the countries in these regions following democratization and the move toward more open economies. Although these transformations generated pressure to reform existing welfare systems, economic performance and welfare legacies exerted a more profound influence. The authors show how exclusionary welfare systems and economic crisis in Latin America created incentives to adopt liberal social- policy reforms, while social entitlements from the communist era limited the scope of liberal reforms in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. In East Asia, high growth and permissive fiscal conditions provided opportunities to broaden social entitlements in the new democracies. This book highlights the importance of placing the contemporary effects of democratization and globalization into a broader historical context.
It is commonly believed that since the 1973 oil crisis, oil and energy prices have been more volatile than other commodity prices. This study examines monthly producer prices for thousands of ...products over the period January 1945 through August 2005. The results show that crude oil, refined petroleum, and natural gas prices are more volatile than prices for about 95% of products sold by domestic producers. Relative to crude commodities, however, crude oil prices are currently more volatile than about 65% of other products, and oil price volatility first exceeded the median for crude commodities following the 1986 drop in oil prices.
The first comprehensive study of August Wilson's drama introduces the major themes and motifs that unite Wilson's ten-play cycle about African American life in each decade of the twentieth century. ...Framed by Wilson's life experiences and informed by his extensive interviews, this book provides fresh, coherent, detailed readings of each play, well-situated in the extant scholarship. It also provides an overview of the cycle as a whole, demonstrating how it comprises a compelling interrogation of American culture and historiography. Keenly aware of the musical paradigms informing Wilson's dramatic technique, Nadel shows how jazz and, particularly, the blues provide the structural mechanisms that allow Wilson to examine alternative notions of time, property, and law. Wilson's improvisational logics become crucial to expressing his notions of black identity and resituating the relationship of literal to figurative in the African American community. The study is augmented by a small collection of essays by two other major scholars: Harry Elam and Donald Pease
After August Maley, Patrick
2019, 2019-08-08
eBook
Critics have long suggested that August Wilson, who called blues the best literature we have as black Americans, appropriated blues music for his plays. After August insists instead that Wilson’s ...work is direct blues expression. Patrick Maley argues that Wilson was not a dramatist importing blues music into his plays; he was a bluesman, expressing a blues ethos through drama.
Reading Wilson’s American Century Cycle alongside the cultural history of blues music, as well as Wilson’s less discussed work—his interviews, the polemic speech The Ground on Which I Stand, and his memoir play How I Learned What I Learned—Maley shows how Wilson’s plays deploy the blues technique of call-and-response, attempting to initiate a dialogue with his audience about how to be black in America.
After August further contends that understanding Wilson as a bluesman demands a reinvestigation of his forebears and successors in American drama, many of whom echo his deep investment in social identity crafting. Wilson’s dramaturgical pursuit of culturally sustainable black identity sheds light on Tennessee Williams’s exploration of oppressive limits on masculine sexuality and Eugene O’Neill’s treatment of psychologically corrosive whiteness. Today, the contemporary African American playwrights Katori Hall and Tarell Alvin McCraney repeat and revise Wilson’s methods, exploring the fraught and fertile terrain of racial, gender, and sexual identity. After August makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on Wilson and his undeniable impact on American drama.
Despite the apparent importance of the “knowledge economy,” U.K. macroeconomic performance appears unaffected: investment rates are flat, and productivity has slowed. We investigate whether ...measurement issues might account for this puzzle. The standard National Accounts treatment of most spending on “knowledge” or “intangible” assets is as intermediate consumption. Thus they do not count as either GDP or investment. We ask how treating such spending as investment affects some key macro variables, namely, market sector gross value added (MGVA), business investment, capital and labor shares, growth in labor and total factor productivity (TFP), and capital deepening. We find: (a) MGVA was understated by about 6 percent in 1970 and 13 percent in 2004; (b) instead of the business investment/MGVA ratio falling since 1970 it has been rising; (c) instead of the labor share being flat since 1970 it has been falling; (d) growth in labor productivity and capital deepening has been understated and growth in TFP overstated; and (e) TFP growth has not slowed since 1990 but has been accelerating.
No set of international relations is as thoroughly analyzed, commented on, taken apart and critiqued as the ties between Europe and the United States. A period of post-Cold War integration has been ...buffeted by trade disputes, economic strife and differences in prosecuting the fight against global terrorism.
Now for the first time there is an accessible and theory-based analysis of European foreign policies in the post-Cold War era. The authors argue that EU- and NATO-mediated geopolitics prevails in most of Europe, but that raw geopolitics tends to pop up at the fringes of this thoroughly institutionalized area. Moreover, the effects of past geopolitics persist in the collective memories of several states and compete with contemporary geopolitics in their policy formulations. Focusing on the post-Cold War era, The Geopolitics of Euro-Atlantic Integration includes analyses of the Benelux, Nordic and Baltic countries, Central and East European countries and those in Southern Europe. This geographical range was made possible through contributions by leading European scholars and area experts. The coherence of this edited collection is facilitated by constellation theory, a new geopolitical theory explaining European foreign policies in a comparative perspective. Scenarios for the future of Europe are formulated as well as perspectives for the constellation theory when applied to other parts of the world.
Of interest to political scientists, observers, academics and students, this is an invaluable guide to post-Cold War European relations.
Preface, Contents, Chapter 1. Introduction, Chapter 2. Geopolitical Theory and the Rules of the Game in Europe Chapter 3. Constellation Theory Chapter 4. The Institutional Dynamics of Euro-Atlantic Integration, Constellation Theory Applied to Europe Chapter 5. Close to Power? Chapter 5. The North Chapter 6. The South Chapter 7. The East Chapter 8. The North-East Chapter 9. Comparative Analysis Meets Theory Chapter 10. Prospects for Europe Chapter 11. The Constellation Theory Applied outside Europe, List of figures, List of References
Hans Mouritzen of the Danish Institute of International Studies has published extensively in fields such as foreign policy, international organization, European integration, transnational relations and the Baltic Se area. His work Theory and Reality of International Politics (Ashgate, 1998) emphasizes the spatial dimension of international relations.
Anders Wivel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. His main research interests are European integration and security, in particular the exercise of power politics and the role of small states in the integration process, and international relations theory, in particular the realist tradition.
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