The Impact of Mediatization on EU Public Outreach Campaigns

This article addresses the mediatization of the European public sphere(s) and the issues it creates for the implementation of EU-wide public outreach efforts. As applied to the EU context, the concept of mediatization is understood as a relationship between the media and political institutions that causes societal transformation. In this sense, the public sphere is seen as a mediating infrastructure of debates of political legitimacy. In the context of mediatized politics, European public opinion is fragmented and bound to national public spheres. EU public outreach efforts are increasingly filtered and shaped by the media of its member countries. Due to multiple implementation issues, the EU has not been able to offer its members an attractive and unifying identity narrative promoting European values. This article offers some conceptual solutions to the problem.

Building Legitimacy

After the collapse of the communist regime in Eastern Europe, political parties were faced with the necessity of building political legitimacy. This research aims to find out how political myths were instrumentalized by political leaders during the presidential campaigns in order to gain popular support. In the first part, the article focuses on defining “myth” as a legitimizing political instrument. In the second part four political myths used in the early 1990s in Romania are being analyzed: the myth of the interwar period, the myth of original democracy, the myth of political reform and the providential man. The method used is political discourse and party platform analysis. The results suggest that, during the early 90s, different political groups tried to build their legitimacy using political myths instead of rational politics, which ended up in their failure to address the real issues of a changing society.

Natural Law Republicanism

By any metric, Cicero’s works are some of the most widely read in the history of Western thought. This book suggests that perhaps Cicero’s most lasting and significant contribution to philosophy lies in helping to inspire the development of liberalism. Individual rights, the protection of private property, and political legitimacy based on the consent of the governed are often taken to be among early modern liberalism’s unique innovations and part of its rebellion against classical thought. However, this book demonstrates that Cicero’s thought played a central role in shaping and inspiring the liberal republican project. Cicero argued that liberty for individuals could arise only in a res publica in which the claims of the people to be sovereign were somehow united with a commitment to universal moral law, which limits what the people can rightfully do. Figures such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and John Adams sought to work through the tensions in Cicero’s vision, laying the groundwork for a theory of politics in which the freedom of the individual and the people’s collective right to rule were mediated by natural law. This book traces the development of this intellectual tradition from Cicero’s original articulation through the American founding. It concludes by exploring how modern political ideas remain dependent on the conception of just politics first elaborated by Rome’s great philosopher-statesman.

What Confers Political Legitimacy in a Modern Society?

In this essay Wight considered several sources of legitimacy for a modern Western society. A well-functioning state bureaucracy is a necessity. Popular consultation involving the consent of the governed is also essential. In Britain elective parliamentary democracy meets this need. Citizens must agree on the principle of respecting current laws pending their revision through legal channels. A new authoritative source of legitimacy may replace an old one if citizens transfer their loyalty to it. Time may either heal the injured and legitimate the results of social conflicts or exacerbate antagonisms. Communist regimes and right-wing autocrats such as General Franco in Spain and the Shah of Iran appealed to a principle of ‘legitimation by success’. Other legitimation myths have included ‘childhood ideas of Robin Hood’, ‘the siege’, and ‘the pilgrimage’, but the most fundamental source of legitimacy resides in the blood shed for a society’s independence and the rebirth of its great founding principles. This bloodshed justifies the society’s rededication to pursuing its unfinished work. An opposing question concerns the individual dissenter’s political legitimacy, which must hinge on certain criteria (such as rationality and conscientiousness) to win moral respect. The ‘rationalist illusion’ supposes that citizens can be critical spectators in the proceedings of their own society and its politics. Such detachment is not attainable, and derives from the fallacy that political life can be reduced to the conscious and purposeful management of material needs.

Citizens’ Expectations for Crisis Management and the Involvement of Civil Society Organisations in China

Chinese citizens are relatively happy with the state's management of national disasters and emergencies. However, they are increasingly concluding that the state alone cannot manage them. Leveraging the 2018 and 2020 Civic Participation in China Surveys, we find that more educated citizens conclude that the government has a leading role in crisis management, but there is ample room for civil society organisations (CSOs) to act in a complementary fashion. On a slightly diverging path, volunteers who have meaningfully interacted with CSOs are more skeptical than non-volunteers about CSOs’ organisational ability to fulfill this crisis management function. These findings imply that the political legitimacy of the Communist Party of China is not challenged by allowing CSOs a greater role in crisis management.

