The section dedicated to the History of Books and Publishing seeks to promote works that follow the circuit of production, circulation and diffusion of books and other printed materials, as unavoidable stages for the study of the production and diffusion of ideas, intellectual trajectories and the links between the world of ideas and politics. With this interest, the section seeks to contribute to studies on books and publishing, a disciplinary field that draws on disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, librarianship and literary studies. In this opportunity, we present four papers that seek to make empirical and conceptual contributions to this field of studies.The paper that opens the section is a translation of the article by historian Robert Darnton, entitled "La France, ton café fout le camp! De l'histoire du livre à l'histoire de la communication", published in 1993 by the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Faithful to Darnton's journey in the configuration of historiographical studies on books and publishing, the work constitutes a contribution to the conceptual and methodological discussion of the discipline, as well as an invaluable archival work carried out in Paris. The article presents a journey through the discussions promoted by the so-called "material turn" in intellectual history, from the classical history of ideas to the studies that focus on mediations, mediators and materials involved in the dissemination of ideas. In that spirit, Darnton engages in the discussion about the cultural and intellectual origins of the French Revolution and studies the effect that subway, clandestine and marginal agents, practices and printed materials promoted in the public sphere, provoking a progressive erosion of the regime that would fall in 1789. The sociohistorical study of the communication circuit that Robert Darnton configures and details shows how the book differs from other media by producing a "book effect" that has differential logics on public debate. This work is illuminating of a period, but at the same time it is a productive input to think about the place of the book in the current public debate, together with other supports and platforms such as the media and social networks. The translation of the text was made by Margarita Merbilhaá for discussion at the Intellectual History Seminar of CeDInCI. Years later, with a revised version by the translator, and thanks to the support of the French journal and the author, we obtained permission for its publication in these pages. Secondly, we present the article by Luccas Eduardo Maldonado, who reviews the works dedicated to the history of the left-wing book in Brazil elaborated by intellectuals Lincoln Secco and Edgard Carone. Maldonado recovers the works of Robert Darnton on the publishing circuit and book production as a starting point to situate the contributions of Secco and Carone in the history of the book in Brazil. The work of these intellectuals and researchers constitutes an invaluable contribution to the studies on the left in that country, through the printed productions, so relevant to think the political and intellectual practice and intervention.Sol Anahí Viñolo's work constitutes a contribution to the study of the links between publishing and politics from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective. Focusing on a current period, the author studies the place of printed culture in two political parties in Argentina: the Unión Cívica Radical and the Partido Obrero. The ethnographer delves into the bowels of the groups to investigate the place of libraries, editions and party press, artifacts that coexist and dialogue with other media and platforms more focused on the digital and the image than on the printed object. The article was proposed to the magazine prior to Viñolo's tragic death in a traffic accident. It is presented in a revised version, edited and prefaced by its editor, anthropologist Gustavo Sorá.Finally, Javier Planas brings us an interview and conversation on the history of libraries in Latin America, conducted with two other exponents of this area so relevant for book and publishing studies, as well as for studies on archives and libraries linked to the CeDInCI world: Alejandro Parada and Carlos Aguirre. The text presented is the result of the transcription and edition of an event that was part of a series of talks organized by the Department of Distance Librarianship and the Library System of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, Paraná, on July 15, 2021. The text reviews studies on libraries in the world and particularly in the region, the difficulties for the periodization of different periods, the key moments to approach the history of libraries, as well as the links of libraries with popular culture and the intellectual world, among other topics. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) ; La sección dedicada a la Historia del Libro y la Edición busca promover trabajos que recorren el circuito de producción, circulación y difusión de libros y otros materiales impresos, en tanto etapas insoslayables para el estudio de la producción y difusión de las ideas, de las trayectorias intelectuales y de los vínculos entre el mundo de las ideas y la política. Con ese interés, la sección busca aportar a los estudios sobre el libro y la edición, campo disciplinar que se nutre de disciplinas tales como la historia, la sociología, la antropología, la bibliotecología y los estudios literarios. En esta oportunidad, presentamos cuatro trabajos que buscan realizar aportes empíricos y conceptuales a este campo de estudios. El trabajo que inaugura la sección es una traducción del artículo del historiador Robert Darnton, titulado "La France, ton café fout le camp! De l'histoire du livre à l'histoire de la communication", publicado en 1993 por la revista Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Fiel al recorrido de Darnton en la configuración de los estudios historiográficos sobre el libro y la edición, el trabajo constituye un aporte a la discusión conceptual y metodológica de la disciplina, así como una invalorable labor archivística realizada en París. El artículo presenta un recorrido por las discusiones que promovió el llamado "giro material" en la historia intelectual, desde la clásica historia de las ideas hasta los estudios que ponen el foco en las mediaciones, mediadores y materiales que intervienen en la difusión de las ideas. Con ese espíritu, Darnton se involucra en la discusión acerca de los orígenes culturales e intelectuales de la Revolución Francesa y estudia el efecto que los agentes, prácticas y materiales impresos subterráneos, clandestinos y marginales promovieron en la esfera pública, provocando una erosión progresiva del régimen que caería en 1789. El estudio sociohistórico del circuito de comunicación que configura y detalla Robert Darnton muestra cómo el libro se diferencia de otros soportes al producir un "efecto libro" que tiene lógicas diferenciales sobre el debate público. Este trabajo resulta iluminador de un período, pero a la vez se trata de un insumo productivo para pensar el lugar del libro en el debate público de la actualidad, junto a otros soportes y plataformas como los medios de comunicación y las redes sociales. La traducción del texto fue realizada oportunamente por Margarita Merbilhaá para su discusión en el Seminario de Historia Intelectual del CeDInCI. Años más tarde, con una versión revisada por la traductora, y gracias al apoyo de la revista francesa y del autor, logramos el permiso para su publicación en estas páginas. En segundo lugar, se presenta el artículo de Luccas Eduardo Maldonado, quien recorre los trabajos dedicados a la historia del libro de izquierdas en Brasil elaborados por los intelectuales Lincoln Secco y Edgard Carone. Maldonado recupera los trabajos de Robert Darnton sobre el circuito editorial y la producción de libros como punto de partida para situar los aportes de Secco y Carone en la historia del libro en Brasil. La obra de estos intelectuales e investigadores constituye un aporte invaluable a los estudios sobre las izquierdas en ese país, por la vía de las producciones impresas, tan relevantes para pensar la práctica e intervención política e intelectual. El trabajo de Sol Anahí Viñolo constituye un aporte al estudio de los vínculos entre edición y política desde una perspectiva antropológica y etnográfica. Situándose sobre un período actual, la autora estudia el lugar que ocupa la cultura impresa en dos partidos políticos de la Argentina: la Unión Cívica Radical y el Partido Obrero. La etnógrafa se inmiscuye en las entrañas de las agrupaciones para indagar sobre el lugar que ocupan las bibliotecas, las ediciones y la prensa partidaria, artefactos que conviven y dialogan con otros soportes y plataformas más centrados en lo digital y la imagen que en el objeto impreso. El artículo fue propuesto a la revista previo al trágico fallecimiento de Viñolo en el marco de un accidente de tránsito. Se presenta una versión revisada, editada y prologada por su director, el antropólogo Gustavo Sorá. Finalmente, Javier Planas nos acerca una entrevista y conversación sobre la historia de las bibliotecas en América Latina, realizada a otros dos exponentes de esta área tan relevante para los estudios del libro y la edición, así como para los estudios sobre archivos y bibliotecas vinculados al mundo CeDInCI: Alejandro Parada y Carlos Aguirre. El texto presentado es el resultado de la transcripción y edición de un evento que formó parte de un ciclo de charlas organizado por el Departamento de Bibliotecología a distancia y el Sistema de Bibliotecas de la Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina, sede Paraná, el 15 de julio de 2021. En el texto se recorren los estudios sobre bibliotecas en el mundo y particularmente en la región, las dificultades para la periodización de distintos períodos, los momentos clave para abordar la historia de las bibliotecas, así como los vínculos de las bibliotecas con la cultura popular y con el mundo intelectual, entre otros tópicos.
