Civic Freedom Research Articles

Informal Institutions in the Western Balkans: An Obstacle to Democratic Consolidation

The countries of the Western Balkans have achieved significant progress in protecting civic freedoms and political rights, that is, formal democracy. However, the region's performance is lagging behind other consolidated democratic post-communist countries with strong formal institutions. By following the theory of impartiality (Rothstein and Teorell), this paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of citizens' perception of informal institutions in the region, and support for a democratic regime with impartial public administration. We employ a quantitative online survey in three countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. The findings indicate that citizens consider formal institutions as very ineffective and hence embrace informal institutions as the lesser of two evils. At the same time, citizens would approve of a more equitable political system and hence contribute to democratic consolidation.

Frances Watkins (Harper), Harriet Tubman and the Rhetoric of Single Blessedness

Abstract Black activists Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet Tubman, during the height of their involvement in the antislavery movement, lived as unmarried women amid a mid-nineteenth-century culture that ostensibly devalued singleness. This essay examines nineteenth-century newspapers and William Still's social history The Underground Rail Road (1872) to reveal how antislavery culture wavered in its representation of single black women. On one hand, antislavery rhetoric emphasized black marriage as the epitome of civic freedom, while on the other hand admitting that women such as Tubman and Watkins Harper could lend their time and finances to abolitionism largely because they were not married. Eluding popular stereotypes of single black women as criminals and deviants, Tubman and Watkins Harper instead etched out more favorable reputations through the rhetoric of single blessedness, which considered single women's vocations and charity as indirectly supporting heteronormative marriage rather than challenging it. Reading through the lens of black feminist scholarship and recent research in singleness studies, this essay traces how the period of mid-life singleness for Tubman and Watkins Harper became a productive, but contested, stage of their public activism.

Przekształcenia strukturalne w procesie rozwoju gospodarczego: modyfikacje i rozszerzenia

Gospodarki nie tylko rosną, ale zmieniają swoją strukturę w procesie wzrostu. Ponadto, chociaż zmiany strukturalne następują w całym procesie rozwoju gospodarczego, istnieją – zdaniem autora – dwie fazy procesu zmian strukturalnych, które z racji ich znaczenia zasługują na specjalną uwagę badaczy. Są to industrializacja (przesunięcie roli silnika wzrostu z sektora rolnictwa do sektora przemysłu) oraz współcześnie przesuwanie się tejże roli z przemysłu przetwórczego do usług o wysokim udziale kapitału ludzkiego.Pierwsza faza jest znacznie lepiej rozpoznana intelektualnie. Rozliczne badania ukazują ogólne prawidłowości strukturalnych transformacji i ich zróżnicowanie. Autor wskazuje w swoich komentarzach jedynie na potrzeby pewnych, niewielkich korekt. Na przykład nieco niższego pułapu udziału przemysłu przetwórczego w PKB, po osiągnięciu którego następuje zmniejszanie się tego udziału, niż sugeruje to literatura przedmiotu. Zwraca on też uwagę, że nowsze badania wskazują na znacznie wcześniejszy moment rozpoczęcia intensywnego wzrostu gospodarczego i wzrostu udziału przemysłu przetwórczego, niż wynika to z uznanej za standard literatury przedmiotu.Druga faza transformacji strukturalnych znajduje się z punktu widzenia badawczego jeszcze w powijakach. Właściwie brak teoretycznych pewników, nie mówiąc już o solidnej bazie empirycznej. Jedyny pewnik to pozytywna korelacja udziału (różnie mierzonych) udziałów subsektora usług o wysokim nasyceniu kapitałem ludzkim z poziomem PKB per capita. Przedmiotem dyskusji jest nawet to, czy przesuwanie się produkcji i zatrudnienia do sektora usług jest szkodliwą deindustrializacją czy pozytywnym przesunięciem popytu i podaży w kierunku wykorzystującym wysoki poziom kwalifikacji mieszkańców bogatego Zachodu.Autor artykułu prezentuje swój wkład w debatę w kwestii determinant owych przesunięć roli silnika wzrostu. Zwraca on uwagę, w ślad za Fukuyamą, że w procesie industrializacji wolności ekonomiczne i obywatelskie odgrywają mniejszą rolę wzmacniającą ten proces. Wskazuje jednak, że ich siła oddziaływania rośnie wraz ze wzrostem PKB per capita i rosnącym udziałem usług o wysokim nasyceniu kapitałem ludzkim. Teza autora znajduje potwierdzenie empiryczne.

