In recent years, political legitimacy as a concept distinct from full justice has received much attention. Yet in addition to querying the specific conditions legitimacy requires, there is a more general question: What is legitimacy even about? How ought we identify and conceptualize these conditions? According to the regnant justificatory liberal (JL) approach, legitimate legal coercion is based on reasons all reasonable persons can accept and JL is explicated in terms of a hypothetical procedure. Alas, Part I explains why JL is inadequate. First, I argue that it de-legitimizes all coercion. Second, it undercuts the proposition that there are certain basic rights which must be protected for legitimacy. Third, I suggest that JL structurally involves paternalism. Where should theorists turn? My perhaps surprising proposal is that they turn to the Christian Reformed (CR) tradition of social thought. As I take it, this tradition is composed of such figures as Augustine and Calvin, Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd, and, more recently, Francis Schaeffer. It has long theorized such issues as church-state separation and permissible coercion, and is replete with conceptual resources. Thus, Part II reconstructs an alternative legitimacy framework out of these resources. The central CR insight is this: legitimacy is a function of preventing basic wrongs. Legal coercion is only necessary "by reason of sin". I develop this insight in terms of three ideas. First, those wrongs which must prevented as conditions of legitimacy are objective wrongs, obtaining universally regardless of consent. Second, they presuppose some view of basic teleology. A teleological view is needed to elaborate contentful basic rights non-arbitrarily, but only a basic teleological view insofar as legitimacy is distinct from full justice. Third, I suggest these wrongs are fruitfully understood as constituting an exogenous standard, one that is neither the product of actual nor hypothetical self-legislation. Part III brings JL and CR legitimacy into dialogue. Understanding legitimacy in terms of objective, teleological, and exogenous wrongs, respectively, helps us avoid each of the unacceptable consequences of JL covered in Part I. Legitimacy is better conceptualized in CR terms; preventing such wrongs is what legitimacy is about. / Thesis (Ph.D, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2013-11-13 04:18:01.642

The aim of the study is to map out and analyse the integration of political parties from Central and Eastern Europe into the main European party families. The prospect of eastern enlargement of the EU implicated opportunities and above all challenges for the West European party families. The challenges consisted of integrating new parties with a different historical legacy. The study focuses on mainly how the European party families handled these challenges and what motives that have driven them in this engagement. At a more general level the thesis sketches two alternatives interpretations of the process: Western neo-colonialism and contribution to democratisation. The method used for the study is comparative case-study method and the main sources that have been utilised are party documents and in-depth interviews. The study is delimited to the three main European party families: the Christian democrats, the social democrats and the liberals. The countries of interest in Central and Eastern Europe are those postcommunist countries that became EU-members in 2004 and 2007: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. The time-frame is limited to the first party contacts in 1989 to the final inclusion of the new parties in 2000-2006. The results suggest that the European parties have responded with ambitious means to the challenge of integrating new parties from a postcommunist context. They have set up new coordinating bodies and organised educational programmes for the applicant parties, mainly directed to young politicians. The Christian democrats and the social democrats have also used parallel organisations as buffer-zones, which provided certain flexibility. As for motives, the Christian democrats stand out as the party family with the clearest power-oriented motives. At the other end, the liberals stand out as the party family that is most steered by ideology and identity. The social democrats went through a change with ideological considerations dominating the early phase and became increasingly poweroriented as the EU enlargement drew closer. When it comes to the two alternative interpretations of this process, the main conclusion is that they are intertwined and more or less impossible to separate from each other.

