Community Of Fate Research Articles

Communities of fate and the challenges of international public participation in transnational governance contexts

A trans-national public consultation on climate change was held in 38 countries to provide citizen input to the 2009 UN Framework on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP15) meeting in Copenhagen. The uniform process involving 100 citizens in the participating countries focused on the key policy questions debated by participating countries. Based on the Canadian experience with this consultation and interviews with 13 other project managers primarily from developing countries, this paper explores several areas of tension: the tensions between the goals of uniformity and standardization versus recognition and accommodation of cultural complexities; the global versus local contexts; public ‘deficits’ versus capacities and capacity-building; the importance of tailoring for policy impacts versus exploring the values behind policy choices; and the complexities afforded by the issue itself. The paper concludes that these tensions are unavoidable in public consultations in transnational governance contexts involving global issues. These tensions need to be explicitly recognized and accommodated, while acknowledging the continuing importance of public consultation experiments in these transnational contexts.

The Fissured Identity of Literature: The Birth of National Literary History out of International Cultural Transfers

of: Vladimir Biti, The Fissured Identity of Literature: The Birth of National Literary History out of International Cultural Transfers. In: JLTonline (25.02.2014) Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-002528 Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-002528

A community of fate? Nonpolarity and North American security interdependence

This article examines the recent evolution of the idea of a North American security perimeter, and its implications for Canadian foreign economic policy in an era characterized by a shifting global distribution of power. The current global order is characterized by a rapidly shifting distribution of power away from the United States and toward not only other states (the BRICs) but also other actors - including networks, multinational corporations, and NGOs. Drawing upon the “new regionalisms” school, we argue that Canada's instinctive approach to the “North American game” - emphasizing the historic Canada-US special bilateral relationship is an insufficient and excessively narrow approach for adapting to the global and regional challenges provoked by the rapid onset of nonpolarity.

Bio-X: Review

Adele Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim's Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in U.S. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Aihwa Ong and Nancy N. Chen's Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Biosecurity. Bioinsecurity. Biorisks. Bioavailability. Bioresources. Biovalue. Biocapital. Bioindustry. Bioeconomy. Bioprospecting. Biopiracy. Bioparanoia. Bioresponsibility. Bioprotection. Biostrategies. Biomapping. Biomedia. Biocollectivism. Biosociality. Biocommunity. Biosovereignty. Bionation. In social studies of science, as in sector, which is one of field's current (pre) occupations, is viral. Working on became a widespread pursuit at end of twentieth century. New biotechnologies and medical technologies (some actual, some anticipatory) surfaced through a conjuncture of economic and technical events, for example: legal incentives to academic-industry partnership (e.g. Bayh-Doyle Act of 1980) and corresponding proliferation of pharmaceuticals; human genome project and general establishment of bioinformatics, a subfield itself indebted to new computing and Internet technologies; and for culturing stem cells and promise of regenerative medicine. More broadly, political-economic milieu of late liberalism has encouraged obsessive attention to individual embodiment, especially in forms of self-surveillance and self-maximization. Whether result of influence, confluence, or co-emergence, feminists and other critical theorists increasingly turned their focus from language to the during those same years. In past decade, as Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein observe in a review of recent work on biopolitics (Cracking Biopower), Foucauldians have moved on from knowledge/power, genealogy, and discourse to theory of biopolitics: 'Biopower,' a decade ago hardly on any scholar's lips, is today on almost everyone's. In part, this is because Foucault's takeup, and take, on only relatively recently came to general attention, and even more recently got translated into English. . . . The digestion of what he actually wrote on subject has only just begun - with something of a rush (2010, 109). Although he did not coin term, Michel Foucault defined biopower as the set of mechanisms through which basic biological features of human species became object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of (2009, 1). This form of power emerged in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, period that witnessed entrenchment of liberalism in Europe and United States, as well as entry of into history. New fields of knowledge - biology and human sciences - defined and characterized humans and other living things, and simultaneously participated in the administration of bodies and calculated management of life (1978, 140). Biopower, in form of anatomopolitics, became essential to development of capitalism, for instance abetting controlled insertion of bodies into machinery of production (141). In form of biopolitics (a term often used synonymously with by theorists today), it facilitated the control of populations. Foucault insisted that biopolitics, far from being centralized or totalitarian, operates through techniques of power present at every level of social body and utilized by very diverse institutions, right down to self-governance by individual. Can Foucault's biopolitics, rooted in an epistemic break around eighteenth century, be applied to what is otherwise declared to be a new break - very recent biomedical revolution, and biotech century it has purportedly midwifed? Two anthologies published in 2010 by Duke University Press suggest that biopolitics continues to operate, on a grand scale, even though what counts as bio has changed. …