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When I was in graduate school "the imaginary" was one of those words that circulated all the more often because it was untethered to any specific theoretical source. It borrowed bits from Lacan and bits from Castoriadis to suggest some historically specific articulation of the very capacity to imagine. There were multiple imaginaries, political, social, technical etc., As someone who was getting interested in Spinoza at the time I tried to connect his writing on the imagination with this idea to no avail.Now, thinking about Spinoza again, it might make sense to think about the way in which Spinoza's particular idea of the imagination is useful for thinking about social and political life. I should be clear that on this point I mean "imagination" as it is described as a particular kind of necessarily incomplete and inadequate knowledge in the Ethics, and not superstition as it is developed in Spinoza's political writings. Any such separation is artificial, as the two are thoroughly intertwined as bodies and minds, however, it is still worth at least heuristically the limitation of thinking from that of acting. For Spinoza the imagination, images formed by the body, always involve both the body that affects us and how we are affected. As Spinoza writes, "Next, to retain the customary words, the affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things, though they do not reproduce the figure of things. And when the mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines." (EIIP17schol).It is not representation but presence that is central to the imagination. To imagine something is to regard i as present. This presence is a confused amalgamation of the qualities of the thing affecting us, and the way we are affected. To imagine is to treat our own associations and connections as if they were part of what we are perceiving. "For example, a soldier, having seen traces of a horse in the sand, will immediately pass from the thought of a horse in the sand will immediately pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a horseman, and from that to the thought of war and so on. And so each one, according as he has been accustomed to join and connect the image of things in this or that way, will pass from one thought to another" (EIIP18Schol). As I have argued in my post on Spinoza and conspiracy theories is that it stresses the imagination can be both complex, involving a chain of associations from hoof print to horse, and horse to war, and immediate, directly lived as something present. As Althusser stresses for Spinoza the imagination is nothing other than the phenomenological world of lived experience as such. All of our perceptions and evaluations of the world as it is lived, or tendency to view some aspects of nature as good or bad, useful or harmful, organized or disorganized, are the imagination, which is to say are confused perceptions of our own desires and the way that the object affects us. I was thinking of this mediation of the immediate or the immediacy of mediation when reading about theories of race. First, and not surprising, is this line from Etienne Balibar's "Is there a Neo-Racism?" As Balibar writes "I shall therefore venture the idea that the racist complex inextricably combines a crucial function of misrecognition (without which the violence would not be tolerable to the very people engaging in it) and a 'will to know', a violent desire for immediate knowledge of social relations." In other words, part of the appeal of racism is that it makes social relations immediately legible. It provides a geography, dividing town into the "good" and "bad" part, a morality, telling us (people who believe ourselves to be white) who to trust and who to fear. As much as this imagination is immediate, registered in somatic markers such as skin, hair, and eye color, the immediacy is a product of associations and connections that we are constantly subject to, media, entertainment, etc., and, like Spinoza's soldier, we have forgotten in focusing on the immediate present nature of the image.Or, to take another version of the argument, this time from Stuart Hall, "Race is only one element in this struggle to command and structure the popular ideology: but it has been, over the past two decades, a leading element: perhaps the key element. Since it appears to be grounded in natural and biological "facts," it is a way of drawing distinctions and developing practices which appear, themselves, to be "natural," given and universal...Race provides the structure of simplifications which make it possible to construct plausible explanations of troubling developments and which facilitates the application of simplifying remedies. Who now wants to begin to explore the complex of economic and political forces which have perpetuated and multiplied the poverty of the working-class districts fo the inner cities? Who will have time for that complicated exercise--which may require us to trace connections between structures of our society which is more convenient to keep apart: when a simple, obvious, "natural" explanation lies to hand."A few hasty connections/conclusions. First, if you listen to any episode of Hotel Bar Sessions the podcast that I am now a cohost of, I suggest you listen to the interview with Caleb Cain available here (I can plug this in good faith because this is from before I joined the show):One of the thing that comes up in the discussion is how the racist, or "race realist" explanation offers a quick an easy explanation of a variety of phenomena, such as why the inner city of Baltimore is the way that it is in terms of poverty and crime. An actual, or to use the Spinozist term, adequate understanding of the actual factors that have made the inner city the way it is would have to take into consideration the history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, deindustrialization, etc. etc. etc., Of course it is important to point out that what appears here as immediate, race as an explanation, is itself the product of a long history of associations. It took us a long time to see race, and it takes a lot of work, political and ideological, for us not to see everything about social life, the accumulation of capital, and so on, that is effaced in the immediacy and simplicity of seeing race. So this is what it might mean to consider what "the imaginary institution of society" might mean from a Spinozist perspective. It is the dominance of a particular set of immediate associations of bodies and qualities, associations that are themselves the product of a complex articulation (in Hall's sense), that disappears in the immediacy of the association. I have focused here on race as one such mediated immediacy. It would be wrong to think it is the only one. As Alexandra Minna Stern argues in her book Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, "Transphobia is the butter on the bread of much alt-right and alt-light vlogging." As with race there is an appeal to a kind of natural immediacy, that of sex, gender, and gender roles, one that is the product of many mediations, right down to the latest explosion in a gender reveal party. The natural order of sex and gender is in some sense the entry point to a larger sense of a natural order. Of course the relation between these two different images of nature, racial and sexual, is complex, overdetermined, and in some sense always shifting. As much as there is an epistemic tendency towards the imagination predicated on its immediacy and self-evident nature, there is a practical one as well: the order and connection of bodies being the same as ideas and all. For many, especially those with advantages in the existing order, there are reasons to hold unto and act within the horizon described by its imagination. I recently finished reading Jeremy Gilbert and Alex William's Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win it Back). In the midst of that book there is a long discussion to retrieve the idea of interests in politics. One of the things that Gilbert and Williams stress that one's interest is related to both one's position and one's horizon. As they write,"From this perspective, workers who vote for immigration restrictions are acting against their interests when conceived within a liberal, communist, or even expansively social democratic horizon, but not when conceived within a conservative horizon. What is it that defines the particular characteristics of the horizon within which interests are perceived, computed, and acted upon? In part it must be a question of the scale--in terms of space and time--of that horizon. When horizons of interest are operating at a small scale, this will mean a focus on the hyperlocal (my immediate family) and the hyper-present (today and tomorrow and perhaps next year). What is reasonable within one horizon is unreasonable in another."If we want to change and expand the horizon of people's interest we must first recognize the horizon that they already operate within even if that horizon is defined by imaginations that seem irrational to us. "Inadequate and confused ideas follow with the same necessity as adequate, or clear and distinct ideas" (EIIP36). To put this in Spinozist terms, we all strive to maintain our existence, but we do so according to what we understand, rightly or wrongly, to be in our interest according to our given level of imagination or understanding. All of which is a very long way of saying that any politics of radical change has to start with understanding the epistemic and practical attachments that most have to the existing imaginary institution of society.
