The politics of the new Germany

The Politics of the New Germany takes a new approach to understanding politics in the post-unification Federal Republic. Assuming only elementary knowledge, it focuses on debates and issues in order to help students understand both the workings of Germany's key institutions and some of the key policy challenges facing German politicians. Written in a straightforward style by four experts, each of the chapters draws on a rich variety of real-world examples. Packed with boxed summaries of key points, a guide to further reading and a range of seminar questions for discussion at the end of each chapter, this book highlights both the challenges and opportunities facing policy-makers in such areas as foreign affairs, economic policy, immigration, identity politics and institutional reforms. The book also takes a bird's-eye view of the big debates that define German politics over time, regardless of which party happens to be in power. It pinpoints three key themes that have characterised German politics over the last sixty years; reconciliation, consensus and transformation. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Germany and the Burden of History 2. Germany’s Post-War Development, 1945-1989 3. Towards German Unity? 4. A Blockaded System of Government? 5. The Party System and Electoral Behaviour: The Path to Stable Instability? 6. Economic Management: The End of the German Model? 7. Citizenship and Demographics: A Country of Immigration? 8. The Reform of the Welfare State? 9. Germany and the European Union: A European Germany or a German Europe? 10. Foreign and Security Policy: A New Role for the Twenty-First Century? 11. Conclusion

'The prime minister said...': voices in translated political texts

A variety of texts are translated to fulfil functions for political communication across languages, cultures, and ideologies. For example, newspapers regularly provide quotes of statements by foreign politicians, without explicitly indicating that these politicians were actually speaking in their own languages. Politicians react to statements by other politicians as they were presented to them in translation. Political scientists and other experts often debate the potential political consequences of (the translation of) a statement. This chapter addresses the (in)visibility of translation in political communication and the link between textual profiles of translations and the socio-political contexts in which they are produced. The analyses are conducted from the perspective of Translation Studies. The focus is on institutionalised forms of political discourse, i.e. texts that originate in political or media institutions. The link between translation profiles and the social, institutional, ideological conditions of text production is illustrated with reference to authentic political texts (interviews, speeches by politicians, press conferences), mainly involving English, French and German as source and target languages.

Nation, region and history in post-communist transitions:identity politics in Ukraine, 1991-2006

Since independence in 1991, issues of nation and identity have become highly debated topics in Ukraine. This monograph explores not only how national identity is being (re)constructed by the Ukrainian state, but also the processes by which it is negotiated through society. The central argument of this work is that too much attention, concerning identity in Ukraine, has focused on markers of ethnicity and language. Instead, the author advocates a regional approach, engaging with the issue of how Ukraine's regional differences affect nation-building processes. Following the tumultuous events of the 'Orange Revolution', the view of Ukraine as a country inherently 'divided' between 'East' and 'West' has (re)emerged to become a popular explanation for political events. The study outlines the necessity for academics, policymakers and indeed politicians to veer away from this simplistic 'West versus East' divide. The book advocates an analysis of Ukraine's unique brand of regionalism not in terms of divisions, but in terms of regional differences and diversity. The author deconstructs the concept of 'Eastern Ukraine' by focusing on three Ukrainian localities, all adjacent to the Ukrainian-Russian border. The study examines how individuals provide 'their' own understanding of the place of their region within the wider processes of nation building across Ukraine. In doing so, the book develops a 'regional' approach to the study of identity politics in Ukraine.

Political parties and public policy in the German Länder:when parties matter

When Parties Matter looks at the extent to which political parties can make a difference to public policy, focusing on the regional level in Germany. Politicians of the left and the right sometimes have radically different views, but inevitably the combined forces of legal and financial constraints, bureaucracy, public expectations and the 'weight of history' restrict their ability to translate political disagreement into policy change. Giving a detailed examination of education policy, childcare and family policy, and labour market policy in three German regions between 1999 and 2006, this book provides insights into what politicians can and cannot achieve, in particular at the level below the nation-state.

