Ideological Sphere Research Articles

The Main Areas of Cooperation between Russia and Kazakhstan in the Framework of Eurasian Integration

The article deals with the cooperation between Kazakhstan and Russia in the framework of the Eurasian integration. It is noted that Kazakhstan stands firmly behind its recess, but this process is accompanied by development of other «vectors» of foreign policy (particularly in China and the Asia-Pacific region, the West and the Islamic states). This policy allows Kazakhstan constantly «balancing» between the interests of the various parties in order to strengthen its independence. It is stated that the president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev was the first one who in 1994 in his famous speech at Moscow State University proposed the idea of creating a new integration association - the Eurasian Economic Union. It is said that after the formation of the Customs Union Kazakhstan began to take an active part in the activities of the organization and its structures. In this regard, the article describes the strengthening of inter-regional and cross-border cooperation between our countries. Thus, according to the president of Kazakhstan now more than 50 large Kazakh-Russian projects totaling about $ 6 billion are realized and planned to implement on its territory. Also, it is indicated how the collaboration between the South Kazakhstan and Moscow region is carried. However, it is indicated that there is no increasing convergence in the ideological sphere. So Russia’s proposal to create a single history textbook for the countries of the Eurasian Union encounters from Kazakhstan on a number of issues, as the task of the authorities of the country is to strengthen the independence of Kazakhstan, what the history books should help. At the end the conclusions and recommendations are given.

On the Anarchist Ideas in Ba Jin’s Novel Destruction

[Chinese original] Editor’s Note: Comrade Ba Jin’s novels have, in the past, found a wide readership among members of the younger generation. To plant the red flag of communism in all areas of the ideological sphere, starting with this issue, we initiate a series of articles that critique Comrade Ba Jin’s most significant works. We hope our efforts will be supported and helped by both our readers and Comrade Ba Jin.

Is Democracy in Decline?

Is Democracy in Decline? Marc F. Plattner (bio) Since the publication of its inaugural issue in January 1990, the Journal of Democracy has published well over a thousand articles, exploring all aspects of the workings of democracy and the struggles of democratic movements. But we have been especially concerned with tracking democracy’s advances and setbacks around the world. For 25 years, we have been “taking the temperature” of democracy. Since 1998, we have published annually an article summarizing Freedom House’s survey of Freedom in the World, and we have featured numerous other essays analyzing democracy’s global trajectory, beginning with Samuel P. Huntington’s classic 1991 article introducing the concept of the “third wave” of democratization. So it should not be unexpected that we turn to this subject as the central theme of our twenty-fifth anniversary issue. Some may be surprised, however, by the headline on our cover—“Is Democracy in Decline?”—which faithfully reflects the way in which we posed the question to our contributors. For a journal that is unabashedly in favor of democracy, this obviously is not the kind of celebratory theme that might be preferred for marking a historic milestone. Yet this seemed to be the question that everyone was asking as 2015 approached, and we decided that it deserved a thorough examination. Tracing the viewpoints and opinions expressed over the years in the Journal (especially on its five-year anniversaries) suggests how evaluations of and sentiments about the state of democracy have evolved since 1990. The editors’ introduction that Larry Diamond and I wrote for the inaugural issue was animated by the view that democracy was experiencing a “remarkable worldwide resurgence,” but also by a concern that [End Page 5] it lagged behind its rivals with respect to political ideas and organization. Five eventful years later, we recognized not only that democracy had spread to many more countries but also that it had hugely improved its standing in terms of ideas and organization. We asserted that democracy had “gained enormous ground” with respect to “international legitimacy” and that it now “reign[ed] supreme in the ideological sphere.” Multilateral organizations were increasingly endorsing democratic principles, and a whole new field of international democracy assistance had emerged. At the turn of the century, these trends seemed only to be growing stronger. In introducing a special tenth-anniversary issue on “Democracy in the World” modeled on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, we argued that Tocqueville had supplanted Marx and concluded, “We are all Tocquevilleans now.” By 2005, however, our tone had grown far more downbeat, and we acknowledged a darkening mood among supporters of democracy. We attributed this in part to the travails of democracy-building in postinvasion Iraq and to Russia’s descent back into authoritarianism, but argued that the overall global trends were mixed and did not justify discouragement among democrats. By 2010, we were prepared to grant that “there now may even be grounds for speaking of an erosion of freedom over the past few years, though its dimensions are very slight.” Confronting Decline Yet here in our twenty-fifth anniversary issue, we feel compelled to confront head-on the question of whether democracy is in decline. Why? There are two aspects to the answer, which although intertwined are in some measure separable. The first deals with what is actually taking place on the ground: How many countries are democratic? Is their number rising or shrinking? What is the situation with respect to such liberal-democratic features as freedom of the press, rule of law, free and fair elections, and the like? The second, more subjective, aspect concerns the standing of democracy in the world: How is it viewed in terms of legitimacy and attractiveness? It is in this latter dimension that the evidence, or at least the widespread perception, of decline is most striking. As readers will see, the first dimension is open to differing interpretations. The divergence among them is most sharply posed by comparing Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s essay on “The Myth of Democratic Recession” with Larry Diamond’s on the need for “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession.” Levitsky and Way point out that...

