Domestic Debate Research Articles

Prospects for Environmental Communication Based on 25 Years of Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change and Eutrophication in Finland

Research on long-term media coverage of environmental issues has focused predominantly on English-speaking industrialized countries and on single isolated topics. This article presents a comparative analysis of the Finnish newspaper coverage of climate change and eutrophication from 1990–2014. The coverage of eutrophication showed an annual cycle with summertime peaks strongly influenced by local conditions and domestic news sources. The coverage of climate change had three distinctive peaks, influenced by several factors including international climate policy negotiations, domestic energy debates, and mild and snowless winter weather. The prospects for building public awareness of environmental issues through media representations are discussed.

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972. By Eric C. Han (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014) 266 pp. $ 39.95

This book illustrates the complex issues surrounding the identity formation of Chinese immigrants in Yokohama, Japan, from the end of the nineteenth century to 1972. Through a solid examination of such multinational sources as archives; newspapers; and personal collections in Japanese, Chinese, and English, it provides a path-breaking study of Chinese communities in modern Japan. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the intertwined past of China and Japan, which cannot be fully grasped in any nation-based narrative.The five chapters of the book follow a chronological order. Chapter 1 examines the history of Chinese immigrants in Japan from the premodern era to the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. A declining view of Chinese immigrants in the archipelago mirrored a discursive shift of Japanese ethnicity from a cultural unit to a modern nation, and consequently the deterioration of diplomatic relations between Meiji Japan and the Qing Empire.Chapter 2 shows how the Chinese community in Yokohama became a central ground for competition between the two schools of Chinese nationalism—the reformers represented by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao and the revolutionists led by Sun Yatsen. It provides an intriguing story of Chinese identity formation in Japan that aptly synthesizes both the political transformations in China and the Japanese domestic debate about mixed residence.Chapter 3 argues that Chinese immigrants became more integrated into the Chinese nation during the era between the establishment of the Republic of China and the Manchurian Incident, when both China’s and Japan’s borders of national identity were strengthened. Chapter 4 discusses how the Japanese imperial state utilized Chinese immigrants in Japan to promote its Pan-Asianist ideology, calling for the collaboration of Chinese diasporic communities around the world. Chapter 5 reveals how the Yokohama Chinese were divided by their ties to either the People’s Republic of China (mainland China) or the Republic of China (Taiwan) between 1945 and 1972. These opposing Huaqiao identities eventually declined with the further integration of Chinese immigrants into Japanese society as ethnic minorities.This monograph is the most important scholarly work in recent years to examine the issues of race and citizenship in the Japanese Empire from the perspective of Chinese immigrants. Joining current studies that highlight the role of multi-ethnic racial discourse in sustaining Japanese colonial rule, Han shows the unexpected tolerance of the Japanese imperial state toward Chinese immigrants in the archipelago, citizens of an enemy nation during the Asia-Pacific War. However, different from existing literature that focuses on the racial inclusion of colonial subjects, such as Koreans and Okinawans, Han’s book argues that the Japanese did not try to assimilate the Chinese immigrants. Instead, they actively encouraged Chinese to retain an independent ethnic and cultural identity, utilizing them to mobilize other Chinese around the world to collaborate with the Japanese Empire under the premise of Pan-Asianism. The book thus adds one more important layer to our understanding of the complexity of racial discourse in the Japanese Empire.Focusing on Chinese communities in Yokohama also enables Han to explore the local dimension in the formation of Chinese identity in Japan. Chinese immigrants in Yokohama, as the study argues, embraced the identity of the city’s residents, on the one hand to challenge Japan’s official refusal to recognize them as Japanese nationals and on the other hand to avoid being exploited by the imperial state to promote Sino-Japanese amity during the war. With rich and fascinating stories, this book shows how Chinese residents in Yokohama negotiated their sense(s) of belonging between the local, the national, and the transnational during moments of peace and war.Although it is a comprehensive study, the book leaves at least one important question unanswered. How was the experience of Chinese women similar to and different from that of their male counterparts in Yokohama? Gender, as an important facet of migrant identity formation, demands further analysis. Nonetheless, Rise of a Japanese Chinatown is a valuable reference for historians of both China and Japan in the twentieth century as well as for scholars interested in the relationship between diaspora and nationalism in general.

