Process Of Political Reform Research Articles

‘Cosmopolitan Europe’ and the EU–Turkey question: the politics of a ‘common destiny’

This paper assesses cosmopolitanism in practice in Europe via an engagement with the ‘EU–Turkey question’, analysing the extent to which a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ is emerging within Turkey and in European reactions to Turkey and the ways in which this plays out in the face of important political opposition in both settings. It argues that in the context of Turkey's internal politics and the European Union's (EU's) consideration of Turkey's candidature, an essentialist view of identity is constitutive of hostile relations between the EU and Turkey and within Turkish and European societies. Conversely, the adoption of a critical and reflexive cosmopolitan outlook as theory and political practice – examples of which are to be found in the Turkish political reform process and some of the recent practice of the European Commission – offers the best hope for a cosmopolitan Europe inclusive of cosmopolitan Turkey.

Harmony or conflict?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the coordination of Chinese technology policy and assess its contribution to technology progress and economy development.Design/methodology/approachA method was developed to assess the coordination and its tendency of technology policy based on technology policy quantification. In addition, econometric models were built to estimate performance of technology policy coordination.FindingsChinese technology policy coordination shows significant characteristics in different periods; the level of policy coordination is promoted rapidly because the institutional path‐dependence and the competition of benefits among departments have aggravated an already unbalanced emphasis on the wording of the technology policy during the process of economic and political reform. The coordination among departments, coordination of policy goals and coordination of policy means play different roles in technology progress and economy development.Research limitations/implicationsBecause of the limitation of data and time, the paper cannot assess the coordination among policy goals and policy means. Also, it is necessary to study the interaction of different principals and agencies during technology policy formulation and execution.Practical implicationsThe methods in the paper can easily be used by decision makers evaluating the situation of technology policy coordination, and optimize policy based on the relationship of different policy targets and policy implements, especially the interaction of different principals and agencies.Originality/valueThe paper develops a method to assess technology policy coordination based on technology policy quantification and builds econometric models to assess its contribution to technology progress and economy development.

The More Things Change…

A line-up of Arab leaders in 1991, the year the Cold War ended and a wave of democ ratization started to gather momentum around the globe, would look almost identical to a line-up of Arab leaders today. A few kings and emirs have died and have been duly replaced by their legitimate heirs. The long-ruling Syrian president, Hafez alAssad, has also since died and been replaced, less legitimately, by his son, Bashar. In Algeria and Lebanon, there has been much drama, but while presidents and prime ministers have been replaced, the underlying systems remain unchanged, with the same political dynasties controlling the life of Lebanon and a leader of the 1950s war for independence still running Algeria. The Arab world has been bypassed by the process of political change that has marked much of the post-Cold War period in many other regions of the world. Virtually nothing changed in the 1990s in the Middle East. After a brief period of ferment and hope in the early and middle part of the present decade, democracy (or even less farreaching, political reform) appears an ever more distant prospect, as opposition parties, including Islamists, lose ground in elections and incumbents re-establish a firm grip on the status quo. This is bad news for Arab citizens, because for the majority of them, particularly outside the Persian Gulf, the status quo does not hold much promise. On the political front, the status quo means the perpetuation of regimes that do not believe in accountability or participation and put much greater emphasis on regime security than on human security. On the economic front, the perpetuation of the status quo in all but the richest oil-producing countries means difficult living conditions, high unemployment, poor education, fraying health services, and, in many cases, decaying urban infrastructure overwhelmed by population growth. In a perverse way, though, the stress the status quo imposes on human security also contains the possibility that the seemingly dead process of political reform will revive before long. Protests over economic and social conditions are spreading in Arab countries. It is mostly organized on a strictly local basis, so far without any sign of overall coordination or even clear goals, a seemingly endless stream of small protests and critical blogging. There appears to be no underlying ideology or organizational structure unifying the disparate episodes in each country, let alone across the region. Indeed, attempts by leftist or Islamist political parties to join protests or take control have not been well received. But even such small-scale action is

‘Democracy 1.0’ Meets ‘Web 2.0’: E-Campaigning and the Role of ICTs in Indonesia’s Political Reform Process since 1998

‘Democracy 1.0’ Meets ‘Web 2.0’: E-Campaigning and the Role of ICTs in Indonesia’s Political Reform Process since 1998

Reshaping Civil Society through a Truth Commission: Human Rights in Morocco's Process of Political Reform

1 Observers of Moroccan politics have debated extensively the significance of the country's ‘top-down’ liberalization. At this point, there is no definitive verdict on palace-guided reforms, such as the recent Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER). Rather, these reforms have left an ambiguous legacy. This article uses the IER – a truth commission established in 2004 to examine past human rights abuses, compensate victims and ensure nonrepetition – as an analytical tool to understand how transitional justice carried out as a strategic measure of top-down liberalization can reshape the relationship between civil society and the state. While the monarchy's reform efforts in Morocco have not (as of yet) led to a civil society capable of supporting a stable democratic transition, the article argues that these efforts have increased civil society's expectations of gaining capacity and space to implement ethical goals and demands. Greater expectations, in turn, have altered how the monarchy must calculate its survival strategy.

