On Friendship, Equality and Introductions: Comparing English and German Regimes of Manners and Emotions

This paper explores friendship by analysing some of the characteristic differences in manners between the Germans and the English, from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1970s. During that time rules for introductions were a major if not the most prominent topic in English manners books, whereas these rules attracted hardly any attention in the German ones. In an opposite way, the same goes for friendship: the topic was almost absent in English manners books while it was a central theme in German ones, together with topics such as duzen – addressing each other with the informal you: Du. Establishing a 'friendship' as well as 'being properly introduced' are both ritual transitions from a rather distant and hierarchical relationship in the direction of greater 'equality' and intimacy. These different forms are explained by placing them in the context of their national class structures and by connecting them to differences in the processes of social emancipation and national integration.Historical and International Comparison of Germany and England: Friendship, Equality, Introductions, Privacy, Good Society, Social Mobility, Informalization, and Regimes of Manners and Emotions

EXTERNAL BORROWING – A SOLUTION IN OVERCOMING THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CRISIS?

The government decisions to call, in recent years, more and more reimbursable financing gave birth to fierce reactions among politicians and economy specialists. The present article aims to analyze how the external borrowing may be a solution to overcome the difficult situation where we are.government, financing, external borrowing, economic crisis

The European Parliament elections show the increasingly fragmented nature of European party systems

Most coverage of the European Parliament elections has noted the rise of several far-right and Eurosceptic parties across Europe. Cas Mudde argues, however, that a more important trend was toward increasingly fragmented party systems. Presenting a series of numbers from the elections, he illustrates that ‘big parties’ are experiencing declining vote shares, with a greater number of smaller parties now competing for power in many EU countries

How scholars turned their attention to the populist radical right

In this extract from his new book, The Populist Radical Right: A Reader, Cas Mudde looks at the boom in academic studies of populist radical right parties. He identifies three waves of scholarship since 1945 – the most recent of which has come to trump the study of all other party families put together, despite their relative lack of electoral success

Complete Characterization of Security Protocols by Pattern Refinement

Recently, the notion of complete characterizations of security protocols was introduced by Guttman and Thayer. We provide an alternative definition of this concept, and extend an existing protocol verification tool (Scyther) to compute our notion of complete characterization. We present both notions of complete characterization, discuss their relative merits, and provide preliminary empirical results using an extended version of the Scyther tool

In the aftermath of the shutdown, widespread grassroots support means that the Tea Party is far from over

The Tea Party has taken much of the blame for the recent US government shutdown, with many commentators predicting that its influence is likely to be massively reduced. Cas Mudde argues that the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party is likely to continue; despite its likely diminishing funding from big business, it still enjoys a massive active base of support. The real challenge for the GOP in the lead up to the 2014 Congressional elections is to prove that it can be viable without the Tea Party

Compositionality of Security Protocols: A Research Agenda

AbstractThe application of formal methods to security protocol analysis has been extensively researched during the last 25 years. Several formalisms and (semi-)automatic tools for the verification of security protocols have been developed. However, their applicability is limited to relatively small protocols that run in isolation. Many of the protocols that are in use today cannot be verified using these methods. One of the main reasons for this is that these protocols are composed of several sub-protocols. Such a composition of protocols is not addressed in the majority of formalisms. In this paper we identify a number of issues that are relevant to applying formal methods to the problem of security protocol composition. Additionally, we describe what research needs to be done to meet this challenge