The politics of the new Germany

The Politics of the New Germany continues to provide the most comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date textbook on contemporary German Politics. The text takes a new approach to understanding politics in the post-unification Federal Republic. Assuming only elementary knowledge, it focuses on a series of the most important debates and issues in Germany today with the aim of helping students understand both the workings of the country's key institutions and some of the most important policy challenges facing German politicians. For this second edition, the content has been comprehensively updated throughout, augmented by additional factboxes and data, and features new material on: •Grand coalition •Lisbon treaty •Constitutional court •Financial crisis •Reform of social policy •Afghanistan. Written in a straightforward style by three experts, each of the chapters draws on a rich variety of real-world examples. In doing so, it highlights both the challenges and opportunities facing policy-makers in such areas as foreign affairs, economic policy, immigration, identity politics and institutional reform. The book also takes a bird’s-eye view of the big debates that have defined German politics over time, regardless of which political parties happened to be in power. It pinpoints three key themes that have characterised German politics over the last sixty years; reconciliation, consensus and transformation. The book is a comprehensive, yet highly accessible, overview of politics in 21st Century Germany and should be essential reading for students of politics and international relations, as well as of European and German studies.

Political representation in France: a crisis of democracy?

The past two decades have witnessed growing political disaffection and a widening mass/elite disjuncture in France, reflected in opinion polls, rising abstentionism, electoral volatility and fragmentation, with sustained voting against incumbent governments. Though the electoral system has preserved the duopoly of the mainstream coalitions, they have suffered loss of public confidence and swings in electoral support. Stable parliamentary majorities conceal a political landscape of assorted anti-system parties and growing support for far right and far left. The picture is paradoxical: the French express alienation from political parties yet relate positively to their political institutions; they berate national politicians but retain strong bonds with those elected locally; they appear increasingly disengaged from politics yet forms of ‘direct democracy’ are finding new vigour. While the electoral, attitudinal and systemic factors reviewed here may not signal a crisis of democracy, they point to serious problems of political representation in contemporary France.

Beyond securitisation : Western Mediterranean international relations from a security perspective 1989-2002

Following the end of the Cold War and the ensuing changes to the international landscape, thinking about security has tended to become more discursive and interpretative in nature. What counts as security has increasingly derived from security discourses (that is, 'securitisation') and uncertainty about the multi-faceted future facing various countries and regions. Within this post-Cold War discourse, the Western Mediterranean has emerged as a region fraught with latent and manifest threats in the economic, political, societal and military sectors. Improved access to EU markets for Maghrebi exports; the security of energy supplies to the EU from Algeria and Libya; lack of democracy and the advance of political Islam; the flow of northward migration and worries about law and order in France, Italy and Spain; the growth in military expenditure and weapons proliferation in the Maghreb; all have been central to the securitisation agenda. However, this agenda has often lacked credibility especially when inter-linkages have purportedly been established between economic underdevelopment and political instability, between the advance of political Islam and the threat to energy supplies, or between immigration and the threat to national identity. Such inter-sectoral linkages distract from the credibility of those 'securitisation instances' which correspond to reality; the former linkages have often been exploited by extremist politicians in south-west European countries as well as by regimes in the Maghreb to advance their respective interests. Thus, securitisation may defeat its main purpose; it may generate responses out of keeping with the aims proclaimed at the outset, aims centred on the countering of real threats and the ensuring of greater stability.

Political leadership:character and performance. A comparative analysis of British political leadership, 1997-2010.

Classical and contemporary scholarship on leadership has referred to political performance and the ability of political actors to deploy the self to political purpose. Literature on contemporary British politics (Hennessy, 2001; Marquand, 2008, King, 2009) has highlighted the qualitative shift in political leadership from the mid-1990s towards a focus upon the image, style, celebrity and performance of political leaders, and the shift towards the presidentialisation or semi-presidentialisation of the prime minister (Foley, 2001). However, the literature has lacked a focus upon political performance and a methodology for assessing leadership performance within cultural and institutional contexts. This thesis assesses British political leadership performance from 1997-2010 through the proposal of a framework of political performance to suit comparative purpose. The framework consisting of culture, institutions and performance is used to assess the performance of the case studies (Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, and Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the televised Leaders’ Debates of 2010). The application of the framework to the case studies will allow us to a) analyse political performance within given cultural and institutional contexts; b) establish the character traits and other aspects of a politician’s political persona; and c) appraise the role and effects of performance and persona upon the political process.