Polityka wschodnia Stolicy Apostolskiej w latach 1978-1989/90: idee i wartości w działaniu

The eastern policy of the Holy See in the years 1978 -1989/1990: the ideas and values in action
 The history and the beginnings of Vatican diplomacy, its high prestige in the field of international relations. The text discusses the features, modes of action, the hierarchy and the number of the Vatican diplomats. The beginnings of the difficult collaboration of the Holy See with the East, inaugurated by John XXII and Paul VI, continued by John Paul II. After a Pole was chosen as the bishop of Rome there was an intensification of the Vatican’s eastern policy. John Paul II openly fought for and frequently spoke about respecting human rights and the increase of the freedom of the Church, not only in Poland, but also in the entire eastern bloc. We should mention the fact that during the events of December 1980 and the period of tension in Poland, John Paul II submitted a letter to Leonid Brezhnev expressing his concern about the fate of Europe and Poland. The bishop of Rome also established a collaboration with the Hungarian episcopate at that time. Despite initial difficulties, he also did so with Czechoslovakia. By making pilgrimages to his fatherland and by meeting general Jaruzelski, the Pope made vigorous attempts to normalize all diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Poland. This normalization eventually happened on 17 July 1989. In the second half of the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev played a considerable role in the warming of the relations between the Vatican and Moscow due to his policy of reconstruction (perestroika). The extension of the dialogue between the Vatican and Moscow was facilitated by the visit made by the Soviet leader to the Pope in December 1989, and especially by the declaration made during that visit that there was a will to bring about a turning point in the religious policy and a will to confer an official status to the relations between the Soviet Union and the Vatican. The Polish Pope’s political sense, and especially his belief about the necessity of making a break with the post-Yalta order in Europe and in the World, an order that was viewed as a moral catastrophe, entailed the idea that the Vatican’s eastern policy did not reach its end with the Spring of the Nations of 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union, but that it entered a new stage of its development. The diplomacy of the Vatican in the face of democratizational processes in Eastern Europe and the emergence of a new political map drawn up on the ruins of the USSR had very little time to spare to adapt its activities to the dynamically changing reality. In the new political reality in the eastern part of the continent there came to the fore the question of restoring or establishing by the Holy See of diplomatic relations both with the countries with a Catholic majority, such as Poland, Hungary and Lithuania, or with countries which were widely represented by Catholics, countries such as Belarus or the Ukraine, or with countries in which the Catholics were a religious minority, as in the case of the Russian Federation. The thusdefined longscale strategic goals of the Vatican toward the countries of the former Soviet Union and its satellite countries in Central and Eastern Europe were fulfilled, maybe with the exception of the Russian Federation alone, and, for other reasons, the Republic of Belarus. The diplomacy of the Vatican made a lasting contribution to the engineering of a new political order on the Old Continent based on the respect of rights and civic freedoms which are derived also from the Christian tradition.

Итак, как мы понимаем свободу? (Генеало­гия свободы). Лекция в университете Нового Южного Уэльса 30 августа 2012 г.

