Civil society versus nationalizing state?:Advocacy of minority rights in the post-socialist Baltic states

Strong civil society provides individuals with arenas to bring their interests to the attention of policymakers. In so doing, civil society organizations (CSOs) can support state policies, but can also criticize policies. This paper argues that most minority rights advocacy CSOs in the Baltic states have little say in the crafting of policy and are compartmentalized into the existing agendas, with only a few groups able to evaluate policies independently. It concludes that the Baltic civil society is weak because the CSOs working on minority issues ask policymakers either too much, or too little. The findings suggest that policymakers quell criticism of their work from the side of the CSOs by ignoring their activities. Alternatively, by funding the CSO that shores up the state agenda, policymakers delegate their responsibilities to civic actors, keep critical voices from public debates and claim that their policies have the full support of a vibrant civil society. This paper investigates the options available for civil society actors to relate to policymakers in a nationalizing state by drawing on the data collected in 77 semi-structured interviews with the CSOs working with Russian and Polish minorities in the Baltic states between 2006 and 2009. © 2011 Association for the Study of Nationalities.

Cold War Politics in Britain and the Contested Legacy of the Spanish Civil War

This article offers a sustained examination of how the vicissitudes of the Cold War shaped changing interpretations of the Spanish Civil War in Britain. Considering the perspectives of participants and historians, it focuses on the diverse strands of the Left that frequently drew on the civil war to attack each other and to make wider arguments about the global Cold War. First, with the aim of criticizing Communist take-overs in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, the article analyzes retrospective assaults on Communist party tactics and Soviet foreign policy in Spain. Second, in order to argue that the Soviet Union took a counter-revolutionary line after 1956, it investigates the re-emergence of debates over the Spanish revolution. Third, to express disapproval of the United States, it examines the increasing use of the civil war as an analogy in Cold War international affairs from the 1960s. Fourth, in support of non-Soviet Left-of-Centre collaboration, most notably Eurocommunism in the 1970s and opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s, it considers the renewed emphasis on the popular front. The trajectories of these debates reveal that, over time, the weight of the Left’s criticism moved from the Soviet Union towards the United States.

Comment on "On the Uniqueness of Stable Marriage Matchings" [Economic Letters 69(1):1-8, 2000]

We prove with the help of a counterexample that Lemma 6 and Corollary 7 from Eeckhout [1] are incorrect.

Protecting the most vulnerable in an economic crisis: a participatory study of civil society organisations in the Republic of Ireland

This paper advances knowledge of how civil society organisations (CSOs) negotiate the shift from boom-time public expenditure to governmental austerity. The study focuses on the Republic of Ireland, where CSOs occupied an important role in providing a voice for ‘vulnerable’citizens in corporatism for over a decade. The global financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures caused the country’s model of corporatist-style ‘social partnership’ to collapse. The article connects CSOs’ adaptation to austerity measures when protecting the ‘people behind the cuts’ to broader questions about co-optation of civil society through state-led policymaking
institutions.