3 results
7 - Competing or Converging Claims on International Order? The EU, China and Human Security
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- By Sebastian Harnisch, Ruprecht-Karls-University, Kai He, Griffith University, Australia
- Edited by Emil J. Kirchner, University of Essex, Thomas Christiansen, Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands, Han Dorussen, University of Essex
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- Book:
- Security Relations between China and the European Union
- Published online:
- 05 September 2016
- Print publication:
- 29 September 2016, pp 124-144
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Summary
Over the past four decades, the European Union (formerly the European Community) and China have maintained an ever-increasing set of bilateral relations of varying degrees of cooperation and conflict (Chen and Armstrong 2010). For the last two decades, as both partners emerged as global security providers, their respective policy agendas have begun to touch upon issues of human security. The concept of human security, hailed alike by pundits and policymakers since the mid-1990s (Gaspers 2005; Fukuda-Parr and Messineo 2012), has thus informed national, bilateral and multilateral policymaking both in the EU and China (Bedeski 2007; Solana 2014; Breslin 2015).
Human security challenges are rooted in two global interrelated processes. First, the crises arising from the steady erosion of modern statehood and responsible government in many parts of the world, which in turn create a diverse set of dangers, risks and threats to human well-being. Following the Cold War, these challenges have multiplied as transnational actors, such as terrorist groups, and transnational occurrences, such as infectious diseases, spread (unevenly) across the globe, probing political authority on all levels: local, national, regional and global (Bajpai 2003; Kaldor 2007). Second, human security is a normative and dynamic concept that arises from the conferral of obligations by normative entrepreneurs on governments to provide (additional) protection and expanded freedoms (Burgess et al. 2007; Gaspers 2009). While Behringer (2005) has argued that “middle powers” were instrumental in pushing the concept, and others have highlighted the impact of various UN agencies (Newman 2014), an intense academic debate ensued as to how far the concept had been “captured” by national governments to pursue their traditional security agenda, thereby sidelining several nontraditional security concerns, such as global health, gender equality and cultural security (Chandler 2008; Owen 2008; Krause 2014).
In the early twenty-first century, considerable differences in content and emphasis of the three key pillars thus remain: freedom from want, freedom from fear and freedom to take action on one's own behalf (UNCHS 2003). To cooperate, however, does not require a formal normative consensus or converging interests between two powers. What is essential, as the example of the emerging norm of “responsibility to protect” attests, is the compatibility of foreign policy behavior by the EU, China, the United States and a few others, which allows for policy coordination in the UN and various other international fora.
Chapter 11 - Policy, Financing and Implementation
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- By Catherine Mitchell, Janet L. Sawin, Govind R. Pokharel, Daniel Kammen, Zhongying Wang, Solomone Fifita, Mark Jaccard, Ole Langniss, Hugo Lucas, Alain Nadai, Ramiro Trujillo Blanco, Eric Usher, Aviel Verbruggen, Rolf Wüstenhagen, Kaoru Yamaguchi, Douglas Arent, Greg Arrowsmith, Morgan Bazilian, Lori Bird, Thomas Boermans, Alex Bowen, Sylvia Breukers, Thomas Bruckner, Sebastian Busch, Elisabeth Clemens, Peter Connor, Felix Creutzig, Peter Droege, Karin Ericsson, Chris Greacen, Renata Grisoli, Erik Haites, Kirsty Hamilton, Jochen Harnisch, Cameron Hepburn, Suzanne Hunt, Matthias Kalkuhl, Heleen de Koninck, Patrick Lamers, Birger Madsen, Gregory Nemet, Lars J. Nilsson, Supachai Panitchpakdi, David Popp, Anis Radzi, Gustav Resch, Sven Schimschar, Kristin Seyboth, Sergio Trindade, Bernhard Truffer, Sarah Truitt, Dan van der Horst, Saskia Vermeylen, Charles Wilson, Ryan Wiser, David de Jager, Antonina Ivanova Boncheva
- Edited by Ottmar Edenhofer, Ramón Pichs-Madruga, Youba Sokona, Kristin Seyboth, Susanne Kadner, Timm Zwickel, Patrick Eickemeier, Gerrit Hansen, Steffen Schlömer, Christoph von Stechow, Patrick Matschoss
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- Book:
- Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation
- Published online:
- 05 December 2011
- Print publication:
- 21 November 2011, pp 865-950
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Summary
Executive Summary
Renewable energy can provide a host of benefits to society. In addition to the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, governments have enacted renewable energy (RE) policies to meet a number of objectives including the creation of local environmental and health benefits; facilitation of energy access, particularly for rural areas; advancement of energy security goals by diversifying the portfolio of energy technologies and resources; and improving social and economic development through potential employment opportunities. Energy access and social and economic development have been the primary drivers in developing countries whereas ensuring a secure energy supply and environmental concerns have been most important in developed countries.
An increasing number and variety of RE policies–motivated by a variety of factors–have driven substantial growth of RE technologies in recent years. Government policies have played a crucial role in accelerating the deployment of RE technologies. At the same time, not all RE policies have proven effective and efficient in rapidly or substantially increasing RE deployment. The focus of policies is broadening from a concentration almost entirely on RE electricity to include RE heating and cooling and transportation.
RE policies have promoted an increase in RE capacity installations by helping to overcome various barriers. Barriers specific to RE policymaking (e.g., a lack of information and awareness), to implementation (e.g., a lack of an educated and trained workforce to match developing RE technologies) and to financing (e.g., market failures) may further impede deployment of RE.
3 - Understanding Germany: The Limits of “Normalization” and the Prevalence of Strategic Culture
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- By Sebastian Harnisch, University of Trier, Kerry Longhurst, University of Birmingham
- Edited by Stuart Taberner, University of Leeds, Paul Cooke, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 08 September 2006, pp 49-60
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Summary
The concept of “normalization” continues to have great resonance in discussions of Germany's post-Cold War development, especially in the field of German foreign and security policy. The notion that Germany's foreign and security policies have or should become more “normal” also remains a potent theme in official discourse among policy makers in the pursuit of defining Germany's international role. The purpose of this chapter is to appraise the notion of normalization in the context of developments in Germany's post-1990 security policy and to consider its limitations and weaknesses in the face of what we call Germany's prevailing strategic culture — a variable that tends to work against a “complete” normalization of German foreign and security policy.
In the early 1990s a forceful argument, pursued mainly by American academics, suggested that a profound change in German foreign and security policy after the end of the Cold War was inevitable. This line of thinking articulated the notion that a normalization would occur by which the policies and preferences of the post-1945 “Bonn Republic” would give way to a less institutionally bound, more powerful and self-interested new Germany prone to maximizing its autonomy outside of the post-Second World War institutional milieu. The normalization of German security policy would result, the argument ran, from change in the international balance of power after the implosion of the Soviet bloc, twinned with the relative growth in terms of territory, population, and resources of the unified Federal Republic.