The Bulgarian Socialist Party: The long road to Europe

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Spirova
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Organizational Continuity ◽  
Left Party

The article provides an analysis of the evolution of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) from a Marxist party in the late 1980s into a European socialist party by the early 2000s. The BSP dominance of the political process in Bulgaria during the early and mid-1990s can be attributed, this article argues, to several factors: the nature of the old regime, the absence of any meaningful opposition before 1989 and its relative weakness during the transition period, the crucial role that the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP) played in the transition to democracy, and the organizational continuity that the newly renamed BSP chose to maintain. In turn, the preserved dominance of the BSP allowed it to remain relatively unreformed in terms of economic and foreign policy positions. It was only after its devastating defeat in the 1997 elections that the BSP came to advocate a truly social-democratic platform and to support a pro-EU and pro-NATO foreign policy. This ideological transformation of the BSP was supported and encouraged actively by the Party of European Socialists, which has been deeply involved in the process of strengthening the social democracy in Bulgaria since the mid-1990s. As a result of this transformation, by 2008 the BSP is recognized as a democratic, center-left party.

The Social Interpretation of Foreign Policy

1978 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 328-350
Author(s):  
Mare Trachtenberg
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Actual Mechanism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Group Politics ◽  
French Foreign Policy ◽  
Social Product ◽  
The Masses

That foreign policy is a social product, that it is in particular the outcome of a political process and an element in the national political system—these are general notions that few scholars would in principle dispute. But in practice foreign policy has been commonly portrayed in exactly the opposite way. It is viewed as some-thing with its own life, essentially cut off from domestic politics, existing primarily in the international sphere. Scholars do of course recognize that domestic factors play a role, but the implied connection is often extremely amorphous and general, with no attempt on the whole made to specify the mode of linkage in a concrete and testable way. Thus America's return to isolation after the First World War is commonly attributed to the unwillingness of her people to bear the burden of world power; British and French foreign policy after 1924 is explained in terms of the deep-seated pacifism of the masses. The actual mechanism of linkage is not spelled out. On those occasions when a specific relation is described the very language used often betrays an unwillingness to see it as a legitimate, integral part of a normal political process. Such things as public opinion and party and interest-group politics are seen basically as exogenous forces, “intruding” or having an “impact” on the policy-making system, not as regular parts of it.

A Tale of Two Hybrid Regimes: A Study of Cabinets and Parliaments in Indonesia and Thailand

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-292
Author(s):  
SIRIPAN NOGSUAN SAWASDEE
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Hybrid Regimes ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hybrid Regime ◽  
Social Profiles ◽  
Two Hybrid ◽  
Rules Of The Game

AbstractThis article applies the concept of hybrid regimes to evaluate the state of political transition in Indonesia and Thailand. It aims to answer why the transition to democracy in Indonesia during 1999–2004 was successful, while the transition in Thailand during 1997–2006 culminated in a reversion to authoritarianism by examining the social profiles and formation of cabinet and parliament members as well as the design of constitutions. The study suggests that the lack of inclusiveness helps explain why democratization in Thailand was in failure. During the transition period, inclusiveness has not markedly increased because of the leadership strongman style, the flaws in the recruitment process, and the problem with the party system. This was unlike Indonesia, where cabinet, parliament, and multiparty system were able to include a variety groups and broad societal segments that played a significant role in deliberating political rules of the game. Indonesia's institutional rearrangements appear to sustain popular participation and engender momentum for fostering democracy, while Thailand's constitutional re-engineering contains many provisions to disempower the elected bodies. The perpetuation of the hybrid regime in Thailand is foreseeable as the hybridity satisfies the needs and concerns of the traditional elites and the urban middle class.

scholarly journals Evolution and Internal Logic of Kyrgyzstan’s International Relations during the Period of Independence

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-202
Author(s):  
I. V. Podobed
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Central Government ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Financial Assistance ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article examines the position of Kyrgyzstan in the international system and its foreign policy in the context of the social fabric established after the collapse of the USSR, the dynamics of socio-economic development, as well as electoral processes and delimitation. The evolution of international relations in Kyrgyzstan is seen as a derivative of the socio-economic macro process that has been developing over the past three decades. In this article, the author attempts to combine the most common research optics that rarely intersect in one work: the study of the domestic political process and its role in setting foreign policy priorities. Due to the existence of an extensive clan system and the fragility of the central government, it is impossible to conduct internally consistent foreign policy. The foreign policy activity of Kyrgyzstan is aimed at maintaining a certain balance in relations with major actors in the region to create the most favourable conditions for labour migration, obtaining financial assistance and transit trade.