In a previous note on these same pages, we made reference to Obama's unpredictable use of executive power and his tendency to overuse it for certain domestic policies, while deferring to the military and foreign policy establishmenton issues he is ambivalent about, such as the international use of force. We also alluded to his tendency to isolate himself and rely excessively on his own judgment in shaping policy, to the detriment of his relations with staff, cabinet and other leaders. The long-drawn decision to seek Congressional approval before striking Syria is a case study of these proclivities.After resisting calls for intervention in Syria by Senate Republican "hawks"and foreign policy specialists since 2011, a year ago Obama conceded that, in spite of his aversion to intervene in "sectarian struggles",certain actions such as the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime against the opposition would constitute a "red line" which, once crossed, would automatically bring about an armed response by the United States. This week he had to face the consequences of his own words.Whenrobust evidence of the use of sarin gas by Bashar Al Assad's forces in rebel occupied territory was produced, the President had no choice but to spendthelast week of the month of Augustfrantically building a case for immediate intervention. Acting simultaneously as Chief Executive, policy shaper and his own spokesman, he used several venues, including an NPR interview, to announce to the American people that the time had come to act.But while Secretary of State John Kerry made a compelling speech on the need to act swiftly to punish the "moral obscenity" committed by the Assad regime, Obama appeared much more circumspect in his appeals to the American people. His early words conveyed both his outrage at the disproportionate actions by Assad as well as his empathy with the war-weary American citizens. In private, he confided he had qualms both about the legality and the political legitimacy of military action. In public, his argument focused on the violation of an international convention prohibiting the use of chemical weapons and the absolutely unavoidable duty to enforce it. But the fact that UN inspectors had not completed their field report on the attack, coupled with the refusal of the UN Security Council to consider armed action, gave him pause and forced him to confront his own doubts once again.In the meantime, momentum was building in the United States where, according to press reports, it was all but certain there would be a military strike to "punish and deter" the Syrian regime, by Labor Day weekend. GOP Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were vocal in their support of intervention but demanded more than just a punitive strike and showed some impatience towards the President's pondering an action that should have been decided long ago.Abroad, Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia were in favor of the US action. As it is widely known, Russia was against it and that is why the US had to bypass the UN Security Council where Russia has veto power. While NATO allies all offered strong support (indeed, both France and Britain were the first to insist on support for the rebels a year ago), Prime Minister David Cameron was delivered a strong blow when he lost a vote in the House of Commons, with some of his own backbenchers voting against intervention. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing a coming election and against the perennial background of German Basic Law constraints, had already told the President that Germany would stand in the sidelines, while offering moral support. The long shadow cast by the Iraqi war around the world once again became evident. But the French President, not required by the Fifth Republic Constitution to consult the legislature, and encouraged by France's recent successful actions in Mali and Libya, remained firm.By Friday, Obama's tortured deliberations came to an end as he abruptly changed courses. Against the advice of his National Security and political advisors team, he made a dramatic announcement from the Rose Garden: his decision on the need for a narrow punitive action against Syria had been made, he said, but he had decided to ask for Congressional authorization first. As Commander in Chief, and in spite of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, he is not obligated to do this. He thus appears to be shifting responsibility onto the legislature while simultaneouslybuying some time to explore diplomatic solutions in the upcoming G-20 summer.The cerebral constitutional law professor and the risk- taking politician in him have made a Faustian bargain. If Congress authorizes the use of force, he will have both legal and political cover for his action while at the same time fulfilling his moral duty of punishing a violator of the Chemical Weapons Convention and of Humanitarian law. If they vote No, he can just blame them for his own lack of action and use all the power of the Presidency on his domestic agenda.It is, in any case, a big gamble, one that has the potential of weakening him and turning him into a lame duck for the rest of his Presidency. The GOP is internally divided on many issues, among them foreign policy, where conservative ideologies run the gamut from minimalist /isolationist to neo-cons/regime- change interventionists and all the shades in-between. And the far left in Obama's own party is against intervention. So there is no guarantee he will get Congressional approval. The cost of losing this vote is enormous: it may set a strong precedent in diminishing Presidential prerogatives.To be fair to the President and his vacillating stance, this is not an easy decision. None of the world leaders have made a compelling public case for a strategic need of intervention in Syria. The proposed limited "punitive" strike will most likely be inconclusive: it will not deter further extreme actions by Assad, who has now been given time to disperse his military assets and capabilities. The strike will not significantly degrade his capacity to fight, and there will be little change in his main goal, namely, to destroy the opposition and regain total control of the country.This is a fight to the end by both sides. If overthrown, Assad and his Alawite supporters (as well as the Christians who have traditionally been under his protection) will be massacred. There are no desirable outcomes in this conflict. The rebels are divided and the biggest group is that ofthe jihadists with strong support of Al Qaeda. While Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel are on the side of the United States and want a moderate alternative to the Assad regime, Iran, to an extent Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon are on the dictator's side (as, incongruously, is Venezuela). The Palestinian group Hamas, previously favoring Assad has now changed sides and is supporting the rebels. So in many ways this is a war by proxy that could become a generalized regional war. There is no indication that the President or anyone else has a political plan or a diplomatic effort in mind for the post-strike scenario.However, US inaction at this time undermines the security of its allies, especially Israel. Even though Netanyahu has adopted a "no comment" stance and hasn't, accordingly, said a word on this issue, other Israeli politicians are worrying out loud about the implications the US lack of resolve will have on other "red lines": Will the United States act when Iran crosses the nuclear threshold? Or will Israel find itself facing Iran alone?They bitterly remind themselves of Obama's speech in Jerusalem, in March this year, when he said in Hebrew: "Atem lo levad" ("You are not alone"). They are very skeptical, now more than ever, that the President will match his lofty rhetoric with action.In the United States the momentum is gone, Congress won't reconvene until September 9, and the President is using the last week of summer to energetically lobby House and Senate leaders and persuade skeptics through intelligence briefings. Urgent issues in the domestic agenda will thus have to be postponed.What no one, either at home or abroad denies, is that the credibility of the Presidency and with it, that of the United States, is at stake. International support for the operation is unlikely to improve. A negative vote by Congress will further weaken the President and may complicate the White House legislative agenda, where he will have to spend all his political capital and still,perhaps, fall short.In a keynote speech to the National Defense University earlier this year, Obama expressed the need to chart a new way in American foreign policy, one that would end the "perpetual wartime footing" that characterized the post 9-11 era, after G.W. Bush got a virtual blank check from Congress in the use of military force and intelligence gathering. So far, Obama has ended two protracted unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it is clear he will not engage in regime change. But a new foreign policy strategy has not crystallized yet. There is no Obama doctrine, no overall framework to guide his decisions and give predictability to his actions.His whole approach to the Middle East, the most explosive region in the planet today, is misconceived. His tepid reaction to the Egyptian situation had already given some approximation of how reluctant he is about taking sides in conflicts in the region. Syrian use of chemical weapons has confirmed his ambivalence and exposed his indecision. At the same time, it has provoked a collapse of American credibility abroad, anduncertainty about its reliability as an ally. Regardless of what follows after this week, his hesitancy will have dire consequences for American foreign policy into the future.The larger problem that looms over the heads of world leaders and that few seem to acknowledge is that this is not about Syria or Egypt or Libya or Yemen or Tunisia as separate conflicts; it is a regional conflagration that has to be addressedcomprehensively, within the larger regional and international context. All major actors, whether it is Europe, Russia, or China and of course the United States, have a stake in the region and it is in their interest to define the rules of the game and together find an overall solution to this predicament.
