Can the EU be a federal democracy? Assessing the horizontal and vertical dimension of the EU government from comparative perspective

The European Union remains an ambivalent polity. This uncertainty complicates the assessment of its democratic and federal quality. Drawing on comparative federalism research can contribute not only to making sense of whether, or rather which kind of federalism the EU has developed. It can also enable addressing such a compounded, but necessary inquiry into the federal and democratic character of the EU and how to ascertain which type of democratic government for which type of federal union may be appropriate. The article first elaborates a framework to assess the dimensions of federal and democratic government, drawing on comparative federalism research to delineate basic types of federal democracy. Here the democratic dimension of government is taken as referring primarily to the horizontal division of powers (among ‘branches’) of government, the federal dimension to the vertical division of powers (among ‘levels’) of governments. The framework is applied to the government of the EU in order to gauge its own type(s) of division of power arrangements and the interlinkage between them. Finally, the discussion reflects on whether or rather how the EU could comprise a federal democracy, especially in light of recent crisis challenges and subsequent institutional developments in EU governance.

Sustainable Development in Middle Powers’ Governance Arrangements

Considering middle powers’ potential to address new demands worldwide and their propensity to contribute to new forms of institution-building in global governance, arrangements between them consist of interesting opportunities to promote sustainable development. However, some have shown to be more effective than others in this regard. When observing two of these partnerships’ outcomes between 2015 and 2018, India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA) Trilateral Forum has demonstrated more effectiveness than Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, and Australia (MIKTA) New Innovative Partnership. To understand why, this study analyses specialized literature, with special attention to Koenig-Archibugi’s (2002) framework on global governance arrangements’ effectiveness. Arguing that middle power arrangements that address sustainable development are more effective when benefiting from greater functional specialization and that diversified power access also plays a role, this study raises awareness about middle powers’ relevance in addressing new global demands. The study points out the nascent research on these informal partnerships and the causal relations between these arrangements’ structures and effectiveness.

Confronting Idea Stealers in the Workplace: The Unfortunate Moral Credentialing Granted to Power-Holders

How and when do employees confront one another for stealing their ideas? Business communication literature on confronting unethical behavior is synthesized with moral licensing theory to better understand responses to unethical actors about unjustified credit taking in the workplace. In this message production experiment, working adults ( N = 344) were randomly assigned to respond to a supervisor, peer coworker, or subordinate who stole or ignored the participant’s intellectual contributions. Content and statistical analyses revealed subordinates were comparatively less direct when confronting bosses, suggesting third-party moral licensing and moral credentialing were measurable in communication patterns. Importantly, this dynamic was not attributable to perceptions of task interdependence. Instead, subordinates perceived the stealing or ignoring of their ideas to be less unethical than did bosses. Additionally, individuals whose ideas have been stolen in the workplace were less confrontational compared to those who have not. Thus, data suggest incremental acquiescence to this form of workplace wrongdoing, particularly when the transgressor holds high hierarchical status. Taken together, these data may explain how recognition for ideas tends to spread vertically to bosses (labeled here, vertical credit creep), which may function to reinforce established power arrangements and to perpetuate unjustified credit taking in the workplace.

Indonesia: The Military’s Transformation From Praetorian Ruler to Presidential Coalition Partner

Indonesia is a highly revealing case study for pinpointing both the conditions under which militaries in postcolonial societies intervened in political affairs and the patterns that led to their subsequent marginalization from politics. It also demonstrates how militaries could defend some of their political interests even after they were removed from the highest echelons of power. Emboldened by the war for independence (1945–1949), the Indonesian military used divisions, conflicts, and instabilities in the early postindependence polity to push for an institutionalized role in political institutions. While it was granted such a role in 1959, it used a further deterioration in civilian politics in the early 1960s to take power in 1965. Military intervention in politics in Indonesia, then, has been as much the result of civilian weaknesses as of military ambitions, confirming Finer’s theory on the civilian role in military power quests. Military rule in Indonesia weakened first as a consequence of the personalization of the polity built by the leader of the 1965 takeover, General Suharto. After a decade in power, Suharto turned the praetorian regime into a personal autocracy, transforming the military from a political actor into an agent. When Suharto’s regime collapsed in 1998 after being hit by the Asian financial crisis, the military was discredited—allowing civilian rulers to dismantle some of its privileges. But continued divisions among civilian forces mitigated the push for the military’s full depoliticization—once again proving Finer’s paradigm. As post-Suharto presidents settled into the new power arrangements, they concluded that the military was a crucial counterweight against the possible disloyalty of their coalition partners. Thus, under the paradigm of coalitional presidentialism, rulers integrated the military into their regimes and granted it concessions in return. In short, while the post-1998 military is much diminished from its role in predemocratic regimes, it retains sufficient power to protect its core ideological and material interests.