Instead of offering a definition of freedom, Quentin Skinner in his lecture proceeds genealogically, asking how the concept arose and developed in our culture and what uses it has been put to. He concentrates on the Anglophone tradition of political philosophy, beginning from the liberal concept of freedom in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan . Hobbes thought that freedom consists in an absence of interference, and he offered an analysis of interference. In the Hobbesian account, only bodily interference takes away freedom of action, and if it is only one's will that is coerced, one obeys freely. This assumption was reconsidered in John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690). Locke claimed that coercion of the will − and not just coercion of the body − takes away freedom. Skinner turns to an intellectual genealogy of "coercion," paying attention not only to Locke's interpretation but also to Jeremy Bentham's in the treatise Of Laws in General . Skinner calls this genealogical line the liberal way of thinking about negative freedom that in a way culminates in Isaiah Berlin's famous essay, Two Concepts of Liberty . He then turns to another line of thinking within the liberal tradition, represented by John Stuart Mill's On Liberty of 1859. Mill rejected the interpersonal nature of freedom and asked: could it be the case that the agent who interferes with your own freedom could be yourself? Skinner reviews three major answers to this question: the tradition connecting freedom and reason (from Plato to Kant); the idea of the yoke of public opinion, which feeds an important strand of existentialist moral philosophy that contrasts a genuinely free action with an authentic action; and the concept of the false consciousness (Marx). Skinner then proceeds to the end of the nineteenth century, when no-interference (the negative definition) became a radically incomplete way of thinking about freedom, and when the idea that human nature is normative was inserted into their logic of thinking. To have freedom was reconsidered as to be able to act in accord with the essence of human nature (neo-Hegelian moral and political philosophers). Skinner further scrutinizes this "positive" view of freedom: the Christian version; in Hannah Arendt's essay Between Past and Future (freedom is politics); in the great Canadian philosopher of freedom Charles Taylor's, Sources of the Self , and so on. At the end, Skinner reestablishes a tradition that was marginalized by the rise of modern liberal political philosophy − the tradition that thinks of freedom not by contrast with interference but by contrast with slavery. He shows how hidden mechanisms of societal inequality can be made visible with the help of this concept and concludes, that "something of extreme importance has got rubbed out, in Gramscian terms, by the hegemony of liberal ideologies and it would be beneficial to our current discussions about civic freedom if it could be put back."

No Answer (for the Economic Dynamism and Civic Freedoms of post-WWII Western Europe)

Given the uncivil reception that Uncivil Society has received from the academic establishment, the worry expressed in this forum that my analysis might be assigned in classrooms or even “become definitive” could be seen as witty. The dominant civil-society and dissident-centric interpretation of 1989 strikes me as far too congenial to the worldview and sentiments of scholars to ever be displaced. Still, a debate is a welcome turn. For the honor of organizing a discussion of my book and challenging me with substantive criticisms and questions, I thank the editors of East Central Europe and the four contributors. Please allow me to take them in order.

Temple as the Site of Struggle: Social Reform, Religious Symbols and the Politics of Nationalism in Kerala

The temple entry movement of the 1920s and ’30s in Kerala, South India, has become a landmark in the history of social reform and nationalist movements for its uniqueness and sweeping success. Popular history has presented the episode as an integral part of the Nationalist Movement and the Gandhian Constructive Programme mainly because the temple-entry issue was endorsed by the Kerala State Congress Committee and the agitation was concluded under its auspices. But this popular and idealist impression of the movement has been challenged from various quarters. It is pointed out that there have been very little attempts at linking the event with the advancing civic rights movement led by the lower caste people for freedom of worship and social equality which was gaining a radical turn by the 20s and 30s; the pressure exerted by the untouchables to achieve civic freedom even at the cost of renouncing Hinduism had created an alarming situation which no caste-Hindu could ignore. Even more surprising is the absence of academic attempts to link the agitation with the Malabar Rebellion of 1921; in fact the Rebellion had challenged the very survival of the Congress organization in Kerala; this factor forced them to retreat from the earlier secular plane to a religious idiom of politics for which the question of temple-entry served their purpose. The Temple entry movement, therefore, has to be studied in the light of the antipathy shown by the Congress towards popular and radical agitations and in the context of its growing tendency to incline towards Hindu symbols in politics as a means to escape addressing vital and burning social issues.