Crowded and isolated Black and Latino neighborhoods are marked by economic deprivation and social depression. Many residents of these neighborhoods are disconnected from the larger society, no longer able to share in the values or social norms of majority America. The study of this concentrated poverty has become a new mini-industry. There has been a spate of books, reports, and articles on the phenomenon, which is variously known as "persistent poverty," the "underclass," or the "new poor." The authors of this book reject the label "underclass" because it is demeaning and "new poor" because it is inaccurate. We find it more profitable to focus on the problems of separation. Poverty has always afflicted America, and even long-term poverty has been an issue during other periods of the nation's development. Today, American society faces a period of growing social and economic separation, caused by worsened opportunities for the poor and resulting in more destructive long-term consequences for them and the society as a whole. We begin with the idea that global economic restructuring has since about 1975 altered the way political and social institutions work at every level in America. Until politics and economics are again reshaped, the problems of urban poverty will remain severe. Reshaping may begin as the pressures from urban separation force community-level institutions and politics to respond; in their response we believe these institutions should be strengthened, restructured, and redirected. Multi-local coalitions should be formed to press for re-allocation of federal resources in favor of domestic needs and for re-regulation of the national economy in favor of workers and common citizens. Only then can a successful attack begin on the problems of persistent poverty. To set the stage for directing the reader's attention to the conditions under which neighborhood organizations and municipal governments can mount a successful attack that will modify the structure and management of the national political economy, we have collected props from a wide-ranging survey. We begin by looking at such broad concerns as the behavior of the global economy, and we conclude with a focus on such narrow questions as the viability of particular municipal programs to alleviate poverty. In the middle sections, our survey shows in detail how persistent poverty in American cities is connected to various influential structures and processes: the global economy, the U.S. industrial structure, federal social policy, metropolitan labor markets, and finally, local politics and policy. We imagine a network of connections. At each of five nodes some of these processes are going through changes, being "restructured" or reorganized. Until quite recently it was assumed that basic needs--such as housing, education, health care, neighborhood safety, and jobs--could be made available to nearly all Americans. Programs to provide these necessities had been expanding for over 50 years, the guarantee becoming over time more accepted as a social responsibility; but suddenly this basic commitment to a social contract has been changed. American society now promises little and delivers less to people or communities who cannot provide for themselves. In the process of transformation, the world's richest nation is creating a third-world sub-society within its own borders. Policymakers have adopted three ways of thinking about these emerging problems. Some hold to the notion that poverty is increasing because a lax welfare state has generated a large group of "nonparticipants," "marginal people," bums. Probably a larger group of policymakers think the rising problems of the poor are caused simply by cutbacks in resources devoted to social equity. A third group sees poverty as an almost inevitable consequence of the vagaries of the market, made worse in recent years by globalization of the economy and lack of a national economic plan. Our argument is that the recent upsurge in persistent urban poverty has been generated by a particular set of American political responses to transformations in structure of the global and domestic economies, exacerbated considerably by a long process of highly subsidized suburbanization and by racism. The purpose of this book is to support this argument by reviewing and interpreting research on the global economy, industrial change, and public policy. In doing this we are able to estimate their combined effects on cities, neighborhoods, and residents. Since the late 1970s the global economy has become increasingly integrated, and American corporations have moved world-wide in search of cheaper ways to produce to meet stiff competition. As a result, American workers have felt a steady erosion of their power and a persistent reduction in their standard of living. There is a trickledown effect in reverse, a backwash that swamps American labor. Unskilled workers have been marginalized by widespread plant shut-downs and blue-collar lay-offs, and they have found a paucity of good career ladders, stuck instead in low-wage, dead-end, service jobs. At the same time, many poorly prepared immigrants have arrived; many women have come to head families, finding themselves unable to support households on their own;) and discrimination against minorities has continued. While some Americans have benefitted financially from the post 1970 changes, the poorest have been pushed down or cut adrift. The federal government, preoccupied with global-economy issues, and careful to be responsive to the growing demands of its new, upper-middle-class, suburban constituencies, has sacrificed the urban poor. State and local governments have also retrenched, adding to the crisis, by responding to demands for austerity from business, tax-paying voters and public officials alike. When the squeeze came from the global economy, public institutions were unprepared to relieve the inevitable difficulties the poor would encounter. Corporate redeployment and government economizing insured that city labor markets would turn sour, especially for basic jobs. Federal funds for cities and poor people were cut and guarantees for benefits and services were reduced. The tax revolt was managed by new politics that coalesced after 35 years of white, middle-class suburbanization the budget reductions hit hardest of all on public jobs and services in central cities. In the scramble to survive from shutdowns, contractions, layoffs, and budget cuts, everyone with any power tried to get out and get ahead, and those with less power got left farther and farther behind, increasingly separated from the main society. The majority of Black Americans and Latinos already were subjected to relatively low wages, bad housing, and poor schools. Most women supporting children by themselves already had great difficulties. New immigrants from Latin America and South East Asia were already near the bottom. In earlier years, economic growth and the development of a more liberal society had allowed some in such situations to escape the poverty of the ghetto and the bad barrios, and because many believed in this promise, some communities had an aura of hopefulness. But with the job losses and the program cuts replacing sound economic growth, and the new self-interest replacing community and collective interests, the situation worsened for those left behind; their expectations plummeted, and their communities became isolated. We find that cities and even neighborhoods have had to turn more and more to their own energies and resources. It is true that they are strapped tightly to small budgets, have made little dent so far on the most serious problems, and will ultimately have to depend on private sector job growth and re-established, well-funded, federal transfer programs. But local governments and community-based organizations are close to problems, and they have both the opportunity to become involved and the need to revitalize these poor communities. Their role in solving community problems has escalated over the last two decades, along with rising expectations for them to intervene. City halls and community organizations are therefore forced to innovate, press demands, and represent neighborhoods. From this pessimistic dilemma arises the main line of our optimism, our principle recommendation for policy. At the national level, action to reduce poverty is at a standstill, or worse. At the local level, resources are not available. But because problems are deep, apparent, and threatening to local authorities, local political movements have grown more successful; both community organizations and city halls have turned seriously to the task of dealing with poverty. As they well know, on their own they cannot succeed; but through cooperation, through state and national coalitions, and by means of other influences on national politics, these progressive local political movements can move toward success. New policies should be directed toward strengthening such possibilities. In Chapter One, after a cursory review of theories of poverty, we lay out our major thesis and preview the various arguments and findings of the book. In Chapter Two we document the appalling conditions of poor and minority people in central cities, explaining why persistent, concentrated, urban poverty ought to be seen in relation to the separations that result from inequalities in the entire distribution of income and wealth. In Chapter Three we analyze the connections between the structure and movement of the new global economy and the dilemmas of the poorest Americans. There we examine widely dispersed, globalized markets and production arrangements that are managed by the tightly centralized control systems of major corporations. In Chapter Four we extend the arguments and see how changing industrial patterns have worsened the structure of opportunities facing most American cities and workers. Simultaneous dispersal of jobs and centralization of management have removed good jobs from cities and left behind minorities and women, and their children. With limited social contact outside their embattled neighborhoods and with weakened social contracts tying them to the larger community, these people have settled into a persistent poverty that leaves few routes for escape. In Chapter Five we first see how economic changes have led to a new, conservative politics. We then examine policies of the federal government, local government, and community-based organizations, finding what is innovative about them and what constrains them. There we argue that only through local reconstruction and a new organization of politics, involving grass-roots and neighborhood groups in new ways, will pressure build up for the required transformation in national politics that will rechannel funds toward domestic needs. In the end, democratic participation and politics will have to take control of the economy, or else poverty will indeed persist. The sources for new change are to be found in coalitions formed from below. Finally, in Chapter Six we propose specific ways that new energy and attention can be refocused in improved policies at all levels of government. There is a tension throughout this study. We are faced with a conflict between two findings. On the one hand, powerful global economic forces play a major role in determining the life chances of American citizens. On the other hand, the situation of the poor can be radically improved through a staged process of local empowerment, the formation of new political coalitions, and the consequent reformulation of a national agenda. The reader may find, concerning the first view, that the arguments in Chapters Three and Four appear to be top-down and accepting of the force of structural arrangements like competitive markets, and too despairing of the potential good influence of human agency, through social movements, political action, and the like. The arguments in these chapters display our deep concern that global economic forces be better understood by the nation's policymakers, so that global contributions to severe poverty in American cities can be traced through to corporate behavior in a newly expanded, more competitive, and highly integrated world market. At the other extreme, the reader may find that the tasks we set in Chapters Five and Six for changed local governments and coalitions of local forces are too demanding; chances for challenging and improving federal policy may seem remote. We acknowledge this risk of asking the reader to examine both sides of the question, but do so because the problems of urban poverty in the United States today are immense, and their resolution will require complex solutions and far-reaching changes. This study began in 1989 for a report to the Rockefeller Foundation on the current state of research on persistent and severe urban poverty. The idea grew our of the authors' discussion with James Gibson and Erol Ricketts, who were concerned with the relationships among economic structure, local institutions, and persistent poverty. The Foundation's Equal Opportunity Division provided generous financial support. Our survey of research and analysis was done together with a team of graduate students at Cornell University and the University of California at Berkeley; Lisa Bornstein, David Campt, and Elizabeth Mueller researched and drafted chapters; Robert Letcher, Sharon Lord, Susan Sullivan, and George Washington assisted. The work was done mainly under the auspices of the University of California's Institute of Urban and Regional Development. We thank Marie Floyd, David Van Arnam, and Demetra Dentes (at Cornell) for editing and typing; and Cathy Girardeau and Arleda Martinez, who efficiently helped with typing.
