Political Science

Is Jörg Haider a »Nazi« as his praise for employment policies in the Third Reich as well as for the Waffen-SS suggests? Do such statements come out of his socialization in a political subculture which has close affinities to the NSDAP? The present papers does not pretend to answer these questions. It analyzes Jörg Haider’s public disourse on the Nazi regime and Austria’s Nazi past in terms of strategic choice. The conclusions it reaches are threefold. First, Jörg Haiders usual handling of this sensitive theme appears as perfectly rational and strategic. Second, Haider’s strategy focuses primarily on the group of potential voters, while at the same time it neglects the hard-core german-national camp. Third, Haider’s statements are in harmony with much of the general population’s attitude towards National Socialism: They are unclear, unsensitive, euphemistic, and ambivalent.

In this country study of Germany the patterns and policies of academic research as well as the evaluation of academic research are analyzed, through applying the following approach: first of all, a bibliometric survey is carried out that investigates the publication output and publication efficiency of Germany’s academic research within international journals; we further investigate whether the results of a bibliometric survey appear compatible with the performance of other indicators. Secondly, discourse and policies of the evaluation of Germany’s university research are investigated by addressing issues such as: the current situation; the structural and cultural constraints against evaluations; the general reasons why evaluations of university research will play an increasingly important role in the future; and an overview of specific evaluation initiatives. Thirdly and finally, also the discourse and policies of the evaluation of Germany’s university-related research are examined.

Independent central banks, because of their purported ability to restrain government officials from manipulating their economies in pursuit of short-term political goals, have been championed by scholars and policy makers alike as guarantors of macroeconomic stability for emerging post-communist democracies. However, Russia's experience in the 1990s calls this argument into question. Although the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) was able to develop a significant degree of freedom from political interference during its early years, its monetary policies at that time were anything but conservative and anti-inflationary. Then, when the CBR's political autonomy began to erode after mid-1993 while its technical capabilities improved, its increasingly monetarist actions began to appear more typical of an "independent" central bank and inflation receded accordingly. This should lead us to rethink our theories on central bank independence - both how we define independence and what we can and cannot expect of an independent central bank. Given the CBR's continuity of personnel, historical objectives, and technical capabilities, even a politically autonomous CBR can not have been expected to internalize and implement new policy goals overnight.

The women’s movement and feminism tend to intimize, to destructure and therefore to depolitizise the public sphere. This accusation is quite popular in the german speaking feminist academic community. What happened to the politics of subjectivity, to the feminist political strategy of overcoming the split between public and privat as well as rationality and emotion? I argue that feminist political science as well as malestream political science is »emotionblind«. This means that emotions are treated as forms of perception, of acting and evaluation that are different from political perceptions and political action. Emotions are outside of the political space – either making the field of politics chaotic (malestream political science) or conzeptualized as a means to feminize and humanize politics (some feminist approaches to female political partizipation). These contradicting appraisals of emotion, gender and politics is putting the connection of gender, emotion and politics on the agenda of feminist political theory. I suggest an approach which conceptualizes emotion as socially and politically constructed. The recent notion of emotion was constructed at the same point in history as gender, with the formation of the capitalist state and the bourgeois class. Gender and emotion build a historical dispositive (Foucault) which emotionalizes women and the private sphere and de-emotionalizes men and the public sphere. The separation of women and men as well as rationality and emotion is a means of control. The notion of an emotional dispositive says that political space is structurally gendered and emotionalized: The dominant mode of beaurocracy – rationality – is the organized hierarchy of male over female as well as rationality over emotion. The Weberian seperation of beaurocracy and (charismatic) politics constructs the public sphere as male and seperates »good« emotions (Vaterlandsliebe/love for the country) from »bad« emotions (sexuality).

The “Third Wave” of global democratization, which began in 1974, now appears to be drawing to a close. While the number of “electoral democracies” has tripled since 1974, the rate of increase has slowed every year since 1991 (when the number jumped by almost 20 percent) and is now near zero. Moreover, if we examine the more demanding standard of “liberal democracy” – in which there is substantial individual and associational freedom, civic pluralism, civi lian supremacy over the military, a secure rule of law, and “horizontal accountability” of office-holders to one another – we observe today the same proportion of liberal democracies in the world as existed in 1991. If a “third reverse wave” of democratic erosion or breakdowns is to be avoided, the new democracies of the third wave will need to become consolidated. Elites and citizens of every major party, interest, and ethnicity must accept the legitimacy of democracy and of the specific constitutional rules and practices in place in their country. In many new democracies, this requires a sweeping agenda of institutional reform to widen citizen access to power, control corruption, and improve the depth and quality of democracy. Elsewhere – as in China and Indonesia – rapid economic development and the gradual emergence of stronger, more autonomous civil associations and legal and representative institutions may be laying the foundations for a “fourth wave” of democratization at some point in the early twenty-first century.