Urban housing experiments in Yugoslavia 1948-1970

In the period from 1948 to 1970 urban housing architecture in Yugoslavia had a distinctly experimental character as it strived intensively towards research and establishment of new architectural patterns and values that would mark the period of economic growth of the country. In conditions of mass housing construction, initiated by the devastated urban housing fund after the Second World War, significant influx of population to towns and the state directed its socialist aspirations at alloting every family acceptable living space. The period of the so-called ?directed housing construction?, whose imperative was to establish the limits of existential minimum in collective housing, maximal space ?packing? and optimal functionality of flats, at the same time represents the most significant period in the development of housing architecture in Yugoslavia. The architects focused their interests in housing in mainly three directions: a) the creation and application of new prefabrication systems, b) innovative application of modernistic patterns in aestheticization of architecture and c) experimenting with space units which will enable a higher level of privacy in high-density housing conditions. The first direction of research emerged in the context of post-war housing construction of a wide scope, which encouraged the advance of technological research in areas of prefabrication and practical application of achieved results on the whole territory of Yugoslavia. The second direction dealt with architectural planning which was strictly subordinated to social and ideological sphere with domineering socialist monumentalism and artistic and sculptural approach to architecture. The third was related to experimental tendency with new urban housing patterns which aimed to search and find more pragmatic, humane solutions within mass high-density housing constructions which were the first to utilize and show examples of ?double-tract? buildings. These were primarily realized in Serbia, as continuation of tendencies first expressed in activities of ?Belgrade School of Housing?.

Language as an Instrument of Socialization and a Representation of National Linguistic Personality

Language, as an instrument of socialization, reveals the most important aspects of the relationship between individuals and society, while national linguistic personality reflects the characteristics of national culture and attitude. To understand a certain national personality, one must express its cultural values and specific attributes on the basis of these aforementioned aspects. In this regard, this paper examines the ideological and cultural core of the Russian and Kazakh people by focusing on certain cultural, symbolic, and stereotypical features. Comparative analysis of the Kazakh and Russian linguistic personalities shows that fundamental reforms in ideological, political, and social spheres have transformed the national linguistic personalities of both these regions.

Spanish

The question of whether school is a place for social transformation or not is a central issue to modern educational thought, particularly in the last decades of the twentieth century. «Theories of resistance» of the 80’s and 90’s aimed to show the transformative potential of schooling through the development of a critical pedagogy, in clear response to the so called «theories of reproduction», which in the 70›had denounced the role played by school in capitalism. This article aims to make a review of this discussion and, particularly, the antagonistic form in which it has been developed, from a materialist perspective. To that end, main classics of both group of theories will be analyzed identifying that, although they seem antagonist, they coincide on one central point: the belief that capitalist social relations are imposed externally to the subject, to a supposal free subjectivity. While «theories of reproduction» argue that such domination can only be faced through class struggle, which can only be given outside school, «theories of resistance» argue that struggle may be developedin the ideological sphere within schooling. The premise of this article is that such external imposition is an appearance product of the alienated character of our consciousness, and does not allow to analyze that social relations, far from being imposed to our free will, are developed by us to organize social work. To transcend these appearances, a process of recognition of the general determinations of education in capitalism will be developed, in order to enable us to overcome a binary logic between reproduction and transformation, and think social transformation as part of the process of social organization itself. How to reference this article Hirsch, D., Rio, V. (2015). Teorías de la reproducción y teorías de la resistencia: una revisión del debate pedagógico desde la perspectiva materialista. Foro de Educación , 13(18), pp. 69-91. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/fde.2015.013.018.004