Crowded and isolated Black and Latino neighborhoods are marked by economic deprivation and social depression. Many residents of these neighborhoods are disconnected from the larger society, no longer able to share in the values or social norms of majority America. The study of this concentrated poverty has become a new mini-industry. There has been a spate of books, reports, and articls on the phenomenon, which is variously known as "persistent poverty,", the underclass," or the "new poor." The authors of this book reject the label "underclass" because it is demeaning and "new poor" because it is inaccurate. We find it more profitable to focus on the problem of separation. Poverty has always afflicted America, and even long-term poverty has been an issue during other periods of the nation's development. Today, American society faces a period of growing social and economic separation, caused by worsened opportunities for the poor and resulting in more destructive long-term consequences for them and the society as a whole. We begin with the idea that global economic restructuring has since about 1975 altered the way political and social institutions work at every level in America. Until politics and economics are again reshaped, the problems of urban poverty will remain severe. Reshaping may begin as the pressures from urban separation force community-level institutions should be strengthened, restructured, and redirected. Multi-local coalitions should be formed to press for re-allocation of federal resources in favor of domestic needs and for re-regulation of the national economy in favor of workers and common citizens. Only then can a successful attack begin on the problems of persistent poverty. To set the stage for directing the reader's attention to the conditions under which neighborhood organizations and municipal governments can mount a successful attack that will modify the structure and management of the national political economy, we have collected props from a wide-ranging survey. We begin by looking at such broad concerns as the behavior of the global economy, and we conclude with a focus on such narrow questions as the viability of particular municipal programs to alleviate poverty. In the middle sections, our survey shows in detail how persistent poverty in American cities is connected to various influential structures and processes: the global economy, the U.S. industrial structure, federal social policy metropolitan labor markets, and finally, local politics and policy. We imagine a network of connections. At each of five nodes some of these processes are going through changes, being "restructured" or reorganized. Until quite recently it was assumed that basic needs -- such as housing, education, health care, neighborhood safety, and jobs -- could be made available to nearly all Americans. Programs to provide these necessities had been expanding for over 50 years, the guarantee becoming over time more accepted as a social responsibility; but suddenly this basic commitment to a social contract has been changed. American society now promises little and delivers less to people or communities who cannot provide for themselves. In the process of transformation, the world's richest nation is creating a third-world sub-society within its own borders. Policymakers have adopted three ways of thinking about these emerging problems. Some hold to the notion that poverty is increasing because a lax welfare state has generated a large group of "non-participants," "marginal people," bums. Probably a larger group of policymakers think the rising problems of the poor are caused simply by cutbacks in resources devoted to social equity. A third group sees poverty as an almost inevitable consequence of the vagaries of the market, made worse in recent years by globalization of the economy and lack of a national economic plan. Our argument is that the recent upsurge in persistent urban poverty has been generated by a particular set of American political responses to transformations in structure of the global and domestic economies, exacerbated considerably by a long process of highly subsidized suburbanization and by racism. The purpose of this book is to support this argument by reviewing and interpreting research on the global economy, industrial change, and public policy. In doing this we are able to estimate their combined effects on cities, neighborhoods, and residents. Since the late 1970s the global economy has become increasingly integrated, and American corporations have moved world-wide in search of cheaper ways to produce to meet stiff competition. As a result, American workers have felt a steady erosion of their power and a persistent reduction in their standard of living. There is a trickle-down effect in reverse, a backwash that swamps American labor. Unskilled workers have been marginalized by widespread plant shut-downs and blue-collar lay-offs, and they have found a paucity of good career ladders, stuck instead in low-wage, dead-end, service jobs. At the same time, many poorly prepared immigrants have arrived; many women have come to head families, finding themselves unable to support households on their own;) and discrimination against minorities has continued. While some Americans have benefited financially from the post 1970 changes, the poorest have been pushed down or cut adrift. The federal government, preoccupied with global-economy issues, and careful to be responsive to the growing demands of its new, upper-middle-class, suburban constituencies, has sacrificed the urban poor. State and local governments have also retrenched, adding to the crisis, by responding to demands for austerity from business, tax-paying voters and public officials alike. When the squeeze came from the global economy, public institutions were unprepared to relieve the inevitable difficulties the poor would encounter. Corporate redeployment and government economizing insured that city labor markets would turn sour, especially for basic jobs. Federal funds for cities and poor people were cut and guarantees for benefits and services were reduced. The tax revolt was managed by new politics that coalesced after 35 years of white, middle-class suburbanization; the budget reductions hit hardest of all on public jobs and services in central cities. In the scramble to survive from shutdowns, contractions, layoffs, and budget cuts, everyone with any power tried to get out and get ahead, and those with less power got left farther and farther behind, increasingly separated from the main society. The majority of Black Americans and Latinos already were subjected to relatively low wages, bad housing, and poor schools. Most women supporting children by themselves already had great difficulties. New immigrants from Latin America and South East Asia were already near the bottom. In earlier years, economic growth and the development of a more liberal society had allowed some in such situations to escape the poverty of the ghetto and the bad barrios, and because many believed in this promise, some communities had an aura of hopefulness. But with the job losses and the program cuts replacing around economic growth, and the new self-interest replacing community and collective interests, the situation worsened for those left behind; their expectations plummeted, and their communities became isolated. We find that cities and even neighborhoods have had to turn more and more to their own energies and resources. It is true that they are strapped tightly to small budgets, have made little dent so far on the most serious problems, and will ultimately have to depend on private-sector job growth and re-established, well-funded, federal transfer programs. But local governments and community-based organizations are close to problems, and they have both the opportunity to become involved and the need to revitalize these poor communities. Their role in solving community problems has escalated over the last two decades, along with rising expectations for them to intervene. City halls and community organizations are therefore forced to innovate, press demands, and represent neighborhoods. From this pessimistic dilemma arises the main line of our optimism, our principle recommendation for policy. At the national level, action to reduce poverty is at a standstill, or worse. At the local level, resources are not available. But because problems are deep, apparent, and threatening to local authorities, local political movements have grown more successful; both community organizations and city halls have turned seriously to the task of dealing with poverty. As they well know, on their own they cannot succeed; but through cooperation, through state and national coalitions, and by means of other influences on national politics, these progressive local political movements can move toward success. New policies should be directed toward strengthening such possibilities. In Chapter One, after a cursory review of theories of poverty, we lay out our major thesis and preview the various arguments and findings of the book. In Chapter Two we document the appalling conditions of poor and minority people in central cities, explaining why persistent, concentrated, urban poverty ought to be seen in relation to the separations that result from inequalities in the entire distribution of income and wealth. In Chapter Three we analyze the connections between the structure and movement of the new global economy and the dilemma of the poorest Americans. There we examine widely dispersed, globalized markets and production arrangements that are managed by the tightly centralized control systems of major corporations. In Chapter Four we extend the arguments and see how changing industrial patterns have worsened the structure of opportunities facing most American cities and workers. Simultaneous dispersal of jobs and centralization of management have removed good jobs from cities and left behind minorities and women, and their children. With limited social contact outside their embattled neighborhoods and with weakened social contracts tying them to the larger community, these people have settled into a persistent poverty that leaves few routes for escape. In Chapter Five we first see how economic changes have led to a new, conservative politics. We then examine policies of the federal government, local government, and community-based organizations, finding what is innovative about them and what constrains them. There we argue that only through local reconstruction and a new organization of politics, involving grass-roots and neighborhood groups in new ways, will pressure build up for the required transformation in national politics that will rechannel funds toward domestic needs. In the end, democratic participation and politics will have to take control of the economy, or else poverty will indeed persist. The sources for new change are to be found in coalitions formed from below. Finally, in Chapter Six we propose specific ways that new energy and attention can be refocused in improved policies at all levels of government. There is a tension throughout this study. We are faced with a conflict between two findings. On the one hand, powerful global economic forces play a major role in determining the life chances of American citizens. On the other hand, the situation of the poor can be radically improved through a staged process of local empowerment, the formation of new political coalitions, and the consequent reformation of a national agenda. The reader may find, concerning the first view, that the arguments in Chapters Three and Four appear to be top-down and accepting of the force of structural arrangements like competitive markets, and too despairing of the potential good influence of human agency, through social movements, political action, and the like. The arguments in these chapters display our deep concern that global economic forces be better understood by the nation's policymakers, so that global contributions to severe poverty in American cities can be traced through to corporate behavior in a newly expanded, more competitive, and highly integrated world market. At the other extreme, the reader may find that the tasks we set in Chapters Five and Six for changed local governments and coalitions of local forces are too demanding; chances for challenging and improving federal policy may seem remote. We acknowledge this risk of asking the reader to examine both sides of the question, but do so because the problems of urban poverty in the United States today are immense, and their resolution will require complex solutions and far-reaching changes. This study began in 1989 for a report to the Rockefeller Foundation on the current state of research on persistent and severe urban poverty. The idea grew out of the authors' discussion with James Gibson and Erol Ricketta, who were concerned with the relationships among economic structure, local institutions, and persistent poverty. The Foundation's Equal Opportunity Division provided generous financial support. Our survey of research and analysis was done together with a team of graduate students at Cornell University and the University of California at Berkeley; Lisa Bornstein, David Campt, and Elizabeth Mueller researched and drafted chapters; Robert Letcher, Sharon Lord, Susan Sullivan, and George Washington assisted. The work was done mainly under the auspices of the University of California's Institute of Urban and Regional Development. We thank Marie Floyd, David Van Arnam, and Demetra Dentes (et Cornell) for editing and typing; and Cathy Girardeau and Arieda Martinez, who efficiently helped with typing.