Who is driving Russian climate policy? Applying and adjusting veto players theory to a non-democracy

What is driving Russian climate policy? This article focuses on the veto player approach developed by George Tsebelis and its applicability for examining the power relations in climate change policy-making in Russia. It makes two original contributions: veto players analysis on Russian climate policy and proposals how to adjust to theory to be applied to non-democracies for comparison with democracies. After identifying the veto players and their preferences, and determining their equivalence in the decision-making process, two case studies are examined: the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and the establishment of one of the Kyoto flexible mechanisms, Joint Implementation, in Russia. Regarding the power play between actors, the latter emerges as far more accessible than the former, where scholars can generally observe only the domestic debate—which, due to the absorption of democratic decision-making institutions by the president, is detached from the actual decision-making process. Three proposals are made for adjusting the veto players approach to facilitate qualitative analysis of Russian decision-making: (1) select cases which involve also lower-level actors in charge of policy implementation; (2) due to implementation problems, changes in the status quo must be sought deeper than in statute-level changes; and (3) note that motivations of actors beyond the actual policy substance can facilitate explanations of puzzling outcomes in the process .

Reflecting the Global? The Common Agricultural Policy and Its Perception in Public Media Discourse

The paradigm shift in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is an instructive case to study the Europeanization of national media discourses. Yet, the symbolic influence of CAP reform cannot be sufficiently understood without considering its embeddedness in global policy frameworks. Hence, by means of content analysis, this paper aims to elucidate the impact of both global and EU farm-policy ideas on domestic debates. In particular, it seeks to reveal to what extent the multiple authorship behind the reform is reflected in discussion. Thus, the focus is on the institutional entrepreneurs with a say in the media, the ideas promoted and discursive interrelations.

The ‘Radiating Effects’ of the European Court of Human Rights on Social Mobilisations Around Religion in Europe – An Analytical Frame

While a growing non-legal scholarship has begun to explore the domestic implementation of international court judgments in national law and policy, virtually no attention has been paid to their indirect effects. Yet the indirect effects are arguably far more important than the direct impact judgments can have by means of their formal implementation by state authorities. Indirect effects include the ways in which international human rights judgments may influence domestic debates in law, politics and academia, raise public consciousness, change how social actors perceive and articulate their grievances and claims, empower national rights institutions, or prompt mobilization among civil society and other rights advocates. This paper sets out an analytical framework for the Grassrootsmobilise research in its study of the indirect effects of ECtHR religion-related case law. In so doing it seeks to start filling the gap in academic research and knowledge about the indirect effects of human rights case law, specifically in the area of religion and religious freedom.

Gareau, Brian J. 2013. From Precaution to Profit: Contemporary Challenges to Environmental Protection in the Montreal Protocol. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Gareau, Brian J. 2013. From Precaution to Profit: Contemporary Challenges to Environmental Protection in the Montreal Protocol. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

‘Pushing against an open door’: Reinforcing the neo-liberal policy paradigm in Ireland and the impact of EU intrusion

Neo-liberalism’s resilience since the financial crisis has by now become a commonplace observation. In the case of Ireland, however, it might be more apt to speak of not just neo-liberalism’s resilience but also its active reinforcement. By re-visiting Hall’s (1993) essay on paradigm change and paying particular attention to the adaptive quality of what he calls first and second order paradigm change and by reading his work against more recent scholarship on the relationship between ideas and power, how Ireland’s response to its crisis has reinforced its dominant neo-liberal policy paradigm is detailed in this chapter. How neo-liberal ideas, despite provoking controversy, remained powerful in domestic debate in the aftermath of the crisis is demonstrated. Moreover, in this chapter, the argument that by the time financial support was acquired, European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) actors were, for the most part, ‘pushing against an open door’ with Irish political elites in relation to deficit reduction, how to achieve it and its role in economic recovery is given. Focusing on changes to taxation and social protection in particular, an analysis regarding how the reinforcement of the neo-liberal paradigm is evident in efforts made to limit tax increases, whereas more radical retrenchment and reform of social protection is taking place to ensure its closer compatibility with the perceived needs of a globalised neo-liberal economic paradigm is provided.

Troubled Membership: Dealing with Secession from a Member State and Withdrawal from the EU

This paper summarizes the debates held at a Round Table in the European University Institute on withdrawal from the Union and secession from an EU member state. The approach is not to look at domestic debates but to seek a European view on the topic. Four issues articulated the discussion: the normative arguments for and against secession/independence within the EU, withdrawal and its effects, the effects of secession/independence for EU member states and the impact for EU citizens of both processes of withdrawal and secession. The paper seeks no final conclusion but rather it aims at conveying different standpoints on the issues.