Ewolucja szwedzkiego modelu gospodarki

Autor rozpatruje model szwedzki z punktu widzenia jego ewolucji w czasie, a następnie dokonuje konfrontacji tego modelu z rzeczywistością ekonomiczną oraz ocenia oddziaływanie tego modelu na efektywność szwedzkiej gospodarki. Co się tyczy ewolucji modelu, autor zwraca uwagę na szczególne historyczne uwarunkowania: relacji władzy królewskiej i chłopstwa. Te relacje przyczyniły się do ukształtowania się demokratycznych i egalitarystycznych cech stosunków społeczno-politycznych i ułatwiły wprowadzenie przez socjaldemokrację tego modelu w czasach współczesnych. Autor podkreśla ideologiczne – kolektywistyczne – cechy modelu szwedzkiego i konsekwencje tejże ideologii. Ewolucja modelu rozpoczęła się po ostrym kryzysie pierwszej połowy lat 90. XX w., a jej w wyniku nastąpiła redukcja skali wydatków publicznych z ok. 70% PKB do 50% PKB obecnego. Po kryzysie model, umownie nazywany przez autora modelem 2.0, przestał być czymś unikalnym i stał się jednym z wariantów tak zwanego europejskiego modelu socjalnego. Autor negatywnie ocenia wpływ oryginalnego modelu szwedzkiego i jego współczesnych pozostałości na efektywność szwedzkiej gospodarki. Dowodem na to są między innymi wyższy wzrost wydajności i produktywności kapitału, szczególnie w przemyśle przetwórczym, po redukcji udziału wydatków publicznych w PKB oraz zwiększeniu zakresu wolności ekonomicznych i obywatelskich (ograniczenie państwa niańki). Nadal jednak gospodarka boryka się z niezdolnością tworzenia miejsc pracy – ich liczba nie rośnie od 1975 r. – oraz z niewysokim poziomem innowacyjności gospodarki (mimo bardzo wysokich wydatków na B+R). Autor formułuje więc tezę, że osiągnięcia szwedzkiej gospodarki mają dwa główne źródła. Pierwsze to historyczne tradycje (etyka protestancka) wpływające na wysoki poziom społecznej dyscypliny, ale słabnące z upływem kolejnych dziesięcioleci istnienia modelu szwedzkiego 1.0. Natomiast drugie to wcześniejsze osiągnięcia szwedzkiej gospodarki jej fazie liberalnej (1860-1950), kiedy rosła ona najszybciej na świecie. W innych warunkach erozja efektywności pod wpływem kolektywistycznych rozwiązań oryginalnego modelu szwedzkiego byłaby znacznie szybsza.

Early Modern Migration from the Mid-Wales County of Radnorshire to Southeastern Pennsylvania, with Special Reference to Three Meredith Families

In 1971 the Honorable Thomas M. Rees of California observed that "very little has been written of what the Welsh have contributed in all walks of life to the shaping of American history." In 1979 historian David Galenson maintained that "the issue of the composition of America's early immigrants is an impor-tant one and will continue to receive considerable attention from historians who seek to understand the social and economic history of colonial America." However, Douglas Greenburg's examination of the historiography of the middle colonies revealed that Pennsylvania, which witnessed the immigration of many early modern Welsh Quaker migrants, has not attracted as much attention from researchers as has its neighboring states.

Public Philosophy in a New Key: Volume I: Democracy and Civic Freedom / Volume II: Imperialism and Civic Freedom by James Tully

<i>Public Philosophy in a New Key: Volume I: Democracy and Civic Freedom / Volume II: Imperialism and Civic Freedom</i> by James Tully

Jacques Maritain and the Jewish Question: Theology, Identity and Politics

This article calls for a reconsideration of Jacques Maritain’s philosophical and theological reflections on the ‘Jewish Question’, on anti-Semitism and, more broadly, on Jewish-Christian relations in modern history. The article follows two broad lines of enquiry. First, it sketches a general outline of Maritain’s arguments against Catholic-Christian anti-Semitism, and his proposals for workable solutions to what he identified as the ‘Jewish problem’ in European life. Second, the article considers the practical value of Maritain’s visions of a ‘new Christendom’, that is, of a new political regime based on Gospel-values and thus recognizing the complete civic equality, political and religious freedoms of European Jews. The article concludes that all of Maritain’s thought on the Jewish question must be read through the lens of his Christian eschatological view.

Public Philosophy in a New Key. Volume I: Democracy and Civic Freedom,

Public Philosophy in a New Key. Volume I: Democracy and Civic Freedom,

Exploring the dynamics between terrorism and anti-terror spending: Theory and UK-evidence

Abstract Recent years have seen governments restricting civic freedoms and legislating significant increases in spending to combat terrorist activities. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between anti-terror spending and terrorism. In line with previous findings in the empirical literature on terrorist activity, our game-theoretic model of the interaction between a benevolent government and a terrorist organization is suggestive of a non-linear relation between terrorism and counter-terrorism spending. Using UK data, our empirical Markov-switching implementation provides evidence in favor of this approach. The empirical results also show that the probability of transiting into a state with high terror is smaller if defense spending is high.