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Navigating challenging and complex civic spaces is nothing new for local organizations working to advance the rights and inclusion of LGBTI communities. Join NDI Senior Program Officer for Citizen Participation for a conversation with three partners from across the globe working to sustain their advocacy for equality and inclusion, while tackling some of the unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play Whitney Pfeifer: Navigating challenging and complex civic spaces is nothing new for local organizations working to advance the rights and inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex communities. Regardless of the levels of tolerance and legal protection in a country, these groups know how to quickly adapt and utilize innovative approaches to maintaining their work and advocating for change. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations to cancel Pride events, training, and in-person advocacy efforts, LGBTI organizations have been quick to respond and adjust, playing an integral role in meeting the basic needs of LGBTI individuals while utilizing online creativity to stay connected and sustain LGBTI community building. Today, we are joined by three partners from across the globe, each working to sustain their advocacy for equality and inclusion, while tackling some of the unprecedented challenges posed by the pandemic. We'll be speaking to each of these local partners to discover how they have successfully built digital communities that achieved real-life results. Welcome to DemWorks. In Panama, Fundación Iguales is working to shift social attitudes towards greater respect and acceptance of LGBTI communities. Part of this process includes collecting stories of how LGBTI communities are being impacted by COVID-19 and its response, demonstrating that as humans, we are all impacted by the pandemic, regardless of how we identify. We spoke with Ivan to learn more. Ivan, thank you for joining us. Ivan: Thank you. WP: Could you tell us a little bit more about the LGBTI community in Panama and the types of challenges LGBTI individuals face in building and maintaining a community? I: We are a country between Costa Rica, who just last month legalized civil marriage for same sex couples, and Colombia, a country with equal marriage since April 2016. We're a part of that less of the 30% of Latin Americans who live in a territory where marriage equality is prohibited. Moreover, are known for public policies that takes into consideration LGBTI persons. The challenges, there are many. As a gay person, for example, I'm not protected by any non-discrimination law, or the gender identity of the trans community is not part of what is respected by the government. There is unfortunately still a lot of stigma and discrimination for being queer. We're a small country where there's a strong control from conservatives and religious groups, but what are the good news, I guess? The civil society is finally organized, and organizations like Fundación Iguales are doing a marvelous work promoting the respect of our human rights, creating community, helping the LGBTIQ community to be more visible, and therefore more respected by the general public. We start a legal process to have marriage equality in Panama since 2016. We are very optimistic we will conquer in the courts and in the public opinion, by strategic innovative and emphatic messages of equality. WP: You alluded briefly to how Fundación is contributing to building and strengthening the community in Panama. Could you discuss the facts a little bit more about how Fundación is contributing to and strengthening during these uncertain times? I: First of all, with positive messages and with a clear presence in national conversations about the measures during the pandemic, highlighting the reality of LGBTI persons. We have had a very tough situation with restriction based on sex to restrain mobility of people here in Panama, and that had impacted dramatically the trans community and the nonbinary community of Panama, in some cases affecting their access to food and medicines. Yes, to be able to even go to the supermarket and buy bread and milk. We decided to join forces with other organizations, specifically with an organization called Hombres Trans Panamá. It's an organization conformed by trans men to create a solidarity network. The network was created for two main activities. The first one, it is to assist directly trans and non binary people who register for humanitarian assistance. We already covered 120 people who were in need of food and medicines. The second part of that program is an online survey to register discrimination cases for the trans community during the quarantine time. We have already had the report of 26 cases, mostly of trans person who were restricted to enter supermarkets to buy food because their gender identity or expression did not match what the police "expect" from them that day. That report was sent to the government, to regional organizations that monitor human rights, and we hope that impact possibly their lives. For other programs that Fundación Iguales is promoting during this times of pandemic, one that is very important is a series of podcasts called Panademia LGBTIQ+, a program of Fundación Iguales with [foreign language 00:06:20], which is an independent group of journalists to highlight stories of LGBTI persons during these times, telling their stories, especially the trans community. WP: That sounds like a lot of excellent work and strengthening the collaboration between groups has been really effective, I think, in this COVID pandemic situation. I: Indeed. WP: You alluded briefly to these podcasts. Are there other forms of technology that Fundación is using to continue the work that you're doing? I: Yes, and that's very interesting because we have to reinvent our work, basically. Just before COVID, we finished a super nice, unprecedented program going through the different provinces of Panama that we call the human rights tour, with the idea to be more democratic on the contents of human rights, specifically talking about Inter-American Court of Human Rights decision on equal marriage and gender identity, the Advisory Opinion 24. It was such a success and we planned to right away continue around the whole country. With this situation we have, being confined at home with mobility restrictions, we have to change all that, but we were lucky to have a strong presence in social media with a robust content that we were able to share and build from it. Also, our capacity of doing initiatives jointly with other NGOs like I mentioned before and you highlight, were also key to show the work that we were doing on respecting human rights. That coordination and collaborations, like the podcast example, the solidarity network, the level of infographic videos and social media interactions of Fundación Iguales are very solid. Since we dedicate an important part of our work to be present in national and international platforms for political participation, that allowed us to be more visible and not to be forget during these complicated times, WP: It sounds that you've been able to pivot pretty smoothly and quickly, despite I'm sure what have appeared to be challenges that we're all facing during the pandemic. Would you be willing to talk about kind of the role and benefits of partnering with international organizations such as NDI in your work? I: When I started Fundación Iguales, I was very privileged to know that working with international organizations like NDI was essential. I lived almost eight years in Washington, D.C., And before that I studied in New York City, and I worked for almost eight years in multilateral organizations. That experience gave me a different look to understand how, and how specifically a country like Panama, a country with so many challenges, with the lack of the government support and local support, I would say, organizations and enterprises and so on ... so for me, it was very important to know that a key part of my work was to knock some doors abroad because it's essential to boost the work that we do here. Definitely, without the help, assistance, donations and more important, the moral support of embassies and organizations like NDI, our work would have been way more difficult than what actually is. WP: As NDI, we like to partner and collaborate with our partners and recognize you as the experts and provide the technical assistance and guidance as needed. So it's good to hear that this has been beneficial for Fundación. My last question is about what's next for Fundación? I: We're very focused that we want a social change for our country in a social change for good. We want a Panama where all persons will be respected and where they can all be happy. We want Panama to join the club of countries where same sex couples can have the support and protection of the government, and more importantly, where society in general welcomes their families. We're trans persons can fully live and decide about their dreams and lives. And we're going to conquer that by strategic campaigns, with messages, with empathy. WP: Thank you, Ivan, for taking the time to speak with us. We look forward to seeing what Fundación is able to do in creating a safer and more equal space for LGBTI communities in Panama. I: Thank you, it's been a pleasure. WP: For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with thousands of courageous and committed democratic activists around the world to help countries develop the institution's practices and skills necessary for democracy's success. For more information, please visit our website at www.ndi.org. You've heard about how an organization is engaging with communities and collecting stories to plan for future advocacy efforts from Fundación Iguales. But what happens when you are in the middle of a project, when things get disrupted? LGBTI communities in Romania successfully organized to prevent an amendment to the constitution that would ban same sex marriage that was put to a referendum in 2018. In the aftermath of these efforts, there was a need to establish priorities moving forward and create space for dialogue within the community about the next steps for the overall movement. Mosaic organized different segments of the LGBTI community, including transgender communities, LGBTI, Roma, women, and older people to build consensus around an advocacy agenda moving forward. In the midst of these community outreach efforts, COVID-19 happened. Vlad Viski, executive director of MosaiQ is with us. Vlad, thanks for joining us. Vlad Viski: Thank you for having me. WP: Can you tell us a little bit more about your project? VV: Between 2015 and 2018, in Romania, there was a national campaign to change the constitution and ban gay marriages, initiatives which were supported by conservative groups and a large share of the political party. For three years, in Romania, society has been talking, probably for the first time in a very serious manner, about LGBTI rights, about the place for the LGBT community in society. This conservative effort ended with a failure at the polls for the referendum to change the constitution, only 20% of Romanians actually casting the vote for this issue when the minimum threshold of votation, of turnout, was 30%. This was possible with quite a successful campaign coming not from not only from MosaiQ but from other LGBTI organizations in Romania throughout the country. We all kind of went on the boycott strategy, we're actually asking people to boycott the referendum because human rights cannot be subject to a popular vote. Once the referendum in 2018 failed in Romania, there was a question in the community. What should we do next? How should our agenda look like for the next couple of years? We at Mosaic, we really tried to focus and we really thought the issue of intersectionality as being extremely important. This is how the idea of this project started, Engage and Empower was the name of the project. It focused on six groups within the LGBT community: transgender people, LBTQ women, elderly, people living