From National Identity to European Identity

Abstract. Since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and especially in the past few years, the European Union has been going through a mixed process of expansion and consolidation. In the last ten years alone there were two new waves of accession, the EU launched the single currency and failed attempts have been made to introduce a constitution. With all these transformations taking place, attention is more and more centred on the question whether
a European identity is emerging. This article investigates this issue examining comparatively the patterns of national identity and of European identity formation and focusing on whether the relationship between the two is a zero-sum type. The aim is to show that although national identity is not necessarily an obstacle for the development of European identity, nationalism is.

A Sense of Place Shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-hc

Full Article:  http://www.e-migration.ro/jims/Vol2_no1_2008/JIMS_vol2_no1_2008_CINPOES.pdf

Cinopes, R.  From National Identity to European Identity

Journal of Identity and Migration Studies. Volume 2, number 1, 2008

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Introduction to Siberia

Overview: Few parts of the world are so consistently ignored, at least in the English-language media, which  almost always focuses on the western, or European, parts of Russia, particularly Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the troubled North Caucasus. Thus, in most people’s imagination, in the West and even in Russia itself, Siberia looks like an iceberg: big, cold, mostly hidden from view, and inherently dangerous. In this series of posts, GeoCurrents aims to shed new light on this vast and significant place. If Siberia were independent, it would have the largest area of any country in the world—by a significant margin.

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Lewis, M.W.. March 21, 2012.  Introduction to Siberia, GeoCurrents

Full Text: http://geocurrents.info/place/russia-ukraine-and-caucasus/siberia/introduction-to-siberia

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Should the Russian Language Be Cleansed of Foreign Words?

Summary: As the previous GeoCurrents post pointed out, languages often borrow words from one another. But just as this process is ubiquitous, it often becomes ideologically and politically fraught. Politicians and bureaucrats—though typically not the ordinary speakers of a language—often feel that foreign words violate the purity of their language..While this proposed ban may seem farcical to some people, especially given the failure of previous such attempts (as discussed below), the real reasons behind it are much deeper and more sinister than may appear.

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Full Text :https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/russia-ukraine-and-the-caucasus/russian-language-cleansed-foreign-words.html

Pereltsvaig, A.  Should the Russian Language Be Cleansed of Foreign Words?   GeoCurrents February 6, 2013

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Tongue Twisting Reforms

Abstract: Wide-ranging education changes meant to end the cultural isolation of Georgia’s Azeri minority may end up forcing Azeri-language schools out of existence.

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Full Text: http://www.tol.org/client/article/23494-tongue-twisting-reforms.html

Sultanova, Shahla . Tongue Twisting Reforms Transitions Online30 November 2012

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Planning a model Soviet city: Transforming Vladivostok under Stalin and Brezhnev

Abstract: This article examines the two major projects for transforming the city of Vladivostok during Soviet times. The first was to make it a Stalinist city during the 1930s, and would have resulted in an almost complete reconstruction of the historic Tsarist city into a model of socialist city planning.

The second project, beginning in the 1960s and continuing on into the 1980s, did transform the city dramatically according to mature socialist planning guidelines, and succeeded in making the city more livable than at any time in its past. This article compares the two plans and contrasts their successes and failures, their underlying goals and ideologies, and considers what the legacy of the two periods is for today’s post-Soviet city.

Full text: http://www.az.itu.edu.tr/azv8no1web/12-richardson-08-01.pdf

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William Harrison Richardson, “Planning a model Soviet city: Transforming Vladivostok under Stalin and Brezhnev”  A|Z ITU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture volume 8 / no 1 – spring 2011

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Climbers

Overview:  A team of young Rwandan cyclists tries to outrun the past.

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Full Text:  http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch
New Yorker
July 11, 2011 Issue
pp.64-79

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Anti-Modernism in Anglophelia

(Dickinson writes of the Anglophilia) “This stylization extends to a whole way of life, not only the acquisition of clothing. Gestures, postures, places of residence, sexuality and the body are all constructed within the confines of style.”

