Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University. This thesis was written in conjunction with Dennis J. Roberts, Mary Lee McLaughlin and Robert F. Pierce. / Statement of the problem: It is the purpose of this thesis to formulate plans for a guided tour throughout Western Europe for secondary-school teachers with emphasis on present and past mathematical and allied science contributions. This study will serve as an answer to four fundamental questions: 1. What are the resources available in Europe of value to mathematics teachers? 2. From the standpoint of marginal utility, which of these would be the most important? 3. where are they to be found? 4. How long would it take to see each of them profitably in a limited amount of time? [TRUNCATED]

Sport le plus populaire de la planète, le football n’est pas un simple loisir permettant de se divertir ou de se dégourdir. Les historiens ont notamment rappelé comment, en Grande-Bretagne d’abord puis, dès l'entre-deux-guerres, sur le reste du continent, le jeu du ballon rond a conquis une place importante dans la vie politique des États-nations : les masses masculines ont notamment pu y voir un puissant vecteur d’intégration à la sphère publique. Cette dimension politique ne peut être ignorée dès lors que l’on s'intéresse au rapport des sexes dans le football. Les avancées sociales, économiques et culturelles dont ont bénéficié les femmes au cours du 20e siècle ne suffisent pas à comprendre les disparités observées dans le développement de la pratique féminine en Europe. Dans une étude statistique publiée en 2000, la Fédération FIFA souligne le retard de la Finlande sur la Norvège, le Danemark et la Suède alors que la condition féminine y est tout aussi avancée. De même, l'étude démontre que le taux de licenciées en Espagne est quatre fois supérieur à celui de la France ou de la Grande-Bretagne alors que la pratique s'y est implantée avec quinze ans de retard. En comparant l'évolution du football féminin dans les différents pays d'Europe, ex-monde communiste compris, de la première guerre mondiale à nos jours, nous tenterons de montrer dans quelle mesure le football a-t-il reflété la division des sexes dans la vie publique nationale et contribué à exclure les femmes de la gestion de la cité. Notre analyse s'appuiera, d'une part, sur des archives de différents ministères ainsi que des fédérations nationales et internationales de football et, d'autre part, sur la presse d’information et sportive européenne / Soccer - being the most popular sport on earth - is not simply recreation in order to entertain or to stimulate. Historians have reminded us how first in Great Britain and later, since the inter-war years on the whole continent, this sports has conquered a crucial place in politics of European nation-states: male masses have seen in it a powerful vector of integration into the public sphere. This political dimension cannot be ignored if one is interested in gender relations within soccer. Yet the social, economic and cultural progress of which women benefited during the 20th century are not enough to understand the disparities that have been observed in the development of women’s football in Europe. Actually, in a statistical study published in 2000 the International Football Federation (FIFA) underlines the setback of Finland over Norway, Denmark and Sweden even if the condition of women is as good as in its Scandinavian neighbours. The FIFA study also highlights that the number of licensees in Spain is four times higher that that of France or Great Britain even its practice developed fifteen years later. In comparing the evolution of women’s soccer in the different European countries including the former Warsaw pact countries from World War I until today this study intends to demonstrate how soccer has reflected the imbalance of genders in national public affairs and contributed to their exclusion. Our analysis is on the one hand based on archives of different ministries and national and international federations and on the other on European-wide sports press

In this study, departing from a more general concern with understanding how political frontiers are demarcated in Turkish politics, I aim to show how ‘Europe’ contributed to such a process of constructing political frontiers during the 1999-2008 period. Rather than looking at the debates on ‘Europe’ within the Turkish political landscape through a pro- vs. anti- Europe bifurcation, I attempt to see the discourses through the lens of ‘hegemony’. By using the Laclau- Mouffean discourse analysis, starting from 1999, I argue that discourses on ‘Europe’ were able to hegemonise Turkish political debates and thereby demarcate the political frontiers that constituted that debate which started to change when discourses began to be substituted by different antagonisms, political frontiers and therefore modes of sustaining hegemony.