This thesis is a comparative study of the national security strategies of Sweden, Russia and the Czech Republic. The analysis investigates the contextual analysis made by each country and the identified security threats. To compare and find out the similarities and differences two theoretical approaches are used: realism and liberalism. To compare and identify the threats a five factor model is used, originating of general military threat assessment. / <p>Erasmus</p>

This thesis argues that to take into account only liberal interpretations of multicultural dilemmas would be insufficient and unrealistic in assessing the claims of justice for ethnocultural diversity. The current liberal approach as offered by Will Kymlicka is a good beginning for ethnic conflict management. However, his theory is marked by a number of limitations due to the fact that he operates only with the principles and norms of liberal institutions. In modern multiculturally constituted democracies, the presence and constant increase of cultural diversity challenges the self-understanding of liberal democracy. Kymlicka's liberal theory of multiculturalism has been challenged by several political theorists, who emphasize the insufficiency of his approach due its reliance on liberal readings of ethnic conflicts. [from Introduction, p. [1]]

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Young people are arguably facing complex life situations in their transition into adulthood and navigating their life trajectories in a highly individualised way. For youth in post-compulsory education, their training years have been extended, their years of dependency have increased and they have greater individual choice compared to previous youth generations. This study develops an understanding of the process of individualisation applied to youth in late modernity and explores it in relation to the neo-liberal climate. It compares the life situation of this youth generation with youth in the early 1960s, brought up with more predefined traditional conditions, cemented in traditional social structures. The processes that led to generational changes in the experiences of youth in the last forty-five years are examined, linked to structural transformations that influence subjective experiences. Specifically, the shifts of the conditions of youth in post-compulsory education are studied in relations to socio-economic, technological and cultural changes. This study discusses the Western Anglo-American model of changes in youths life experiences and examines how it (mis)fits in a more conservative Catholic Mediterranean setting. The research investigates conditions in Malta, an ex-colonial small island Mediterranean state, whose peculiarities include its delayed economic development compared to the Western setting. The core of the research comprises of primary data collection using in-depth, ethnographical interviews, with two generations of youth in different socio-historical context; those who experienced their youth in the early 1960s and youth in the late 2000s. This study concludes that the concept of individualisation does indeed illuminate the experiences of youth in late modernity especially when compared to the experiences of youth forty-five years ago. However the concept of individualisation is applied in a glocalised manner in line with the peculiarities of Malta that has lagged behind mainstream developments in Western Europe and still retained traditional features. Building on the individualisation concept, I use an empirically grounded concept of compromised choices to describe the increase in the bargaining of choice happening at different fronts in the life experiences of youth, especially in the life biography of women, choices in education and the job market and choices in consumption.

<p>This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print—the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production—across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post-colonial economy.</p><p>Historians of Mexico have typically approached print as a vehicle for texts written by elites, which they argue contributed to the development of a national public sphere or print culture in spite of low literacy levels. By shifting the focus to print’s production, my work instead reveals that a range of urban residents—from prominent printshop owners to government ministers to street vendors—produced, engaged, and deployed printed items in contests unfolding in the urban environment. As print increasingly functioned as a political weapon in the decades after independence, print production itself became an arena in struggles over the emerging contours of politics and state formation, even as printing technologies remained relatively unchanged over time.</p><p>This work examines previously unexplored archival documents, including official correspondence, legal cases, business transactions, and printshop labor records, to shed new light on Mexico City printers’ interactions with the emerging national government, and reveal the degree to which heated ideological debates emerged intertwined with the most basic concerns over the tangible practices of print. By delving into the rich social and cultural world of printing—described by intellectuals and workers alike in memoirs, fiction, caricatures and periodicals— it also considers how printers’ particular status straddling elite and working worlds led them to challenge boundaries drawn by elites that separated manual and intellectual labors. Finally, this study engages the full range of printed documents made in Mexico City printshops not just as texts but also as objects with particular visual and material qualities whose uses and meanings were shaped not only by emergent republicanism but also by powerful colonial legacies that generated ambivalent attitudes towards print’s transformative power.</p> / Dissertation