Egyptian reforms post-2005 and the politics of succession: implications and consequences for the future Egyptian reform process

Egyptian economic reforms have been an on-going process since the Egyptian government adopted liberal market reforms in 1991 (Kienle 2001, 2004), influenced by a number of internal socio-economic factors, including growing levels of poverty, heightened inflation, high levels of corruption and rising levels of unemployment, in particular among new university graduates. These factors were exerting heavy pressure on a highly bureaucratic and inefficient state (Bayat 1997). However, the ensuing economic reforms resulted in tightened fiscal and monetary polices, and a subsequent increased and heightened socio-economic crisis in Egypt, which the Egyptian government attempted to control by imposing increasingly authoritarian measures, with political de-liberalization evident in both urban and rural areas (Kienle 2001). This led, at the turn of the millennium, to a period of failed economic reforms and increased levels of authoritarianism, which coincided with the political rise of the president's son, Gamal Mubarak, whose economic and business credentials have led to optimism concerning the possibility of future reform and change in Egypt. This paper examines the electoral promises made by Hosni Mubarak in the 2005 presidential elections and the ensuing economic and political implications for the political succession in Egypt, leading to conclusions about the future processes of economic and political reform in Egypt and the impact upon them of the political succession

Peri-Urban Land Reform, Political-Economic Reform, and Urban Political Ecology in Zanzibar

The rapid urbanization of land in the peri-urban West District surrounding Zanzibar city in Tanzania has occurred during a 20-year period of political and economic reform, with related reforms in the land sector. Utilizing 2006 and 2007 interviews with officials and residents alongside document and archival research, this study examines two themes in relation to Zanzibar's most prominent program of contemporary land reform, a Finnish-funded project for the Sustainable Management of Lands and Environment (SMOLE). These themes entail: (1) the importance of the historical-cultural geography of peri-urban land dynamics for dual reform (simultaneous political and economic reform) processes in Africa; and (2) the critique of pro-poor, neoliberal land reform for the disjunctures between its rhetoric, actual planning practice, and the beliefs and practices of the peri-urban poor, wherein we discover a lack of participation, transparency, or democracy in the land sector. The article's broader aim is to contribute a detailed African case study to urban political ecology's efforts to argue for democratization of the construction of social environments.

Turkey Divided

Abstract: The period leading up to the July balloting exposed a key fault line in Turkish society. On one side of the divide were those who supported the economic and political reform process that the AKP had undertaken since coming to power in the elections of November 2002. The main objective of the second of the "two Turkeys" is the preservation of the Republic as a unitary, strictly secular, and nationalist country rather than one which adopts federal or confederal arrangements to accommodate the Kurds, permits Islam to make its weight felt in the public sphere, and opens itself up decisively to transnational influences.

Europeanization through EU conditionality: understanding the new era in Turkish foreign policy1

Since October 2001, Turkey has embarked upon a process of wide-ranging political reforms through harmonization packages to redress its shortcomings vis-a-vis the Copenhagen criteria. The Turkish ec...

Increasing longevity and social security reforms—A legislative procedure approach

Increasing longevity causes an upward trend in the dependency ratio in many countries. This raises concerns about the financial sustainability of social security schemes, and reform proposals and initiatives abound. It is shown that a fundamental policy choice inevitably arises since a given social security system cannot be maintained by simply indexing pension ages to longevity. The political reform process is analysed using the so-called legislative procedure. When longevity increases, the retirement age is raised more than proportionally to the increase in longevity, but the young also make larger transfers to the old.

Turks of Macedonia: The Travails of the “Smaller” Minority

The Republic of Macedonia was the only state which had managed to separate itself from the rump Yugoslavia without any serious military confrontation with the Yugoslav Army (JNA) in the beginning of the 1990s. However, the international conditions that had required rapid recognition of Macedonia as a sovereign state by ignoring the fragile ethnic composition of this tiny Balkan country led to ethnic strife and consequently a political reform process. This process was definitely predominated by the political demands of the ethnic Albanians at the expense of the majority Slav Macedonians and the other smaller ethnic groups, including the Turks. In this context, this study aims at unfolding the political stand of the Turkish minority during the political reform process between 2001 and 2002 in Macedonia—the so-called Ohrid (Framework) process—which culminated in a semi-consociational system entirely favoring the ethnic Albanians, to the chagrin of the smaller minorities, particularly the Turkish minority.

