scholarly journals A válságok hatása a politikai rendszerekre

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-256

Összefoglaló. A második világháborút követően talán nem volt egyetlen esemény sem, amely olyan hatást gyakorolt a világ országaira, mint a koronavírus-járvány kirobbanása. A vírus-válság felgyorsította a liberális világrend erózióját, kiélezte a nagyhatalmak közötti ellentéteket, válságforgatókönyvek és prognózisok készültek. A válság rávilágított arra is, hogy kudarcra vannak ítélve azok a kormányzatok, amelyek nem ruháztak be a közösségi infrastruktúrába, és elhanyagolták a közszolgálati tudást. Az is kiderült, hogy a kormányzati intézményeknek szakértőkre és nem lojális mamelukokra van szüksége a válsághelyzetből fakadó közpolitikai gondok megoldása során. Egy világméretű és példátlan sebességgel terjedő válság elleni eredményes fellépés elsődleges frontvonala tehát a nemzetállam maradt. Summary. In times of crisis, all political systems give the executive exceptional powers, as it is not possible to face new and rapidly changing challenges within the framework of existing laws. One of the American founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, who feared the excessive power of central government, believed that in times of emergency the system of checks and balances should be suspended. Constitutional democracy will be threatened if the rule of law is not restored after the emergency has passed. Perhaps no event since the Second World War has had such an impact on the countries of the world as the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic. The virus crisis accelerated the erosion of the liberal world order, sharpened the antagonism between the great powers, especially the US and China, and highlighted the vulnerability of the production chains that had been outsourced to the Far East in the hope of cheap labour. Crisis scenarios and forecasts were drawn up, and prominent scientists and researchers expressed the view that there would be no return to the world before the virus. The virus crisis has also highlighted the failure of governments that have not invested in community infrastructure and have neglected public knowledge. It has also shown that government institutions need experts, not loyal mamelukes, to solve public policy problems arising from the crisis. The coronavirus is the most pressing challenge of this century so far, and in responding to it, localism is being valorised as a crucial centre of solidarity and problem-solving. Forecasters fear that rising inequalities and the erosion of family savings could trigger a wave of political discontent that is more angry and violent than ever before. The majority of people will not be able to manage their children’s digital education and work from home without a separate room and computing infrastructure, so governments will need to develop special programmes to address this, and people’s health and the capacity of public health to cope will come to the fore. The pandemic crisis has provided a new argument for those who argued for the reinvention of the state and the importance of governments’ ability to act quickly to deal effectively with natural and economic crises. In recent decades, many have buried the nation state, arguing that successful responses to global problems in a globalised world cannot be found within the framework of a nation state. The Covid-19 crisis has shown that the nation state remains the first front line for effective action against a crisis that is spreading at an unprecedented global scale and speed. Different countries have followed different crisis management strategies and very significant differences in contagion rates have emerged. The crisis has reassessed the role of nation states and borders, which already played an important role in receiving migration flows.

Author(s):  
Ivan I. Antonovich

The article analyses the main directions and paths of Chinese modernisation, the features of the US’ opposition to it, it is concluded that the success of socialism with Chinese characteristics creates a new world situation in which new socio-economic civilisational foundations can create a society of socialist orientation. It is noted that Deng Xiaoping, without holding any government posts, being only the chairman of the CPC Central Committee’s Defense Committee, led the process of Chinese modernisation, which brought China to the forefront of scientific, technological and social progress in the world. The author argues that the basis of Chinese success is the Leninist formula of the NEP – the use of private entrepreneurship under the control of a socialist state in order to develop at an accelerated rate of social wealth in the amount necessary to meet the basic life needs of its citizens. The path of China was fraught with many unsuccessful and tragic experiments, therefore the current socio-economic leap forward in civilisation is an unprecedented event in world history. The implementation of goals and objectives of such a global scale will make serious changes in the world order, and require a new political philosophy. The success of socialism with Chinese characteristics within the country, as well as in programs to support the progressive development of countries and peoples of the world ready for cooperation, allows us to give a cautious optimistic assessment of the future Chinese perspective. And this, according to the author, is today a clear threat to the tasks and goals of American domination in the world.