Cold War Correspondents and the Possibilities of Convergence: American Journalists in the Soviet Union, 1968–1979

This article examines the writings of six American journalists who were stationed in the Soviet Union during the crucial period of détente in 1968–1979. All of them took their role as integrated observers of Soviet society seriously and published book length accounts of their experiences in Russia. They claimed that inside knowledge of Russian history and the Russian people was important for trying to understand the possibilities for change in the Soviet Union. In the process of getting to know the Soviet Union, however, they also revealed the importance of their own cultural background and expectations. They reached the conclusion that while change was possible in the consumer sphere, Russian history and Soviet ideology stood in the way of political convergence.

Дальше – без заветов-3

The article analyzes current socio-political and economic situation in China after Xi Jinping coming to power. The article emphasizes the most critical problems in the ideological sphere, domestic policy, economy, social and foreign policy of China, inherited from the previous leaders. Also the short term forecast of socio-political and economic development of China is submitted. New details of emerging Chinese foreign policy doctrine marked. The article shows China’s “New concernment” in the development of Sino-Russian relations as a counterweight to Sino-US relations.

Nadzieja Europy: od rynku do praw

Autor porusza problem jedności Europy w sferze gospodarczej, prawnej, a także ideowej. Przedstawia jej historyczne podłoże – filary, na których opiera się cywilizacja europejska, czyli dziedzictwo religii monoteistycznych, cywilizacji grecko-rzymskiej oraz witalności wnoszonej przez nowych członków jej wspólnoty. Autor wspomina również doświadczenia historyczne, zarówno pozytywne, jak i negatywne (m.in. zdobycze oświecenie, ale również konflikty zbrojne minionego wieku), które ukształtowały dzisiejszą, zjednoczoną Europę.Jedną z dróg do zjednoczenia było powszechne uznanie praw podstawowych. Lokalny, narodowy, europejski i uniwersalny wymiar praw podstawowych pozwala bowiem uwidocznić wieloraki – a przy tym niekonfliktowy – charakter tożsamości w perspektywie europejskiej, przejawiający się w możliwości czucia się „Europejczykiem” dzięki swym korzeniom oraz więziom narodowym, regionalnym i lokalnym. Z kolei „duchowym pierwiastkiem” spajającym Europę jest zasada solidarności wywodząca się z miłosierdzia chrześcijańskiego.Kolejnym etapem jednoczącym Europę była integracja rynku oparta na liberalizmie gospodarczym. Autor przypomina jednak, że zarówno rynek, jak i liberalizm z czasem przesłoniły podwójne korzenie Europy (tj. korzenie religijne i kulturowe), a wyrazem tego procesu jest narastanie opozycji między krajami bogatymi i krajami ubogimi. Wskazuje, że w obliczu światowego kryzysu gospodarczego konieczny jest powrót do idei i wartości, które legły u podstaw Unii Europejskiej. Chodzi tu o wartości, które wpisane są w europejskie korzenie: centralny charakter osoby ludzkiej, znaczenie praw podstawowych, dialog, pluralizm, umiejętność zdobycia się na autorefleksję, kultura człowieka, solidarność i dobroczynność. Powrót do nich może bowiem uchronić Europę przed krokiem wstecz, który oznaczałby porzucenie jej dorobku na każdym polu.Zdaniem Autora odpowiedzią na globalne wyzwania stojące przed Europą (m.in. światowy kryzys finansowy, zagrożenie terroryzmem, łamanie praw człowieka) jest skuteczniejsza i bardziej zdecydowana ochrona praw człowieka i godności osoby ludzkiej. A jedną z dróg prowadzącą do osiągnięcia tego celu jest czerpanie z dotychczasowych osiągnięć Unii Europejskiej w tej dziedzinie (m.in. Konwencji o ochronie praw człowieka i podstawowych wartości) oraz szerzej – z dorobku polityczno-instytucjonalnego i kulturowego.