We Really are all Multiculturalists Now

Treating multiculturalism as a social fact, this article develops the argument that it ought to be construed as a form of political claims-making advanced by spokespersons on behalf of what can be described as communities of fate. After brief examinations of the claims-makers and those groups that claims are made on behalf of, five types of claims are analyzed: (1) exemption, (2) accommodation, (3) preservation, (4) redress, and (5) inclusion. This leads to a concluding section devoted to analyzing the politics of identity as constituting an effort to ovecome the burdens of stigmatization, with a focus on the respective contributions of Goffman, Taylor, and Alexander.

When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (review)

Reviewed by: When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature Jenifer S. Cushman Vivian Liska . When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009. Pp. 239. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 9780253353085. The crux of Vivian Liska's painstakingly researched When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature is that there is no crux—at least not for Franz Kafka and the other writers she addresses. Arranged carefully in five sections of three chapters each, Liska's meticulous examination tackles the seemingly contradictory task of bringing together a group of authors whose texts resist "pre-existing concepts and categories." (4) Thankfully, [End Page 93] the "uncommon community" Liska identifies shares more than a mere way of writing unconventionally in the margins of twentieth-century German-Jewish experience (3), or even a literary debt to Kafka, which, in the cases of Else Lasker-Schüler and Ilse Aichinger, is decidedly tenuous. Paradoxically, what ultimately links these authors, according to Liska, is a uniformly ambivalent response to Kafka's question "What have I in common with Jews?" (3-4), and a consequent rejection of a closed community "in which all faces turn toward each other." (22) Because Kafka's question binds the writers together, Liska conceives of her project as organized concentrically outward from Kafka (9), in three distinct time periods. While German Jews early in the twentieth century perceived a rift between modern (urban) and antimodern (shtetl) experiences, according to Liska (6), those after the war grappled with their identity within a Schicksalsgemeinschaft, or "community of fate." (6) For the third period, Liska borrows Homi Bhabha's term to claim that Jews in the latter part of the twentieth century saw their Jewishness as "inbetweenness." (7) Liska places her study within this broader chronology, beginning with the first decades of the century: Part One addresses only Kafka, and Part Two focuses on Theodor Herzl and Else Lasker-Schüler. In Part Three, the analysis proceeds to Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, and then to Ilse Aichinger in the beginning of Part Four; the three together represent the immediate postwar period. Liska then moves to contemporary Austrian-Jewish literature in the remaining chapters of Part Four and analyzes works by Robert Schindel, Doron Rabinovici, and Robert Menasse. Part Five reverses the chronological movement, returning to more detailed discussions of Celan and Aichinger, and concludes both the section and the book with a curiously brief snippet on Kafka and Hannah Arendt. Throughout the book, Liska's precise and far-ranging scholarship convincingly informs her tightly constructed arguments for locating Kafka within a community of literary heirs. Her discussion of Kafka's "Speech on the Yiddish Language" is particularly compelling in its identification of Kafka's "we" as a rhetorical device to unsettle the western Jews of his audience. (30) Liska provocatively calls into question Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Kafka as appreciating only one movement within his works (16), and her inquiry admits to many ways of reading Kafka and his relationship to the Jewish community. Her treatment of the other authors is also well-considered, especially of two "uncommon" reactions to closed communities under very different circumstances, namely of Else Lasker-Schüler in chapters 5 and 6, and Paul Celan in chapters 7, 8, and 13. Liska's reading of a feminine subtext in Else Lasker-Schüler's treatment of "Song of Songs" (69) is augmented by her spot-on gendered comparison of Kafka's "Worries of a Family Man" and Aichinger's "Spots" (201), and her discussion of Celan supports the notion that the writers she examines continually question the "rootedness" of the Jewish tradition (108), even as they rewrite stereotypes and redefine that tradition. Aside from a puzzlingly speculative concluding chapter that utilizes Kafka's "Imperial Message" to explore Hannah Arendt's relationship to Kafka, the one area where Liska's analysis falls short is in her incomplete exploration of the "contentious hyphen" between the two denominations of "German-Jewish." [End Page 94] (78) Indeed, the question as to whether she succeeds in bringing her subjects together into an uncommon community is perhaps less important than the...

