German Parliament Research Articles

Semantic Struggles in the Face of Crisis: ‘The West’ as Contested Key Concept in West German Parliamentary Debate (1973/74)

This article suggests to read West German parliamentary debate on the first oil crisis as a semantic struggle on the concept of the West. Drawing on latest research, the West is considered to be a narrated concept with its meaning being negotiated upon when being evoked. Even though the West does not refer to any empirical reality, it is not an arbitrary concept either. Rather it repeatedly presents itself in three ideal typical narrative forms: being the civilisational, the modern and the political narrative. As shown by the analysis of the parliamentary protocols of the winter 1973/74, West German parliamentarians applied all of these narratives. However, with the civilisational narrative being referred to only marginally and the modern narrative applied with consent, it was foremost the political narrative that led to parliamentary dispute. Whereas the conservatives interpreted the political narrative in terms of the Cold War geopolitics, the social-liberal government under Chancellor Willy Brandt tried to renegotiate the political narrative by shifting focus to the European integration process. In West German parliamentary debate, the oil crisis of 1973 henceforth functioned as a catalyst for expressing different interpretations of the concept of the West, and above all, the political West. Against the background of the Cold War, these different interpretations of the political narrative of the West reflected the domestic struggle on German identity.

Preliminary safety assessments in the high-level radioactive waste site selection procedure in Germany

Abstract. The Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal (BGE) is a German waste management organization responsible for implementing the search for a site with the best possible safety for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste for at least 1 million years, following the amendments of the Repository Site Selection Act in 2017. The selection procedure is meant to be a participatory, transparent, learning and self-questioning process based on scientific expertise. This contribution provides an overview of the methodology of the forthcoming preliminary safety assessments as a major part of the next steps in the site selection procedure. This procedure overall consists of three phases with increasing levels of detail for identification of the best site. The first phase consists of two steps. The objective of the first step was to determine sub-areas in the three considered host rocks, salt (halite), claystone and crystalline host rock, by applying legally defined exclusion criteria, minimum requirements and geoscientific weighing criteria. A total of 90 sub-areas that cover approximately 54 % of the area of Germany were identified due to their general suitable geological conditions. The results were published in September 2020. The second step of phase one is currently in progress and includes representative preliminary safety assessments that aim to assess the extent to which the safe containment of the radioactive waste can be expected in the investigated sub-area. The requirements for conducting preliminary safety assessments in the site selection procedure are defined by a governmental directive released in October 2020. Representative preliminary safety assessments have to be performed for each sub-area and consist of the compilation of all geoscientific information relevant to the safety of a repository, the development of preliminary safety and repository concepts and the analysis of the disposal system. In addition, a systematic identification and characterization of uncertainties has to be undertaken and the need for exploration, research and development must be determined. The application of the representative preliminary safety assessments as well as the following renewed application of geoscientific weighting criteria will lead to the identification of siting regions within the larger sub-areas identified in step one. These regions will be considered, first for surface-based geoscientific and geophysical exploration, including e.g. seismic exploration and drilling of boreholes. Subsequently, the last phase of the site selection will proceed with subsurface exploration. Finally, all suitable sites will be proposed and the German government and parliament will decide the actual site. This process is expected to be finalized in 2031.