This thesis investigates the reasons for the change in decision-making patterns in abstract judicial review in Germany, Italy and Austria in the last three decades. The literature on constitutional courts suggests that there are six factors influencing the decision-making of a constitutional court judge: personal political attitudes of the judges, direct influence by political institutions, Black Letter of the Law, Precedent, changes in public opinion and the harmonisation of national law with European law. The empirical data shows that throughout the last three decades the conditions in which legislation is formulated has become more complex through the harmonisation of national law with European Law. This causes the courts to react in three distinct ways: 1. The style of decisions is more interpretative 2. More laws are, at least in part, found unconstitutional 3. The pattern of decisions is leaning towards more unconstitutionality rulings so as to clarify the political framework for future legislation. Worry is expressed by the courts that not all the cases reaching them are referred to them in good intention. Politicians are increasingly using the complexity of the political system to refer cases to the courts on which they would prefer not to take a decision.

This thesis addresses the subject of political dissent during the Khrushchev era. It examines the kinds of protest behaviours that individuals and groups engaged in and the way that the Soviet authorities responded to them. The findings show that dissenting activity was more frequent and more diverse during the Khrushchev period than has previously been supposed and that there were a number of significant continuities in the forms of dissent, and the authorities’ responses to these acts, across the eras of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. In the early Khrushchev years a large proportion of the political protest and criticism that took place remained essentially loyal to the regime and Marxist-Leninist in outlook, though this declined in later years as communist utopianism and respect for the ruling authorities seem to have significantly diminished. In place of mass terror, the authorities increasingly moved toward more rationalised and targeted practices of social control, seeking to ‘manage’ dissent rather than to eradicate it either by persuasion or by force. All of this was reflective of the fact that the relationship between state and society was undergoing a vital transitional stage during the Khrushchev years, as both parties began to establish for themselves what had and had not changed since Stalin’s death.

Although the new architecture of experimentalist governance has been influential in academic scholarship as well as in policy debates over the last two decades, its actual impact on policymaking is still largely unclear. Specifically, questions about whether, under what conditions and how it influences policymaking processes remain largely unsolved. Without an adequate analysis of experimentalist policymaking, the current scholarship confines our understanding to the diffusion of experimentalist architectures, ultimately resulting in a poor understanding of their effects on policymaking processes. Thus, this thesis seeks to contribute to closing the knowledge gap by identifying conditions in which the Commission engages in experimentalist policymaking. To this end, it makes a number of inductive claims by further developing arguments found in experimentalist and shadow of hierarchy theories and using empirical analysis to follow them through. It studies the case of European Union energy regulation from the beginning of its liberalization and re-regulation in the late 1990s to the present day. The central argument of the thesis is that, when the Commission finds itself in conditions of greater uncertainty, even though the shadow of hierarchy is weaker or the distribution of power is less polyarchic, it engages in experimentalist policymaking by granting discretion to Member States and/or regulated companies to pursue common goals through distinct means, stimulating the comparison of their approaches and providing a basis for agreements on reforms to be developed with high stakeholder participation. Besides extending empirical research on EU energy regulation and contributing to the literature on modes of regulation, this thesis contributes to advancing the study of experimentalist governance in a number of respects. First, it clearly distinguishes experimentalist and hierarchical institutional architectures from policymaking processes by developing a set of indicators which are widely applicable. Second, by identifying patterns of policymaking that are not based on polyarchy, shadow of hierarchy, time or sector, but rather, are consistent with uncertainty, it suggests that uncertainty is an individually sufficient condition for experimentalist policymaking. More broadly, by identifying patterns of policymaking that are not based on specific institutional architectures, it shows that the type of policymaking can vary even if institutional architectures do not change, and hence warns scholars of the need to look beyond institutional design to the ways in which decision-making actually occurs.

