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

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

Heavy Load Rollers in Logistic Systems

Wheels with polyurethane bandages are in common use in logistic systems with friction gear actuation. Many research projects have studied the mechanical construction of these heavy load wheels. The studies have been theoretical as well as experimental. Research interests at the department of machine elements include the wear in the presence of intermediate material on the contact area between the bandage surface and the contact surface on which the wheel rolls off. This problem, which is observed when examining this tribochemical system, has not been studied before. Within this project both one-phase intermediate materials such as sand, water, cutting-cooling-emulsion, metal splinters and two-phase intermediate materials such as sand/water and combinations of the latter were taken into consideration. In addition, the exposure of the bandage hardness, the cross linking agent of the polyurethane, the mechanical stress, and the slip are observed. The analysis of the experimental results indicates that friction gear actuators can be constructed abrasion-optimised, taking into account special interfering effects in the form of intermediate materials in the contact area

Universality of grain boundary phases in fcc metals: Case study on high-angle [111] symmetric tilt grain boundaries

Grain boundaries often exhibit ordered atomic structures. Increasing amounts of evidence have been provided by transmission electron microscopy and atomistic computer simulations that different stable and metastable grain boundary structures can occur. Meanwhile, theories to treat them thermodynamically as grain boundary phases have been developed. Whereas atomic structures were identified at particular grain boundaries for particular materials, it remains an open question if these structures and their thermodynamic excess properties are material specific or generalizable to, e.g., all fcc metals. In order to elucidate that question, we use atomistic simulations with classical interatomic potentials to investigate a range of high-angle [111] symmetric tilt grain boundaries in Ni, Cu, Pd, Ag, Au, Al, and Pb. We could indeed find two families of grain boundary phases in all of the investigated grain boundaries, which cover most of the standard fcc materials. Where possible, we compared the atomic structures to atomic-resolution electron microscopy images and found that the structures match. This poses the question if the grain boundary phases are simply the result of sphere-packing geometry or if material-specific bonding physics play a role. We tested this using simple model pair potentials and found that medium-ranged interactions are required to reproduce the atomic structures, while the more realistic material models mostly affect the grain boundary (free) energy. In addition to the structural investigation, we also report the thermodynamic excess properties of the grain boundaries, explore how they influence the thermodynamic stability of the grain boundary phases, and detail the commonalities and differences between the materials.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figure

Crystal structure of 2-methyl-1,2,3,4-tetra­hydro­iso­quinoline trihydrate

The crystal structure of the title compound, C10H13N·3H2O, a heterocyclic amine, was determined in the presence of water. The compound co-crystallizes with three water mol­ecules in the asymmetric unit, which leads to the formation of hydrogen bonding in the crystal

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