Building the Cathedral of Democracy: Frankfurt’s Paulskirche in Hitler’s Shadow

Abstract After Nazi horrors disgraced German nationalism, Frankfurt’s Paulskirche became an ideal monument through which to redeem the German nation. In 1848, the first democratic German parliament convened here to debate the contours of a united, politically liberal German nation-state, only to be dispersed by reactionary forces. In 1944, the Paulskirche burned. Out of this shell, postwar politicians, intellectuals and architects fashioned a veritable ‘cathedral of democracy’ in which to celebrate the ‘better Germany’ now reborn. This article analyses formative issues at stake as the ruin was reconstructed into a sacred site for national identity after Hitler. At the same time that the Paulskirche provoked debates about whether modernist or traditional architectural styles were properly ‘democratic’ or represented an ‘authoritarian’ false path after Hitler, onlookers were disturbed that though few of the architects had been party members, most had worked for Hitler, deployed an aesthetic reminiscent of Nazism and applied tyrannical planning methods. For the greater good of ‘German democracy’, the city also confiscated the church from its Protestant congregation. Subsequent feuds about whether the Paulskirche should keep its 1948 aesthetics or be retrofitted to look as it had in 1848 served as ideological ‘events’ that once more questioned what the ‘German nation’ should represent after Hitler. At a time of overwhelming material suffering, Germans poured resources and energy into proving in physical space that Germany had a democratic past, present and future. However, debates about how that democratic tradition should architecturally manifest itself conjured shadows from the Nazi past.

New Vision Zero Measures with the use of Telematics and Mobility Data

Worldwide, 1.35 million people die every year as a result of road accidents [Status 2018]. More than half of all traffic deaths are among vulnerable road users: pedestrians, cyclist, and motorcyclists [1]. To reduce this number, there are many approaches, an effective and sustainable variant is the Vision Zero(VZ). First and foremost, VZ should be seen as a strategy based on an ethical foundation, creating and supporting a totally new perspective on the road safety problem and the approach to solve it. In Germany, the German Road Safety Council (DVR) has pursued the strategy since 2006 and in 2018 the German Parliament has committed to VZ in the coalition agreement [2]. Since the turn of the century, many European countries have been pursuing the vision of zero traffic fatalities. Numerous VZ measures for traffic infrastructure, vehicle safety features and for instruction have been defined, implemented and validated in order to improve traffic safety, but facing new digital technologies as telematics systems and mobility data via smart phone sensors, these measures need to be redefined in order to be smarter, more efficient and cheaper.

REGULATORY ASPECTS OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION: NON-SAFETY CONTEXTS

In order to approximate the laws of the EU Member States in the field of handling classified information and to establish a comparable level of protection of such information from illegal receipt, use or disclosure throughout the EU, Directive 2016/943 on the protection of undisclosed information was developed and approved in June 2016. how and business information (trade secrets) from illegal receipt, use and disclosure (hereinafter - the Directive). The Directive introduces the concept of "trade secret", defines the lawful and illegal acquisition, use and disclosure of trade secrets, establishes procedures and remedies for the illegal acquisition, use or disclosure of trade secrets in the context of the application of security conditions. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the essential characteristics of trade secrets, as well as to study the legal framework of domestic experience and international cooperation on the basis of a practical mechanism for ensuring safe operating conditions. The article examines the conceptual and categorical apparatus of trade secrets and the regulatory framework for international cooperation, respectively. The practical set of measures to preserve the confidentiality of trade secrets is substantiated. As a result of scientific research, the essential and substantive characteristics of provision the Directive as the main legal vector of ensuring safety conditions have been identified. Based on this, the implementation the legal aspects of international cooperation in the context of secure measurement at trade secrets is demonstrated. Summarizing scientific research, it should be noted that a country like Belgium, taking into account the Directive, has adopted a law aimed at protecting undisclosed know-how and commercial information (trade secrets) from illegal possession, use and disclosure. This Law has implemented all the above-mentioned recommendations on the protection of trade secrets during court proceedings. It is investigated that the German parliament passed the Law on Trade Secrets of the Federal Government. This law implements European Parliament Directive (EU) 2016/943 on the protection of undisclosed know-how and trade information (trade secrets) against their illegal acquisition, use and disclosure in German national law in order to establish uniform protection of trade secrets. The law provides for the confidentiality of court proceedings. In civil proceedings, by granting jurisdiction to certain specialized courts in cases of commercial secrecy, the possibility of classifying the proceedings as confidential at the request of one of the parties, and the potential limitation of the number of persons entitled to access evidence and / or hearings. Keywords: international cooperation, normative-legal base, Directive, trade secret, security contexts, security conditions.