When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (review)

When Kafka Says We: Uncommon in German-Jewish Literature, by Vivian Liska. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 239 pp. $29.95. Surely, there are plenty of books about Franz Kafka. So, why yet another book on Kafka? Vivian Liska's study isn't actually a book on Kafka. Instead, this is a remarkable piece not only shedding new light on complex relationship with Judaism, but, more importantly, providing a frame to consider some of most significant German-Jewish writing during twentieth century by Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Else Lasker-Schuler, Ilse Aichinger, Robert Schindel, Robert Menasse, and Doron Rabinovici. Taking question, What do I have in common with Jews?, as starting point and centerpiece for her analyses, Vivian Liska delivers careful close readings of selected texts that all explore relationship of their writers with their respective social, ethnic, and religious communities, Jewish and otherwise. After a short but illuminating introduction, book is divided into five parts.Kafka's sets up frame, while also commenting on role of Yiddish in work and re-examining complex relationship with women.Revisiting Common Ground explores Theodor Herzl's and Else Lasker-Schuler's religious roots, and to what (limited and/or differing) extent religion and religious thought informed their writings. The next chapter provides perhaps least surprising combination in Communities of Fate, where poetry of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs is revisited. However, Liska here delivers fascinating interpretations of some of Celans and Sachs's lesser known or earlier poetry, introducing readers to incredibly moving lines that delineate Celans kinship with community of dead, and Sachs's relationship with Israel. Part Four, Contentious Commemorations, yields most intriguing blend of German Gruppe 47 poetry and Aichinger's role in it, silence over Holocaust, and Austrian-Jewish writings. This chapter, in a nutshell, delivers a precise and chilling account of how German and Austrian silence over Holocaust affects German-Jewish writing to this day. The final part, Kafka's Companions, returns to Kafka , and here previous chapters' groupings are once again re-arranged to provide interesting illuminations of connections between Celan and Kafka, and between Aichinger and Kafka, to end with the gap between Hannah Arendt and Kafka, an ending that shows how Liska also, when appropriate, resists overdrawing connections. I was at first suspicious of a book that so clearly approaches its subject matter via writers' biographies, statements, and diary entries, rather than primarily focusing on texts themselves. Since writers' claims are often ambiguous, intentionally or not, this approach could lead to a problematic blurring of boundaries between lived experiences and (fictional or poetic) texts. …

The Black Market in History and Memory: German Perceptions of Victimhood from 1945 to 1948

Using recent scholarship on memory and German identity formation as a springboard, this article examines the illicit trade that flourished in the immediate postwar period to probe the creation of a community of fate, one that emphasized its victimhood. It explores both contemporary perceptions and the memory of the black market from multiple viewpoints, the occupiers, the Germans and the Displaced Persons (DPs). Rather than treating the illicit trade as solely one activity, it explains its gradations, in terms of what was exchanged, by whom, and the perceived morality of the exchange. This approach highlights the disconnection between ubiquitous participation by Germans in illicit trade and their memories of it as primarily a foreign phenomenon. In other words, Germans saw their trading outside of official channels as necessary and moral, whereas the trade by foreigners, either DPs or occupation troops, was seen as both exploitative and immoral. Given the high visibility of Jews among the DPs, it also provides a window into the continuation of antisemitism in the immediate postwar period. It argues that the conjunction in 1948 of the currency reform, the noticeable drop in black market activity, and the emigration of Jewish DPs have cemented two of the prevailing myths of the postwar period: the economic miracle and Jews as black marketers.