Mutual constitution or convenient national interest? The security strategies of Canada and the United States since 1991

The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of one of the most intensive periods of overseas operations for the Canadian forces, encompassing two decades of near continuous deployments in zones of conflict. The War in Iraq stands as an aberration amid a number of multinational operations in which Canadian forces have operated alongside their American counterparts since the end of the Cold War. In all other instances from Somalia to Libya and the many stops in between both Canadian and American forces have been actively engaged in the same multilateral operations and have seemingly taken a very similar response. In this paper we take a closer look at the factors that have led the American and Canadian governments to dispatch their forces to these conflicts and humanitarian crises. To do so, we examine the influence of international institutions and collective security agreements that bind Canada and the US together, such as the UN and NATO, as well as domestic debates on the relative merits of values and interests in accounting for these deployments. Our ultimate goal is to assess whether the respective commitments of the Canadian and American governments reflect a common approach to contemporary security issues and the consequences of their respective strategies for the future defence relations of the two nations.

Debates in China about the responsibility to protect as a developing international norm: a general assessment

Over the past several decades, international debates over intervention have usually focused on the primacy of state sovereignty or the protection of human rights. The emergence of the responsibility to protect (R2P) stimulates more profound debates by providing different perspectives and terminologies. In this vein, an important voice of dissent, or at least scepticism, comes from China. This article pays special attention to the domestic debates concerning the R2P concept in China. Based on a review of most of the academic studies on R2P in China, together with in-depth interviews with senior diplomats and practitioners, this article illustrates the different views of Chinese officials and scholars on the concept of R2P, offering insight into how to construct the new norm of R2P in order to shape the concept into an international norm that is more acceptable, legitimate and operational.

Party Finances and Money Politics in Southeast Asia: Power Broking in the Shade

Southeast Asia, riding on a wave of economic and asset growth in the last few decades, has developed an exaggerated level of money politics and enrichment opportunities for all sorts of political entrepreneurs. The part of political parties in this game and the different methods of securing enough funding for the management of the party machineries and the increasingly costly election campaigns vary from country to country. But the basic pattern can be described as a skilful move to blur the distinction between big business, state funds, and political parties in order to control and manipulate cash flows as the main instrument for coming to power and secure it. Based on traditional patron-client relationships and the remaining big income gap between mostly rural poor and mostly urban middle and upper classes, “pluto-populism” and “pork-barrelling”, nepotism, cronyism, and favouritism have become prominent features of party politics almost everywhere. The overrepresentation of businessmen and bankers in parliaments and governments reflects the interdependence of party politics and business sectors, once dubbed as “incestuous relationship” by veteran opposition politician Lim Kit Siang in Malaysia. And the rising cost of being selected as a candidate or branch leader as well as the goodies to be showered on potential voter groups and party supporters are only a logical consequence of these developments which have hardly been affected by progress in democratic and institutional development. Frustration with the level of corruption is high among citizens in Southeast Asia, but the vicious cycle of political cash flows and party politics remains below the necessary domestic debate threshold to lead to radical reforms. As the May 2013 election in Malaysia has shown, anti-corruption rhetoric strikes a strong chord with large sectors of the electorate, but the well-oiled machinery of the incumbent government coalition could not be defeated. In Indonesia, and certainly similarly in other parts of the region, the anti-corruption sentiments seem to be superseded by resignation. Since all parties are more or less involved, and people are so used to the daily petty corruption, the argument is losing appeal in campaigns, also because even the most corrupt parties use it strategically.

Journey to the West: China Debates Its ‘Great Power’ Identity

This article joins recent debates on China’s rise that claim the People’s Republic of China has become increasingly ‘assertive’. By examining discourses calling for China to emulate Western great powers, it demonstrates that there remains a powerful discourse within Chinese society which regards Western standards as the sole ‘benchmark’ for success and recognition in the international community. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of ‘Occidentalism’, which is a belief that a state’s identity is deeply connected to Western recognition, and which constructs a highly idealised and essentialised ‘Western Other’ to promote particular political reforms. The existence of ‘Occidentalism’ in domestic debates on China’s future as a great power demonstrates that claims of China’s ‘assertive turn’ are premature, and those who call for a more muscular Chinese foreign policy are one of many voices within Chinese political circles.

