European Union Cross-Border Cooperation and Conflict Amelioration

The relevance of European Union (EU) cross-border cooperation for European border con?ict amelioration may be questioned in the contemporary global climate of threat and insecurity posed by forces of ’dark globalisation’. In any case, empirical evidence exposes the limitations of cross-border cooperation in advancing con?ict amelioration in some border regions. Nevertheless, in an enlarged EU which encompasses Central and East European member states and reaches out to neighbouring states through cross-border cooperation initiatives, the number of real and potential border con?icts with which it is concerned has risen exponentially. Fortunately, there are cases of EU ’borderscapes’ that have adopted a cross-border ’peace-building from below’ approach leading to border con?ict amelioration. Unfortunately, countervailing pressures on EU cross-border cooperation from border security regimes (principally Schengen), the Eurozone crisis, EU budgetary constraints, the conceptualisation of ’Europe as Empire’, and the possible recon?guration of the EU itself compromises this approach. Therefore, the path of European integration may well shift from one of inter-state peace-building and regional crossborder cooperation after the Second World War, to border con?ict and coercion in constituting and reconstituting state borders after the recon?guration of the EU.

The Protective Role of Group Identity: Sectarian Antisocial Behavior and Adolescent Emotion Problems

The protective role of strength of group identity was examined for youth in a context of protracted political conflict. Participants included 814 adolescents (M_age = 13.61, SD = 1.99 at Time 1) participating in a longitudinal study in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Utilizing hierarchical linear modeling, the results show that the effect of exposure to sectarian antisocial behaviors has a stronger effect on youth emotion problems for older adolescents. The results also show that youth with higher strength of group identity reported fewer emotion problems in the face of sectarian antisocial behavior but that this buffering effect is stronger for Protestants compared to Catholics. Implications are discussed for understanding the role of social identity in postaccord societies.

Politics without the Vernacular: Liberal Culturalism and the Language Policy of the European Union

Will Kymlicka's liberal culturalism presents a tension between the idea that linguistic diversity in multilingual polities should be protected and the claim that democratic debate across linguistic boundaries is unfeasible. In this article, I resolve that tension by arguing that trans-lingual democratic deliberation in multilingual polities is necessary to legitimise those measures aimed at the protection of linguistic diversity. I conclude that my account provides a coherent normative response to the challenges faced by the European Union (EU) in the field of language policy and that an EU-wide deliberative forum is not as unfeasible as Kymlicka suggests.