scholarly journals On some Actual Aspects of the Interpretation of the Liberal Tradition in Russia

Politeja ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (5(62)) ◽  
pp. 209-222
Author(s):  
Vladimir Gutorov

On some Actual Aspects of the Interpretation of the Liberal Tradition in Russia The article examines the key moments of the transformation of liberal tradition in Russia in the context of analysis of the main directions of the transformation of liberal ideological discourse and liberal culture in Western Europe and the United States. The need for such an analysis is primarily determined by the fact that since the early 1990s Western liberal stereotypes have become an ideological basis of the new Russian political elite and the dominant trend in state propaganda. However, the following main fact is often overlooked: in the 20th century,Russian liberalism was compromised twice, so in the short-term the hopes for the revival of the liberal ideas are gone. In the West, the liberal tradition has also been in the state of crisis: Western liberalism has been undergoing a very significant transformation that has far-reaching cultural and political implications. In particular, at the turn of the 21st c., a more active role in Western public discourse was taken by the radical neo-conservative versions of an ideology that combined a conservative program of political reforms with a strong libertarian (neoliberal) rhetoric. This ideology is actively used by the ruling circles of the US and Western Europe to influence ideologically the political elites of Russia – as it happened in Central and Eastern Europe during the so-called “velvet revolutions”. At the same time, what increasingly clearly and sharply came to the fore in the late twentieth century is anti-liberal thought and criticism that has always evolved in parallel with liberalism itself and that almost never ceases to exist.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-47
Author(s):  
Yinan Li

The development of the PRC’s armed forces included three phases when their modernization was carried out through an active introduction of foreign weapons and technologies. The first and the last of these phases (from 1949 to 1961, and from 1992 till present) received wide attention in both Chinese and Western academic literature, whereas the second one — from 1978 to 1989 —when the PRC actively purchased weapons and technologies from the Western countries remains somewhat understudied. This paper is intended to partially fill this gap. The author examines the logic of the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States in the context of complex interactions within the United States — the USSR — China strategic triangle in the last years of the Cold War. The first section covers early contacts between the PRC and the United States in the security field — from the visit of R. Nixon to China till the inauguration of R. Reagan. The author shows that during this period Washington clearly subordinated the US-Chinese cooperation to the development of the US-Soviet relations out of fear to damage the fragile process of detente. The second section focuses on the evolution of the R. Reagan administration’s approaches regarding arms sales to China in the context of a new round of the Cold War. The Soviet factor significantly influenced the development of the US-Chinese military-technical cooperation during that period, which for both parties acquired not only practical, but, most importantly, political importance. It was their mutual desire to undermine strategic positions of the USSR that allowed these two countries to overcome successfully tensions over the US arms sales to Taiwan. However, this dependence of the US-China military-technical cooperation on the Soviet factor had its downside. As the third section shows, with the Soviet threat fading away, the main incentives for the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States also disappeared. As a result, after the Tiananmen Square protests, this cooperation completely ceased. Thus, the author concludes that the US arms sales to China from the very beginning were conditioned by the dynamics of the Soviet-American relations and Beijing’s willingness to play an active role in the policy of containment. In that regard, the very fact of the US arms sales to China was more important than its practical effect, i.e. this cooperation was of political nature, rather than military one.


2021 ◽  
pp. 101-126
Author(s):  
Alice Ciulla

Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States in November 1976. A few months earlier, the Italian elections marked an extraordinary result for the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and some of its members obtained institutional roles. During the electoral campaign, members of Carter's entourage released declarations that seemed to prelude to abandoning the anti-communist veto posed by previous governments. For a year after the inauguration, the US administration maintained an ambiguous position. Nonetheless, on 12 January 1978, the United States reiterated its opposition to any forms of participation of communists in the Italian government. Drawing on a varied set of sources and analysing the role of non-state actors, including think tanks and university centres, this article examines the debate on the Italian "communist question" within the Carter administration and among its advisers. Such discussion will be placed within a wider debate that crossed America's liberal culture.


Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent

This chapter examines how the United States and the Soviet Union tried to maintain their respective spheres of influence during the Cold War, especially in three regions: Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Latin America. The death of Joseph Stalin and the assumption of power by the triumvirate of Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Georgi Malenkov resulted in a fresh approach to domestic issues and to the nature of Soviet control over its European satellites. The apparent change produced a new Soviet approach to East–West relations. The chapter first considers how the new Soviet leadership addressed the crisis in East Germany before analysing American influence in Western Europe and US relations with Latin America. The discussion covers themes and events such as the Soviet policy on Hungary and Poland, the Messina Conference and the Spaak Committee, nuclear cooperation and multilateral force, and the US response to the Cuban Revolution.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Jurado ◽  
Lina Mur ◽  
María Sol Pérez Aguirreburualde ◽  
Estefanía Cadenas-Fernández ◽  
Beatriz Martínez-López ◽  
...  

Abstract African swine fever causes substantial economic losses in the swine industry in affected countries. Traditionally confined to Africa with only occasional incursions into other regions, ASF began spreading into Caucasian countries and Eastern Europe in 2007, followed by Western Europe and Asia in 2018. Such a dramatic change in the global epidemiology of ASF has resulted in concerns that the disease may continue to spread into disease-free regions such as the US. In this study, we estimated the risk of introduction of ASF virus into the US through smuggling of pork in air passenger luggage. Results suggest that the mean risk of ASFV introduction into the US via this route has increased by 183.33% from the risk estimated before the disease had spread into Western Europe or Asia. Most of the risk (67.68%) was associated with flights originating from China and Hong Kong, followed by the Russian Federation (26.92%). Five US airports accounted for >90% of the risk. Results here will help to inform decisions related to the design of ASF virus surveillance strategies in the US.