From Soviet Republics to Independent Countries: Challenges of Transition in Central Asia

AbstractIn the twentieth century, the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan passed through a complex historical period. They were originally founded as republics of the Soviet Union in the 1920s-30s as a result of national and territorial state delimitation. The process of the creation of new national state formations began after the Soviet Union disintegrated and these republics achieved independence. At the same time, the region's nations are facing complex problems of transition and the creation of new societies. Nevertheless, these countries have to continue the process of political and economic reforms, as well as development of civic institutions. The Central Asian nations established contacts with foreign states and international organizations and started to form a system of interstate relations between the countries of the region. There are potentials for development of regional integration of Central Asia. Future integration will depend on the readiness of the nations to carry out political and economic reforms, introduce forms and methods of economic regulation compatible with global norms, and most important, international support of political reforms and regional integration.

“Without Poachers, No Foresters, and Vice Versa”:1 Political Violence in Günter Grass's Ein weites Feld

In the months after the Berlin Wall collapsed, Gunter Grass repeatedly called for a slower process of political and economic reform.2 For citizens of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), German reunification proved difficult as the agency, founded to privatize the assets of the former GDR, carried out massive downsizing (Abwicklung) of East German businesses. Grass revisits his criticism of Helmut Kohl's government in the 1995 reunification novel Ein weites Feld, which presents snapshots of post-wall Berlin through the eyes of the East German Theo Wuttke, also known as Fonty. The primacy of the author's focus on the privatization policies after reunification is such that Ein weites Feld initially carried the working title Treuhand (Stolz 171). Because the novel explores the plight of disinherited East Germans, the appears in a negative, even threatening light. Grass's emphatic critique of reunification culminates in the assassination of the agency's CEO, an allusion to the murder of chairman Detlev Karsten Rohwedder on April 1, 1991.3 The fictionalized assassination in Ein weites Feld opens up questions about the causes of political violence in the 1990s in Germany. Instead of examining these issues, the media largely focused on Grass's persona. The novel received heavy criticism from reviewers, culminating in the uproar surrounding the title page of Der Spiegel, which showed the czar of German criticism, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, tearing up Bin weites Feld.4 Grass's novel and his public statements were also met with derision from conservative politicians such as Birgit Breuel, Rohwedder's successor, as well as from Social Democrats, notably Klaus von Dohnanyi, who discounted Grass's ability to assess the political situation.5 Grass points out that reviewers' statements often reflected a desire to play down the political problems the novel uncovers, and instead to present Prozess der Vereinigung als gegluckt und abgeschlossen.6 The outrage over the novel's political tenor was in part derived from Grass's comment in an interview on the Treuhand's role in the novel: Wer ein solch menschenverachtendes Instrument die ins Leben ruft, mus sich nicht wundern, wenn darauf terroristisch reagiert wird.7 However, Grass introduces this admittedly provocative statement in a way that makes clear that he does not wish to legitimize violence, but to explain wie es zu solchen Anschlagen kommt (qtd. in Negt 418). Moreover, he pursues a perspective that gives voice to the former GDR: sitze nicht auf der Bank der Sieger. Ich schreibe die Geschichte der Betroffenen, der Menschen, [...] die den Umwalzungsprozessen ausgeliefert sind (qtd. in Negt 442). In the novel, Grass expresses his concern for violent escalation not only by showing the East German protagonist's criticism of the Treuhand, but also by demonstrating Fonty's relativistic views on the legitimacy of violence as well as his hostility toward Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Fonty's reactions imply that victims of reunification saw no other way to protest than to engage in violence. In contrast, Grass rightfully objects to the fact that the novel's critics equated statements by characters with the author's opinion (qtd. in Negt 418). It is thus necessary to make a distinction between Grass's desire to explain terrorist violence in reunified Germany and his protagonist's failure to condemn such violence. The topic of violence in Grass's works, e.g., anti-establishment protests in Ortlich betaubt and the war between the sexes in Der Butt, has been discussed in detail.8 Other works address violence in Grass's oeuvre in connection with Vergangenheitsbewaltigung and World War II. The following analysis draws on sociological and anthropological studies in order to interpret the motivations behind terrorism as portrayed in Ein weites Feld. Violence can be thought of as an inherent aspect of human nature, as a reaction to specific situations, as an indiscriminate act or as a deliberate action. …

Increasing Longevity and Social Security Reforms

Increasing longevity causes an upward trend in the dependency ratio in many countries. This raises concerns about the financial sustainability of social security schemes, and reform initiatives and proposals abound. It is shown that a fundamental policy choice inevitably arises since a given social security system cannot be maintained by simply indexing retirement ages and benefits to longevity. The political reform process is analysed using the so-called legislative procedure. When longevity increases, the young generation contributes more, and the old generation faces lower benefits and a retirement age that increases more than proportionally to the increase in longevity.

