The Terrorist Attacks In New York And Washington Dc On 11 September 2001, and the killing of thousands of people were not sufficient to dispel a mood of suspicion in European public opinion towards America. Of course, during the very first days after the attack, there was widespread grief and sorrow about the event among Europeans. But, as soon as discussion on the right strategy to pursu to combat terrorism began, the initial mood of identification with America started to change. And when America, although backed by a large international coalition and legitimated by two UN resolutions, moved towards an armed intervention in Afghanistan, European anti-Americanism emerged again. Thus, during the armed intervention in Afghanistan, especially when the bombing led to the death of innocent victims, a social mobilization against the American war grew day after day, with its critics apparently losing sight of the fact that a dramatic terrorist attack on America had recently taken place.

The interesting question is why does anti-Americanism re-emerge regularly in large sections of European public opinion? This intermittent Anti-Americanism appears more in southern and continental Europe, than in the northern British Isles and Scandinavia, where it is outdone by a more vociferous anti-Europeanism. In the latter countries, anti-Americanism takes the form of uneasiness with the United States. In fact, in spite of Britain's traditional special relationship with the United States, the fact cannot be denied that post-war British elites grudgingly accept their inferior status in that special relationship. But, of course, frustration with America is not the same as anger towards America. In any case, in (continental) Europe, anti- Americanism seems to be one of the few public philosophies that can unite large sections of the left, the right and the Catholic Church. It is a public philosophy which emerges especially in periods of war (and of international crisis in general).

Rather Than Signalling The End Of War, As Many Liberal Minds had hoped, the end of the cold war has seen ‘hot’ war moving firmly to centre-stage, while at the same time presaging a reclassification of its predominant forms and purposes. Since 1990 there has been a rash of what Kaldor calls ‘new wars’. Although often highly localized, they confound settled understandings of inter-state or civil war by virtue of the diverse range of protagonists involved, the issues over which they are fought, and their consistently brutal impact upon civilians. A virtual revolution in media technology has also made such wars publicly visible to an unprecedented degree. In spite of the fact that new wars are often fought without recourse to the most sophisticated or destructive of military technology, the horrific impact upon populations caught up in them has clearly assaulted public sensibilities worldwide and generated a chorus of demands that something should be done about them. Consequently, the political and ethical dimensions of going to war in response to such threats have also moved in from the periphery to the centre of public and intellectual debate. As Walzer has recently observed, the ‘chief dilemma of international politics is whether people in danger should be rescued by military forces from outside’. From the point of view of the key members of the international community at least, armed ‘humanitarian intervention’ is no longer just a form of war but has become virtually synonymous with permissible war itself.

In The Mid-Morning Hours Of 11 September 2001, Shortly After the second Twin Tower of the World Trade Center had collapsed, amidst the fog surrounding us all – who, when, why – I heard a brief item of news on the radio. Canada had closed its airspace to all American planes still en route; since US airports were also closed for several hours on that day, these pilots would have no choice but to return to their destinations or to circle the airs in search of ‘safe haven’. This news was not repeated. Canada eventually did permit US airplanes to land and many transatlantic passengers found safety in Iceland's Reykjavik airport for a period of time, up to several days in some cases.

This small incident is one among the many in recent years that have made increasingly transparent the fragility of the territorially bounded and state-centric international order. For a few brief hours, the passengers of the airplanes that could not obtain landing permission were like refugees without first admittance claims. The same logic that permits states to deny first admittance to certain refugees and asylees, and often contrary to the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, was operative in this instance as well. Invoking national security concerns, the USA's closest neighbour could, even if briefly, follow the imperatives of sovereign statehood and close its airspace as well as landing privileges to passengers who had now become ‘refugees in orbit‘ in the heavens.

This Article Explores The Nature Of Contemporary Social democracy, questioning, with like-minded scholars, John Gray's interpretation of the relationship between social democracy and globalization, which asserts that social democracy is a historically exhausted project. Garrett, for example, in rejecting such assertions, argues that social democracy remains a distinctive and viable ‘project’ within the global economy, specifically in cases where strong left-of-centre parties are linked to ‘encompassing labour movements’. He has subsequently argued that social democracy in ‘Euroland’ (with or without encompassing labour movements) can pursue a less constrained fiscal policy, and expect a more accommodating monetary policy than some predict. Garrett thus insists that social democratic governments within the Eurozone are able to ‘use macroeconomic policy to lessen market dislocations and to redistribute wealth and risk in the ever more globalized economy’.

Economists Say There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. The burgeoning ‘risk industry’ – no doubt set for further expansion after the terrorist attacks on US heartlands in 2001 – says there is no such thing as a risk-free lunch. Anthropologists say there is no such thing as a blame-free risk. And political scientists know blame is central to politics.

