Citizens, Polarization, and the Pandemic in the Italian Hybrid News Media System

Italy was the first Western democracy to experience mass lockdown in response to COVID-19. In the early stages of the pandemic, citizens' trust in the government increased and journalists “indexed” to institutional sources; however, elite polarization was not long in coming, in tandem with an infodemic. Rooted in this context, this longitudinal study investigates Italian citizens' positions on an issue which lies at the very heart of democracy: the balance between public health and individual freedoms. Findings indicate that citizens' opinions did not polarize between extreme communitarian and libertarian stances. On the contrary, a significant majority of citizens expressed strong beliefs in the primacy of public health over their freedoms. Extreme libertarians were only a minority, and their positions were driven by a completely different vision of the news reliability of “older” and “newer” media arenas, different attitudes toward the “official truth,” and different levels of trust in the government to those of extreme communitarians. Implications are discussed in the conclusion.

The Islamist Challenge in the Greater Mediterranean

The article examines and analyzes the spread of Islamism or Political Islam movements in the Greater Mediterranean and their increasing influence on the socio-political situation in 2011-2021. The historical factors, which contributed to the emergence of the hearths of Islamic culture in the countries which entered the Arab Caliphate in the Greater Mediterranean parallel with the Antique centers of European civilization, are retrospectively exposed. The Islamist ideologues called the Ottoman Imperia the heir of the Arab Caliphate. The main doctrinal conceptions of Political Islam and its more influential movement Muslim Brotherhood (forbidden in Russia) are discovered. The factor of the Arab Spring, which considerably influenced the strengthening of the Islamist movements, as well as its continuation of the protests in the Arab countries in 2018-2021, is examined. The main attention is allotted to analyzing the actions of the Islamic movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and in the Libyan and Syrian conflicts too. The influence of external actors, the most active of which was Turkey, is revealed. The author also analyzes the situation in the Arab-Muslim communities in the European Mediterranean on the example of France, where social-economic problems, aggravated by COVID-19, have contributed to the activation of radical Islamist elements. It is concluded that confronting the Islamist challenge is a complex and controversial task. Its solution depends on both forceful opposition to radical groups and an appropriate foreign policy. An important negative factor is the aggravation of socio-economic problems and crisis phenomena in the institutions of Western democracy, in response to which the ideologues of Islamism preach an alternative world order in the form of an Islamic state. At the moment the Western society and the countries which repeat its liberal model do not give a distinct response to this challenge.

The Balance of Power in The World in March 1939

This essay surveys the political fluidity and antagonism in the triangular relationship among the main power groupings in March 1939—the Soviet Union, the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan), and the Western Powers (Britain and France above all). Rather than focusing on their military capabilities and combat options, the essay concentrates on the ideas expressed in each camp—in the Western Powers, interest in the rule of law and constitutionalism; in the Axis Powers, ambitions for territorial acquisitions and increased might; and in the Soviet Union, the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary vision. In conjunction with this three-cornered dialogue, the essay examines factors in addition to ideas that influenced decision-making, including greed, coercion, resentments, power pressures, national egoisms, dependence on allies, and perceived security imperatives. Three combinations were hypothetically possible: a Nazi–Soviet alliance, a Soviet–Western alliance, or a Nazi–Western alliance. In August 1939, Nazi Germany offered the Soviet Union a non-aggression pact that enabled Moscow to seize territories in Eastern Europe and to limit its immediate involvement in combat. Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought about a Soviet–Western alliance determined to defeat the Axis, despite the chasm between Soviet totalitarianism and Western democracy.

Democracy and Borderline Cases: Covid-19 Emergency

Since the primary mode of Covid transmission is person-to-person contact both through respiratory droplets produced by sneezing, breathing, coughing and direct contact with an infecting subject or indirect through hand-mediated transfer of the virus, governments had to limit the contact between individuals to reduce the risk of coronavirus infection. The effect has been a drastic reduction of human interactions, as these were “cut to the bone”. The strict rules the world population has been following, have brought about an urgent debate on the behaviour and regulations that governments have embraced. Fundamental questions about democracy and social theory have been raised by scholars and theorists seeking for a possible answer about why, how and whether the Covid-19 emergency has caused a transformation in a society and, if it is so which are the effects and where are we heading. The paper will be divided in two sections: the former is focused on different perspectives on the impact of Covid-19 and aims to understand whether a western democracy can handle a borderline case like this, or does it have to develop into some other social system. The latter section will focus on what the Covid emergency has been causing in a society and how governments have decided to control and face this situation.

Why Non-Democracy Engages with Western Democracy-Promotion Programs

ABSTRACT Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, the Chinese government was distinctly open to the Western offer of democracy-assistance programs. It cooperated with a number of Western organizations to improve the rule of law, village elections, administrative capacity, and civil society in China. Why did the Chinese government engage with democracy promoters who tried to develop these democratic attributes within China? The author argues that the government intended to use Western aid to its advantage. The Chinese Communist Party had launched governance reforms to strengthen its regime legitimacy, and Chinese officials found that Western democracy assistance could be used to facilitate their own governance-reform programs. The article traces the process of how the government’s strategic intention translated into policies of selective openness, and includes evidence from firsthand interviews, propaganda materials, and research by Chinese experts. The findings show how democracy promoters and authoritarian leaders have different expectations of the effects of limited democratic reform within nondemocratic systems. Empirically, reflecting on the so-called golden years of China’s engagement with the West sheds new light on the Chinese Communist Party’s survival strategy through authoritarian legitimation.