Party servants, ideologues or regional representatives? The German Länder and the reform of federalism

This article considers recent attempts to reform German federalism, the failed 2004 reform, and the reforms agreed in 2006 and 2009. It compares partisan, ideological and territorial factors which contribute to an understanding of reform, finding that all three have a role in explaining actors’ views of reform proposals. Two other claims are developed: that in some aspects of the reforms, a division between ‘generalist’ and ‘subject specialist’ politicians became apparent; and that a decisive change between 2004 and 2006 was the formation of a grand coalition at a federal level, which paved the way for agreement upon reform proposals.

Representing religion in the European Union:does God matter?

Religious actors are becoming part of the EU bureaucratic system, and their mobilisation in Brussels and Strasbourg in the last decade has increased dramatically. This book explores the mechanism and impact of religious representation by examining relations between religious practitioners and politicians in the European Union from the Second World War until today. This book seeks to answer the following questions: How do (trans)national religious groups enter into contact with European institutions? What are the rationale and the mechanisms of religious representation in the European Union? How are religious values transposed into political strategies? What impact has relations between religious practitioners, EU officials and politicians on the construction of the European Union? Examining religious representation at the state, transnational and institutional levels, this volume demonstrates that ‘faith’ is becoming an increasingly important element of the decision-making process. It includes chapters written by both academics and religious practitioners in dialogue with European institutions and will be of great interest to students and scholars of European politics, history, sociology of religion, law and international relations.

Margetinggeschichte:Die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik, Hartmut Berghoff