Comparison Literature

Some novels do not belong to any one national, ethnic, or linguistic tradition. They are instead comparative novels, or works of what this essay calls "comparison literature." Works of comparison literature are "born-translated": they were published almost simultaneously in multiple languages, and they engage formally, thematically, and sometimes typographically with the theory and practice of translation. Comparison literature fits uneasily within methodologies, comparative and national, that assign unique locations or unique substance to literary artifacts. It urges us to imagine new geographies of literary production and requires methodologies that understand the history of the book to include its many editions and translations. Treating Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year as examples of comparison literature, this essay asks how the multilingualism of the book tests the national singularity of the work and how the translation of literary texts, into more languages and faster than ever before, establishes networks of affiliation that are less exclusive and less bounded than the nation's "community of fate."

Bóg - ״budowniczy Izraela"1 i Kościoła. Przesłanie Rdz 2,18-24 w świetle tajemnicy paschalnej Chrystusa

This article aims mainly at revealing the spiritual sense of the pericope according to wording of the Papal Biblical Commission: the spiritual sense conceived according to Christian faith, as sense expressed through biblical texts, when they are read under the influence of Holy Spirit in the context of paschal mystery of Christ and the new life springing from it. JHWH is expressed in the words: It is not good for the man to be for himself (Gen. 2,18a). In BHS there is a particle of purpose 19, for, in purpose of, overlooked by exegetes in a Hebrew word hbaddó, consisting of a particle of purpose 19, a noun bad = separation, a part of, and a pronoun suffix 6. That is why the standard translation of this verse should be changed (istead to be alone, for to be for himself). ‘The man-Adam, being alone, not having any relation to anybody else, was not yet image of God’ (Kiemikowski), because ‘God is love’ in the relation of the three divine persons, and because it is said in Gn 1,27 that woman and man were created together in God«s image and the word 3àdam means both man and woman (1,26). The deepest carrier of the message of the pericope is the verb banah - built, occuring here in the form of wajjiqtol wayylben. It is full of meaning that the theme of God as a builder or an architect in himself appears in the exile or post-exile texts Is 45,13; 62,5; lKgs 11,39; Jer 5,5n; 31,2-6; Ez 36,33-38; Ps 102,17; 127,1; 147,2. Biblical authors use a verb ״bnh”- to build because a conception and birth of the man was always related to activity of God who ‘was building’ man in his mother's womb (Gn 16,2; 30,5; Ps 139,13), who was building a dynasty (2 Sm 7,27; 1 Kgs 17,25), and consequently he was building the nation and the state, (cf. Ex 1,21 Dt 25,9). The following conlusions result from this article: 1. The key to understanding the pericope is the allusion of the verse Gn 2,23a to the formula of the covenant (W. Briiggemann), which does not say about origin of the woman in a biological sense. Exegetical tradition interpreting the text as supposedly saying about the biological origin of the woman is based on familiarization of the word ‘rib’ and with inappropriate play of words in 23b, which blurrs and misinterpretes the meaning of the text. While the main intention of the text is to emphasize solidarity of man and woman and their mutual responsibilty for each other and for the world. 2. This solidarity is mutual but it refers both to cultivating soil - 3àdàmàh (3iSSah - 5adama11) and to observing the Law of the covenant. 3. Image of God and his bride Israel is close to the prophets.That is why Gn 2,18-24 refers to the teachings of the prophets about the covenant (H. Renckens), especially to Hos 1-3; Ez 16 i 23; Deutero- i Trito-Isaiah. This image was presented both in terms of infidelity and restored relations of the covenant. The metaphor of marriage says about the covenant of God with Israel. However, on basis of Gn 2,23a it is clear that this marriage is not a more personal or auxiliary image of the covenant but speaks directly about permanent relations which last between God and Israel in weal and woe, in weakness and power, in faithfulness and infidelity. 4. The same imagery is used by St. Paul in Eph 5,21-33. The relation between Christ and Church was built on the community of fate, loyalty and responsibility which has a guarantee to survive in any lot. Christ and Church are one body. This is a formula of the covenant repeated by Paul from Gn 2,24. The words of St. Paul His purpose for dying for all was that men, while still in life, should cease to live for themselves, and and should live for him, whofor their sake died and was raised to life (2C0r 5,15) are found as a prolongation of Gn 2,18 It is not good for the man to be for himself. 5. The text does not suggest any superiority of male element over female or justifies sexual intercourses since such a problem did not exist in Israel. Marriage was based on community of fate, loyalty and commitment which ought to be treated seriously. It is neither light nor accidental, grounded on mood or feeling. It is based on an oath of solidarity. Its general aim is not tofind mutual joy, though not excluded, but it is the job of cultivating soil and obeying the Law of the covenant. Thus, human relations were grasped in context of solidarity and responsibility for people and the world.