European integration: Quo vadis? A critical commentary on the PSPP judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court of May 5, 2020

Abstract In its judgment of May 5, 2020, the Second Senate of the German Constitutional Court qualified for the first time a judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)—C-493/17 Weiss—as “arbitrary from an objective perspective” and declared the underlying European Central Bank (ECB) decisions regarding the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) to be ultra vires. It requested the German Government and the German Parliament to take steps against the PSPP in its current form and to ensure that the ECB conducts a proportionality assessment of its PSPP. The judgment also prohibits the German Central Bank from participating, after a grace period of three months, in the implementation and execution of the ECB decisions at issue, unless the ECB assesses and substantiates that the measures provided for in its decisions satisfy the principle of proportionality. The present article, which was written by academics, lawyers, and civil servants from five countries, casts a critical eye on the judgment of the German Constitutional Court. It identifies significant shortcomings from both a German constitutional and a European Union perspective.

Die Parlamentarismusdebatte in der Weimarer Republik [The debate on parliamentarism in the Weimar Republic

ABSTRACT From the outset of the Weimar Republic on 9 November 1918, the organization of a parliamentary democracy after the First World War and the repartition of powers between the German Parliament and the German State President aroused a lively debate about parliamentarism. The first phase of the debate was dominated by constitutional advocates who defended the form of parliamentarism created by the Weimar Constitution. In the course of time, criticism became more systematic and this was enhanced by the permanent condition of political instability, due to the inability to form stable coalitions and lasting governments. The advocates of parliamentary democracy were progressively forced onto the defensive and at the same time, they became aware of the existing difficulties of the political situation. This article therefore examines the key issues and reform proposals that characterized these constitutional debates in the Weimar Republic.

Fighting Hate with Speech Law: Media and German Visions of Democracy

ABSTRACT In Germany, far-right groups have revived Nazi terminology like Lügenpresse (lying press) or Systempresse (system press) to decry the media today. German politicians, journalists, and the public have turned to numerous methods to try to combat the reinsertion of Nazi language into everyday German life. One key method is the law. Prior to the 2017 German election, the German parliament swiftly passed the Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (Network Enforcement Law, NetzDG for short). While English-language press has often called this act a hate speech law, it actually enforces 22 statutes of extant German speech law online. Spearheaded by the SPD-led Justice Ministry, NetzDG represented the most public effort by the German government to push back against the AfD, the far right, and the rise of hate speech in Germany. NetzDG attracted huge global attention as the first major law to fine American-based social media companies for not adhering to national statutes. This article examines why German politicians turned to law as a way to combat the rise of the far right. I explore how NetzDG represented German political understandings of the relationship between freedom of expression and democracy and argue that NetzDG followed a longer historical pattern of German attempts to use media law to raise Germany's profile on the international stage. The article examines the irony that NetzDG was meant to defend democracy in Germany, but may have unintentionally undermined it elsewhere, as authoritarian regimes like Russia seized upon the law to justify their own curtailments of free expression. Finally, I explain the difficulties of measuring whether NetzDG has achieved its goals and showcase a few other approaches to the problems of information in democracies.

Sentiment/tone (Automated Content Analysis)