Японо-китайские отношения: на пороге холодной войны?

Up to beginning of the XXI century political contradictions in Sino-Japanese relations had little influence on strong economic ties. However, since early 2010s several unstable elements that existed between the countries have been tending to discharge from political sphere into economics complicating bilateral cooperation. One of the sources of contradictions in Sino-Japanese relations is referred to differences in perception of each others’ strategies and intentions. China and Japan view each other as potentially offensive while depicting themselves as defensive. The growth of defense capabilities on one side is perceived as a potential threat on the other side. Another reason for deterioration of political situation is Japan’s efforts to give a proper reaction to the rapid rise of China’s economical and political might. On the other hand, it is China’s willingness to defend its growing interests. The escalation of nationalism in both countries adds to instability in Sino-Japanese relations. Sino-Japanese contradictions in economical, political, ideological and military spheres became intertwined in the territorial dispute of the East China Sea. Different expectations towards the US involvement in the potential conflict around the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands makes the situation even more difficult as it leads to the growth of military spending in both countries. Low levels of trust, the absence of clear dispute settlement and preventive diplomacy mechanisms, narrow opportunities for negotiations increase the probability that the cooling of Sino-Japanese relations will continue in future.

Political conditions in Russia becoming a socially oriented market economy

The article deals with the real possibility of Russia's transition to a socially oriented market economy, which caused by the political course of the country in general and social policy in particular, that suggests the necessary changes in political, socio-economic and ideological spheres of society.

Catalanism and national emancipation movements in the rest of Europe between 1885 and 1939

Catalans’ demands for self-government were always attuned to the national emancipation movements in the rest of Europe. This was one way of projecting the movement abroad and seeking strategic models and international support, even though only occasionally and with no lasting ties except Catalonia’s participation in the Congress of European Nationalities starting in 1926. This organisation encompassed the national minorities which were theoretically safeguarded by the League of Nations. The time span of this article ranges from 1885 to 1939. The Irish and Czech national movements were the most influential ones outside the sphere of Marxist ideology. In the 1930s, curiosity about and admiration for the status of the nationalities within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was based on an idealised image which the circumstances of the 1936 Spanish Civil War contributed to feeding.

B2B in Translation Studies

This article adopts a meta-theoretical and meta-academic perspective. It takes a critical look at how academic research in translation studies (as in other fields) is increasingly dominated by market forces as the world of higher education is drawn more and more into the sphere of neoliberal action and ideology. The paper acknowledges the positive effects of competitive pressures on scholarship – including increased research output, greater innovation and more efficient communication – but it also considers their adverse effects. More specifically, it is argued that the relentless pressure to innovate is having a negative impact on the intellectual rigour of our research by leading to needless fragmentation and ultimately undermining quality-control mechanisms. The paper concludes by making a number of recommendations to counterbalance the forces of the market.

Land-Art, Ecologie, Politică şi Societate

Abstract The Land-Art was integrated to Postmodernism by the most art historians, having as arguments the important affinities presented by the two artistic phenomena, both at the expressing modalities level but, especially, at the level of principles and, of the ideological sphere. The Postmodernism intended, as it is well-known, to parody or to interpret, in a proper way, a cultural tradition whose authority had become disturbing the Land-Art also started an innovating programme in the 60s -70s of the 20th century, through which the millenary art of the landscape was questionable, trying this way, a new and radical art-like approach of nature. The Art-Land was given various other names, syntagms which points out the work modalities or the materials used in the creation art: “Sociological Art”, “Earth Art”, “Works Art”, “Environmental Art”, “Earthworks”, “The Art of Landscape”, “The Sculpture of Landscape”, “The Walking Art”. The Land Art borrowed, in a great measure, the own means of expression of other tendencies which were performing on the artistic stage in the same time, such as the technique of installation, some of the principles experienced by Process-Art, by the Environmental Art or by Happening. The most representative land artists knew to integrate all the borrowings to a new vision, an original one, which, for the first time, was turning the nature into the support of the artistic creation. Apart from the point of view through which the Land Art is understood as an integral part of Postmodernism, there are also opinions, supported by well-known specialists, through which the Modernism of the 60s from the past century is seen as a possible origin of the Land-Art, especially if we have in mind the works of some great modern artists, such as Henry Moore, Robert Morris, Anthony Caro, Yves Klein and Tony Smith. Land Art presents two different ways of demonstration, hostile from the point of view of attitude towards nature and public: on the one hand some of the land artists look for the privacy of the act of artistic creation in the natural environment (one example this way is Richard Long), others, on the contrary, are guided by an art with clear social implications (e.g. the typical case of Christo). The ecological position of the tendency is underlined by the artists ' spokesman, Robert Smithson, who thinks that it should be adopted a committed, fighting attitude, pragmatically sheltered itself towards future.