Canada, Germany, Canada-Germany

This special edition of International Journal is presented in honour of Robert Spencer who, for a quarter of a century, was a professor at the University of Toronto. It is devoted to a wide-ranging discussion of Germany, Canada, and Canada-Germany relations, topics that were central to Spencer's scholarly work. This is also a very timely issue for two reasons: first, was president of both the EU and G 8 in 2007 and several contributors discuss what implications these responsibilities have had for transatlantic and, specifically, Canada-Germany relations; and second, it comes at a time when Canada has witnessed something of a Germany obsession (see Markus Kaim's contribution) over Afghanistan.The two countries may have arrived at a crossroads, as each seems to realize that the other is simply a good friend pursuing its own specific interests, neither more nor less. Of course, as some of the contributions argue, such reflect domestic pressures and have emerged over time. Nevertheless, in each country there appears to be some disillusionment about the other's foreign policy initiatives and general directions, whether it is Canadians looking at Germany's Afghanistan policy or Germans looking at Canada's Arctic policy. Is there a growing perception that we can no longer take as given the transatlantic solidarity and common values that characterized assumptions about each other's foreign policy agenda and that made Canada-Germany special?Or, if we look at the current situation from a more historical perspective, are we simply passing through a phase? Today's public feelings of Germany. ..letting down the side, and Canada in particular and lapses of solidarity1 are mirrored in earlier Canadian-German dissonances, for example in the late 19603, when Prime Minister Trudeau contemplated the complete withdrawal of Canada's NATO troops from and then announced their reduction in 1969. In those years, it was the Germans who felt that Canada was letting down the side, and in particular. Then, as now, the existence of shared security interests and values was questioned. In the end, a Canadian-German rapprochement symbolized by the Mannerfreundschaft (friendship between men) between the two leaders, Trudeau and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, helped weather the storm. In fact, descriptions of the transatlantic community as Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of fate) and Wertegemeinschaft (community of values) have been challenged ever since they were espoused. Undeniably, current Canada-Germany find themselves at a critical junction but, as most authors in this issue would agree, the relationship is a very durable one.Many things have changed since the Schmidt-Trudeau friendship. Both countries have become integral parts of regional arrangements, which directly affects their room for maneuver in specific foreign policy fields. This is more so the case for Germany, which is increasingly bound by EU common policies. itself often champions European approaches over national Sonderwege (special paths), as it often considers the European path to be in its best national interest. Acknowledging the importance of such regional structures and the internationalization of formerly domestic policy fields, we conceptualize relations broadly. The articles in this issue transcend the national/ internation al dichotomy and also go beyond bilateral as traditionally defined. Canada and are often not simply linked through political bilateral relations, but also, indirectly, through a third dimension. That is, Canadian-German political consist of finding common - or at least complementary - policies on global issues and trying to avoid working at cross-purposes. It also means that both countries often deal with each other in regionally or internationally mediated ways; linkages exist via institutions such as the EU, NAFTA, NATO, UN, G8 or transatlantic forums. …

