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This thesis is about how human rights issues were mediated by the American media, and as a consequence, influenced U.S-China relations at the end of the Cold War. Focusing my research on the news framing by some American news outlets of the 1989 Tiananmen enabled me to observe and understand their role. "Framing" suggests a strategy of news reporting. In some ways, it facilitates our recognizing the ideological lens through which Americans perceived China affairs. I conceptualize their ideological bent as an imagination of a "special relationship" between America and China. My thesis consists of three sections. The first two sections concern the American media coverage of the protests at Tiananmen and the military crackdown on June 4th. The news coverage consistently characterized the Tiananmen protest as a democratic movement intelligible to the informed public in the U.S. As a consequence, this news framing raised the American public's expectations for the protesters. When disillusioned, they turned hope into anger, which was then expressed in Congress in wake of the Tiananmen massacre. Thus, the final section addresses how the Congressional leaders' arguments corresponded with news framing of the Tiananmen protest. My thesis concludes with a reflection over the moral dilemma of liberalism in U.S. China policy and analyzes its implications for both publics in both countries in the future. / History

Various writers, for example Rudolf Bahro and Arne Naess, have for a long time associated Green politics with an impulse toward deepening democracy. Robert Goodin has further suggested that decentralisation of political authority is an inherent characteristic of Green politics. More recently in New Zealand, speculation has been raised by Stephen Rainbow as to the consequences of the direct democratic impulse for existing representative institutions. This research addresses that question. Examination of the early phase of Green political parties in New Zealand has found that the Values Party advocated institutional restructuring oriented toward decentralisation of political authority in order to enable a degree of local autonomy, and particpatory democracy. As time has gone on the Values Party disappeared and with it went the decentralist impulse, this aspect of Green politics being conspicuously absent in the policy of Green Party Aotearoa/New Zealand, the successor to the Values Party. Since this feature was regarded as synonymous with Green politics, a certain re-definition of Green politics as practised by Green political parties is evident. This point does not exhaust the contribution Green politics makes to democracy however, and the methodology used in this research, critical discourse analysis (CDA), allows an insight into what Douglas Torgerson regards as the benefits in resisting the antipolitical tendency of modernity, of politics for its own sake. This focusses attention on stimulating public debate on fundamental issues, in terms of an ideology sufficiently at variance with that prevalent such that it threatens to disrupt the hegemonic dominance of the latter, thereby contributing to what Ralf Dahrendorf describes as a robust democracy. In this regard Green ideology has much to contribute, but this aspect is threatened by the ambition within the Green Party in New Zealand toward involvement in coalition government. The final conclusion is that the Green Party in New Zealand has followed the trend of those overseas and since 1990 has moved ever closer to a commitment to the institutions of centralised, representative, liberal democracy and this, if taken too far, threatens their ideological integrity.

This Master Thesis aims to answer the question why the EU foreign policy-makers decided toimplement the Eastern Partnership (EaP). As the EU foreign policy decision-making processis based upon consensus between all EU Member States, an argumentation analysis isconducted to find the arguments that the policy-makers use to convince the others. By usingHabermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, the arguments are categorized into pragmatic(security and economic interests), moral (humanitarian values) or ethical-political (culturalvalues) logics. The research material consists of official documents and statements of the EUinstitutions. Then, the arguments are evaluated as whether they can be said to be legitimate,‘mobilizing’ arguments: intelligible, appropriate and true. The main result is that even if allargumentation categories are used by policy-makers, none of the categories can be said to becompletely legitimate. Therefore, an ideological perspective is a possible complement to thecategories within the Theory of Communicative Action. This perspective would possibly addto the understanding why the EaP was implemented.