Book revew: Marketinggeschichte: die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik [Marketing history: The genesis of a modern social technique], edited by Hartmut Berghoff, Frankfurt/Main, Campus Verlag, 2007, 409 pp., illus., [euro]30.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-593-38323-1. This edited volume is the result of a workshop at Göttingen University in 2006 and combines a number of different approaches to the research into the history of marketing in Germany's economy and society. The majority of contributions loosely focus around the occurrence of a ‘marketing revolution’ in the 1970s, which ties in with interpretations of the Americanisation of German business. This revolution replaced the indigenous German idea of Absatzwirtschaft (the economics of sales) with the American-influenced idea of Marketing, which was less functionally oriented and more strategic, and which aimed to connect processes within the firm in order to allow a greater focus on the consumer. The entire volume is framed by Hartmut Berghoff's substantial and informative introduction, which introduces a number of actors and trends beyond the content of the volume. Throughout the various contributions, authors provide explanations of the timing and nature of marketing revolutions. Alexander Engel identifies an earlier revolution in the marketing of dyes, which undergoes major change with the emergence of chemical dyes. While the natural dyestuff had been a commodity, with producers removed from consumers via a global network of traders, chemical dyes were products and were branded at an early stage. This was a fundamental change in the nature of production and sales. As Roman Rossfeld shows in his contribution on the Swiss chocolate industry (which focuses almost exclusively on Suchard), even companies that produced non-essential consumer goods which had always required some measure of labelling grappled for years with the need to develop fewer and higher impact brands, as well as an efficient sales operation. A good example for the classical ‘marketing revolution’ of the 1970s is the German automobile industry. Ingo Köhler convincingly argues that the crisis situation of German car manufacturers – the change from a seller's to a buyer's market, appreciation of the German mark which undermines exports, the oil crises coupled with higher inflation and greater frugality of consumers and the emergence of new competitors – lead companies to refocus from production to the demands of the consumer. While he highlights the role of Ford in responding most rapidly to these problems, he does not address whether the multinational was potentially transferring American knowledge to the German market. Similarly, Paul Erker illustrates that a marketing revolution in transport and logistics happened much later, because the market remained highly regulated until the 1980s. Both Paul Erker and Uwe Spiekermann in their contribution, present comparisons of two different sectors or companies (the tire manufacturer Continental and the logistics company Dachser, and agriculture and trade, respectively). In both cases, however, it remains unclear why these examples were chosen for comparison, as both seem to have little in common and are not always effectively used to demonstrate differences. The weakest section of the book is the development of marketing as an academic discipline. The attempt at sketching the phases in the evolution of marketing as an academic discipline by Ursula Hansen and Matthias Bode opens with an undergraduate-level explanation on the methodology of historical periodisation that seems extraneous. Considerably stronger is the section on the wider societal impact of marketing, and Anja Kruke shows how the new techniques of opinion research was accepted by politics and business – surprisingly more readily by politicians than their commercial counterparts. In terms of contemporary personalities, Hans Domizlaff emerges as one fascinating figure of German marketing history, which several contributors refer to and whose career as the German cigarette manufacturer Reemtsma is critically analysed by Tino Jacobs. Domizlaff was Germany's own ‘marketing guru’, whose successful campaigns led to the wide-ranging reception of his ideas about the nature of good branding and marketing. These are variously described as intuitive, elitist, and sachlich, a German concept of a sober, fact-based, and ‘no frills’ approach. Domizlaff did not believe in market research. Rather, he saw the genius of the individual advertiser as key to intuitively ascertaining the people's moods, wishes, and desires. This seems to have made him peculiarly suited to the tastes of the German middle class, according to Thomas Mergel's contribution on the nature of political marketing in the republic. Especially in politics, any form of hard sales tactics were severely frowned upon and considered to demean the citizen as incapable of making an informed choice, a mentality that he dates back to the traditions of nineteenth-century liberalism. Part of this disdain of ‘selling politics like toothpaste’ was also founded on the highly effective use of branding by the National Socialists, who identified their party through the use of an increasingly standardised image of Adolf Hitler and the swastika. Alexander Schug extends on previous research that criticised the simplistic notion of Hitler's charisma as the only explanation of the popular success and distances his approach from those who see it in terms of propaganda and demagogy. He argues that the NSDAP used the tools of advertising and branding precisely because they had to introduce their new ideology into a political marketplace dominated by more established parties. In this they were undoubtedly successful, more so than they intended: as bakers sold swastika cookies and butchers formed Führer heads out of lard, the NSDAP sought to regain control over the now effectively iconic images that constituted their brand, which was in danger of being trivialised and devalued. Key to understanding the history of marketing in Germany is on the one hand the exchange of ideas with the United States, and on the other the impact of national-socialist policies, and the question whether they were a force of modernisation or retardation. The general argument in the volume appears to favour the latter explanation. In the 1930s, some of the leading marketing experts emigrated to the USA, leaving German academia and business isolated. The aftermath of the Second World War left a country that needed to increase production to satisfy consumer demand, and there was little interest in advanced sales techniques. Although the Nazis were progressive in applying new marketing methods to their political campaign, this retarded the adoption of sales techniques in politics for a long time. Germany saw the development of idiosyncratic approaches by people like Domizlaff in the 1930s and 1940s, when it lost some leading thinkers, and only engaged with American marketing conceptions in the 1960s and 1970s, when consumers eventually became more important than producers.

The ‘first three years’ movement and the infant brain:a review of critiques

This article reviews a particular aspect of the critique of the increasing focus on the brain and neuroscience; what has been termed by some, 'neuromania'. It engages with the growing literature produced in response to the 'first three years' movement: an alliance of child welfare advocates and politicians that draws on the authority of neuroscience to argue that social problems such as inequality, poverty, educational underachievement, violence and mental illness are best addressed through 'early intervention' programmes to protect or enhance emotional and cognitive aspects of children's brain development. The movement began in the United States in the early 1990s and has become increasingly vocal and influential since then, achieving international legitimacy in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and elsewhere. The movement, and the brain-based culture of expert-led parent training that has grown with it, has been criticised for claiming scientific authority whilst taking a cavalier approach to scientific method and evidence; for being overly deterministic about the early years of life; for focusing attention on individual parental failings rather than societal or structural problems, for adding to the expanding anxieties of parents and strengthening the intensification of parenting and, ultimately, for redefining the parent-child relationship in biologised, instrumental and dehumanised terms. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Exploration of metaphors used by Indonesian legislators and political elites in the Indonesian sociopolitical domain