Social Democracy �ber Alles

Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. By David Held. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 216 pp., $57.95 cloth (ISBN: 0-7456-3352-8), $19.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7456-3353-6). Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus is David Held's most comprehensive manifesto yet for “global cosmopolitan social democracy.” In it, Held outlines a system that embeds universal human security guarantees and the globalized market system—both characterized with commendable nuance—into a liberal global social compact. Global Covenant is breathtaking in its visionary sweep and relentless in its commitment to a refined Atlanticist multilateralism that would create an overlapping “multicentrism” of democratic institutions—even of citizenship and sovereignty. (Ideally, sovereignty becomes “liberal international sovereignty.”) Kant's conception of humanity as being united in “overlapping communities of fate” pervades the book and energizes Held's vision for “multilayered, multilevel governance.” Obviously, Global Covenant will not persuade skeptics who believe that social democracy could only flower in the Western-dominated twentieth century (Desai 2005) or that it “merely polishes capitalism's roughest edges” (Bond 2005:89). Nor will the book engage realists who renounce the power and practical value of ideals in international relations. Nor will its ambitious scope satisfy admirers of pure and narrow disciplinary scholarship. As a manifesto, Global Covenant is unconcerned with alternatives. Comparative assessments of Held's vision vis-a-vis Asian regionalism, for example, or to less formal global governance based on public–private cooperation and mutual transparency (Reinicke 1998; Florini 2003) will not be found here. Yet, even though it clearly is a manifesto, Global Covenant is carefully documented. It does, however, rely heavily on the usual scholarly suspects: economists Dani Rodrik and Joseph Stiglitz, philosopher Jurgen Habermas, and political scientists …

Die Deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939 bis 1945. Politisierung, Vernichtung, Überleben. Edited by Jörg Echternkamp. Band 9, Halbband 1, Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Edited by Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt. Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. 2004. Pp. xi+993. €49.80. ISBN 3-421-06236-6. Die Deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939 bis 1945. Ausbeutung, Deutungen, Ausgrenzung. Edited by Jörg Echternkamp. Band 9, Halbband 2, Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite

During the Second World War, Germans fought a “two-front war.” A “community of fate” bound together Germans at home and Germans in uniform who carried the war beyond Germany's borders. “Between 1939 and 1945, there was no doubt that civilians were no longer excluded from the fighting; they found themselves right in the middle of it—as actors, as observers, and as those who bore the suffering” (part 1, p. 2) of the war. The Nazi leadership knew this from the start, and only days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Hermann Göring was exhorting a factory workforce to remember: “We are now all fighters at the front!”(part 1, p. 8). Jörg Echternkamp reminds us of this in his introduction to this massive two-part volume, the latest installment in the history of Germany in the Second World War that has occupied historians of the Military History Research Office (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, or MGFA) for the last twenty-five years. Echternkamp is the editor, and he deserves enormous credit for pulling together a collection of twenty essays—some of which could easily stand on their own as monographs, all of which are grounded in staggering amounts of original research—that not only summarize what we know about the impact of the war on the homefront in Germany, but also add considerably to that knowledge. Previous volumes in the MGFA series (seven of which are available from Oxford University Press in English translation) have focused primarily on the military planning, the war at the front, and the organization of the war economy at home. In the more than 2,000 pages of this two-part volume, contributors turn their attention to the impact of the war on German society. The results are extremely impressive, and what Echternkamp has brought together will be the starting point for anyone who wants to understand the war at home in Germany.

The Birth of the European Citizen Out of the Dutch No Vote

Dutch government disoriented and confused. Confusion and surprise are normal. Confusion becomes visible. Gapap between authorities and people is part of political life. Citizenship aspects. Citizenship cannot be produced. Community of fate. Institutions and routines needed.

The Language of Democracy: Vernacular or Esperanto? A Comparison between the Multiculturalist and Cosmopolitan Perspectives

Will Kymlicka has argued that ‘democratic politics is politics in the vernacular’. Does this statement mean that democratic politics is impossible in a multilingual community, whether at the local, national, regional or global level? This paper discusses this assumption and maintains that democratic politics should imply the willingness of all players to make an effort to understand each other. Democratic politics depends on a willingness to overcome the barriers to mutual understanding, including the linguistic ones. Anytime that there is a community of fate, a democrat should search the available methods to allow deliberation according to the two key conditions of political equality and participation. If linguistic diversity is an obstacle to equality and participation, some methods should be found to overcome it, as it is exemplified by the Esperanto metaphor. The paper illustrates the argument with four cases of multilinguistic political communities: (1) a school in California with English-speaking and Spanish-speaking students; (2) the city of Byelostok in the second half of the nineteenth century, where four different linguistic communities (Polish, Russian, German and Yiddish) coexisted. This led Markus Zamenhof to invent Esperanto; (3) the linguistic problems of the Indian state and the role played by English – a language unspoken by the majority of the Indian population in 1947 – in developing Indian democracy; and (4) the case of the European Parliament, with 20 languages and a wealth of interpreters and translators.