DEMOCRACY AT THE SERVICE OF FOREIGN POLICY OF THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. FREDDIE
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Foreign Policy Change ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Apartheid Regime

The article examines the place and role of democracy and human rights in South Africas foreign policy. The author analyzes the process of South Africas foreign policy change after the fall of the apartheid regime and transition to democracy. He gives characteristics of the foreign policy under different presidents of South Africa from 1994 to 2018 and analyzes the political activities of South Africa in the area of peacekeeping and human rights on the African continent.

How government-controlled media shifts policy attitudes through framing

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Jennifer Pan ◽  
Zijie Shao ◽  
Yiqing Xu
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Composite Measures ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Tv News

Abstract Research shows that government-controlled media is an effective tool for authoritarian regimes to shape public opinion. Does government-controlled media remain effective when it is required to support changes in positions that autocrats take on issues? Existing theories do not provide a clear answer to this question, but we often observe authoritarian governments using government media to frame policies in new ways when significant changes in policy positions are required. By conducting an experiment that exposes respondents to government-controlled media—in the form of TV news segments—on issues where the regime substantially changed its policy positions, we find that by framing the same issue differently, government-controlled media moves respondents to adopt policy positions closer to the ones espoused by the regime regardless of individual predisposition. This result holds for domestic and foreign policy issues, for direct and composite measures of attitudes, and persists up to 48 hours after exposure.

Feminism, Pragmatism or Both? Czech Radical Nationalism and the Woman Question, 1898–1914

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-552
Author(s):  
T. Mills Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
National Society ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
The Social

During a debate on the franchise reform bill in the Austrian Reichsrat on 12 September 1906, the Czech National Socialist Party deputy Václav Choc demanded that suffrage be extended to women as well as men. Otherwise, Choc asserted, the women of Austria would be consigned to the same status as “criminals and children.” Choc was certainly not the only Austrian parliamentarian to voice his support for votes for women during the debates on franchise reform. However, his party, the most radical of all the Czech nationalist political factions, was unique in that it not only included women's suffrage in its official program, as the Social Democrats had done a decade earlier, but also worked hard to change the political status of women in the Monarchy while the Social Democrats generally paid only lip service to this goal. Moreover, Choc and his colleagues in the National Socialist Party helped change the terms of the debate about women's rights by explicitly linking the “woman question” to the “national question” in ways entirely different from the prevailing discourse of liberalism infin-de-siècleAustria. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, liberal reformers, whether German or Czech, tried to mold the participation of women in political life to fit the liberal view of a woman's “proper” role in society. By contrast, the radical nationalists who rose to prominence in Czech political culture only after 1900, attempted to recast the debate over women's rights as central to their two-pronged discourse of social and national emancipation, while at the same time pressing for the complete democratization of Czech political life at all levels, not merely in the imperial parliament. In so doing, and with the active but often necessarily covert collaboration of women associated with the party, these radical nationalists helped extend the parameters of the debate over the place Czech women had in the larger national society.

Real-World Global Egalitarianism

2018 ◽  
pp. 117-129
Author(s):  
Darrel Moellendorf
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Real World ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
Egalitarian Justice

This chapter notes that normative International Political Theory (IPT) developed over the past several decades in response to political, social, and economic events. These included the globalization of trade and finance, the increasing credibility of human-rights norms in foreign policy, and a growing awareness of a global ecological crisis. The emergence of normative IPT was not simply an effort to understand these events, but an attempt to offer accounts of what the responses to them should be. Normative IPT, then, was originally doubly responsive to the real world. Additionally, this chapter argues that there is a plausible account of global egalitarianism, which takes the justification of principles of egalitarian justice to depend crucially on features of the social and economic world. The account of global egalitarianism applies to the current circumstances in part because of features of those circumstances.

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