This thesis examines the ways Indonesian politicians exploit the rhetorical power of metaphors in the Indonesian political discourse. The research applies the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Metaphorical Frame Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis to textual and oral data. The corpus comprises: 150 political news articles from two newspapers (Harian Kompas and Harian Waspada, 2010-2011 edition), 30 recordings of two television news and talk-show programmes (TV-One and Metro-TV), and 20 interviews with four legislators, two educated persons and two laymen. For this study, a corpus of written bahasa Indonesia was also compiled, which comprises 150 texts of approximately 439,472 tokens. The data analysis shows the potential power of metaphors in relation to how politicians communicate the results of their thinking, reasoning and meaning-making through language and discourse and its social consequences. The data analysis firstly revealed 1155 metaphors. These metaphors were then classified into the categories of conventional metaphor, cognitive function of metaphor, metaphorical mapping and metaphor variation. The degree of conventionality of metaphors is established based on the sum of expressions in each group of metaphors. Secondly, the analysis revealed that metaphor variation is influenced by the broader Indonesian cultural context and the natural and physical environment, such as the social dimension, the regional, style and the individual. The mapping system of metaphor is unidirectionality. Thirdly, the data show that metaphoric thought pervades political discourse in relation to its uses as: (1) a felicitous tool for the rhetoric of political leaders, (2) part of meaning-making that keeps the discourse contexts alive and active, and (3) the degree to which metaphor and discourse shape the conceptual structures of politicians‟ rhetoric. Fourthly, the analysis of data revealed that the Indonesian political discourse attempts to create both distance and solidarity towards general and specific social categories accomplished via metaphorical and frame references to the conceptualisations of us/them. The result of the analysis shows that metaphor and frame are excellent indicators of the us/them categories which work dialectically in the discourse. The acts of categorisation via metaphors and frames at both textual and conceptual level activate asymmetrical concepts and contribute to social and political hierarchical constructs, i.e. WEAKNESS vs.POWER, STUDENT vs. TEACHER, GHOST vs. CHOSEN WARRIOR, and so on. This analysis underscores the dynamic nature of categories by documenting metaphorical transfers between, i.e. ENEMY, DISEASE, BUSINESS, MYSTERIOUS OBJECT and CORRUPTION, LAW, POLITICS and CASE. The metaphorical transfers showed that politicians try to dictate how they categorise each other in order to mobilise audiences to act on behalf of their ideologies and to create distance and solidarity.

Constructing a normative national identity: the Leitkultur debate in Germany 2000/2001

In recent years, public discourse about German national identity has increasingly focussed on the large foreign population within Germany's borders. Whilst right-wing politicians such as Edmund Stoiber foster fears of identity loss ('Überfremdung'), more liberal observers, and indeed the ruling red-green coalition, acknowledge that multiethnicity has by now become an integral part of this identity. The debate experienced its provisional climax in late 2000 and early 2001. Friedrich Merz, then parliamentary leader of the CDU party, introduced the term 'Leitkultur' into the political discourse. The notion suggests the existence of a clearly identifiable spectrum of German cultural values and proposes that foreigners who wished to live in Germany should adhere to these values. Merz's proposal triggered a wave of highly controversial comments which have been evaluated for the purpose of this paper. It draws on roughly 350 newspaper articles and interviews and aims to introduce the English-speaking reader to the complex range of arguments. The Leitkultur debate is taken as symptomatic of the current state of public discourse about foreigners and national identity in Germany.