Sentiment/tone describes the way issues or specific actors are described in coverage. Many analyses differentiate between negative, neutral/balanced or positive sentiment/tone as broader categories, but analyses might also measure expressions of incivility, fear, or happiness, for example, as more granular types of sentiment/tone. Analyses can detect sentiment/tone in full texts (e.g., general sentiment in financial news) or concerning specific issues (e.g., specific sentiment towards the stock market in financial news or a specific actor). The datasets referred to in the table are described in the following paragraph: Puschmann (2019) uses four data sets to demonstrate how sentiment/tone may be analyzed by the computer. Using Sherlock Holmes stories (18th century, N = 12), tweets (2016, N = 18,826), Swiss newspaper articles (2007-2012, N = 21,280), and debate transcripts (2013-2017, N = 205,584), he illustrates how dictionaries may be applied for such a task. Rauh (2019) uses three data sets to validate his organic German language dictionary for sentiment/tone. His data consists of sentences from German parliament speeches (1991-2013, N = 1,500), German-language quasi-sentences from German, Austrian and Swiss party manifestos (1998-2013, N = 14,008) and newspaper, journal and news wire articles (2011-2012, N = 4,038). Silge and Robinson (2020) use six Jane Austen novels to demonstrate how dictionaries may be used for sentiment analysis. Van Atteveldt and Welbers (2020) use state of the Union speeches (1789-2017, N = 58) for the same purpose. The same authors (van Atteveldt & Welbers, 2019) show based on a dataset of N = 2,000 movie reviews how supervised machine learning might also do the trick. In their Quanteda tutorials, Watanabe and Müller (2019) demonstrate the use of dictionaries and supervised machine learning for sentiment analysis on UK newspaper articles (2012-2016, N = 6,000) as well as the same set of movie reviews (n = 2,000). Lastly, Wiedemann and Niekler (2017) use state of the Union speeches (1790-2017, N = 233) to demonstrate how sentiment/tone can be coded automatically via a dictionary approach. Field of application/theoretical foundation: Related to theories of “Framing” and “Bias” in coverage, many analyses are concerned with the way the news evaluates and interprets specific issues and actors. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Manual coding is needed for many automated analyses, including the ones concerned with sentiment. Studies for example use manual content analysis to develop dictionaries, to create training sets on which algorithms used for automated classification are trained, or to validate the results of automated analyses (Song et al., 2020). Table 1. Measurement of “Sentiment/Tone” using automated content analysis. Author(s) Sample Procedure Formal validity check with manual coding as benchmark* Code Puschmann (2019) (a) Sherlock Holmes stories (b) Tweets (c) Swiss newspaper articles (d) German Parliament transcripts Dictionary approach Not reported http://inhaltsanalyse-mit-r.de/sentiment.html Rauh (2018) (a) Bundestag speeches (b) Quasi-sentences from German, Austrian and Swiss party manifestos (c) Newspapers, journals, agency reports Dictionary approach Reported https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/BKBXWD Silge & Robinson (2020) Books by Jane Austen Dictionary approach Not reported https://www.tidytextmining.com/sentiment.html van Atteveldt & Welbers (2020) State of the Union speeches Dictionary approach Reported https://github.com/ccs-amsterdam/r-course-material/blob/master/tutorials/sentiment_analysis.md van Atteveldt & Welbers (2019) Movie reviews Supervised Machine Learning Approach Reported https://github.com/ccs-amsterdam/r-course-material/blob/master/tutorials/r_text_ml.md Watanabe & Müller (2019) Newspaper articles Dictionary approach Not reported https://tutorials.quanteda.io/advanced-operations/targeted-dictionary-analysis/ Watanabe & Müller (2019) Movie reviews Supervised Machine Learning Approach Reported https://tutorials.quanteda.io/machine-learning/nb/ Wiedemann & Niekler (2017) State of the Union speeches Dictionary approach Not reported https://tm4ss.github.io/docs/Tutorial_3_Frequency.html *Please note that many of the sources listed here are tutorials on how to conducted automated analyses – and therefore not focused on the validation of results. Readers should simply read this column as an indication in terms of which sources they can refer to if they are interested in the validation of results.