The growth of the ‘risk industry’, the associated explosion in discussion of safety and hazard issues and the search for better ways of assessing and managing risk, has been much commented on. The BSE issue, highlighted in the UK by the blockbuster sixteen-volume Phillips report in 2000, is taken by Ulrich Beck as emblematic of what he claims to be a ‘risk society’. Michael Power says an age of ‘new risk management’ has dawned in corporate governance, sparked by high-profile business failures and accidents. Much academic and media attention has been paid to risks from food, electric power lines, mobile phones, dangerous people, even dangerous dogs (ostensibly a rather traditional risk, but one that in recent years has been the subject of draconian new regulatory regimes in several countries, including France, Spain and Germany). Such developments in the ‘risk game’ have been described by best-selling sociologists like Beck and Giddens (who make much of their world-historical significance in an era of ‘high modernity’) and by social psychologists interested in what shapes risk perception or ‘amplification’.

A Change Of Government In Britain Does Not Necessarily Imply a change in foreign policy, but when Robin Cook entered the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in May 1997 it was with the ambition of bringing about a break with the past. The FCO was endowed for the first time with a ‘Mission Statement’, in which spreading the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy (‘mutual respect’) was described as a benefit to be secured through foreign policy; the new Foreign Secretary elaborated this ambition at the launch of the Mission Statement, asserting: The Labour Government does not accept that political values can be left behind when we check in our passports to travel on diplomatic business. Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves. We will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy.

As Christmas 2000 Approached In Dublin There Appeared Little prospect that its citizens would avoid the annual rigmarole associated with securing a safe passage home after an evening out. Anaesthetized by now to forecasts of an integrated transport system the envy of Europe, this was a public that had become weary. As for getting a taxi home, there are few it seems who by now could not recount to you their own little horror story: two-hour vigils at a taxi rank in the rain had become firmly ensconced within the mythology of the Celtic Tiger. And yet, as with so many other anecdotes of this period, they would have to vie for our attention in a conversation space crowded with incredulous descriptions of Dublin's morning gridlock, its escalating house prices or political and financial embezzlement.

The Election For Japan'S House Of Councillors Took Place On 29 July 2001. The result was a resounding victory for the major governing party, the Liberal Democratic Party, with its majority regained after the failure in the previous election in 1998. The election was very interesting in two senses. First, the deepening difficulty of the economy did not prevent the LDP from making a comeback of sorts. Normally, the Japanese voters, like most others, reward the governing party when the economy goes well. Secondly, its newly chosen maverick President, Junichiro Koizumi, successfully adopted a rhetoric of ‘Reform with Pain’ for the ostensible reason of escaping Japan's dilemma: the impossibility of allowing many business firms and banks to go bankrupt without thereby aggravating economic problems and antagonizing the electorate; its inability to drastically reduce the large number of public corporations with large registered deficits; and its inability to drastically reduce huge accumulated deficits. He came, he saw and he won. ‘How?’ is the question that the rest of this article attempts to answer.

Commissioning A Series On ‘Identity Politics’ Inevitably involves making contentious, if hopefully defensible, editorial choices about what each of these terms involves. Issues relating to ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ have figured ever more prominently on both the political and academic agendas over the past thirty years. These terms are often employed to describe a wide range of somewhat heterogeneous phenomena. For example, a recent UK Economic and Social Research Council Programme on ‘Identity and Choice’ lists under this rubric everything from ethnicity, nationality, gender and religion, to class, disability, shopping and musical preferences. However, such usage risks broadening the concept of identity to the point of vacuity. Therefore, the scope of this series is somewhat narrower: namely, political identity. Of course, the concept of the ‘political’ is itself contested and likewise seemingly infinitely expandable to all issues and areas of life. Consequently, a more restricted meaning applies here too, with politics limited to the making of collectively binding decisions amongst people holding divergent opinions and interests.

In 1989 The Reserve Bank Of New Zealand Act Gave The Rbnz the operational independence to vary monetary instruments, in particular to control the level of short-term money market rates, in such a way as to hold inf lation within a stated range over a stated period of time. That numerical range and period were to be agreed in a contractual arrangement between the Minister of Finance and the Governor, and the Governor was to be held personally responsible for achieving those agreed objectives.

The Main Aim Of This Article Is To Understand Some Of The processes at work in the management of European policy formation by political parties in the UK. More specifically, it attempts to apply and extend the model proposed by Aspinwall of institutional constraints on that policy management. Whereas Aspinwall limits the application of his model to parliamentary coalitions and effective power, we push the model further by describing and analysing its interaction with other features of the political landscape, most notably the generally low level of interest in European affairs on the part of the British public.