with HIV, Roma LGBT people, and sex workers. WP: Could you talk a little bit more about how the organization is trying to maintain momentum in this community building efforts, despite what's going on with the pandemic? VV: We at MosaiQ, we had to reimagine some of the projects that we were involved in, so that included canceling events or postponing them or rescheduling for the fall. But the problem is also that we don't really know the timeline for this story or when it will end. We've had issues related to personal issues of people in the community. People living with HIV were not getting their treatment due to the fact that hospitals were closed except for the coronavirus. Then we've had issues related to sex workers not being able to work anymore. The issue of poverty has been quite an important issue. A lot of people have been laid off, a lot of people were not able to pay rent, a lot of people were either in unemployment benefits, and so on. At the personal level for us and as an organization, all of a sudden we got a lot more messages from people asking for help. We've tried to help them on a case by case basis. We are not a social health kind of organization, but we've tried to fix as many problems as we were able to. Then throughout this, and actually talking about issue of intersectionality and the issue of the project and the way we work with the Roma LGBT community, what we've witnessed throughout this pandemic and the lockdowns, especially, was an increase in violence, against Roma people from the police. So together with colleagues from civil society, especially Roma groups, we had to monitor hate speech in the media, monitor cases of abuse and violence from the police, and also make statements and letters to official institution, to the president and the prime minister and so on. So for us, it was an issue of also solidarity with other groups affected by the pandemic. WP: I believe that you've had to move some of your activities online, correct? VV: That was another part, which we kind of tried to make the best out of the situation. We felt that there were a lot of young kids, for example, who, because schools were closed, they had to go back and live with their homophobic parents. A lot of organizations, LGBT organizations in Romania were not able to have the Zoom meetings with their volunteers because they were living with homophobic or transphobic parents so they could not reveal what they were doing or who they were talking to. So the issue of depression and psychological pressure that comes on people being locked down, people trying to survive throughout this pandemic, we decided to have a campaign online, which was called MosaiQ Quarantine, and that included parties online in order to support queer artists who were not able to earn any money because there were no gigs. We organized these online parties and we paid them and we supported their work. Then we had the zoom talks with, or like talks online, with all of the organizations and groups in Romania, LGBT groups, to kind of better see the situation on the ground in different cities in Romania. That was for us extremely important because we felt like there was a need to have this dialogue within the community. Then we had the all sorts of posts on social media and different kinds of events. We also talked with organizations from the region, from the US, from Moldova, from Russia, to kind of see what the feeling also over there. So for us, it was quite an exercise to take advantage of the fact that using social media and using online tools, we were able to reach out to people who otherwise would not have been able to participate in our events, being so far away. WP: It sounds like Mosaic has certainly stepped up to the challenges. Could you just briefly talk about what NDI support has meant to Mosaic? VV: I think the project funded by NDI was extremely important, both for the community ... right now, we have an active Roma LGBT group. We have all of these, the issue of intersectionality being put on the agenda. We have the [inaudible 00:19:36] sports, which is a sports club run by women who is also trying to grow based also on the support that Mosaic has offered through NDI. We've had, at the Pride last season, the first Roma LGBT contingent putting the issue on the agenda. So for us, in many regards, this project kind of focused us more on this intersectional approach to activism and the need to include all voices within the community. The trust that they had in us was very important. WP: I'm glad to hear that it's been a fruitful partnership, both for NDI and Mosaic. Vlad, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. VV: Oh, that's it. WP: We'll be back after this short message. To hear more from democracy heroes and why inclusion is critical to democracy, listen to our DemWorks podcast, available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Before the break we heard from two partners using digital platforms to create and support communities. But how are groups sustaining their online networks and communities once created? Rainbow Rights trained paralegals in the Philippines on legal issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity and how to support LGBTI communities. Through Google Classroom, these paralegals formed an online network to help communities facing discrimination and violence. Eljay, welcome to our podcast. Could you tell us a little bit more about the paralegal support project? Eljay: Yeah. One of the main components of our community paralegal program is to create a national online platform wherein all of the trained paralegals of our organization will be able to share their experiences, their cases, and they could also refer some of the difficult cases to us. So that's the main idea. It's just that it gained a deeper significance in this COVID-19 pandemic that we're experiencing because a lot of legal organizations hurried to do to do what we had been doing in the past year, which is to create an online platform. Right now, even though there's a lot of problems in the Philippines barring the central autocracy, we have been maintaining the platform. People are still referring cases to us and we are working on those cases. Part of the deeper significance that it has is in the Philippines, human rights violations have increased because of the lockdown. So it became a source of reporting documentation for these human rights violations during the lockdown. We did not expect that it will evolve that way but we're happy that it has, and despite some connectivity issues in the Philippines, it has been reaping as well. WP: So when you're talking about the program, there've been increased human rights reports, is that generally more broad human rights abuses? Or are we talking specifically to the LGBTI community? E: Yeah, we accept every report on numerous violations, but we take on the LGBTI human rights violations specifically. When we receive human rights violations that is not really in our lane, so to speak, we refer them to bigger organizations. We have seen increased numerous violation against the LGBTQI community here. WP: You had mentioned that Rainbow Rights fortunately had organized the training for the paralegals before the pandemic hit and already have a plan in place to use online platforms, which was Google Classroom, to create this network across the country. You've briefly referenced what the current situation is like now, but could you go a little deeper into that? What kind of challenges is Rainbow Rights facing in continuing to engage with the community? E: As I have mentioned, maybe a bigger challenge is the connectivity issues in the Philippines. We don't have good internet here, and that's a challenge. It's also challenged to keep the interest level of our paralegals and keep them engaged. That is also challenged because they have bigger problems now. Because of the pandemic, they're thinking of their health, they're thinking of their livelihoods, and that is a challenge during these times. However, before the pandemic, we also saw that we had to be creative at the level of interest, so that's a challenge. The situation, it's working. Overall situation's working. We have referrals, we continue to share modules in our platform, refreshing their memory on the training. We also try to be light. There are some light moments so that they be so that they keep themselves also, the interest level is high and that they see us and they trust us in maintaining this platform. WP: You alluded to the fact that it's often difficult to maintain interest of your paralegals when engaging online. E: Basically, we had a two-pronged approach on this. One is to find the people who has a genuine interest to serve the community. So in our selection process, we have chosen people who have track records of service in their communities. The other side of the approach is to build on the spirit of camaraderie, friendship, and community solidarity between us. So even before the pandemic, we have been setting up calls and checking on them, even adding them on Facebook and Twitter just to continually engage with them. I think that's a big part of our strategies. We're also looking to ... I think in my personal view, I think a lot of what they do is labor, so I think in the future, we will be able to compensate them for their efforts in their community and we're looking into that as well. WP: That's really interesting. Could you speak a little bit more to the role and benefits of partnering with international organizations such as NDI in your work and as well as helping to sustain this national network? E: Yeah. I think it's invaluable. Foreign support, foreign funding support such as the NDI had been really great for us. We have been envisioning this project for a long time and NDI gave us the opportunity to really implement it. They also gave us a level of freedom in how to execute the program because there's a recognition that we in the ground know how to solve our problems. But there's also a lot of technical support aside from the funding. Like in digital security, NDI has given us a lot of resources, even given us a training for this and how to secure our online platforms. They also provided a lot of coalition building resources. So there, and I think we are also sharing what our experience with NDI to our other funders, because I think with NDI, we had a lot of freedom and we had a lot of support because you guys always check on us, so that's great. WP: Well, I'm glad to hear that NDI is taking care of our partners. Thinking about how June is Pride Month for a lot of communities around the world, and Pride is often equated to the community of LGBTI people around the world how would you say Rainbow Rights efforts have contributed to strengthening the community in the light of the violence and the discrimination that LGBTI people face on a daily basis in the Philippines? E: Since 2005, Rainbow Rights has been doing this approach wherein we come ... a top down approach at the policy level, but we also complement it with from the grassroots, bottom up approach. We make sure that whatever we bring at the policy level, it is informed by our grassroots services. I think that's one of our biggest contribution, is to really complement policy with experience on the ground. Most of the policies that we've pushed for is really coming from what our experiences and what are the real needs of the people that we serve in the communities. I think that's one of our biggest contributions in our approach. We're not just the legal, we don't just bring cases to court. We don't just bring legal expertise, but we also inform it with community level approaches and grassroots approaches. WP: Well, thank you LJ again for taking the time to speak with us and telling us a little bit more about how Rainbow Rights is contributing to a holistic support system to the LGBTI community in the Philippines. E: Thank you so much for this opportunity. WP: Thank you to Ivan, Vlad, and Eljay for sharing their experiences and for the work you're doing to advance LGBTI equality and inclusion, and thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI or to listen to other DemWorks podcasts, please visit us at ndi.org
