Comparing and Inter-Relating the European Union and the Russian Federation : Viewpoints from an international and interdisciplinary students' project

Over the years Russia has become one of the most important partners of the European Union. Due to this fact a more democratic and modern Russia would have great benefits for the EU and might contribute to the stabilization of the European continent. But existing problems like terrorism, organized crime and environmental pollution are central challenges for the relationship and their solution demands for intensive cross-border cooperation. Therefore a clear strategy is needed in order to establish a successful cooperation. What strategy have the European politicians pursued and which influence have their plans exerted on the actual policy of the European Union? The European Union clearly accentuated the meaning of common values for the relationship towards the Russian Federation in the early and fundamental documents. However, it becomes more and more evident that in day-to-day policy there is a tendency to tolerate even substantial violations of the norms which originate from the concept of common values. One of the main causes for this behaviour is the strong economic interest of the EU towards Russia. For example, the Russian Federation supplies the EU with most of its energy resources, such as gas and oil. On the other hand the EU is the major trading partner of the Russian Federation. The notion of the common shared values is based – as stated in the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) and in the subsequent documents – on the principles of the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris. Because such principles are easily stated in a document their impact on the real policy has to be called into question and must be examined further in this essay. --

Rescuing/ abandoning the convergence claim: modernization processes and criticism

"The editor argues that the convergence claim characterising classic modernization theory is not tenable anymore unless it is lifted onto a discursive level. It can be rescued for contemporary modernization theory only if it is linked to the development of practices of critical examination of the modernization project itself. Rather than the emergence of certain structural patterns or interpretive templates and attitudes, modernization theory can take as its point of departure the general tendency toward the development of immanent criticism of society that characterises modernising and modernised societies. Recent theoretical work highlights the inescapability of conflicts in modern societies. Thereby it is not so much the differences between different types of societal modernization patterns that cause conflicts in the contemporary world, but instead the different claims and attitudes within modernised and modernising societies that are increasingly confronting each other. What therefore generates conflicts is not so much the factual (non-)convergence of societal processes but rather a 'sense of involvement in the project of universalism' (J. Alexander) the consequences of which are open to dispute. The emergence of a critical potential within society that turns the various modernization projects into reflexivity and confronts them with their own aims and means is therefore common to all processes of societal modernization. The commonality of 'different' modernities is the acceleration of fundamental politicisation that brings about immanent criticism of the modernization project itself. This approach contests the following shortcomings of modernization theory so far: its latent Eurocentric bias due to which some societies are 'more modern' than others; the 'container metaphor' which tends to treat societies as self-sufficient systems; the teleological and/ or evolutionary tendency that explicitly or implicitly characterises most approaches toward societal modernization: at the moment that the 'critical stage' is achieved evolutionary constructions of social change become themselves a field of political contestation." (author's abstract

Comparing and Inter-Relating the European Union and the Russian Federation : Viewpoints from an international and interdisciplinary students' project

Over the years Russia has become one of the most important partners of the European Union. Due to this fact a more democratic and modern Russia would have great benefits for the EU and might contribute to the stabilization of the European continent. But existing problems like terrorism, organized crime and environmental pollution are central challenges for the relationship and their solution demands for intensive cross-border cooperation. Therefore a clear strategy is needed in order to establish a successful cooperation. What strategy have the European politicians pursued and which influence have their plans exerted on the actual policy of the European Union? The European Union clearly accentuated the meaning of common values for the relationship towards the Russian Federation in the early and fundamental documents. However, it becomes more and more evident that in day-to-day policy there is a tendency to tolerate even substantial violations of the norms which originate from the concept of common values. One of the main causes for this behaviour is the strong economic interest of the EU towards Russia. For example, the Russian Federation supplies the EU with most of its energy resources, such as gas and oil. On the other hand the EU is the major trading partner of the Russian Federation. The notion of the common shared values is based - as stated in the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) and in the subsequent documents - on the principles of the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris. Because such principles are easily stated in a document their impact on the real policy has to be called into question and must be examined further in this essay

Institutionalistische Konzepte finanzwirtschaftlicher Wandlungsprozesse: Theorie, Methodologie, Operationalisierung

