KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY, GLOBALIZATION AND TAXATION: WHAT CAN THE STATE DO?

The article analyzes the State’s fiscal crisis and the impact on social inequalities in the global age. The old instruments of fiscal and monetary policy have lost much of their effectiveness, and they no longer allow capitalism to be governed at its present stage of development. The changes in the productive forces, modifying profoundly the economic structure, vary over time the effectiveness and the practicability of the macroeconomic regulation tools available for governments. The article sustains that is necessary to circumscribe the level of deep integration achieved by current economies to restore the redistributive action in modern democracies and to safeguard welfare systems, in order to face the effects of the technological restructuring underway. Globalisation, financialisation, and technological change are inextricably interconnected in cognitive capitalism and therefore require a unitary policy action to be adequately addressed by governments.

THE GOVERNANCE OF MIGRATION THROUGH THE MEDITERRANEAN: A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The paper aims to verify the reproduction of ‘modern coloniality’ through externalising the European borders in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, focusing particularly on its discursive and practical articulations. Crossing Critical Border Studies’ approaches and an analytical view on the policies and agreements supporting the externalisation politics, we have tried to trace the evolution of the external dimension of E.U. migration policy from the perspective of both the countries of the Francophone Maghreb and of the member states of the European Union. The results show that beyond the rhetoric of the global approach to externalisation of borders adopted by the EU, Maghrebian states have implemented forms of resistance and accomplishment to make their global political agenda prevail over E.U. attempts to manage the Mediterranean governance migration.

THE FAITHFUL KNIGHT OF THE KING WITH NO KINGDOM. THE CASE OF LÁSZLÓ ALMÁSY. (THE ENGLISH PATIENT)

The paper will present the sociological and psychological complexities behind the encounter of Charles, last Emperor and King of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and his young admirer, László Almásy at Easter, 1921. The King, withdrawing from power in 1918, and the young man Almásy met in the palace of the Bishop of Szombathely in 1921 in the night hours of Great Saturday. The following morning the King was to make a journey to Budapest to meet Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, whom he had made Admiral three years before. Almásy was the driver of the car bringing the King to Budapest. Horthy and the King met in the Royal Castle of Buda where Charles had been coronated as King of Hungary in December 1917. The Admiral was unwilling to transfer the power and sent the King back immediately. Almásy had become the knight of the king involuntarily but, as it will be demonstrated, his role in the attempted coup d’etat of the King was far from being accidental. Michael Ondaatje published a novel in 1992 entitled The English Patient. Based on the novel, Anthony Minghella directed a romantic war drama film of the same title in 1996. The character named as the “English Patient” was the Hungarian driver of Charles IV attempting to get his throne back in 1921. The real Almásy, however, had a much more romantic life than his fictitious counterpart.

CROSS-BORDER IDENTITY AS A DAILY RESISTANCE TACTIC OF COSMOPOLITANISM IN A TIME OF GLOBAL HEALTH EMERGENCY: GORIZIA-NOVA GORICA GO BORDERLESS

Ulrich Beck represented cosmopolitan society as overcoming the nation-states as the container of the respective civil societies. In order to understand these profound changes, sociology itself appears inadequate, populated as it is by definitions that Beck considers as zombie concepts: “the conceptual apparatus of the sociology of modernity appears in crisis because it is inadequate to describe the situation of societies in which the borders of the nation-states that contained them have dissolved in an extremely rapid period. Rather than a definitive departure from that sociology, Beck’s invitation to the international community of sociologists is to recalibrate their concepts in a cosmopolitan perspective» (Porcelli 2005: 8). The social contract, which was at the base of the construction of what Anderson defined the imagined communities, sanctioned the renunciation by the populations of part of their prerogatives of freedom favouring the security guaranteed by the sovereign power. The present global health emergency seems to have proposed the same social pact: more security and less freedom, especially people segregated within the resurging nation-states by new borders and walls. The remaining residue of globalisation is its economic-financial globalism. Ethnographic analysis along border areas reveals a consolidated cross-border identity experienced in people’s everyday lives as a tactic of resistance against the erection of new self-containment barriers. This contribution aims to analyse the salient aspects of this phenomenon in the city of Gorizia, which for decades has constituted an integrated metropolitan area of the Italian and Slovenian zones, defining a specific cross-border identity shared by both Italian and Slovenian citizens. This identity has not given way in front of the walls that have been restored in recent months in order to contain the contagion and therefore could represent what de Certeau defined as a tactic of resistance that in the present case bears witness to the invention of an increasingly cosmopolitan daily life. In this respect, the main points of the project book submitted for the candidacy of Gorizia-Nova Gorica as European Capital of Culture 2025 will be examined. The title of the bid book itself specifies the cosmopolitan identity of the area under analysis: “Go borderless”.

AMERICA’S HISTORICAL MEDIA FASCINATION WITH RUSSIA: THE NEW YORK TIMES AND RUSSIAN JEWS 1851-1905

This article details how one newspaper The New York Times portrayed Russian Jews between 1851 and 1905 and seeks to answer how and why there were certain periods of time that reporting on Russian Jews peaked in the newspaper. The results demonstrated that during time periods of significant immigration of Russian Jews to the United States, namely 1881-1882, 1890-1893, and 1903-1905, The New York Times reported significantly more about Jewish persecution in Russia. The results also demonstrate that news stories about Russia may have appealed to American citizens, particularly when the portrayal of Russia was either sensationalized or negative. The methods used were analysis of historical The New York Times newspaper articles as well as quantification of articles used through categorizing by date of publication. For example, in the 1870s 6 articles related to Russian Jews were published in The New York Times, 80 in the 1880s, 170 in the 1890s, and 407 between 1900 and 1905. The extent of which Americans were interested in Russia is subject for later research by comparison to how other newspapers portrayed Russia during this same immigration period. This research only focuses on one source as a baseline to discover trends in reporting within an individual source.

Explaining Social Processes: Perspectives from Current Social Theory and Historical Sociology

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