The European Commission has initiated a series of conferences in all member states of the European Union on fundamental political and social rights. The basic idea is to start a European-wide civil dialogue which should eventually lead to a revision of the Treaty on the European Union at a next Intergovernmental Conference. This volume documents the Austrian conference which was hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies and held on 23 and 24 May 1997. In addition to the full text of some core statements at the meeting we report about the discussions in five parallel workshops and reprint the theses of keynote speakers. Before the conference a questionnaire had been sent out to government agencies, NGOs and independent experts. We document the main findings of this survey and the proceedings of two discussion fora which focused on how to promote and implement political and social rights in the Union. The programme of the conference and the list of participants is documented in the Annex.

The paper examines the role of »democracy« in the process of European integration. In the first part the author traces the development of a formal legitimacy deficit that turned into a material deficit when the European Union was established. At this point the question of democracy came to the fore and very likely is to influence the prospects of any further move towards greater unity in the European Union. The European Union falls short of traditional democratic standards in many respects. A comprehensive account of the diverse deficiencies forms the bulk of the second part of the paper. The democratic quality of the EU’s political system is not measured by any specific organizational blueprint but draws on a structured inventory of critiques found in the literature. The last part of the paper examines if the European Union with its singular political structure qualifies at all for a democratic transformation. By critically discussing the applicability of the concept of statehood to the European Union, the role of community and citizenship as a presumed prerequisite for democracy, and the relationship between economic and democratic development the author argues that both the underlying concepts as well as the political structures and processes have to be adapted to further democratize the European Union.

The process of European unification, which some call a ›myth‹, yet others an ›illusion‹, gives rise to important questions about national membership and citizenship rights. This article examines recent developments in Europe from the background of the history of political thought about citizenship. Citizenship involves three salient aspects: collective identity, privileges of political membership, and a bundle of rights and entitlements which accrue to the citizen. T.H. Marshall has analyzed this last aspect of citizenship through his famous categorization of civil, political, and social rights. What we are observing in contemporary Europe is a »dissociation« or »disaggregation« of these various aspects of citizenship. Migrant workers and third country nationals often enjoy civic and social rights, while their political rights are limited. The article challenges the »coupling« of nationality and the privileges of political citizenship. I argue that ›jus sanguinis‹' and ›jus soli‹ are not alone justifiable, from a normative viewpoint, to confer citizenship rights and that consent is the only principle which is wholly consistent with the selfunderstanding of liberal democracies in the granting of citizenship rights. I plead for a decentered model of the polity, in which membership and participation in the institutions of civil society are steps toward the acquisition of the status of citizen.

Once again, Carl Schmitt is en vogue. The reappearance of his theoretical framework within the New Right in order to criticize liberal democracy is the starting point of this paper. The introductory chapters put Schmitt in the intellectual context of the Weimar Republic, especially the so-called “Conservative Revolution”. Nonetheless, the main part of the paper deals with various aspects of Schmitt´s critique of liberal democracy. The paper tries to work out six different elements of this critique: Political Catholicism, liberalism, parliamentarism, democracy, modernity and economy. Finally, it indicates that Schmitt’s arguments can also be placed within the communitarian way of criticizing liberal democracy though this fact is almost neglected by the scientific community so far.

Although it is widely accepted that a basic task of schooling is to prepare each new generation for their responsibilities as citizens, the appropriate form and content of citizenship education is often controversial. This paper discusses some of these controversies. I begin by arguing that citizenship is more complicated than is often realized, and that even ‘minimal’ conceptions of citizenship impose significant obligations and constraints on individual and group behaviour. I then consider three inter-related areas of debate: whether citizenship education requires common schooling; whether promoting responsible citizenship requires promoting personal autonomy; and whether promoting a shared civic identity requires teaching not only shared political values or principles but also promoting particular national or cultural identities. These three issues help illustrate the centrality of education for citizenship to both political theory and educational philosophy.