Innerhalb der Vergleichenden und Internationalen Politischen Ökonomie sind in jüngster Zeit Forschungsansätze historischer Pfadabhängigkeit zum Einsatz gekommen, deren prominenteste Ausprägung der "Varieties of Capitalism" (VoC)-Ansatz darstellt. Nach seinen Hauptannahmen besteht eine Komplementarität zwischen sich wechselseitig verstärkenden Mikroinstitutionen der Unternehmenssteuerung und den Makroinstitutionen gesellschaftlich verankerter industrieller Beziehungen. Ferner wird angenommen, dass nicht alle Ökonomien im Zuge von Globalisierungsprozessen unterschiedslos auf das Modell liberaler Marktwirtschaft hin konvergieren, sondern dass sich die verschiedenen Gruppen von Marktökonomien immer stärker ihrem jeweiligen Idealtypus annähern, weil sie nur dadurch einen institutionell bedingten, wirtschaftlichen Effizienzzuwachs erzielen können. An diesem Ansatz ist vielfach die Tendenz zum Funktionalismus kritisiert worden, die der Annahme der institutionellen Komplementaritäten Vorschub leiste. Der Autor nimmt diese Kritik zum Ausgangspunkt, um den VoC-Ansatz anhand des Beispiels jüngster finanzwirtschaftlicher Wandlungsprozesse in Deutschland um organisationssoziologische Aspekte zu ergänzen. Er zeigt, dass dadurch die Frage nach einer stattfindenden oder ausbleibenden Konvergenz politisch-ökonomischer Ordnungen auf die Ebene der Deutungen solcher Ordnungen und der Konflikte um diese Deutungen verlagert werden kann. (ICI2

Technology and (Post-)Sociality in the Financial Market

The article takes issue with recent influential work on the paradigmatic relevancy of technologically induced modes of communication and sociality on the financial markets. According to Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger, the technological infrastructure of the global financial markets engenders novel forms of sociality and social integration: intersubjectivity with non-present others and (post)sociality with (imagined) objects. The article differentiates these hypotheses by way of confronting them with results from interviews conducted with financial market professionals such as asset managers and financial analysts. They reveal that financial professionals attribute the role of technology a varying meaning and engage in divergent technological practices depending on their market positionality: while, for instance, intraday traders report on an intimate and quasi-social relationship with the technologically institutionalized "object" of the market, equity analysts display a more distanced stance toward the market and attribute the technological nature of mass communication (especially the real-time circulation of information) paramount importance. In conclusion the paper calls for a nuanced and contextualized understanding of the impact of technology upon changing social relations

Modular sovereignty, security and debt: The Excessive Deficit Procedure of the European Union

The Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) is a political mechanism that aims at ‘multilevel governance’ of state indebtedness in the European Union. As such, it has become the concern of research that asks how sovereignty becomes articulated in this process. This article approaches this question through the conceptualization of a modular notion of sovereignty elaborated through a discussion of work on the finance-security nexus. The article argues that existing accounts of the formation of sovereign power in relation to state debt can be combined into a notion of modular sovereignty when seen through the prism of critiques of contractualism that take issue with liberal notions of state sovereignty and credit security. This way, the indebted state becomes visible as the referent object of multiple, and potentially contradictory, invocations of sovereignty as exercised in the EDP. First, it figures as the seat of budget sovereignty, holding its social substrate liable for its debts while ignoring inequalities in that substrate. Second, it is appealed to, within a biopolitical rationality, as the sovereign guarantor of the financial wellbeing of its population. Third, it is seen as the executor of financial wisdom that is mobilized in struggles between different levels of financial governance in the EDP

Die Sozialwelt-Dingwelt-Grenze und die Frage gesellschaftlicher Bedeutung

Der Verfasser befasst sich mit der Frage nach der soziologischen Begründbarkeit einer Grenze zwischen Sozialwelt und Dingwelt. Der Beitrag versucht, die theoretische Möglichkeit einer solchen Grenze innerhalb der Sphäre gesellschaftlicher Bedeutung bzw. sozialen Sinns zu verorten. Es geht um die Frage, ob Objekten und Praxen ein besonderer Bedeutungstyp zu eigen ist, der sie von der Bedeutung unterscheidet, wie sie die Lebenswelt als Sozialwelt kennzeichnet. So wird die Entgegensetzung zwischen einer Aufhebung des Objekthaften im sozialen Sinngebungsprozess und einer Hypostasierung des Objekthaften als der sozialen Deutung radikal entgegengesetzt vermieden. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass eine objektzentrierte Sicht nicht die Dinge als das Andere sozialer Bedeutung auffassen muss, dass ihre Bedeutung vielmehr als performativ und fiktiv gesehen werden kann. Objekten wird eine bestimmte Form gesellschaftlicher Bedeutung zugeschrieben, die sich in ihrer Konstitution, Struktur und Referenz von der Bedeutung, wie sie für die Sozialwelt charakteristisch ist, abgrenzen lässt. (ICE2