Softening culture, opening Europe

Focaal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 (56) ◽  
pp. 19-34
Author(s):  
Jeff Katcherian

This article examines the development of cultural policy recommendations, in the form of “soft law,” by the Civil Society Platform for Intercultural Dialogue, a nascent European civil society collaboration aiming to make culture a separate political endeavor within the context of European integration. Drawing on fieldwork among European bureaucrats and members of European civil society in Brussels, Belgium, the article offers an alternative discussion from common understandings of soft law, paying close attention to law as an aesthetic form that challenges dominant modes of policy-making. An investigation of soft forms of law provides a useful perspective to those who attempt to define, locate, and create European identity.

Focaal ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 (55) ◽  
pp. 27-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Banu Karaca

The notion of culture has loomed large in discourses and polemics regarding European integration and immigration in the European framework. While culture, as in fundamental cultural difference, is identified as the source of contemporary political quandaries, its incarnation as intercultural dialogue is conceived as their solution. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the arts settings of Berlin and Istanbul, this article elucidates how this type of "culture talk" intersects with recent cultural policy formations in the European Union and the national arenas of Germany and Turkey. Much of the political productivity of culture arises from a constant slippage between the different, often contradictory, meanings accorded to the culture-concept. This extension of the "rhetoric of culture" engenders a shift from a governance of culture to one through culture by relaying an array of pressing political concerns from the realm of social and economic policy to that of culture in the sense of artistic expression.


Author(s):  
Ruslan Mokhnyuk

The purpose of the article is to study the trinity and interactions of European integration clusters, state cultural policy, and civil society. The methodology is based on the integrated use of general scientific and special-applied methods, namely: analysis and synthesis, abstraction and concretization, analogy, and comparison. A special culturological method, ie the method of culturological determination made it possible to consider the influence of cultural factors on the formation of a socio-cultural, civic environment. The use of empirical level methods allowed us to form a holistic picture of the organization of European integration cultural practices in the Rivne region, observing the activities of cultural institutions in the region. The scientific novelty lies in the complexity of the study of the state cultural policy of Ukraine with a focus on its social, economic, mental state and content of modern European integration modes, which activates the process of civil society development. Conclusions. The creation of a single cultural space in Europe is based on the cultural diversity of countries, cultural diplomacy, which ensures communication and finding common ground in establishing cooperation. Sustainable development and gender equality are new priorities in the cultural policy of the European Union. For Ukraine in the context of European integration, it is important to create conditions for harmonization, preservation, actualization of national cultural space despite the fragmentation and dispersion of cultural heritage, as well as the intensification of the national sector of cultural industries, ensuring the competitiveness of national cultural product in the world market. with the involvement of representatives of civil society. These are the basic bases for creating the concept of state cultural policy in Ukraine.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Foster

Since the early 1990s a dominant modernist narrative has assumed that European integration and the progressive march of secularism, multiculturalism and increased material prosperity would lead to the fading-away of tribal, national, racial and other parochial identities; identities ostensibly incompatible with a meta-national 'European' identity founded not in ethnosymbolic myth, but in cosmopolitanism. This has informed not only academic theory but has also guided 60 years of EU policy making, with Ernst Haas' doctrine of neofunctionalist spill-over dominating European assumptions that a pan-European identity would replace national affiliations. Brexit contradicts this in four ways. First, Brexit demonstrates the renewed appeal of ethnic nationalism on multiple levels: nationalist (British), sub-nationalist (English), and meta-nationalist (white nationalism). Second, Brexit demonstrates shifts in traditional nationalism in the form of gulfs in a neo-medieval society. Third, Brexit demonstrates the existence of multiple and incompatible 'European' identities. Finally, Brexit demonstrates how a specifically EUropean identity can be just as hostile and exclusionary as ethnic nationalism. This reappearance of social discord, ethnosymbolic identities, and the praxis of ethnic identity exemplified by the British, but seen across the EU, necessitates a fundamental reconsideration of the apparently irreversible trends of an unfalsifiable theory of modernist, neofunctionalist progressivism in the form of European integration. Using the British as a case study, this paper argues that the very processes of European integration have, by accelerating antagonistic national and EU identities, inadvertently constructed the apparatus for EUrope's potential disintegration.