Charles Dickens, the American South, and the Transatlantic Debate over Slavery

The complex relationship between Dickens and his readers in the American South was shaped by the novelist's views of slavery and capitalism. Neglected both by Dickens scholars as well as historians of the South, Dickens' views on slavery offer important insights into the transatlantic debate over bondage and free labour. In addition, the way in which Dickens was read by both black and white Americans and his popularity among southerners in particular virtually guaranteed he would figure prominently in domestic policy debates. While African-Americans employed Dickens to attack slavery, and criticized him when he failed to meet their antislavery expectations, white southerners rejected Dickens's criticism of slavery but embraced his depiction of the ill effects of industrial capitalism. In examining politics, literature and intellectual life between the 1830s and the 1860s, this essay joins two broad historiographies that rarely intersect: the economic and political history of slavery and the intellectual and literary culture in the Early Republic. In examining the interactions, both real and imagined, between Dickens and his southern readership, we join current historiographical debates over political economy with transatlantic literary history in ways that shed light on Dickens, the South and the debates on political economy that strained sectional harmony and led to the Civil War.

From Keeping a Low Profile to Striving for Achievement

Since 2012, some scholars, both Chinese and foreign, have argued that China’s assertive foreign policy is doomed to fail. Nevertheless, after examining China’s foreign relations in the last two years, this paper finds that China has experienced improved relations rather than deteriorating ones. In comparison with the strategy of keeping a low profile (KLP), the strategy of striving for achievement (SFA) shows more efficiency in shaping a favorable environment for China’s national rejuvenation. The author applies the theory of moral realism to explaining the role of the SFA strategy and argues that morality can increase both international political strength and the political legitimacy of a rising power. The key difference between the KLP and the SFA is that the former focuses on economic gains and the latter seeks to strengthen political support. That is the reason that the SFA values the role of morality and the KLP does not. Due to these different goals, the SFA strategy differs from the KLP strategy in aspects of tenets, general layouts, working approaches, and methods. So far, the SFA has achieved progress beyond people’s expectation from Xi Jinping in 2012. Xi’s strong leadership may become a new case suitable for illustrating the theory of moral realism. The year of 2010 was a turning point for both China’s international status and its relations with some countries related to East Asia. In 2010, China’s GDP surpassed Japan’s to rank only behind the United States. The year of 2010 also witnessed rising tensions between China and the United States, Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. These tensions intensified China’s domestic debate over the necessity of

Potential Danger in Domestic Debate Constructing a Cuban Shangri-la: Online Chinese Perceptions of Cuba and Implications for China and the World

Although China and Cuba are generally seen as intimate partners, their socialist ideals have begun to diverge from each other since they launched their respective reforms, and Cuba’s importance to China in the Western hemisphere is also gradually being replaced by larger economic powers such as Brazil and Mexico. How do the ordinary Chinese perceive Cuba and the Cubans and how does this perception deviate from the official viewpoint? Given the limited knowledge the Chinese have about Cuba, how and why are such perceptions and discrepancies formed? What would be the impact on and implications for future Sino-Cuban relations, Sino-Latin American relations and US-Cuba relations? Would China have to face up to a crisis, the origins of which are in the seemingly risk-free construction of a faraway Latin American image? Presently, the Internet in China is increasingly acknowledged as a meaningful primary source to understand public opinion in general and that of global issues in particular. Using systematic, qualitative research on the Chinese online community, this article addresses the questions raised and concludes by describing the discrepancies between the official and popular Chinese perceptions of Cuba and their implications.

Universal Jurisdiction, the Alien Tort Statute, and Transnational Public Law Litigation after Kiobel

The Alien Tort Statute, enacted in 1789 as part of the first Judiciary Act, provides that “[t]he district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations. . . .” Although the statute lay dormant until the 1980s, the ATS has since become the font of transnational public law litigation in American courts. This litigation, frequently involving largely foreign parties and events, has become a form of civil-side universal jurisdiction. Like more traditional forms of universal jurisdiction, it allows American courts to hear human rights claims based on the enormity of the offense, even when the claims lack any significant ties to the United States. But unlike traditional universal jurisdiction, which is overwhelmingly a criminal phenomenon, the ATS places control over initiation and conduct of the litigation in private hands and engages the exceptional machinery of American civil justice.The Supreme Court sharply limited ATS suits last year in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. This article defends the Court’s rejection of universal jurisdiction in Kiobel and assesses the future of human rights litigation in American courts. I make three main sets of arguments. First, I submit that the the scope of human rights litigation under the ATS is best viewed not as a sui generis problem of foreign relations law, as most lawyers and scholars have treated it, but within the more traditional federal courts framework of implied rights of action and federal common law. Kiobel’s concerns about extraterritorial application of the ATS fit comfortably within this framework, and they suggest that the Court will be extremely cautious about expanding the scope of ATS litigation in future cases. Second, I contend that scholarly exploration of the ATS’s terse text and limited history has reached the point of diminishing returns. The Framers of the First Judiciary Act could not have anticipated what ATS litigation would become, and they left us very few useful clues to answer, for example, whether aiders-and-abettors of human rights violations should be liable. The best hope for adequate answers to such questions lies with Congress, and the article proposes a number of reforms that should be addressed in a new statute amending or replacing the ATS. Third, I place the ATS in the context of broader debates about enforcement of international human rights. In this context, we confront two crucial questions of institutional design: reliance on supranational or national institutions, and public or private control of enforcement. I suggest that this debate, too, can be usefully informed by domestic debates about regulatory enforcement. But the international context affords a unique middle option, which is decentralized public enforcement of international human rights by national governments.