Geophysics ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 654-670 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigmund Hammer

Geophysical activity in explorations for petroleum on a global scale in 1954 was 6.3% lower than the record high of 1953. Notable increases in geophysical effort in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East were not sufficient to overcome the very substantial decreases in the United States and Canada. The reduction occurred mainly in seismic operations, which decreased globally by 8.4%. Gravity activity was on the increase almost everywhere with the world‐wide rise of 7.1%. Magnetic and miscellaneous other geophysical methods also showed moderate increases in the neighborhood of one percent.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elenius ◽  
Alena Bartosova ◽  
Jude Musuuza ◽  
Berit Arheimer

<p>Irrigation practices of various kinds are used in farming all over the world. Especially in cases of over-irrigation and inadequate drainage, evaporation losses can be high and lead to accumulation of minerals in the soils. Water uptake in crops is driven by osmosis, and as such it is reduced or diminished when salt concentrations in the soil water increase. Today, approximately 10 % of irrigated land worldwide has faced diminished production due to salinization, and losses increase every year. There is also concern that global warming can deteriorate production further due to increased evaporation, which should be considered in the light of increasing crop demands with population growth. There is therefore pressing concern to study effects and measures on a global scale.</p><p>Continental to global scale hydrological models have emerged in recent years as tools for flood forecasting and estimation of dynamic water fluxes. HYPE is a catchment-based model that simulates rainfall-runoff as well as water quality processes. Recently, an application was developed based on HYPE that covers almost the entire globe, World Wide HYPE (Arheimer et al., 2019). This tool also has great potential for future global assessments of soil salinization under different scenarios.</p><p>In this work, a salinization routine was developed in HYPE, whereby salt components follow all main natural hydrological pathways as well as irrigation using groundwater or river flow as a water source. Equilibrium reactions, complexation and cation exchange determine the distribution between dissolved and solid states in the soil. A semi-arid catchment in South Africa with salinization issues (the Crocodile River, Mpumalanga province) was chosen for code development, calibration and verification. Evaluations were based on comparison of simulated and observed mineral concentrations in rivers and groundwater. The model was also tested for all of South Africa.</p><p>Detailed analyses of the soil salinity processes were carried out for the Crocodile River catchment. Results show the sensitivity of salinization to hydrological parameters such as recession coefficients, infiltration capacities and macropore flow. This will guide future calibration of the World Wide HYPE model setup. Assessment of the major processes and sources of salinization is performed, and mitigation strategies such as irrigation control and drainage management are tested. Possible regionalization of parameters for global salinization modeling is also suggested based on the results.</p><p>Arheimer, B., Pimentel, R., Isberg, K., Crochemore, L., Andersson, J. C. M., Hasan, A., and Pineda, L. (accepted). Global catchment modelling using World-Wide HYPE (WWH), open data and stepwise parameter estimation, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2019-111, in press, 2019</p>


2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Teeple

Rights define the prevailing relations that constitute a community. They are in turn defined by the character of a given mode of production, and as that changes so too the system of rights. The rights that comprise ‘human rights’ evolved in the transition from feudalism to capitalism and represent the principles of the emerging world order in the 18th and 19th centuries. Only in the aftermath of World War II with the exhaustion or defeat of the European states and Japan was it possible to declare these same principles as belonging to the whole world equally and as intrinsic to all humans - yet within national frameworks. The accumulation of capital on a global scale, however, soon began to undermine the national practice of these human rights. By the end of the 1980s the construction of regional or global ‘enabling frameworks,’ quasi-states for capital, detached from any formal or legitimate means of countervailing political leverage, made human rights appear increasingly like anachronisms. An increasingly violent usurpation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other forms of rights around the world followed. In the absence of a legitimizing set of principles for this new global economy, a growing need for a rationale to govern by fiat becomes the central problem of the day.


2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-314
Author(s):  
François Gauthier

This article is a critical response to Jörg Stolz’s 2019 ISSR presidential address as to the advances made by secularization research over the last 20 years. The article argues that the data presented can be boiled down to confirming what we already knew: the decline of ‘churched’ religion. Sketching a radical epistemological, methodological and empirical critique, it argues that the seven areas of ‘advances’ discussed in the presidential address erode into near insignificance. Because this quantitative research compartmentalizes religion and lacks solid contextualization in the world we live in, it completely overlooks the massive qualitative changes that have been reconfiguring religion on a global scale, and which can be understood as the result of the erosion of the nation-state container at the hands of economic globalization and the massification of neoliberal and consumer dynamics and the consequent substantial changes in global societies, well beyond the West.