Public Opinion of Winners and Losers

Chapter 10 analyzes public opinion data to identify individuals who were more and less likely to support transitional reforms. In the mid-1990s, significant numbers of disaffected Russians indicated a preference for the old Soviet regime when compared to the current regime or a Western democracy, which suggests evidence for a phenomenon termed “red nostalgia.” Public opinion data also suggest that market capitalism is more popular in Central and Eastern Europe, but that many of those who expressed support for reform did it out of self-interest. The beneficiaries of transition—mostly the wealthy, young, educated, urban, and men—were more likely to support markets and democracy than their demographic counterparts. The chapter shows that across the postsocialist world, differences in support for reform are indicative of widespread belief that transition was being led from above, and that political and economic reforms were being imposed on the socialist masses by liberal elites.

Three varieties of Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Rule by the experts, the people, the leader

Neoliberalism and authoritarianism are intimately connected, as is demonstrated by the existence of a growing body of literature on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. This article provides a taxonomy of authoritarian neoliberalism and claims that it appears in three varieties – technocracy, populist nationalism, and traditional authoritarianism. Also, it proposes both an overview of the varieties and an analysis of three states as case studies. States are investigated as actors which strongly contribute to the neoliberal project amidst a more complex process of multilocalized and variegated neoliberalizations, which have to be incorporated into the comparative research. First, Italy is studied as a consolidated Western democracy which has been often governed by technocrats, independent, non-party professionals who have recurrently been in power since the 1990s, and within the frame of an increasingly technocratic European Union. Second, the paper concentrates on Hungary, a semi-peripheral Central European country which has become an epitome of a populist nationalism with increasingly authoritarian traits. Third, the paper focuses on Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Union republic with no significant experience of liberal democracy before independence, and a key example of the ‘traditional authoritarian’ variety. The three varieties, however, are sometimes combined and coexisting, and their evolution will be decisive for the future of capitalism and liberal democracy.

TRANSFORMATION OF CURRENT ISSUES OF MODERN SOCIO-POLITICAL CHANGES

The article provides estimates of the “material standard of living” of the world’s population by periods (life expectancy, the volume of production of consumer goods, services, and products per capita). Many scientists and experts, politicians and, statesmen who have left their mark on world history have thought about the concept of progress. Most of them supported the idea of “progress” only from the bottom up. One described the pinnacle of progress as Chinese communism and, another called it “Western democracy.” This one-sided explanation reflects in the theory of five entities. (primitive, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and, communism or Western democracy). It emphasizes that all nations must go through these formations. The end of the twentieth century was characterized not only by the breakdown of the socialist system so “longawaited” in the West, the disappearance of the bipolar world and the emergence of world centers of power, unpredictable insane globalization with all the ensuing consequences, but, as it is obvious now, by the emergence of new, previously unseen threats and challenges not only to the sovereignty of individual countries but, above all, by threats to the existence of both each individual and by challenges to the existence of people itself. The first quarter of the 21st century, more than ever before, stuck out, exposed and, brought to the culmination point all painful problems - environmental, economic, geopolitical, socio-cultural, etc. The problem of adequate analysis and forecasting of these threats and challenges did not test, methodologically verified. The study made it possible to conclude that the issue of global and national security on earth is one of the main tasks of any state. And the understanding of the current requirements plays a principal role in preventing the emergence of a threat factor. Thus, understanding the period is one of the dominant needs in preventing the emergence of a threat factor

Between Religion and State

On the basis of Martin Luther’s theologia crucis in the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), the Lutheran concept of law in the 20th Century is examined. Luther’s distinction of religious and civil dimension of law with its religious restriction to a convicting function regarding the sin is received in the Luther-Renaissance of the 1920 and 1930s. The sample of Emanuel Hirsch (1888–1972) gives insight into the deeply ambivalent character of the Lutheran concept of law before World War II which combined a profound theory of Christian subjectivity with a theory of state promoting German nationalism in opposition to western democracy. The moderate theology of Wolfgang Trillhaas (1903–1995) reflecting the experience of the Nazi-Regime de-potentializes the Lutheran prejudice against the law in order to achieve new democratic perspectives on the notion of law in dogmatics and ethics. Thus, an affirmative position is established despite a remaining ambivalence in contemporary Lutheran Protestantism.

The chinese communist party is responsible for millions of deaths and the global disaster by enabling the spread of the wuhan virus

Since the ruling party/military in China by now claim to have managed to control and halt the spread of the corona virus in contrast to the rest of the world, it use its alleged success to justify a claim that their form of rule is superior to western democracy. They also expect us to forget that the infections started and spread from Wuhan and by controlling all form of information inside the country, by now they even try to claim that the virus originated elsewhere. They are also using their economic power to prevent mentioning that the virus originated in China. Their embassy in Germany must have pressured the publishing house Carlsen to pulp the entire edition of a children’s book about the corona virus just because it mentioned that the virus came from China.