In 1963, Turkey and the European Union (EU) agreed on an Association Treaty. Turkey did not apply for EU membership until 1987 and this formal application was recognised at the EU summit in Helsinki as late as 1999. Political reforms in Turkey started in earnest after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, indicating a sincere interest in membership. As a result of these steps, the EU decided in 2004 to start negotiations; these began in 2005. Fairly soon thereafter, however, developments on both sides stalled and relations between the two deteriorated.
Ten years ago, in June 1999, a group of 29 European Ministers signed the Bologna Declaration with the goal of establishing the European Area of Higher Education by 2010 and promoting the European system of higher education world-wide. In April 2009, 46 European Higher Education Area Ministers will gather for the fifth biennial EHEA Ministerial Conference, to take stock of this first decade and jointly define goals for the coming years. At this juncture, it is important to look at the changes that have occurred through the Bologna Process in the context of transatlantic exchange, and how they affect the way U.S. higher education institutions are approaching graduate admissions, awarding transfer credit and credit for study abroad, and advancing institutional linkages.
The idea of the knowledge economy has brought with it a new paradigm of work that espouses the professionalization of all work. This new paradigm is now affecting the organization of work throughout the economy. However, not all work is knowledge work, whatever definition is used. The number of “professionals” may rise, but many workers still face rather traditional working conditions. Moreover, we argue, the expected growth in the share of knowledge work may be less than expected: along with the forces pushing for an increase in knowledge work, there are also forces counteracting these. We develop a simple typology of work that takes autonomy and frequency of external contacts as dimensions. Workplaces with high autonomy and frequent external contacts (with customers and other stakeholders) are considered “paradigmatic” for knowledge work. Using data from the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS), we analyze the distribution of the European workforce across different types of work. Analysis of EWCS data (1995, 2000, 2005) shows that “paradigmatic” knowledge work is actually shrinking. We offer a first, tentative explanation of this remarkable trend.
Judge-made law has played a crucial role in the process of European integration. In the vertical dimension, it has greatly reduced the range of autonomous policy choices in the member states, and it has helped to expand the reach of European competences. At the same time, however, “Integration through Law” does have a liberalizing and deregulatory impact on the socioeconomic regimes of EU member states. This effect is generally compatible with the status quo in liberal market economies, but it tends to undermine the institutions and policy legacies of Continental and Scandinavian social market economies. Given the high consensus requirements of European legislation, this structural asymmetry cannot be corrected through political action at the European level.
The Obama administration is right that the United States can safely cut some of its nuclear arsenal, but it must retain the right capabilities. Otherwise, the United States' adversaries might conclude -- perhaps correctly -- that Washington's nuclear strategy rests largely on a bluff.
Turkey hopes to be a global power, but it has not yet become even the regional player that the ruling AKP declares it to be. Can the AKP do better, or will it be held back by its Islamist past and the conservative inclinations of its core constituents?
This article examines the historical development of the concept of security in two phases. In the first phase, the word coined by the Romans as 'securitas' and accompanied from the beginning by ambivalence and religious connotations had conceded most of its territory to 'certitudo' at the end of the Middle Ages. In the second phase starting in the times of Thomas Hobbes, it became one of the paradigmatic 'great words' of the modern state. In this phase, 'security' became associated with the genesis of the authoritarian 'super state' committed to the prevention of civil war. This article starts by elaborating the connection between Thomas Hobbes and the ancient Greek historian Thucydides and proceeds by examining the usages of the concept by several contemporary authors.
I argue that International Relations Theory has not been able to transcend its parochialism because it continues to negate the agency of the East. By analyzing the articles published in four leading journals of the discipline between 2002-2007, I find that the number of studies that focus on the East have indeed increased, but most of these studies continue to situate the cases derived from the East in the context of West-centric theories. Even critical approaches continue to position the West as the main subject of international relations and dismiss the mutual constitution and interaction between the East and the West, and the local and global. I contend that the generation of non-Western IR theories is not going to pose an adequate challenge to West-centrism; what is necessary is the formulation of specific propositions on East-West relations that directly counter the established assumptions of West-centric theories.