Political Science

This paper focuses on the problematique of building the legitimacy (one of the most used and misused concepts in Political Science) of governance (one of the most fashionable concepts in contemporary political discourse) within the context of the European Union (one of the most novel of political experiments). Whether intentionally or not, the EU has become a formidable producer of such arrangements, but lacks a “formula” for their legitimation. The author presents three sets of principles that might be used to guide the design of European Governance Arrangements (EGAs) in order to enhance their legitimacy. He concludes with some caveats, underlining inter alia that EGAs will not resolve all policy issues in the supra-national realm, and they will not work unless firmly based on explicitly poljitical choices involving their charter, the composition of participants and the rules for decision-making. Purely technocratic or administrative considerations will not suffice.

Jean Monnet’s work and impact are omnipresent in Community circles: there are hardly any memoirs of leading post-world-war politicians of the post-world-war period that do not describe encounters with Jean Monnet, hardly any political speeches that do not discuss his method. But does his significance go beyond a historical figure that set the stage for new developments? Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wessels focuses on the so-called Monnet method and analyses its main strategic aspects. He not only presents the main elements of the method, but also emphasises its relevance for strategic reflections on future integration, especially after Nice.

This working paper, which is based on a lecture at the Institute of Advanced Studies, focuses on the work of a great European: Jacques Delors. His name is connected to milestones of the European integration process: the internal market und the Economic and Monetary Union to just name two. Within this paper Prof. Heinrich Schneider places these projects into a larger context. Although he focuses on biographical details and on the economic-political background of the politics of the “Delors-Commission,” he describes in a very convincing manner the visions of Jacques Delors and what became of them.

This article examines the current debate about the nature of democracy and discusses the main theses of the approach called ‘deliberative democracy’ in its two main versions, the one put forward by John Rawls, and the other one put forward by Jürgen Habermas. While agreeing with them as regards to the need to develop a more of democracy than the one offered by the ‘aggregative’ model, I submit that they do not provide an adequate understanding of the main task of democracy. No doubt, by stating that democracy cannot be reduced to a question of procedures to mediate among conflicting interests, deliberative democrats defend a conception of democracy that presents a richer conception of politics. But, albeit in a different way than the view they criticize, their vision is also a rationalist one which leaves aside the crucial role played by ‘passions’ and collective forms of identifications in the field of politics. Moreover, in their attempt to reconcile the liberal tradition with the democratic one, deliberative democrats tend to erase the tension that exist between liberalism and democracy and they are therefore unable to come to terms with the conflictual nature of democratic politics. The main thesis that I put forward in this article is that democratic theory needs to acknowledge the ineradicability of antagonism and the impossibility of achieving a fully inclusive rational consensus. I argue that a model of democracy in terms of ‘agonistic pluralism’ can help us to better envisage the main challenge facing democratic politics today: how to create democratic forms of identifications that will contribute to mobilize passions towards democratic designs.

This paper attempts a comparison across time and space, focusing on the transborder homeland nationalisms of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia. Both involve claims to monitor the condition, support the welfare, and protect the rights and interests of external ethnonational kin – persons who are seen as “belonging” to the state in some way despite being residents and citizens of other states. There are superficially striking parallels between the target populations as well – the ethnic Germans stranded in an array of nationalizing successor states after the First World War, and the ethnic Russians (and other Russianspeakers) similarly stranded after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Yet while noting these and other parallels, the paper focuses on key differences between the two cases, and between their broader interwar and contemporary contexts.

The article analyzes the impact of the globalization of markets, technologies and companies and of the Europeanization of public policies on state capacities in technology policy. Based on empirical examples from the field of information technology, the article argues that technology policy has been characterized by two contradictory developments in the last two decades. On the one hand, the concepts and strategies guiding public policies have become more and more complex, resulting in comprehensive programs for national and European „innovation policies“. On the other hand, as a result of the economic globalization; as well as of changes in the internal structure of the state, the state capacities to implement these ambitious strategies successfully have been eroding. As a consequence, technology policy both on the national and on the supranational level has been confronted with an intensifying strategic dilemma. Finally, the article discusses policy options to cope with this strategic dilemma in innovation policy.

Institutional theory in political science has made great advances in recent years, but also has a number of significant theoretical and methodological problems. The most important of these problems is the generally static nature of institutional explanations. Also, there is a nagging problem of the difficulties in measuring institutional variables in other than simplistic, nominal categories. As well as discussing these problems this paper addresses the static nature of institutional theory by examining the concept of “institutionalization”, and the creation (and tearing down) of institutional structures. The paper argues that by considering institutionalization as a continuous variable rather than a nominal variable we can begin to understand better the dynamics of institutions themselves, and therefore also develop better institutional explanations for other social and political phenomena.

States are organizations of governance that apply to the people living in a defined territory. But in order to sustain such governance, the people must not just individually obey the law, but also colletively conceive of themselves as “We, the People..”, with whom the law originates. For only if I, the individual citizen, have reasons to trust that, they, my fellow citizens, are actually willing to also obey the law, I’ll do so myself. This indispensible sense of belonging to a civic community can be based upon a variety of factors: ethno-cultural, linguistic, civic republican (as in “constitutional patriotism”) or social justice. Applying this notion of an indispensible civic infrastructure to the case of European integration, the author discusses a number of potential sources from which the view might be derived that what happens in Europe is a matter of “us, the Europeans”. In the absence of a democratic regime in Europe, as well as a European welfare state (to say nothing about a strictly “European culture”), it is not easy to find out possible foundations of European “identity”.

Europe has become a laboratory for recombining elements of citizenship. The paper suggests a matrix of citizenship dimensions (membership, rights and practices) and conceptions (liberal, republican and communitarian). The second part discusses three challenges to a monistic view of citizenship as a homogenous status and exclusive link between individuals and a singular political community. First, international migration leads to overlapping multiple citizenship through the proliferation of dual nationality but also “denizenship” rights for foreign residents. Second, claims for territorial autonomy by national minorities have resulted in the devolution of unitary states, creating thereby a nested multilevel citizenship that is also emerging in a different way in the European Union itself. Third, cultural rights of citizenship have been increasingly differentiated according to group membership in response to demands by cultural minorities for protection from discrimination, for special exemptions from general obligations of citizenship, or for public resources and recognition.

In the following paper we present recommendations for the evaluation of university and university- related (“außeruniversitäre”) research in Austria, based on the executive summary of the final report of a recently completed study commissioned by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Transport (BMWV). Our challenge is to design a comprehensive evaluation model for Austrian university research, which can be applied systematically on a nationwide scale. A dual evaluation mode is proposed that equally combines two different evaluation concepts: first a monitoring and, second, an external ex post evaluation of university research. Derived from such evaluation results and based on an explicit formula, it should be possible to accredit “research points” to university departments that again allow for consequences with respect to the allocation of resources. In addition, we also develop a comprehensive evaluation model for university- related research that expresses compatibility with university evaluation. Furthermore, we suggest several recommendations concerning the financing of research as well as the research promotion activities of the FWF (Austrian Science Fund).