Developments in German Criminal Law: Speed Merchant or Murderer? The Ku’Damm Road Race Case and the New Criminal Legislation Regulating Illegal Motor Racing

AbstractThe Regional Court of Berlin (Landgericht (LG) Berlin) was the first court in Germany to mete out a life sentence for murder—pursuant to § 211 German Criminal Code (StGB)—to two men convicted of killing an uninvolved driver whose car they hit while they were participating in an illegal car race on a public highway. Upon their convictions, the defendants appealed to the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof; BGH) claiming that they did not intend to kill the person and were thus acting without the necessary mens rea for murder. The question whether or not the case could be qualified as murder, and thus whether or not the existence of a killing with intent had been sufficiently proven by the LG Berlin, was the subject of several appeals and retrials. In its latest decision, the BGH confirmed the murder conviction of one of the defendants, while quashing the other defendant’s conviction and issuing a retrial. This case caused ripples amongst legal scholars as it called for the toughest possible sanctions to be imposed. However, whether the conduct qualifies as murder remains questionable. As a reaction to several similar cases of illegal car races in recent years, the German parliament subsequently passed a new law—§ 315d StGB—proscribing illegal vehicle races, thereby penalizing the participation, organization, or carrying out of an illegal vehicle race. Until that point there had been no provision criminalizing illegal racing.

정당 중심 민주주의의 재고: 개정 공직선거법과 독일 선거제도 비교를 중심으로

지난 4월 개정 공직선거법에 따라 도입된 이른바 ‘준연동형 비례대표제’에 따른 첫 총선이 실시되었다. 위성정당등의 출현으로 당초 기대된 비례성 제고의 효과조차 제대로 달성되지 아니하였다는 비판이 거세고, 이에 뒤따라 우리 국회의원 선거 제도의 성격을 독일의 그것과 같이 근본적으로 비례선거로 바꾸지 아니하는 한, 낮은 비례성이라는 고질적인 문제를 해결하기 어려우리라는 전망도 이어진다.<BR> 그러나 개정 공직선거법의 모델이 된 독일의 ‘연동형 비례대표제’와 우리의 선거법제를 비교하여 보면 과연 ‘준연동형 비례대표제’를 도입하는 것부터가 올바른 결정이었는지 의문이 생긴다. 연동형 비례대표제에서 의석 배분의 근간을 이루는 것은 정당이다. 정당은 항상 선거에서 국민의 의사를 대표할 수 있는 단위로서 자격이 있는가? 정치 공동체의 의사결정 과정은 공동체 내부의 ‘균열’을 표현하여 공동체의 의사를 대표하여야 한다. 그런데 한국의 정치현실과 제도를 고려하여 볼 때 정당이 한국 공동체 내부의 ‘균열’을 제대로 대표할 여건이 갖추어졌다고 보기 어렵다. 이러한 점에서 초과의석을 해결하기 위하여 보정의석을 부여한다거나, 권역별 비례대표제를 시행한다거나, 중복입후보를 허용하여 석패율제를 도입한다는 방안은 모두 정당을 대표성 확보의 중심 주체로 두고 있는 이상 그중 어느 것도 현행 국회의원 선거 제도의 바람직한 개선안이 되기 어렵다.

Who cares about coal? Analyzing 70 years of German parliamentary debates on coal with dynamic topic modeling

Despite Germany’s Paris Agreement pledge and coal exit legislation, the political debate around carbon-intensive coal remains heated. Coal power and mining have played an important, yet changing role in the history of German politics. In this paper, we analyze the entire parliamentary debate on coal in the German parliament (Bundestag) from its inception in 1949 to 2019. For this purpose we extract the more than 870,000 parliamentary speeches from all protocols in the history of the Bundestag. We identify the 9167 speeches mentioning coal and apply dynamic topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique that reveals the changing thematic structure of large document collections over time – to analyze changes in parliamentary debates on coal over the past 70 years. The trends in topics and their varying internal structure reflect how energy policy was discussed and legitimized over time: Initially, coal was framed as a driver of economic prosperity and guarantee of energy security. In recent years, the debate evolved towards energy transition, coal phase-out and renewable energy expansion. Germany’s smaller and younger parties, the Greens and the Left Party, debate coal more often in the context of the energy transition and climate protection than other parties. Our results reflect trends in other countries and other fields of energy policy. Methodologically, our study illustrates the potential of and need for computational methods to analyze vast corpora of text and to complement traditional social science methods.