This study of civil-military relations treats the parallel development of: a.) the professional soldier and the Prussian- German army in the era from 1806 until 1945, as well as; b.) the rise of nationalism in central European politics and society, which culminated in the union of the professional soldier and National Socialism after 1933. These two political phenomena of modern Europe, in the first instance, the army, and in the second instance, voelkisch nationalism became a deadly combination in the Germany of the era 1914-1933. The abdication of the monarchy in 1918 forced the professional soldier to look for a substitute sovereign, who would insure the survival of the privileged role of the soldier in republican state and society. This study provides case studies of civil-military episodes in German history from 1806-1944, where civilian control and liberal oversight of the aristocratic military structure might have been possible, but liberal and socialist forces squandered the opportunities at hand. This study counter poses episodes of civil-military conflict in the Prussian German past, with an analysis of the origins and character of integral nationalism and National Socialism. In particular, the study analyzes the ideological effort to influence the Reichswehr during the Weimar Republic. The missed civil-military opportunities for democratic forces in the 1920s resulted in the culmination of political, military, and socio-economic conditions ideal for the National Socialists in their quest for power. This failure of important political-military reform set the stage for interwar cooperation between military and the Nazis. The National Socialists wanted to make the army an instrument of power via a â bottom upâ revolution to subjugate the military command structure. This study speaks to this historical series of case studies within the general analysis of democratic civil-military relations. The failure of liberal and later democratic forces to integrate the military into constitutional mechanisms stands as one of the more grievous catastrophes of the story of the soldier and the state.

Ce mémoire traite de la prostitution d’un point de vue philosophique. Pour ce faire, il est nécessaire que l'on étudie le concept d’autonomie, puisqu’il est employé de part et d’autre par les intervenants dans le débat public et théorique. En évaluant les contributions de philosophes, ce mémoire esquisse une position mitoyenne. Ainsi, dans un premier temps, on rapportera la contribution d’auteurs de la tradition libérale, qui considèrent que la prostitution est un travail ou une vision de la sexualité acceptable. En dénonçant le lourd tribut d’une morale conventionnelle dépassée, ils ont montré que le respect des choix individuels est primordial et doit servir de guide au moment de penser l’intervention de l’État. Ce faisant, ils ont néanmoins omis de considérer dans leur équation des éléments contextuels qui teintent négativement le quotidien de la personne prostituée. Les féministes radicales et auteurs libéraux perfectionnistes ont mis en lumière le système que l’anthropologue Paola Tabet appelle échange économico-sexuel et qui fait qu’en général, l’acte sexuel porte en écho la socialisation qui fait des hommes les prestataires du service sexuel des femmes. Plus encore, c’est la participation à la vie sociale et politique des personnes prostituées qui est limitée. La stigmatisation et la violence qui caractérisent l’exercice de la prostitution détruisent des vies, mais privent également les personnes prostituées du crédit social nécessaire à l’exercice de leur citoyenneté. Explorer une redéfinition du concept d’autonomie dans une perspective féministe et relationnelle permettra de répondre aux considérations que partagent les défenseurs du travail du sexe et les abolitionnistes : aucune femme ne subissant de contraintes économiques et sociales ne devrait voir en la prostitution la seule option qui s’offre à elle. Aussi, si une personne autonome décide de monnayer ses services sexuels, ce doit être toujours selon des modalités qu’elle aura elle-même définies. / I will discuss the issues raised by prostitution in a philosophical way. It seems necessary to analyze autonomy, a concept used in the public debate about prostitution. I will try to sketch a middle view on the question inspired by the work of Liberals and Feminists. Some of these authors view prostitution like any other job or as a legitimate way to live one’s sexuality. They show that the State must consider individual choices and they criticize a moralistic common perspective on prostitution. Nonetheless, they choose to ignore a global perspective about a systematic representation of the female sexuality as a service. Women are socialized in a way that they can only offer their sexuality, not live it. Moreover, it is the political and social participation of women that is made precarious out of this. Stigmatization and violence that commonly shapes the experience of sex workers not only destroys lives, but is also threatening the expression of their citizenship. Exploring a redefinition on autonomy in a feminist and relational way will offer the tools to think another way. Consequently, we will be able to address two considerations that both abolitionist and sex work advocates share. First, that nobody wants a woman to be placed in front of prostitution thinking that it is her only choice. Second, that every woman who wants to do sex work should be the only one who shapes her practice.

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