Author(s):  
Larysa Kovryk-Tokar

Every nation is quite diverse in terms of his historical destiny, spiritual priorities, and cultural heritage. However, voluntary European integration, which is the final aim of political integration that began in the second half of the twentieth century from Western Europe, provided for an availability of large number of characteristics in common in political cultures of their societies. Therefore, Ukraine needs to find some common determinants that can create inextricable relationship between the European Community and Ukraine. Although Ukrainian culture is an intercultural weave of two East macrocivilizations, according to the author, Ukraine tends to Western-style society with its openness, democracy, tolerance, which constitute the basic values of Europeans. Keywords: Identity, collective identity, European values, European integration


Author(s):  
Sheryl Felecia Means

Across the Central American region, several groups received political autonomy by the end of the 20th century. By granting autonomy to these groups, countries like Nicaragua acknowledged certain populations as members of distinct ethnic groups. This was not the case for every country or group in the region, and the lack of effective ethno-racial policy-making considerations across Central America has led to language attrition, loss of land and water rights, and commodification of historic communities. This article focuses on Honduras and Belize as unique sites of ethno-racial and socio-cultural policy making, group identity making and unmaking, and group rights for the Garinagu. Specifically, this work forwards a re-examination of national ethno-racial policy and a critical assessment of political models based on ethno-cultural collective rights intended to combat racial discrimination.


2019 ◽  
pp. 78-83
Author(s):  
E. O. Kazmiryshyn

The article is devoted to determining the list of administrative and legal instruments for ensuring the implementation of state policy in the field of European integration of Ukraine. In order to achieve the stated purpose, it seems necessary to solve the following research problems: 1) to analyze the domestic scientific literature devoted to understanding the category of “administrative and legal instruments” or its analogues; 2) identify the types of administrative and legal instruments used by public administration entities in implementing state policy in the field of European integration of Ukraine; 3) to specify the prospects of expanding the list of administrative and legal instruments that public administration entities may use in implementing state policy in the field of European integration of Ukraine. As a result of the study the following conclusions are reached: they use the appropriate administrative and legal instruments to perform the tasks assigned to the subjects of the public administration of Ukraine involved in the implementation of state policy in the sphere of European integration of Ukraine. The conducted research allows to state that the specifics of this direction of state policy of Ukraine determines their insignificant list. These include: by-laws, planning acts and information acts; the necessity of introducing a clear procedure for involving civil society institutions and interested individuals in developing, discussing and monitoring the implementation of state policy plans in the field of European integration of Ukraine has been proved. The procedure for such involvement should be defined at the level of the Administrative Procedure Code of Ukraine; the necessity of expanding the list of administrative and legal instruments used by the public administration of Ukraine in implementing state policy in the field of European integration of Ukraine is substantiated. Their extension is possible, for example, through the involvement of administrative contracts, in particular: subordination and coordination administrative agreements. They could become the legal basis for the interaction of public administration entities of Ukraine, as well as subjects of national public administration and local self-government bodies or civil society institutions in particular areas of implementation of state policy in the field of European integration of Ukraine.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (4) ◽  
pp. 161-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mykhailo Trebin

Author analyzes the basis for the formation of civil society in Ukraine, especially the formation of the basic institutions of civil society in the context of European integration and international trends, the ways of further improving the institutions of civil society, to overcome the negative trends in the Ukrainian way into the European community.


2021 ◽  
pp. 183-198
Author(s):  
Anatoliy Krugashov ◽  
Andriana Kostenko

Abstract. The article deals with the wide range of mechanisms in support of civil society institutions–government interaction in the context of developing and implementing European integration reforms in Ukraine. The authors identified 6 strategic documents and 20 areas of reform related to the process of European integration, as well as the key issues concerning implementation of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. The authors conclude that positive trends are visible in recent decades in the institutional development of Ukrainian civil society, which has become a driving force of the country’s European integration aspirations. In this setting, civil society institutions (CSIs) work with government agencies, engage in informal advocacy, conduct monitoring policies, perform and publish policy analysis and recommendations, and work with and lobby international agencies and other actors.


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