Precious Neighbors: The Value of Co-locating with the Government

I analyze the firm value of co-locating with the government. Since neither firms nor gov- ernments move randomly, this value is normally hard to identify. I solve this problem by examining a unique event - the decision to relocate the German federal government from Bonn to Berlin in 1991. Following reunification, there was a free vote in the German parliament on the future location of the government. Berlin won by a narrow margin, an event that could not be anticipated even days before and that is free from confounding fac- tors. Firms with corporate headquarters in Berlin experience abnormal equity returns of about 3.5 percent following the relocation decision. These value effects are predominantly realized by firms in lobbying-intensive industries.

ACTUALIZATION OF THE CONCEPT PARTNER IN GERMAN VIRTUAL POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Scientific research is focused on identifying the means of actualizing the concept PARTNER in German virtual political discourse. First, the theoretical preconditions for the analysis of the concept PARTNER in virtual political discourse are considered. The views of many leading domestic and foreign scholars on the concepts of "discourse", "virtual discourse", and "concept" are analyzed to develop our interpretation of definitions of virtual discourse, virtual political discourse, and concept. Possible means of actualization of the concepts and the researched concept PARTNER, in particular, are clarified. The meaning of the lexical unit and identifier of the concept (the word Partner) is studied, and its synonymic row is described. 500 lexical items and phrases that form the empirical basis of the study were identified with the help of a continuous sampling method on the web pages of the German government bundesregierung.de and the German parliament bundestag.de. All empirical material is subdivided into groups that are filled inhomogeneously. The noun Partner is the first or second component of compounds, and some derivative words are also formed from it. The concept of Partner is elaborated by the use of definite verbs that name actions which can be taken both by a partner and others towards him to achieve a certain goal. The lexical unit Partner is combined with a large number of adjectives (the most frequent group), which are semantically divided into five subgroups. The "partner status" subgroup is the most filled one. Two more subgroups, such as "international/national relations" and "qualities of partners " have almost the same number of words. Examples of the use of selected lexical units in context are given, and a model of the nominative field of the concept PARTNER is constructed. Its nucleus is defined with a lexical unit and identifier, a nuclear zone containing synonyms of a nuclear lexical unit, compounds with the component Partner and derivative words, and periphery (free phrases with verbs and adjectives) included. The conclusions summarize the results of the study and outline the prospects for further research.

OP509 Do They Care? Debates About Nursing And Health Technology Assessment In The German Bundestag

IntroductionOpposition parties in Germany are allowed to send formal requests to the government to control actions and pass important political debates to the parliament. These formal requests include a comprehensive analysis report issued by the scientific service of the German parliament. A systematic overview of these reports would support a deeper understanding about healthcare topics and assessments discussed by parties in the highest German decision body, particularly in the field of nursing.MethodsWe conducted a review using the German parliament “Bundestag” database for all formal requests since 1949. To systemize the formal requests we performed a quantitative category analysis using descriptive statistics.ResultsWe identified 26,197 formal requests with 146 reports related to nursing issued between 1978 and 2019. The 146 reports related to nursing accounted for 0.54 percent of all requests. Almost 30 percent of these requests were related to recruitment and qualification. The second major topic, with 15 percent, was financing of the nursing sector. Of all 146 formal requests in the history of the Bundestag, 55 percent (n = 81) were issued in the last 10 years.ConclusionsNursing is an emerging topic in the German parliament, highlighting the demographic shift in Germany and the growing pressure in the nursing care sector. Health Technology Assessment bodies should be informed and work together with the scientific services of parliamentary bodies. This would support a more transparent and evidence based healthcare system, aside from lobbyism.

