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The late twentieth century witnessed remarkable changes in Soviet domestic and foreign policy. Eastern Europe sprang free of the country that held it in its grip for over forty years. The Soviet leadership has accepted the reunification of Germany and supported the US-sponsored resolution in the UN permitting the use of force in the Gulf against one of its former allies. Moreover, the leadership's quest for stability during a time of rapid technological, economic and political change seriously weakened the position of the Soviet Union on the international scene. This volume assesses those dramatic changes. It chronicles the debate within the Soviet Union over the success and validity of perestroika and the 'new thinking' on foreign affairs, the policy alternatives supported by various groups within the elite and their likely impact on future policies.
Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play an active role in European and global governance, and many commentators see them as a link that connects the international level with citizens. But not all CSOs active at the international level do have a substantial number of members. The question we investigate in this article is to what extent membership distinguishes these CSOs from other transnational actors. To what extent do member and non-member CSOs differ in their roles and activities? Is it plausible to argue, as it quite often happens, that CSOs with members are more legitimate than others? On the basis of a survey of 60 exemplary CSOs we find that membership CSOs neither differ substantially from non-member CSOs in their political behavior, nor do they differ in important aspects of legitimacy, such as transparency or efforts to include beneficiaries.
This article investigates the ways in which political parties are codified in modern democratic constitutions, providing a unique cross-sectional and longitudinal overview of the patterns of party constitutionalization in post-war Europe. Although the constitutions of western liberal democracies traditionally have paid little attention to the role of parties, evidence suggests that in contemporary democracies, both old and new, they are increasingly accorded a formal constitutional status. Little is known, however, about the substantive content of their constitutional position or about the normative connotations of their constitutional codification. In this article, we demonstrate that there is a clear correlation between the nature and the intensity of party constitutionalization and the newness and historical experience of democracy and that, with time, the constitutional regulation of the extra-parliamentary organization and the parties’ rights and duties has gained in importance at the expense of their parliamentary and electoral roles. The analysis furthermore suggests that three distinct models of party constitutionalization can be identified – Defending Democracy, Parties in Public Office, and Parties as Public Utilities – each of which is related to a particular conception of party democracy.
Linguistic barriers may pose problems for politicians trying to communicate delicate decisions to a European-wide public, as well as for citizens wishing to protest at the European level. In this article I present a counter-intuitive position on the language question, one that explores how grassroots activists in social movements use translation as a novel practice to debate political alternatives in the European Union's (EU) multilingual public sphere. In recent years, new cross-European protest movements have created the multilingual discursive democracy arena known as the European Social Forum (ESF). I compare deliberative practices in the multilingual ESF preparatory meetings with those in monolingual national Social Forum meetings in three Western European countries. My comparison shows that multilingualism does not reduce the inclusivity of democratic deliberation as compared to the national context. In the ESF, grassroots deliberators work using a novel practice of translation that has the potential to include marginalized groups. It is, however, a distinct kind of translation that activists use. Translation, compared to EU-official practices of multilingualism, affects a change in institutionalized habits and norms of deliberation. Addressing democratic theorists, my findings suggest that translation could be a way to think about difference not as a hindrance but as a resource for democracy in linguistically heterogeneous societies and public spaces, without presupposing a shared language or lingua franca, nor a national identity.