The 2002 Elections In France Were A Gripping Drama Unfolding in four acts. Each act has to be understood as part of a whole, as each election was ultimately dependent upon the results of the first round of the presidential election on 21 April. However untypical in the context of Fifth Republican history, the first round of the presidential election strongly inf luenced the peculiar course of the subsequent contests. The outcome of the first election on the 21 April – at which the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen won through to the second ballot against Jacques Chirac, narrowly distancing the outgoing premier Lionel Jospin – created an electric shock which reverberated around the streets of Paris and other French cities and sparked a civic mobilization without parallel since May '68. The end-result of this exceptional republican mobilization was to secure the easy (initially rather unexpected) re-election of Chirac as president at the second round two weeks later. The election of 5 May was unlike a typical second-round election. Rather than a bipolar contest pitting left and right over a choice of future governmental orientations, it was a plebiscite in favour of democracy (hence Chirac) against the far-right (Le Pen). Chirac was re-elected overwhelmingly as president, supported by at least as many leftwing as right-wing voters. This enforced plebiscite against the extreme right allowed a resurgent Jacques Chirac to claim a renewed presidential authority. At the parliamentary election of 9 and 16 June, the Fifth Republic reverted to a more traditional mode of operation, as a new ‘presidential party’, informally launched just weeks before the elections, obtained a large overall majority of seats to ‘support the President’ in time-honoured Fifth Republican tradition.

In this article we open the black box of governance in the new democracies by examining episodes where these governments are confronted with urgent threats that require swift and decisive state responses. This provides a unique insight into how political and administrative decision-making actually takes place. It enables us to analyse and evaluate the performance of the new institutions at times when it matters most. Specifically, we discuss how three of these new democracies, the Baltic states, have dealt with risks and crises in vital societal and political domains such as health and safety, public order, economic management and foreign policy. All belong to the core of the classic state functions.

The article is divided into three parts. In the first part I review and compare the two leading sociological theories on intellectuals, those of Z. Bauman and A. Gramsci whose concepts are later critically examined to form the basis of my argument. The second part of the article draws on Gramsci's typology of organic and traditional intelligentsia and Bauman's distinction between interpreters and legislators in order to identify and assess the profile of the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav intelligentsia. Here I argue that Yugoslavia lacked the category of traditional intellectuals (be they legislators or interpreters) and that the dominant type of Yugoslav intellectual was an ‘organic’ legislator. As a result, the post-Yugoslav states are also characterized by the lack of a traditional intelligentsia and thus in the early post-communist period only the former organic legislators have become ‘organicistic’ interpreters. The final part of the paper summarizes the findings and looks at their implications relating to Bauman's and Gramsci's concepts.

There Has Been Much Concern In The Past Few Years About the ‘decline of parliament’ in West European democracies. In the United Kingdom, criticism of the New Labour government has included its apparent neglect of Parliament demonstrated by the style and strategies of the government, ranging from reduction in the time allotted to prime minister's question-time and the utilization of the mass media rather than Parliament as the forum for important policy statements, to the government's refusal to accept reforms to the method of appointments to House of Commons select committees, as recommended by the House of Commons Liaison Committee. Strong party discipline, coupled with sanctions which can affect the political careers of MPs for failure to obey the edicts of the party leadership, have limited the autonomy of MPs in Britain, and, to a varying degree, in other West European countries also. Certainly the German Bundestag has been criticized for being too much under the control of the leaderships of the political parties, in terms of voting on legislation, the stage-management of debates and the choice of leaders of the parliamentary parties (the removal by Chancellor Schröder of Scharping as leader of the SPD parliamentary party in 1998 at the instigation of Lafontaine, the then party chairman, is a notorious instance).

The Very Nature Of Democracy Makes Its Defence Difficult. In a democracy, the majority has the right to be wrong and the opportunity to make public its private passions while acting on its personal interests. What is more, democratic tolerance of pluralism and legitimation of social conf lict ensure that democracy will be characterized above all by self-criticism. As a result, when it is threatened, its enemies will find at least some domestic support from those who despair of democracy, or at least of this democracy, and who convince themselves that a better, more substantial or less superficial, democracy can be brought into being. Such critics of the really existing democracy are convinced that they are acting in the name of real democracy. So it was, for example, that the American Communist Party could claim to incarnate ‘twentieth-century Americanism’ following the same logic used by Marx a century earlier to criticize the ‘merely formal’ nature of bourgeois democracy. But so it was too when the CIA took it upon itself to finance not only political opposition to Soviet inf luence but also to support and encourage what Francis Stonor Saunders's recent study of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters revealed. The shared logic of the CIA and the communists turns out, as the saying goes, to be no accident.

With The Inauguration Of The Socialist President, Ricardo Lagos, in March 2000 it would appear that the Chilean party system had come full circle since the 1973 coup that unseated the last Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Despite the Chilean military's efforts to eradicate the left during its almost seventeen years in power, a Socialist assumed the presidency only a dozen years after the electoral defeat of the military regime in 1988. In one sense, this success is a testament to the perseverance of the party of Allende, and the party system in general. Nonetheless, the Socialist Party, and indeed the Chilean party system, are quite distinct from the ethos of the Allende years of the early 1970s. At the same time, it is undeniable that there are striking continuities in terms of the number of political parties and patterns of partisan competition. Thus, how should one interpret the extent of transformation and continuity in the Chilean party system?