Inclusive classroom interaction in lower secondary education

Following the German parliament’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2008, inclusive pedagogy has become increasingly relevant for educational science and educational policy. Empirical studies of classes which combine students with and without visual impairment mainly focus on questions of performance and well-being, while not directly examining classroom interactions. Our research seeks to address this notable lack of in-situ studies, using a selected case as an example and illustrating the potential of such an approach through reconstructing the contradictory expectations of inclusive teaching as a specific conflict of norms. This approach ought to demonstrate the potential insights to be gained by reconstructing and interpreting relevant communicative processes of meaning-construction. Based on transcribed interactions in an inclusive fifth-grade class, we interpret the scene of classroom instruction with regard to the normative conflict between the egalitarian promise of participation and a non-egalitarian focus on performance. Adopting a methodology of second-order observation, as outlined in Systems Theory, allows us to conduct an analysis of normativity in order to understand which norms prevail in interactions with students with and without visual impairment. At the center of the analysis is not only the common discrepancy between an inclusive school’s policy and its interactive implementation. Rather, our interpretations also show how the ableist norm of performance is navigated and negotiated among all participants in classroom communication and how the multitude of norms and expectations surrounding inclusive teaching come into conflict, that is, in the paradoxical structural tension between the operational necessity of establishing a separation between students and the policy imperative of decategorization.

Psychoanalyst Examines How Culture Influences Suicide

Psychoanalyst Examines How Culture Influences Suicide

The evolution of European economic institutions during the COVID-19 crisis.

This article argues that the incomplete economic and institutional integration of the euro area has exposed the monetary union to increasing economic divergence, which could be deepened by the COVID‐19 crisis. We discuss how monetary and fiscal measures implemented at the onset of the pandemic have contributed to mitigate the economic consequences of lockdowns, but provided limited insurance to narrow economic gaps across member countries. However, EU countries agreed on July 21, 2020 to develop, for the first time, countercyclical fiscal transfers financed by common debt issuance. We discuss the potential of this instrument to contribute to improve the resilience of the eurozone.

Multiplicity, hybridity and normativity: disputes about the UN convention against corruption in Germany

In 2014, Germany became the 173rd state to ratify the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) – after more than ten years of disputes in the German parliament. To make sense of the protracted debates about ratifying UNCAC, the article follows the recent introduction of Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology to International Relations (IR). I argue that this approach opens new avenues for researching normativity in hybrid arrangements of multiple, overlapping orders of worth and through ongoing tests of the right evaluation of a situation. I show that the belayed ratification of UNCAC in Germany was the result of the hybridity inherent to norms against corruption. In the debates, members of the German parliament relied on competing normative inventories to translate the term ‘public official’ to the German context and to settle the meaning of corruption. This article contributes to IR norm research by unpacking normative multiplicity and contradictions that undergird international norms and disputes about them.

The revenge of the village? The geography of right-wing populist electoral success, anti-politics, and austerity in Germany

This paper discusses the geography of the electoral successes of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the national election to the German parliament in September 2017. Unlike other studies that reduce the electoral pattern to differences between “the city” and “the country,” we do not accept the empirical observation of an urban-rural divide as a sufficient explanation. By doing so, this paper proposes a theorization of the urban and the rural as social relationships that can be dialectically differentiated through the all-encompassing urbanization process and which materialize through space. This approach draws on Henri Lefebvre’s work on urbanization and his understanding of “the urban” and “the rural” and integrates it with Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of “the provincial” to better characterize “the rural” as a form of social relationship in which the culturally familiar, authenticity, and a lack of difference and reflection dominate. Recent theoretical discussions of anti-politics—understood as both a mode of making political claims and a political strategy that negates arguments, negotiations, and compromise, starting instead with absolute, non-negotiable positions— inform this paper as well. Based on this theoretical foundation, we argue that the rural is the breeding ground for anti-politics and AfD votes. A discussion of three places where the AfD was particularly successful supports our argument: the more peripheral, small-town administrative district of Western Pomerania-Greifswald and the two large-city districts of Mannheim-Schönau and Pforzheim-Haidach.