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The EU has widened and deepened the single market over time according to a transactionalist discourse of common-interests in integration. This rationale holds that as amounts of cross-border movement increase, Member State populations should perceive the single market as beneficial, thus leading to the creation of an affective European identity. Instead, as consequences of integration have become more visible, resistance to the EU has become more pronounced, especially with relation to the Union's right of free movement of persons. This thesis argues that interest-based theories of integration ignore prospects for resilient national identities to influence the accordance of solidarity ties, so as to color interest perceptions within national public spheres. Combining the literature on European identity, moral panic and communication studies on news framing, it maintains that the popular news media provide a conduit through which these interest perceptions can be taken up through the tendency of news outlets to report events that deviantly threaten underlying identity conceptions. Through content analysis of 'popular' press in the UK, Spain and Poland, it seeks to show how the inane tendency of news to report events in terms of an identity-based narrative can serve to foment moral panic within national publics. Contrary to interest based theories of integration, the EU's discourse clashes with national identity. Disintegration may be posited as the 'proper stance' to be supported on the part of the public in news narrative, if threatening deviance caused by EU migration is to be resolved.

While a vast range of works have been written on European identity from historical, cultural, political, sociological, and economic points of view, I am attempting to turn the discourse around and investigate the complex notion of European identity that forms the basis of personal, collective and societal identities represented in literature and a European space imagined and depicted differently by various writers. My thesis explores the diverse interpretations of Europe by creating and investigating a literary dialogue between some works in Hungarian and British contemporary literature and so, in a generalized sense, in some aspects between the Eastern and Western peripheries of Europe. The literary interpretation of Europe and European identity is a neglected research area, just as is the literary dialogue between the Western and the Eastern parts of the European Union. Due to this lack of exemplary methodological routes, the thesis’s comparative nature and the fact that it deals with the cultural positions and literary capitals of two very unequal countries, the methodological background is provided by world literary approaches. Widening the time-scale from the most recent works to ones published in the 1990’s and some even before the fall of the Iron Curtain presented the opportunity for analysing the dynamic character of British and Hungarian perceptions and the changing focus on prevalent themes. Imre Kertész (1929-2016) was primarily concerned by the formulation and articulation of new ethical and philosophical values for Europe emerging on the ethical zero ground of the Holocaust and focused on a detached, theoretical observation of the individual. Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) was more interested in the active and often contradictory aspects of identity and the practical moral dilemmas after the Wars in twentieth-century Europe. Marina Lewycka’s (1946-) novels deal with the European aspects of migration concerning the different generations and the gender dimensions of the Europe concept. László Végel (1941-) writes about the utopia of Europe as a multi-ethnic unity and explores the minority identity in relation to the migrant existence. Tim Parks (1954-) approaches the issues of fate and destiny, and their relevance to European politics and personal choices, while also investigating the possibility of linguistic schizophrenia. Gábor Németh’s (1956-) novels investigate the symbolism inherent in European Jewish identity and cosmopolitanism and the current attitudes on populism and anti-immigration. The perspective and the focus from which the novels are analysed have been influenced by present events, and the political, social and cultural atmosphere of both countries and the EU. I have been trying to spot signs which might have forecast the disillusionment and hostility felt towards the European dream by the majority of both populations. The disappointment over the dissolving vision of a united Europe has emerged as an overall theme connecting the writers’ works; however, the pressing want of free-spirits, the Nietzschean Good Europeans, has also been persistent.

After the extension of the European Parliament's (EP) decision-making powers introduced by the Treaties of Amsterdam and Lisbon, it was assumed that the EP would increase the democratic credentials of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) and, given the EP's traditional promotion of civil liberties and human rights, that it would also tip the balance towards a more rights-based approach. Six years on, these expectations have not been fulfilled. The objective of this study is to evaluate why the EP, now a co-legislator, has been unable (or unwilling) to maintain its past policy preferences. In order to understand this gap between expectations and actions, the study looks at three case studies (the ‘Data retention' directive, the ‘Returns' directive and the SWIFT Agreement) and compares the impact that the introduction of more powers for the EP has had on these different episodes. In order to maximise the number of possible explanations, the study uses rational-choice and constructivist institutionalist approaches to identify the reasons behind the change in the policy preferences of the EP. In this sense, it aims to uncover the levels and direction of change as well as the main conditions and drivers that led to the abandonment of its previous policy positions.