Anglophiles, in this regard, can be identified not merely by their great admiration for all things English but by their performativity. “Acting English” becomes a manifestation of this identification and at times it can become not merely superficial, but suffusive of one’s identity. It can be the wearing of English clothes (Harris tweeds, Burberry scarves) and affecting one’s accent, but it can involve participating in distinctively British institutions (attending certain kinds of Anglican churches, sending your children to a British-style private school, even hiring an English nanny). It can even involve outright rejection of national circumstances and making England one’s adoptive country, both geographically and legally.

Before Lord Black, the novelist Henry James, the poet T.S. Eliot and the Canadian industrialist, Lord Beaverbrook, perhaps North America’s best-known anglophiles, took this route and made England their permanent home. It should be noted, as Dickinson (1997) points out, that these “performances” were preceded by a stage of consumption. One needs to buy authentic Harris tweeds and to pay for English-style boarding schools, none of which can be acquired cheaply. This expense serves to make anglophilia not only more desirable, but also more exclusive, thus heightening the participant’s sense of detachment from the reality of modernity still further.

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Full Text: http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2010-vol13-num04-fall/plato.html

Michael Plato
There’ll Always Be An England: Anglophilia as Antimodern Leisure

College Quarterly
Fall 2010  Volume 13 Number 4

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Debunking the Myth of the “Good” Coup d’État in Africa

Abstract:  In response to the recent coup in Niger, which ousted the country’s president turned- strongman Mamadou Tandja,  the capital erupted in pro-coup demonstrations. Many  commentators  and foreign governments also showed tacit support for the  junta.

What is the likelihood that this coup and the other coup regimes in Africa will lead to the institutionalization of durable and stable democracies?  Based on historical analysis of past African coups that brought brief democratic transitions, this article argues that it is unlikely.

For the  four African coups that  briefly put in place democratic institutions— Sierra  Leone (1968), Ghana (1978), Sudan (1985), and Niger (1999)—the juntas and proceeding civilian governments failed to address core political and economic issues, lacked durability, and did not engender long-term political stability.  To further debunk the myth of the so-called ‚good‛ coup d’état in Africa, this article also demonstrates that coup regimes, which  consolidate governing authority  in failed states, attempt to institutionalize autocracies.

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Full Text: http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/PDFs/v12i2a3.pdf

Debunking the Myth of the “Good” Coup d’État in Africa

Andrew C Miller

African Studies Quarterly Volume 12, Issue 2  Winter 2011

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Traditional and Non-Traditional Security Threats in Central Asia: Connecting the Old and the New

Precis: This article analyzes how traditional and non-traditional threats in  Central Asia interact and reinforce each other. It argues that analysts  need to overcome the intellectual separation between “hard” and “soft”  threats and to better understand how “hard” and “soft” security issues  overlap and in many ways reinforce each other.

The weakness of Central  Asian states seriously impairs their capacity to deal with security threats,  especially non-traditional ones (including environmental threats). The  result is that security problems in the region tend to multiply. The  combination of weak states with old and new security threats in Central  Asia weakens government structures even more and  creates  a vicious  cycle.

Full Text: http://www.chinaeurasia.org/images/stories/isdp-cefq/CEFQ201005/cefq8.2ns35-51.pdf

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Niklas Swanstro

Traditional and Non-Traditional Security Threats in Central Asia: Connecting the Old and the New

China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, Volume 8, No. 2 (2010) pp. 35 – 51

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The Mediatization of Politics in Pakistan

Precis:  Last two decades of twentieth century saw a development in media due to growing influence of privately-owned television channels. This TV era was so influential that society and politics in Western democracies became dependent on the media and its logic. This process was theorized as mediatization of politics and/or society. Though initially a western phenomenon, soon it started to diffuse in the developing world.

Using mediatization as a key concept, this article presents a theoretical framework to analyze the media development in Pakistan. The unprecedented influence media exerted in political discourse of recent years reveals that Pakistani politics is going to be mediatized. As majority of studies on Pakistani media are of descriptive nature and only narrate the history of Pakistani media, this study tries to establish a structural framework in which media, its development, and transformation from an observer to an active player in political stage can be studied further.

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Full Text: http://www.pakistaniaat.org/article/view/4043/3029

Muhammad Atif Khan

The Mediatization of Politics in Pakistan: A Structural Analysis

Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 1, No. 1 (2009)

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