The Liberty of the Post-Moderns? Market and Civic Freedom within the EU

Taking its cue from Benjamin's Constant's famous essay, this article uses the case of EU citizenship to explore how far ancient, civic, freedom can be combined with modern, market, freedom. Many commentators have, in different ways, argued that the forces promoting European integration call for a new form of post-national citizenship that either builds civic freedom on the basis of the liberties of the moderns or does away with the need for it altogether. These arguments are disputed. Constant perceptively raised a number of problems with this analysis, while ignoring - or being ignorant of - a number of others. As he noted, ancient liberty corrects various pathologies and lacunas of modern liberty, but he overlooked the degree to which its survival rested on the continuing importance of certain pre-modern forms of social solidarity in modern times. Those seeking new forms of post-modern citizenship tend to ignore one or other or both these points. The piece concludes by arguing that the only practical way of combining ancient and modern liberty within the EU is to view it as a particularly intense form of international cooperation between democratic states rather than as a supranational organisation that transcends its component parts.NB This is a first draft of a subsequently much revised paper: 'The Liberty of the Moderns?: Market Freedom and Democracy within the EU' forthcoming in Global Constitutionalism

Classical libertarianism: The economic perspectives of Milton Friedman including his likely views on the ‘proper’ role of government in the subprime mortgage debacle

This study presents the libertarian ideas of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize in Economics awardee in 1976 and the most influential libertarian of the twentieth century. Specifically, the foundations of Milton Friedman's libertarianism, which are private property rights, competitive markets, economic, political and civic freedoms and the limited role of Federal government, are articulated. Further, public policy issues where Milton Friedman's suggested reforms have been successfully implemented in varying degrees are also detailed. They include (1) floating the dollar, (2) ending the military draft, (3) repealing interest rate ceilings, (4) treasury innovations such as auctions and inflation indexed bonds, (5) ending rent control, (6) deregulation in industries such as banking and telecommunications and (7) promoting market completion and individual choice in primary and secondary schools. Also, presented are Milton Friedman's likely economic assessments of the Federal government's, including both the Federal Reserve System and the Department of Treasury, economic stimulus programmes to resuscitate the economy from the subprime mortgage debacle. These inferences about Milton Friedman's likely economic assessments are based upon his published economic writings and a recent interview with his long-time collaborator, Anna Schwartz. Mr Friedman's likely economic assessments, as a short list, include (1) the grade for the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve System in the subprime mortgage debacle was below average because it did not address the fundamental problem of the financial markets being unable to accurately price the risky securitised subprime mortgage products and the mistaken belief that credit default swaps (CDSs) would adequately hedge their future asset risks, (2) that the Paulson II economic stimulus plan lacked any rigorous and systematic economic justification because it rewards financial institutions that have performed poorly and because it results in partial nationalisation of the financial services system, (3) the Paulson plans result in a large increase in government size via a large increase in government expenditures and (4) there will be multiple challenges to capitalism as the primary resource allocator. Also discussed are the determinants of the subprime mortgage debacle including (1) the increased demand for securitised mortgage products resulting in significantly lower mortgage lending standards for home loan borrowers and (2) the belief that CDSs could/would reduce the risk associated with the ownership of subprime mortgage tranches. These two phenomena have led to a number of sinister economic results such as (1) the absence of market clearing transactions and hence (2) market prices for securitised subprime mortgages, (3) meaningful assessments of the probabilities of default/bankruptcies of many firms in the financial services industry.