Introduction

This chapter explores what it means when people say that they practice religion. It focuses on what people do and say rather than only on what they think and believe. It explains how practices are the interconnected strings of activity that constitute personal lives and social relationships that shape the contours of people's collective existence. All practices are an interplay of habit and improvisation, of choice and constraint. The chapter also talks about the practice in the study of religion, which is an emerging and yet insufficiently elaborated development. It directs attention to how religion is enacted within the everyday settings of people's personal lives and in the public discourse and power arrangements that govern their lives together. It boldly challenges the notion that religion can be understood in terms of predefined categories of affiliation and belief or that religion is too subjective, too idiosyncratic to be a focus of academic inquiry at all.

Feminist Frameworks for Educational Leadership in the United States

Feminist insights offer ways to rethink and restructure schooling to fit with realities faced by educators, students, and families. This article relies on its model of values affecting schooling policies and practices then presents the range of feminisms, It shows how feminisms would be seen as looking awry and would be assessed as inadequate and inappropriate for leaders. It then charts their implications for school leaders, who will be able to identify the values, structures, and power arrangements to be questioned and altered.

Assemblages of desire

This paper considers the operations of affective technology within contemporary technocapitalism through affect theory. It is argued that affective technologies enter into power arrangements with political and corporate interests, altering an acting bodies’ affect — in the Spinozan definition, the “capacity to affect and be affected” — within social and political life. Affective computation uses machine learning techniques to ‘capture’ and quantify affective intensities in data form, automating a normalizing logic of division and categorization that classifies bodies, emotions, and objects. Affective technologies invoke what Luciana Parisi called “automated decisionism,” where machine learning processes digitize incomputable states in order to impose a self-rationalizing logic structure that regulates a user-subject’s actions (Parisi, “Reprogramming Decisionism”). Affective technologies exert biopolitical control over users through quantified logics of division and devaluation. It is suggested thataffect might simultaneously operate as an analytic lens to speculate on whether collective affectivity and political agency might be reclaimed through using these technologies. The following concludes with an engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages of desire” to suggest that affective technologies might produce other micropolitical arrangements that increase user agency as social and political subjects.

Beyond the confines of the law: Foucault’s intimations of a genealogy of the modern state

The general claim advanced in this article is that Foucault’s genealogy of the modern state traces two ideal-typically different power arrangements at the origin of the modern state, roughly referred to as ‘sovereign power’ and ‘governmentality’. They are ideal-typically different in that they operate according to a different logic, including different ends, means and modi operandi. The more specific claim, then, is that due to this different logic, their ever changing interpenetration on the level of the state is imbalanced. In order for ‘governmentality’ to operate according to the law, it must be backed by the juridical frameworks provided by sovereign power, but then again these juridical frameworks prove inadequate and insufficient to curb ‘governmentality’s’ operational procedures as well as the modalities and intensities of its implementation. In other words, in his genealogy of the modern state, Foucault tracks down ‘governmentality’ as a distinctive form of power which, although intertwined with the state, cannot juridically be contained by the state. It cannot be appropriately restrained by its legal regulations and, as such, constitutes an excess vis-à-vis those regulations.

The Tragedy of the Chosen: Saul’s Kingship—1 Samuel

THE STORY OF Samuel, the last and possibly the best of the judges (1 Sam 7:15), provides the framework through which we view the rise and fall of Israel’s first king. The opening section of the book focuses on Samuel’s birth, childhood, and lifelong work as a circuit-riding judge (7:16–17), and then in his old age, his reluctant anointing of a monarch so Israel can fulfill its ambition to be “like all the nations” (8:20). Saul’s last important exchange before his own death is with the disgruntled ghost of Samuel, summoned back from Sheol by a medium, through whom Samuel delivers, not the guidance for which Saul longs, but rather a last rehearsal of Saul’s royal failures (28:16–19); hence, Samuel renders the final judgment on Saul’s kingship. But the book’s first and most comprehensive statement about how God characteristically disturbs human power arrangements comes many years before that, in an exultant song (2:1–10) uttered by Samuel’s mother, the once-barren Hannah. After bearing and weaning her son, Hannah pronounces that he will be ...

Relating Nationalism and Political Theory

This paper discusses the limitations of the liberal model of multiculturalism as a conceptual framework suitable for thinking about justice in complex ethnoreligious national contestations by introducing a wide spectrum of its critics. Liberal formulations of multiculturalism, it is argued, do not challenge the underpinning power infrastructure of the polity nor the normative definition of belonging as articulated by the so-called 'majority culture'. Conversely, the polycentric tactic articulated by Nancy Fraser indeed offers the possibility for a counter hegemonic reimagining of the power arrangements. But it does not address how religion may partake in such introspective rethinking. This process does not imply merely a power reconfiguration. It also entails a reassessment and rethinking of the legitimizing ethos of the nation.