‘Europe-as-Hegemony’ and Discourses in Turkey after 1999: What has ‘Europeanization’ Got to Do with It?

This paper focuses on the significance of the discourses and the notion of ‘hegemony’ to understand the process of Europeanization within the Turkish political landscape. By applying the poststructuralist theoretical framework of Laclau and Mouffe to the analysis of the shifting discourses on ‘Europe’ in Turkey after 1999, the paper identifies the different ways in which the concept has shaped domestic political debates and the political struggle detectable in the utterances of key political elites. I call this phase, ‘Europe-as-hegemony’. The overall claim is that a hegemonic approach permits us to see the changing landscape of the Turkish discourse in terms of a political struggle over ‘Europe’ and, finally, how ‘Europe-as-hegemony’ vanishes after 2005.

Lessons from German Reunification for Inter-Korean Relations: An Analysis of South Korean Public Spheres, 1990–2010

In this article I present competing patterns of discursive reconstruction of German reunification in South Korean public spheres and the methods of mobilizing them for domestic debates on inter-Korean relations. I analyze the editorials and opinion articles of two newspapers, Chosun Daily and Hankyoreh, which respectively represent the most influential conservative and progressive print media in South Korea. The articles not only discuss German reunification in contrasting ways but also integrate those interpretive schemes into policy advocacy on North Korea. The conservatives utilized the narratives about the breakdown of the East German regime and the subsequent unification to justify an aggressive policy toward North Korea, whereas progressives consistently judged the German case as “unification by absorption,” giving full support to reconciliation and peaceful coexistence.

Domestic politics, news media and humanitarian intervention: why France and Germany diverged over Libya

The European Union member states split over the military intervention in Libya with France, Germany and the UK voting differently in the United Nations Security Council. This article compares news media in France and Germany to better understand the foreign policy decisions of these key actors. Using a newspaper analysis of 334 articles, it shows that the German domestic debate started very late and was much less stable than the French debate. This supports arguments that Germany's decision-making was erratic. The analysis, however, also shows that the German debate was comprehensive and included an extensive discussion of the legitimacy of intervention. This fits in well with the traditional reluctance of German foreign policy elites to support military action.

The Geopolitical Constitution: Executive Expediency and Executive Agreements

From the Founding through the Second World War well established understandings constrained executive power over foreign relations. Since the Cold War the executive has enlarged its foreign relations power. Courts and commentators justified and defended the growth of executive power in relation to two geopolitical phenomenon. First, the executive was better positioned to command the United States' wider global responsibilities. Second, the threat posed by Soviet expansionism and nuclear missile technology did not afford time for congressional deliberation. While scholars have debated whether the Cold War actually justified the extent of executive power, they have generally accepted as a self-evident proposition that the president's authority should expand in response to geopolitical circumstances. Professor Paul characterizes the proposition that presidential power expands relative to geopolitical exigencies as a of executive expediency. Paul traces the origin of this discourse to the domestic debates over the Bricker Amendment, McCarthysm and the War in Indochina and shows how courts used this justificatory rhetoric to construct a new method for interpreting the president's constitutional powers. Focusing particularly on the use of executive agreements, Paul argues that even in the absence of any external threat, courts willingly suspended critical judgments and embraced expediency discourse. In Paul's view, the expansion of the president's foreign relations power obstructed public accountability, facilitated interventionism, and corrupted the policy-making process. Paul challenges the continued reliance on Cold War discourse and offers an alternative approach to adjudicating questions on the reach of executive foreign relations power.