What Does A Government New To Office Do When The Idealistic principles that guided its members in opposition face the hard realities of power? Recent German experience in the realm of foreign policy provides an instructive case study – not least because Germany's history in the first half of the twentieth century has created tremendous sensitivities in this sphere. Following a history of opposition to German military participation in actions beyond the NATO area, the parties of Germany's political left were immediately confronted with the need to make decisions on foreign and security policy when they were elected to govern in 1998. Pacifist principles or aspirations proved unsustainable in practice, and a policy consistent with that pursued by the outgoing conservative-liberal coalition was adopted. The new government developed a pragmatic foreign policy, incorporating the use of military means, notwithstanding the existence of a domestic political culture suspicious of the employment of military force.

In An Essay Written In The Mid-1980S Trevor Taylor Concluded that ‘. . . international relations scholars show little sign of seriously considering the place of sport in global human affairs’ and prescribed that ‘international relations should take more account of sport . . .’ We might have expected some change in the period since then, not least because the academic study of sport has established itself in such fields as politics and law and has made further advances in sociology and social history. The ‘myth of autonomy’ which suggested that sport should and did have little effect on other human activities has been largely undermined; indeed, we might argue that in some cases there has been an overreaction against it. Modern sport is increasingly and perhaps essentially international and has had an international dimension almost from the outset. It has developed highly autonomous international organizations, most notably the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, the international (association) football federation.

Globalization – Simply The Growing Intensity, Extent And deepening impact of worldwide interconnectedness – poses anew the classic questions of political life, namely: who rules, by what means, in whose interests and to what purpose? This is not to suggest, as some do, that the forces of globalization are eclipsing sovereign states but it is to acknowledge that the necessary conditions for sovereign and democratic self-government are undergoing a significant transformation. This is especially evident in Europe where, at the great intersection of regionalism and globalism, a novel continental political order is crystallizing: not quite federalism in its orthodox form but clearly something more than classic intergovermentalism. Caught between two worlds – a Europe of nation-states and a Europe of Citizens to use Joschka Fischer's construction – the future political trajectory of the continent, in part, will depend upon how effectively regionalism mediates the dynamics of globalism and localism.

In This Article I Do Two Things. I Begin With A Brief Discussion of the nature of political community in general, and argue that a political community is defined and constituted by the common public commitments of its citizens. Its identity is political not ethnic or cultural in nature, an important distinction that is obscured by the term ‘national identity’ and often ignored in much of the discussion of it. Its identity has an inescapable moral content. Although the latter is often shared with other communities, what distinguishes a political community is the way in which it interprets and institutionally articulates these moral principles. I then apply this general analysis to Britain and suggest how we might best define its identity.

In The Debate That Continues To Rage Over The Question Of American exceptionalism, two facts are historically well established that have distinguished the United States from European countries: the United States failed to develop and to institutionalize an electorally viable social democratic or labour party that represents the interests of its unionized working class and aspires to achieve a socialist society; and the United States has lagged behind its European counterparts in building the institutions of a comprehensive welfare state.

This Article Considers The Social Responsibility Of Business, why it exists, why governments might be interested in it, and its place in new governance. The discussion is primarily conceptual, informed and stimulated by empirical findings from Australia and the UK, countries which have been associated neither with the extent of business social responsibility long-witnessed in the USA nor with the extent of neo-corporatism characteristic of parts of northern Europe and Scandinavia.