Hong Kong's political influence over China: institutional, informative, and interactive dynamics of sovereignty

This article explores how Hong Kong has exercised political influence on China since the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, and tries to comprehend such seemingly impossible influences by reinterpreting the concept of sovereignty. It argues that the British Hong Kong existed as a ‘reference society’ for China's modernization and helped to change Chinese perceptions of capitalism. As this resulted in Chinese recognition of the legitimacy of Hong Kong's colonial institutions, which were featured with political legacies of civic freedom and the rule of law, it also reveals the institutional dimension of sovereignty. Secondly, the information flow from Hong Kong to China reflects a communicative (in contrast to coercive) nature of sovereignty, which highlights Hong Kong's central position in the Chinese world of information. Thirdly, Hong Kong's ongoing democratization challenges Chinese authoritarianism through societal interactions that are beyond state control. Conceptually, in this article, state sovereignty is argued as being something fluid and constantly reshaped in everyday practice with institutional, informative, and interactive dynamics; practically, it attempts to find some remaining ‘silver lining’ to the growing authoritarian Chinese clouds above Hong Kong as reversing the logic of examining external factors in democratization.

Murder in the Feminine: Marie Lafarge and the Sexualization of the Nineteenth-Century Criminal Woman

Murder in the Feminine: Marie Lafarge and the Sexualization of the Nineteenth-Century Criminal Woman Lisa Downing (bio) This article examines a series of European nineteenth-century discourses—medical, literary, and popular—about the female murderer in France in particular and in Europe more generally and traces their persistence in present-day thinking. It examines the ways in which discourses of criminality produced by inaugurators of criminology such as Cesare Lombroso in Italy and Alexandre Lacassagne in France were informed by and intersected with contemporaneous ideas about deviations of sexual and gendered behavior that were underpinned by a belief in heredity and degeneration theory. The “personage” of the murderer was thus constructed as a type in the nineteenth-century science of criminology in the same way that—as Michel Foucault has famously argued—the figure of the homosexual became a “personage” by means of the “specification of individuals” central to the classificatory systems of sexology and psychoanalysis.1 Examining what was written in autobiographical, literary, journalistic, medical, and criminological texts about those figures who transgressed social and legal edicts most forcefully by killing offers a particularly powerful insight into contemporaneous ideas about normality and abnormality and how the distance between them may be measured and reduced as well as how different yardsticks of acceptable or normal behavior were applied to men and women. The case study on which I focus here is that of the Frenchwoman Marie Lafarge, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the poisoning of her husband in 1841. The trial and imprisonment of Lafarge attracted considerable media attention in France in the 1840s, and she went on to become key raw material for the theories of the burgeoning science of criminology toward the end of the century; for example, Lombroso used her as an example of the inborn female criminal. Passivity and benevolent maternal [End Page 121] instinct were lauded as feminine virtues par excellence in the years of the July Monarchy in France (1830–48). The specter of the violent, husband-dispatching woman that Lafarge presented thus posed a particularly threatening refutation of gender expectations in an era in which women’s civic freedom (for example, her right to initiate divorce) was strictly curtailed by conservative governmental policy. The fact that Marie Lafarge was also a published writer problematizes her status even further in a century and a culture that recognized only partially and grudgingly the possibility of female creativity. As I shall demonstrate, a creative female murderer was constructed as the most deviant and monstrous of social subjects by her contemporaries. However, we should not assume that the nineteenth- century male murderer was attributed an unambiguous virility. Class as well as gender determined the conceptualization of the murderer, separating the sexually ambivalent figure of the gentleman criminal or poet criminal, celebrated most notably by the French Romantic writers in the figure of Pierre-François Lacenaire (executed in 1836), from the projected threat offered by the anonymous proletarian criminal. Murder, as an extreme act, functions as a surprisingly complex social marker, both exaggerating and mitigating gender and class stereotypes in unexpected ways. The beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of the institution of public hygiene. To quote Pierre Cabanis, one of the most famous early-nineteenth-century medical writers, doctors in this period aspired to be “the guardian of morality as well as of public health.”2 1829 saw the foundation in France of the Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale (Annales of Public Hygiene and Legal Medicine), an influential journal whose rubric explicitly set out the role of medicine in the social control of criminality: The aim of medicine is not only to study and cure illnesses, it also has an intimate relationship with social organization. By means of its associations with both philosophy and legislation it can exercise a strong influence over the progress of humanity. It must enlighten the moralist and assume the noble task of reducing the number of social ills. Wrongdoings and crimes are the diseases of society that we must work to cure or at least to cut in number, and the means of this cure are never so great as...