GAMES OF HUNGER: THE POLITICS OF FAMINE, STATE-BUILDING PROCESSES AND CONTEMPORARY HUNGER STRIKES IN EUROPE – THE CASES OF NORTHERN IRELAND AND UKRAINE

The famines and periods of prolonged hunger that took place in Europe in the last centuries had a complex social dynamics and substantial transformative potential that still influence European politics. Dramatic cultural representations of hunger and starvation became deeply engaged in various modern nationalist narrations in order to open up new sources of political legitimacy for newly arising nation states. The periods of the Great Famine and Holodomor were at the same time moments of an extremely intense consolidation of Irish and Ukrainian national identities and the collective mindsets of multiple communities. Those identities became major political forces on the peripheries of the Old Continent. Hence, some strategies of transforming the experience of hunger into politically beneficial strategies of civic resistance were developed. Those tactics determined the future roles of both political and civil actors in sovereignty conflicts. Using a comparative approach, this paper explores the way in which the state-building processes in Ukraine and Northern Ireland in the 20th and 21st centuries were framed by famines, the raise of civic society, hunger strikes, and how the mindset of food scarcity grew into the nations’ characters. The mindset has turned into a serious drive for some political projects in Ukraine and Ireland to become modern nation states integrated with increasingly globalized European societies. The compelling and enchanting cultural narrations on hunger are profoundly up-to-date and political, as well as European phenomena, and as such should be analyzed – through the conceptual lens of modernity and postmodernity, and the international forms of political and economic coercions.

Reading Nineteenth-Century Persian Histories from the Caucasus

This essay examines six Persian-language historical works that were produced in the Caucasus during the nineteenth century. These works have conventionally gone unnoticed due to the language of composition and the predominant approach to the region as a Russian imperial province. Interestingly, these texts bear the mark of the Afsharid period, and demonstrate a marked interest in the figure of Nader Shah. They demonstrate that the Safavid collapse and the subsequent developments of the eighteenth century had an important impact on conceptions of political legitimacy in the Caucasus. They also suggest that the birth of new local Persianate historiographical traditions in the region should not only be viewed through the lens of Russian imperial modernity and instead be better situated in their local and historical context.

Investigating the Relation of Functioning as A Determinant of Wellbeing to Political and Social Trust in Three Balkan Countries

The measurement of wellbeing, political trust in institutions and social trust provide important indicators of the welfare of nations, political legitimacy and the stability of democratic political systems, and a country’s political culture, respectively. In this paper, the relation of functioning as a determinant of wellbeing to political and social trust was investigated using 2012 European Social Survey (ESS) datasets of three Balkan countries: Albania, Bulgaria and Kosovo. This involves first examining the structure of functioning and assess the psychometric properties of the resulting scale (or subscales). Preliminary tests explored the statistically significant relations of functioning to the political and social trust items as well as the socio-demographic variables and the left/right self-placement scale. Only in the case of the Bulgarian dataset, EFA and CFA resulted in a unidimensional valid and reliable scale measuring functioning scale comprised of all the initial eight items. Although the analysis did not result in the same structure of functioning for the three Balkan countries, it did provide a reliable and valid scale in the cases of Bulgaria and Kosovo. This work could be extended to cover all participating countries of this Round of the ESS.

Deliberative Democracy in Multicultural Societies: The Challenges of Effectiveness, Legitimacy, and Equality

Multicultural societies are marked by the coexistence of ethnic, sexual, religious, racial, and cultural minorities and mainstream groups. This coexistence can either be tense or collaborative. How to bridge the gap between the political demands of majority and minority groups? What are the obstacles to meaningful participation? What are the main challenges faced by such societies? And finally, how do we encourage large-scale debates around issues of minorities? In order to provide answers to these questions, this review examines Intercultural Deliberation and the Politics of Minority Rights by R. E. Lowe-Walker (2018), Deliberative Democracy Now: LGBT Equality and the Emergence of Large-Scale Deliberative Systems by Edwina Barvosa (2018), and Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-determination in Multicultural Societies by Jorge M. Valadez (2018).