Toward a History of Russian Jewish “Medical Materialism”: Russian Jewish Physicians and the Politics of Jewish Biological Normalization

This article introduces a missing Russian-Jewish perspective into the discussion of Jewish involvement in modern racialized and medicalized discourses and brings together the domains of intellectual and social history that have tended to be marginalized in these discourses. I argue that different forms of modern collective Jewish identities in the Russian Empire were substantially influenced by biological categories, and this influence was reflected not only in the sphere of ideology and science but also in the patterns of Jewish national and professional self-mobilization that culminated in the creation of the all-Russian Obshchestvo Okhraneniia Zdorov’ia Evreiskogo Naseleniia (OZE). The Jewish public health movement is the story of social mobilization based on a shared ethos of “medical materialism” and a specific understanding of the Jewish nation in the Russian imperial and early Soviet contexts.

Russian Intellectual History since 1991: Overcoming the Left–Right Divide

In 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union raised hopes that new era was about to begin, not only in former Soviet countries, but in the world at large. Many anticipated that the dismantling of the political system in the East would open up the possibility of creating new social system in the West, one based on new philosophical and moral conceptions. Not only did that system fail to emerge, but the intellectual renaissance that was supposed to underpin it never took shape either. Ideas appeared to have lost their vibrancy and power as force in history; the history of ideas as scholarly field suffered as consequence. Russian intellectual history (or call it the history of Russian thought, or philosophy) was struck with special force: the collapse of communism made it obvious that the field needed to be reinvented. It remained unclear, however, what values should underpin this quest. declining fortunes of intellectual history in the West have left at least some scholars feeling nostalgic about its status during the Cold War. David Saunders recently captured this feeling: The history of Russian thought used to be fashionable. Indeed, in the 1950s and early 1960s it occupied centre stage in English-language writing about Russian (1) Among the leading lights Saunders lists are Isaiah Berlin, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Martin Malia, and Marc Raeff, whose studies defined the field for decades. Those must indeed have been exhilarating times. Berlin, Riasanovsky, Malia, and Raeff knew one another reasonably well: all spent time at Harvard in the late 1940s. There were very few English-language publications in the field when they took their doctoral degrees--almost any topic they chose to write about would represent major contribution. No less enviable was their confidence about the governing role ideas play in history. This certitude may partly have been product of wartime experiences. Raeff, Riasanovsky, and Malia were all born in 1923 or 1924; the former two were refugees from Nazism and communism, and all three served in the U.S. Army and Navy during the final years of World War II. For them, as for many in their generation, there could be no doubt that ideas matter. As Riasanovsky remembered, to emphasize the importance of ideas and ideologies was not to insist that their impact was rational. On the contrary, these could be irrational and utopian. That point, he said, was especially important to Malia. (2) Another shared assumption of their generation was that ideas naturally fall along political spectrum from left to right. Riasanovsky recalled that this had been the organizing principle behind the course in Russian intellectual history, which he and Malia famously co-taught at U.C. Berkeley: I introduced subjects from the Russian Right, Martin from the Russian Left (in some relationship to our respective research interests). (3) This was an uncomplicated division of labor. first years after 1991 saw the publication of two significant works that maintained the importance of ideas and ideology in history: Malia's Soviet Tragedy (1994) and Andrzej Walicki's Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (1995). In Soviet Tragedy, ideology is essentially what happens when ideas are extended beyond reasonable limits. ideology that mattered most to Malia was socialism, and he would define it as a utopia, in the literal meaning of that term: 'non-place' or 'no-where.' ... full reality of socialism is reserved for the realm of faith, 'the belief in things unseen, the hope in things unknown.' (4) Reason, Malia believed, always followed logic, even if that logic had disastrous consequences. Reason's cunning, however, ceased to captivate younger scholars. On the contrary, the new generation of intellectual historians would steer away from anything that smacked of determinism or teleology in the realm of ideas. So, for example, Andrei Zorin would describe the ideological sphere of culture . …