Soviet-Cuban Relations, 1985 to 1991: Changing Perceptions in Moscow and Havana , and: The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Embargo , and: Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the "Special Period" (review)

Reviewed by: Soviet-Cuban Relations, 1985 to 1991: Changing Perceptions in Moscow and Havana, and: The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Embargo, and: Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the "Special Period" Max Azicri Mervyn J. Bain , Soviet-Cuban Relations, 1985 to 1991: Changing Perceptions in Moscow and Havana. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007. 164pp. [End Page 126] Patrick J. Haney and Walt Wanderbush, The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Embargo. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 222pp. H. Michael Erisman and John M. Kirk, Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the "Special Period". Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. 360 pp. The scholarly works under review here discuss three major political events in the history of the Cuban revolutionary government, complementing one another in their subject, scope, and significance. Two of the studies cover parallel international issues: one examines the final years of the three-decade-long association with the Soviet Union and European socialism, while the other one covers the domestic American political forces that have driven Washington's never-ending dispute with revolutionary Cuba—which has become entrenched even further under President George W. Bush. The third study deals with the nature and conditions of Havana's more recent foreign relations policy (launched following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc), which has been carried out under the Special Period in peacetime, an emergency program that seeks to keep the regime alive. As happened earlier, a creative approach to foreign policy strengthens Havana's survival power at a particularly critical time and avoids following the self-destructive history of fellow socialist European regimes. Using primary and secondary sources, and the published memoirs of some of the political actors involved, Mervyn J. Bain provides an insightful account of some historic events that occurred while Mikhail Gorbachev was heading the Soviet Union. He examines some developments marking the end of the Soviet regime and how and why the Soviet-Cuban relationship ended. Although Gorbachev sought to improve socialism in his country and elsewhere, and even held the Cuban Revolution in high regard, his antidote for a sluggish economy and a political yearning for civic freedoms brought down the closed communist state. His two central reform policies, perestroika first (administrative and political reorganization) and later glasnost (openness in communication) created a bitter internal argument about the urgency for freedom of the press and a mixed economy. With respect to Cuba, Soviets argued that they should no longer subsidize Cuba's inefficient economy, especially while the Soviet Union was undergoing economic austerity programs. The powerful Cuban lobby in Moscow nevertheless worked vigorously to solidify and safeguard the special relationship with Havana. However, the combined effect of American pressure that demanded an end to the Soviet Cuban relationship, the material losses and human casualties of the ill-advised military intervention in Afghanistan, the increasingly poor performance of the economy, the assertiveness expressed by different nationalities in the country, the spreading secessionism among Soviet republics, and the separatist dynamics of socialist bloc members made the situation unmanageable for Gorbachev. The Soviet Union had to curtail its generous economic and military [End Page 127] support of Cuba. In late summer 1991, Prime Minister Gorbachev announced in front of U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (without having notified Havana in advance) the withdrawal of the Soviet brigade that had been deployed in Cuba for decades, symbolizing an end to socialist solidarity and support for the island's national security. Bain renders an enlightening account of a remarkable historic period, one full of miscalculations and unintended consequences. His proclivity to repeat himself almost verbatim throughout the narrative detracts somewhat from the study, but the summaries appearing at the end of the chapters are a welcome feature. Patrick Haney's and Walt Wanderbush's intelligent and needed study of the Cuban embargo makes one wonder why this book has not been written before. Although scholars have examined the subject, it has not received thorough coverage. This book offers a new approach to the Cuban Democracy Act. It views the act more as an American domestic political phenomenon than a foreign policy issue per se...

Economic democracy: meaningful, desirable, feasible?

Daedalus Summer 2007 To some, economic democracy is self-evidently a good thing if it means spreading economic opportunities more widely, giving workers a greater say in the workplace, and allowing communities to participate in the investment decisions that shape their future. Indeed, a classic argument has it that political democracy–universal suffrage, civic freedoms, and all that is needed to make them practical and effective–will work better if accompanied by ‘social’ or ‘economic’ democracy. Absent the latter, real civic participation will be low and big money will corrupt the political process, especially in complex societies where commercial networks can shape political agendas and the cost of campaigning is high. While few deny the need to reform the way elections are run and 1⁄2nanced– a source of recurrent scandal in nearly every rich country–another line of thought would challenge the conclusion that it makes sense to aim for economic democracy. The very phrase is thought to be a contradiction in terms, or a category mistake. Economic processes are too complex to be governed by votes and electioneering. Governments can and must lay down some basic ground rules, but, as Friedrich Hayek showed, they lack the locally speci1⁄2c information required to run complex enterprises effectively, still less to plan the entire economy. On the one hand, consumer needs are too intricate and changeable; on the other, the myriad of speci1⁄2c investment opportunities at the local level can never be known at the planning center. While Hayek’s critique of central planning was in many ways compelling, it failed to acknowledge the extent to which markets rely on the wider social context in which they are embedded. It also did not demolish the argument that public initiative and collective resources are necessary to meet large-scale and manifest threats.1 Robin Blackburn