The sustainability and some consequences of Chinese economic growth

During the past 27 years, China's economy and relationship with the outside world has been transformed. The magnitude of annual economic growth and rapid increase in the volume of output of goods and services raise unsettling questions about potential threats to the sustainability of current growth levels and implications for economic and political stability. This paper examines the sources of economic growth and concludes the strong state system, high rates of saving and investment and demographic structure will sustain growth. Chinese authorities must be aware that a failure to maintain the process of financial and political institutional reform or to address the widening regional income inequalities poses potential domestic threats to sustainable growth. Tensions remain in China's international relationships, forcing China to consider further adjustment and accommodation in its regional security and economic relationships.

Europeanization in Turkey: Trigger or Anchor for Reform?

Since late 2001, successive Turkish governments have pursued an ongoing and unprecedented process of domestic political reform. Given the correlation between political reforms and relations with the EU, this process of change has been associated with Turkey's Europeanization. This article analyzes the link between Turkey's reform process and its path to EU accession. Did the accession process trigger the reforms as an external force driving internal change; or has domestic change been spearheaded by domestic actors that have used and been strengthened by the external EU anchor? What appears to be in the making is a process of change largely driven by endogenous factors, whose precise form and timing is intricately linked with the launch of Turkey's accession process.

Water institutional reforms in Chile

This paper provides a review of the recent institutional changes observed in the water sector in Chile. This review is then used to reflect the Chilean experience in the light of the results concerning institutional change found in existing literature on both institutional economics in general and water institutional economics in particular. These results relate to factors explaining institutional change and the role of endogenous institutional features, such as path dependency and institutional linkages during the reform process. Against a brief description of the main features of the water sector in Chile, the paper provides an overview of Chilean water management institutions and the reforms process ongoing since the 1980s. The factors that motivated institutional changes in Chile's water management include ideology, transactions costs, interest-group behavior and path dependency. While the already observed institutional changes, such as the transferable water rights, water markets and urban water reforms, are all significant, further reforms are delayed by the deliberate legislative process required for changes as a result of the 1980 Constitution. Future water reforms in Chile, therefore, depend on a very difficult process of political reforms needed to change the 1980 Constitution and the 1981 Water Code.

Explaining the Politics of Recognition of Ethnic Diversity and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Oaxaca, Mexico

A ‘politics of recognition’– a process of political reform intended to recognise formally cultural diversity and indigenous peoples’ rights – has developed in Mexico, both at the federal and at the state levels, since the early 1990s. The case of the state of Oaxaca stands out in this respect – the local constitution and nearly a dozen secondary laws were reformed during the 1990s, resulting in the conformation of the most comprehensive multicultural framework in Mexico. In this article, I attempt to explain the emergence and the particular development of Oaxaca's unique politics of recognition. Following an explanatory framework proposed by Donna Lee Van Cott, I conclude that the recognition agenda emerged in Oaxaca as legitimacy and governability was put under strain. In addition, I conclude that the (by Mexican standards) rapid and broad fashion in which it developed can be explained on the bases of the severity of the threats to governability and of the capacity of indigenous actors to influence the decision‐making process and form alliances with key political actors – i.e. the state governors.

Russian Political Reform and Integration Processes in the CIS, Problems and Deadlocks (Comments to the Article by K. Truevtsev)

Russian Political Reform and Integration Processes in the CIS, Problems and Deadlocks (Comments to the Article by K. Truevtsev)

Democracy Under Stress in Thaksin's Thailand

Thailand has often looked like an emerging democracy. While it is true that considerable political instability and numerous military interventions followed the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, by 1990 there had been no successful military coup since 1977, and Thai political scientist Chai-Anan Samudavanija felt able to write in the inaugural issue of this journal that his country was “gradually moving toward full membership of the new and larger comity of liberal democratic nations.” But this optimism was confounded by the February 1991 coup, which demonstrated residual military ambitions to dominate the political order. In the wake of the putsch came a popular uprising that ended with the fatal shooting of at least 50 unarmed civilians (May 1992), two new constitutions (1991 and 1997), and five general elections (March 1992, September 1992, July 1995, November 1996, and January 2001). Several of these events were setbacks for democratic change. Writing in 1999, Suchit Bunbongkarn hailed as a virtually unqualified success the political reform process that had culminated in the promulgation of the 1997 Constitution. Arguing that the onset of the Asian economic crisis in 1997 had boosted popular awareness of the need for greater democracy and good governance, he felt confident that the new institutions and procedures introduced that year would in the long run loosen the grip of money on politics and clean up the Thai political order. Yet the rapid pace of change in Thailand makes taking a long view extremely difficult; what appear to be robust processes of political liberalization can rapidly give way to crises of democratic confidence. Coupled with the rise to power of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai (“Thais Love Thais,” or TRT) party, the Senate and lower house Duncan McCargo is professor of Southeast Asian politics at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. His latest book is Media and Politics in Pacific Asia (Routledge, forthcoming).