Author(s):  
Hans J. Ladegaard

Although there is no exact definition of globalization, and relatively little empirical evidence on how it affects people’s lives, most scholars argue that it reflects an increasingly mobile and interconnected world. People travel for pleasure or work, or they migrate to other parts of the world. They also communicate with linguistic and cultural others, either face-to-face or via modern communication technologies, which requires them to use a global lingua franca (English). This leads to greater interdependence and a sense of sharedness, but also to more intergroup conflicts. Thus, the world has become more interconnected, but also more fragmented, and social and economic inequality both within and across nation-states has become more visible. The importance of culture as an analytical concept in (intercultural) communication research is another pertinent topic in the literature. Some scholars have argued that culture has lost its potency as a meaningful analytical concept and therefore should no longer take center stage in communication research. Others claim that culture will always be salient and influence behavior. How and to what extent globalization changes culture has also been discussed extensively in recent years. Some scholars argue that globalization leads to sameness and uniformity, and ultimately to the end of the nation-state. Others disagree and posit that globalization leads to a strengthening of the nation-state and of the cultural values we associate with it. A meaningful way to test theoretical assumptions about globalization and culture is to analyze communication and work practices in global organizations. Research from these contexts suggests that globalization has not led to cultural assimilation and uniformity. Employees in the global workplace and student sojourners use national stereotypes as a frame of reference when they communicate with cultural others, and they demonstrate high awareness of cultural differences and how they impact their communication, study, and work practices. Recent research on cultural change and globalization has included a critical dimension that questions a world order where the increase in power and cultural and economic wealth in developed countries happens at the expense of poor people with no voice and little visibility living in developing countries. Critical (intercultural) communication research considers these imbalances and also provides a critique of Anglocentric research paradigms, which do not include the cultural and linguistic experiences of non-Western cultural others.


Author(s):  
Charles Sheppard

Ocean temperatures are rising. This is critical for corals and other reef organisms because most live very close to their thermal limits already. The rise is caused by the greenhouse effect from increasing CO2 emissions. Superimposed on a general background rise caused by the general increase in heat content of the world are pulses—ocean heatwaves—caused by vagaries in ocean circulation. Globally, this is now the greatest threat to reefs. Warming pulses cause mass coral bleaching and mortality when the overstressed symbiotic algae are expelled from the corals, showing the white limestone beneath the now transparent coral tissue. All coral reef areas of the world now exhibit mass bleaching events. Recovery of a reef is possible, but only if given some decades of stable temperatures, and predictions are that warming events are occurring increasingly frequently and are of increasing severity. Coral cover on reefs in all reef areas is declining sharply. Seawater also becomes increasingly acidic, which impedes coral calcification. Added to this, there is a lag of 20–40 years for carbon dioxide in the air to equilibrate with the ocean, so even were there to be a cessation in the rise in the atmosphere today, these effects would continue to develop for a few decades more. 350 parts per million CO2 is considered to be a threshold concentration for calcification to be possible but already the atmosphere is at about 415 ppm. Sea levels are rising too as a result, and reefs are degrading and losing their ability to act as breakwaters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-79
Author(s):  
V. T. Yungblud

The Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations, established by culmination of World War II, was created to maintain the security and cooperation of states in the post-war world. Leaders of the Big Three, who ensured the Victory over the fascist-militarist bloc in 1945, made decisive contribution to its creation. This system cemented the world order during the Cold War years until the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the destruction of the bipolar structure of the organization of international relations. Post-Cold War changes stimulated the search for new structures of the international order. Article purpose is to characterize circumstances of foundations formation of postwar world and to show how the historical decisions made by the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition powers in 1945 are projected onto modern political processes. Study focuses on interrelated questions: what was the post-war world order and how integral it was? How did the political decisions of 1945 affect the origins of the Cold War? Does the American-centrist international order, that prevailed at the end of the 20th century, genetically linked to the Atlantic Charter and the goals of the anti- Hitler coalition in the war, have a future?Many elements of the Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations in the 1990s survived and proved their viability. The end of the Cold War and globalization created conditions for widespread democracy in the world. The liberal system of international relations, which expanded in the late XX - early XXI century, is currently experiencing a crisis. It will be necessary to strengthen existing international institutions that ensure stability and security, primarily to create barriers to the spread of national egoism, radicalism and international terrorism, for have a chance to continue the liberal principles based world order (not necessarily within a unipolar system). Prerequisite for promoting idea of a liberal system of international relations is the adjustment of liberalism as such, refusal to unilaterally impose its principles on peoples with a different set of values. This will also require that all main participants in modern in-ternational life be able to develop a unilateral agenda for common problems and interstate relations, interact in a dialogue mode, delving into the arguments of opponents and taking into account their vital interests.


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