Schillers Rebellionskonzept und die Französische Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Schillers Rebellionskonzept und die Französische Revolution David Pugh Jeffrey High . Schillers Rebellionskonzept und die Französische Revolution. Studies in German Language and Literature 35. Lewiston: Mellen, 2004. 175 pp. US$ 109.95. ISBN 0-7734-6500-6. In this revised dissertation, Jeffrey High sets out to debunk a conventional mis-apprehension of Schiller's evolution, according to which his political attitudes went through three distinct phases: first a revolutionary "Jugendperiode," then a period of disappointment during which he saw his initial high hopes for the French Revolution dashed, and finally a period of flight from political engagement into philosophical [End Page 74] abstraction. High argues, on the basis of a careful study of the relevant texts, that this view does not hold water. Schiller's political stance prior to 1789 was never that of a straightforward revolutionary. He was indeed interested in the phenomenon of rebellion, but his consistent view was that rebellions had to be judged on whether they furthered happiness and autonomy. There is no evidence that Schiller took part in the enthusiasm that seized some sectors of German opinion after the fall of the Bastille; when the National Assembly conferred French citizenship on him in the summer of 1792, that decision was based on the most imprecise knowledge of his works and opinions. In the winter of 1792–93, Schiller briefly considered travelling to Paris to speak in the defence of Louis XVI, who was on trial for his life, and he made a bitter remark about "Schindersknechte" after the execution on 21 January 1793. However, High shows that the notion that Schiller turned from political engagement to philosophy is largely an optical illusion. In 1792 he had written to Körner about certain hopes that he entertained of the French, and some scholars have assumed that such hopes referred to the political realm. High shows convincingly that Schiller was in fact discussing career prospects pertaining to a possible relocation from Jena to Mainz. As for his turn to the study of philosophical aesthetics, this had in fact occurred in 1791, after the collapse of his health. Schiller's composition of the "Kallias" letters to Körner and then of Über Anmut und Würde in 1793 was thus part of a longer-standing programme of work and had little connection with events in France. While this is all very good and helpful, I am not quite so satisfied by High's discussion of the period after 1793, in which he focusses on Schiller's "Publizistik" relating to the French Revolution, in practice on the Horen project, and on the Ästhetische Briefe. This is a sensible limitation of the book's terms of reference, but it does lead to the slightly anomalous decision to exclude Wilhelm Tell. After all, in his first chapter High has discussed the portrayal of rebellions in Fiesco and Don Carlos, and so the absence of Tell creates a certain lack of symmetry. In connection with the Horen, High assembles some interesting quotations from Schiller's letters that yield a differentiated picture of what he was intending. With reference to the Ästhetische Briefe, however, I find him a little too quick to endorse Schiller's state-ments that the work has concrete political goals. To be sure, Schiller wrote to the Duke of Augustenburg that civic freedom represented "das heiligste aller Güter, das würdigste Ziel aller Anstrengungen." However, his belief that the ennoblement of the individual character was a necessary prelude to the granting of such freedom surely exemplifies what T. J. Reed has called the tradition of German "unpolitics." Politics from this perspective becomes a matter of moral education, not of the building of institutions or the exercise of rights. High's short book is strong on detail but has no space to consider the wider context. And yet Schiller's opinions belong to their age, and the political attitudes of the German Enlightenment are by no means self-explanatory. High cites but does not discuss Koselleck's classic Kritik und Krise, with its brilliant analysis of the unpolitical or even antipolitical opposition of the Enlightened German bourgeoisie. A work like Koselleck's can help us to...