2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-300
Author(s):  
Michael De Groot

This article contends that Western Europe played a crucial and overlooked role in the collapse of Bretton Woods. Most scholars highlight the role of the United States, focusing on the impact of US balance of payments deficits, Washington’s inability to manage inflation, the weakness of the US dollar, and American domestic politics. Drawing on archival research in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, this article argues that Western European decisions to float their currencies at various points from 1969 to 1973 undermined the fixed exchange rate system. The British, Dutch, and West Germans opted to float their currencies as a means of protecting against imported inflation or protecting their reserve assets, but each float reinforced speculators’ expectations that governments would break from their fixed parities. The acceleration of financial globalization and the expansion of the Euromarkets in the 1960s made Bretton Woods increasingly difficult to defend.


Author(s):  
Simon Collins ◽  
Tim Horn ◽  
Loon Gangte ◽  
Emmanuel Trenado ◽  
Vuyiseka Dubula

Community responses to the AIDS crisis have changed traditional approaches to medicine, healthcare, health systems, and research. Earlier approaches were rooted in widespread discrimination against key affected populations who were already socially marginalized. The background of community responses, first in the United States and then in other regions, each has a special history. This chapter provides an overview of historical community responses to HIV and is written by activists from the United States, India, South Africa and Western Europe. Examples of key projects include the role of peer advocacy and treatment literacy, which have enabled people living with HIV to learn more about HIV and treatment, adherence, treatment choice, drug resistance, and pipeline research for better drugs in the future. The outcome of this advocacy is that people living with HIV have been empowered to take an active role in their healthcare. HIV advocacy also provides an example of how the international activism that has changed the face of global healthcare is rooted in similar principles developed by early HIV-positive activists and is just as relevant today.


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 663-695
Author(s):  
Bilyana Petkova

AbstractBuilding on the theory of democratic constitutionalism, I assess the political implications of the constitutional space formed by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and national constitutional courts in Europe. Democratic constitutionalism helps situate the role of constitutional courts in stimulating a degree of consensus, necessary for governance of heterogeneous communities such as the United States and the European Union. Questions of legitimacy and confidence in the judiciary come to the fore. I examine a mechanism used by the US Supreme Court, the CJEU and the ECtHR alike to foster democratic constitutionalism: in order to confront challenges to judicial legitimacy and remain responsive to the extra-judicial environment, these courts rely on majoritarian trends, or consensus, inspired by, but not limited to, the constitutional law of federal states and member countries.


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 197-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lykourgos Kourkouvelas

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union and its East European allies sought to prevent the installation of U.S. nuclear missiles in Western Europe by embarking on a diplomatic “peace offensive” that included proposals for the creation of denuclearized zones in various geographical areas of Europe. This article considers how the NATO countries responded to these proposals. In the end, the Western allies rejected proposals for the denuclearization of the Balkans and other areas in Europe, but discussions within NATO's councils often proved complicated, especially regarding southern Europe. In the case of the 1957 Stoica proposal for the denuclearization of the Balkans, the leading NATO countries stepped back and let Turkey and Greece reject the proposal, but by 1963, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and other key allied countries as well as the NATO bureaucracy assumed a more active role in evaluating and ultimately rejecting the notion of denuclearization in the Mediterranean.


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 673-674
Author(s):  
Virginia Garrard-Burnett

The Politics of the Spirit is Timothy Steigenga's long-awaited quantitative study of religious affiliation and political behavior in Central America. What he has done in this spare and conscientious study is to take to task the “conventional wisdom” about Protestantism in Central America. This is a formidable endeavor, given the flood of scholarly literature that has been produced by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists about Protestantism, and especially Pentecostalism, in Latin America over the past two decades. Because Pentecostalism seemed to emerge in Central America during the region's political crisis of the late twentieth century, much of this literature carried with it a highly deterministic subtext, defined by Max Weber and by models of political behavior borrowed from the United States and European experiences.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.V. Merenkov ◽  
R. Campa ◽  
N.P. Dronishinets

In connection with the active role of Russia and other countries in the design and implementation of devices with artificial intelligence (AI), there is a need to study the opinion of different social groups on this technology and the problems that arise when using it. The purpose of this work is to analyze public opinion on AI, in Russia and various foreign countries, and the possible consequences of its implementation in different areas of human activity. The research has revealed students’ opinions about AI devices and the problems related to their development in Russia. The research methods adopted are a content analysis of foreign publications devoted to the study of public opinion on AI and a questionnaire survey. Overall, 190 students of the Ural Federal University enrolled in Bachelor’s and Master’s programs were interviewed. The analysis of publications devoted to the study of public opinion in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, as well as the results of our survey, has led to the conclusion that the majority of people have only a vague idea of what AI devices are. Our study has revealed that 23.6% of the respondents know nothing about AI. 36% of the respondents believe that in the near future the most demanded specialists in the labor market will be those who create robots and control their work. The survey has also shown the important role of mass media and general and special education institutions in informing the population about the opportunities and problems that arise when devices that exceed human mental capabilities are created and enter the social fabric. Keywords: public opinion, artificial intelligence, subjects of public opinion, representations of social groups about artificial intelligence


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