No More Nice Girls: Feminist Art as Revision

Nothing says “the sixties” like the word revision. Barely anything survives in the academy that was not upended or blue-penciled in the wake of the battles of Berkeley and the Sorbonne. Revisionism, the muse of the moment, seeped into the arts like corrosive salt through a fresco. Moving with the times was easiest in the arts, where avant garde postures stand bail for serious attention to the nature of the times. Repudiation of inherited models of aesthetic worth was mistaken for redemption from the necessity of them. The fledgling feminist art movement dismissed hard-won mastery as “mere skill” and snubbed the canon of Western art as evidence of male dominion over the criteria for legitimacy and achievement. The movement rallied women whose resentments welcomed an assault on taste. Ideology gilded mediocrity—and ritual grousing—as celebrations of “women’s way of knowing.” Its boiler-plate idiom of class struggle set adrift concepts of (male) greatness. Timely academic kriegspiel, dedicated to promoting party spirit among women, validated—however inadvertently— the 1963 assertion of Leonid Ilychev, Kruschev’s spokesman for the arts: “Art belongs to the sphere of ideology.” Identity politics was In and here to stay. Much of today’s art and culture mimics the intellectual fray of the 1960s, itself an imitation of contests begun in the 1910s and 1920s. From the 1909 Futurist Manifesto to the 1963 Fluxus promise to purge the world of Acad. Quest. (2009) 22:486–490 DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9128-4

“We Come From Trees”

This paper explores the pervasive role of plants in the lives of the Jotï, a group of 900 people from the Venezuelan Guayana. In contrast with other Amazonian people for whom plants play relatively minor roles in spiritual spheres when compared to animals (e.g., the Ese Eje, Aguaruna or Yanomami), among the Jotï plants pervade their religious universe, assuming fundamental and polysemic dimensions. Plants constitute active agents in Jotï biological, cultural, and spiritual production and reproduction. Plants are prominent within all aspect of Jotï society making it difficult to establish strict separations between subsistence and ideological spheres. This question is explored here using a broad concept of Religion including four interrelated concerns: protology, anthropogony, ecogony and eschatology. Embedded in this text are three aspects: (1) the contemporaneity of phyto-myths in daily lives; (2) the centrality of plants in the fabrication of humanity; and, (3) the relationship of the phyto-world to what Amazonian scholars refer to as “the symbolic economy of alterity”.

Dark knowledge befits dark color: Turkish novelists interrogate the ideology of light

AbstractThe Republican discourse of progress has established a strong link between Turkey's modernization and the absolute power of light. As the Turkish word aydin (enlightened) replaced the Ottoman münevver (intellectual), the obligation to be enlightened along the dictates of Kemalist precepts became a national imperative. This over-valuation of light in the cultural and ideological spheres has provoked some Turkish novelists to interrogate the clichés of the symbolism of light versus dark, by obscuring their writing with the twilight colors of shadowy zones. Their texts challenge the reader to dig up what lies beyond the shadows and behind the mists with which these writers have chosen to darken their tales. As the intellectual tradition of modern Turkey has evaded doubt, uncertainty, and indeterminacy, the majority of Turkish novelists have opted for novels of clarity, sited on the axis of conviction and invested with moral certitude. The genealogy of the writers of the dark and dim zone of doubt, disillusionment, and frustration, however, has generated the more intriguing, if not more interesting, novels.

Guerra, formação do estado e identidade nacional nas franjas do mundo Atlântico

This paper deals with the impact of war on state formation in Ireland and England, focusing on the period from 1590 to 1691, the key turning point for the future development of the state in both countries. War played a vital role, but in a number of different ways, including in the ideological sphere, in a complex process, rather than simply causing a long-term expansion in army size and subsequent growth of the state. The author further emphasizes the dynamic nature of the state itself.