Social extremity, communities of fate, and the sociology of SARS

This article identifies the chief factors which transform a group of people into a “community of fate”. A community of fate refers to a temporary form of existence, born of duress and social emergency, which cuts across familiar divisions to elicit something socially consequential. One such community materialized during the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Hong Kong. It is examined here in detail together with a range of other crisis communities – from Montreal battling smallpox, to the captives of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Universities as communities of fate

PurposeWhat is the rhetoric that higher education institutions use when they develop and publish policies to improve student retention? Using the organization literature on institutional environments, this study examines the nature and evolution of institutional rhetoric used by three public universities in a single state over a 20‐year period. Consistent with the intent of the larger volume, this study provides an example of how the frameworks and concepts provided by organization theory can be used to complicate thinking about educational organizations.Design/methodology/approachStinchcombe's definition of institutions as “communities of fate” and key concepts from the organizational ecology and institutional literatures provide the framework for this study. Using a qualitative methodology, over 2,800 retention‐oriented statements were used as study data. These were analyzed using codes generated from the institutional theory and student‐retention literatures.FindingsStudy data suggest that, while each institution developed a unique, defining identity over time, an institutional isomorphism emerged around student‐retention in these same institutions. This ideology centered on the creation of a “caring and student‐friendly” campus environment and played an important role in the development of student‐retention policies on each campus.Originality/valueResearch in student retention theory and policy has almost exclusively studied retention practice and student persistence. The research for this paper was deliberately designed to operationalize theoretical concepts in organizational ecology literature and to examine their manifestation in universities over time.

Jürgen Habermas

Habermas’s recent writings on the future of Europe advocate a European constitution as a means of consolidating the achievements of post-war social democracy and providing European level institutions with a normative foundation without the need to appeal to the idea of Europe as a ‘community of fate’. This article argues that, while these aims are laudable, the terms in which Habermas formulates them owe much both to a domestic German agenda and to his theory of communicative rationality and the public sphere, which restricts the horizon within which the legitimacy of a European polity might be discussed and entails premature assumptions about what the core of a European identity consists in. It ends by suggesting an alternative sense of the European achievement and European identity.

Some principles for siting controversy decisions: lessons from the US experience with high level nuclear waste

Beginning with the role of ‘stakeholders’ – those whose interests are, knowingly or unknowingly, affected – in the siting of noxious facilities, this paper seeks to develop principles for acceptable and democratically arrived at policies related to problems associated with advances in and products of science and technology. Although widely regarded as a necessary condition for success, the principles underpinning stakeholder involvement, such as representativeness, often are violated in practice. Using the example of the failure to site a high‐level nuclear waste (HLW) repository in the United States, complexities related to the proposed principles are noted. Because safe disposal of HLW transcends national boundaries, other principles also are recommended. These include: 1. recognition of the inevitability of uncertainty and agreed‐upon ways of dealing with it; 2. development of ‘communities of fate’ and of trust among all stakeholders; 3. building on common values related to the environment and to the well‐being of future generations; and 4. adherence to the rule of law.

Toward a Theory of Panethnicity: Explaining Asian American Collective Action

This analysis extends theoretical models of ethnic boundary formation to account for the shifting and layered nature of ethnic boundaries. It focuses on the underlying structural conditions that facilitate the expansion ofethnic boundaries or the construction of a pan-national identity, and explores how organizing along an ethnic boundary affects collective efforts at the panethnic level. Two processes could be occurring: (I) Competition with other ethnic or racial groups could lead groups with different national origins to engage in collective action based on a pan-national boundary, or (2) occupational segregation could foster pan-national interests and networks that lead groups to participate in pan-national collective action. Using a new longitudinal data set ofcollective action events involving Asian Americans, the analyses indicate that the segregation ofAsians as a group raises the frequency of pan-national collective action, while the segregation among Asian subgroups depresses the rate ofpan-Asian collective action. The results also show that intragroup competition discourages pan-Asian collective action, and organizing along ethnic lines generally facilitates it. Overall, these findings are consistent with the cultural division oflabor theory, which suggests that segregation processes influence panethnic collective action due to intragroup interaction, common economic interests, and membership in a community of fate.