Rainbow Rights Paralegal Training
A Conversation With LGBTI Activists on Community-Building
Democracy (General), Podcast Listen LGBTI Pride National Democratic Institute NDICountries: All Regions
The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) learned with immense shock and sadness of the passing on of Professor Samir Amin on Sunday, 12th August 2018. Subsequently, Prof. Samir Amin's body was interned at Père Lachaise in Paris on 1st September 2018 at a site provided by the French Communist Party. The Council was represented at the burial by Prof. Fatow Sow and Dr. Cherif Sy; two members of the CODESRIA community who have worked with Samir Amin for a while. For CODESRIA, this marks nothing less than the end of an era in the history of African social research given the many pioneering roles the late Professor Amin played as a scholar, teacher, mentor, friend, and revolutionary. Samir was many things to us as a Council; for the younger members of the community, it meant much more to be in his company at the numerous CODESRIA meeting he attended. A model for three generations of African and, indeed, radical scholars globally, Samir was that giant Baobab tree whose grandeur of intellect and spirit made him a worthy role model. While serving as Director of the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP), he hosted the initial scaffolding of the CODESRIA at IDEP, brought together and nurtured new talent that laid the foundations which launched Council on a path of growth and resilience to what it is to-date. As the final note on his reflections contained in this Bulletin illustrates, while serving as CODESRIA's founding Executive Secretary, Samir worked very closely with Abdalla Bujra and later Thandika Mkandawire, to shape the initial years of CODESRIA's intellectual identity and trajectory. After CODESRIA relocated from the premises of IDEP to a new home in the Fann Residence part of Dakar, Samir Amin remained engaged with Council and its community of scholars, participating actively and effectively in all its activities. This 15th General Assembly of CODESRIA is perhaps the first Assembly without Samir Amin presence. In all previous General Assemblies, Samir has been a notable presence even giving the Cheikh Anta Diop Lecture at the 10 Assembly in Kampala, Uganda. It is at the General Assembly that many young academics interacted with Samir, often for the first time and indeed experiencing the awe of his presence. Though Samir is absent at the current Assembly, there is no doubt that his intellectual and revolutionary spirit is definitely present just as the thoughts and ideas that he shared so generously and to the very end will continue to inspire reflection and debate. Samir Amin's intellectual journey was a long and illustrious one. It was a journey marked by commitments that distinguished him as a scholar of unparalleled convictions. He died still an unapologetic socialist academic or, as the title of his memoir reads, 'an independent Marxist' whose work was driven by an unshakeable conviction to confront and oppose totalizing economic orthodoxies. He treated this confrontation and opposition as a prelude to social transformation. He was steadfast in his belief that the world must shift away from capitalism and strive to build new 'post-capitalist' societies. He described capitalism as a small bracket in the long history of human civilization. His works identify and record the multiple crises of capitalism, a system he described as senile and obsolete. In its place, Samir Amin formulated a political alternative that he envisioned would proceed by i) socializing the ownership of monopolies, ii). definancializing the management of the economy and iii) deglobalising international relations [cited in Campbell, 2015: 286]. For him, these three directions provided the basis of an active politics of dismantling capitalism; a politics he committed his skill and energy mobilizing for. Even as he grew older, he mustered fresh bursts of energy to continue the struggle and to the very last days when he was in Dakar, he was apart of the team of scholar/ activists gathered together by International ENDA Third World Network to draft the Alternative Report on Africa (Dakar, 2018). CODESRIA was apart of this process and the Report will by shared at this General Assembly. Many of Samir Amin's writings make the point repeatedly on the urgent necessity to dismantle the 'obsolete system' known as capitalism. However, none was as emphatic in rethinking the underlying cultural underpinning of the 'obsolete system' like Eurocentricism. In that engaging publication, he provided a rggesounding critique of world history as is centered around Eurocentric modernity and invites us to understand modernity as an incomplete process that, to survive its current crises, will need 'economic, social and political reconstruction of all societies in the world.' Embedded in this argument is a long held position about the importance of the Bandung moment (1955) as a moment of an alternative globalization based on Afro-Asian solidarity. It is from this perspective that one understands why Samir Amin emphasized the importance of China [see tribute by Sit Tsui and Yan Xiaohui in this bulletin]. Afro-Asian solidarity was the basis upon which Samir Amin located his alternative politics which also defined his towering global outlook and presence. There is no doubt that Samir Amin's intellectual presence was defined by depth of knowledge, complexity of thought and fidelity to Marxist organising principles. There is no way of summarizing the corpus of work he produced, the revolutionary engagements he undertook and the transformative potential that led him to remain steadfast even when many others were only too happy to find a good reason to backtrack and conform. His work is enormous in volume but also in the depth of its knowledge and relevance to society. He provoked and joined debates across the globe but more importantly with comrades in Latin America and Asia, those of the dependency and underdevelopment school but also later from a South-South perspective. In CODESRIA's flagship journal Africa Development alone, Samir Amin published twenty articles. A biodata document he shared with the Council has 24 books in English and 41 in French. He is published in English, French, Arabic, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish to name but these few languages. In all these publications and in the various languages, Samir Amin articulated his belief in alternatives, and as indicated above, this belief remained strong even to the last month of his life on earth. Born to an Egyptian father and French mother on 3rd September 1931 in Cairo, Egypt, Samir Amin's convictions owe much to the context of his childhood all the way from Port Said in northern Egypt to Cairo where he schooled. He spent his early life in Egypt where he attended his formative schooling before proceeding to France to pursue higher education at Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris ("Sciences Po"). Here, he earned a diploma in 1952 and later a PhD in 1957 at the Sorbonne. Samir later earned another diploma in mathematical statistics from L'institut national de la statistique et des etudes economiques. He had always been interested in radical thought and action from early on, noting in an interview that he already considered himself a communist in Secondary School. Even though he and his cohort did not know what communism really meant in their early childhood, they assumed it meant "equality between human beings and between nations, and it meant that this has been done by the Russian revolution." It is not surprising that with this pedigree, Samir Amin focused in his graduate research on "The origins of underdevelopment – capitalist accumulation on a world scale" and emphasized in his work that underdevelopment in the periphery was, in large measure, due to the working of the capitalist system. He consequently underscored the need to search for socialist alternatives to liberal globalisation. Samir Amin returned to Cairo in 1957, worked briefly in Gamal Abdel Nasser's Institute for Economic Management (1957–1960) before heading to work as an adviser in the Ministry of Planning in Mali (1960- 1963). Subsequently, Samir Amin's intellectual life became largely internationalist in orientation, and anchored principally on the question of accumulation as key to understanding underdevelopment. He maintained the sojourn between France where he took up a Professorship in 1966 and Dakar, Senegal his adopted home where he worked for ten years, from 1970 to 1980 at IDEP. Later in 1980, he founded the Third World Forum, originally hosted at the CODESRIA Secretariat, and lent his considerable weight to the institutionalisation of ENDA and the World Forum for Alternatives. His support for revolutionary politics is marked not just in the books and papers he published but also in the lecture circuit where he spoke to audiences about the undeniable relevance of radical politics. Samir Amin's thinking was in large measure defined by the solidarity built around the Bandung Confer- ence of 1955. This remained a critical touchstone in his work in which non-western civilisations and his- tories played an important role. Bandung, for him, inaugurated a different pattern of globalisation, the one he called 'negotiated globalisation.' Though not asufficientbasisforcomplete"de-linking"from'ob- solescent capitalism', Samir Amin saw in Afro-Asian solidarity possibilities and pathways to that delinking; the process, as he explained, by which you submit "ex- ternal relations to the needs of internal progressive so- cial changes and targets." The notion of 'delinking' oc- cupied a major place in Samir Amin's thinking and is positioned in contrast to 'adjustment' that was the pre- ferred approach of the Bretton Woods Institutions. As Mamdani shows elsewhere in this Bulletin, there are major problematic elements of this notion that Samir Amin continued to grapple with. But ultimately, Samir Amin noted that delinking is in fact a process that, de- pending on the societies implementing it, can be used to install graduated level of autonomous development instead of countries in the periphery remaining locked into and merely adjusting to the trends set by a funda- mentally unequal capitalist system. In Samir Amin, we found the true meaning of praxis; a thinker who insisted that his work has immediate relevance to society. His departure deprives us of the practical energy he brought to our meetings and debates; and denies radical thinkers a model around whom they found the compass that enabled them to navigate the treacherous, indeed murderous, waters of capitalism. We however are lucky to have lived in his company, to have learned from his fountain of knowledge and to have shared in the passion of his convictions. The Council plans to invigorate the value of his legacy by celebrating him during this 15th General Assembly but also beyond the confines of the Assembly. Thus, this edition of the Bulletin contains two intertwined sets of essays; all organised around Samir Amin. In the one instance, we have a selection of messages in his memory. One the other, we have a selection of essays he authored. Separately, we will re-publish all the essays he published in Africa Development in a special issue of the journal to provide them in one collection for posterity. But whichever way, and as his own reflection in the essay published in this volume and his memoirs show, CODESRIA is an inheritance that Samir Amin bequeathed the African social science community. As such, it is fitting that the Bulletin designed for the 15th CODESRIA General Assembly is also a Bulletin that publishes essays in his honour. The choice of theme for the General Assembly predates the passing on of Samir Amin. But the theme itself is one that was dear to Samir Amin. It is our pleasure therefore to present the essays contained here as essays that shed light on a life lived fully but also that open up a space to explore the unfulfilled promises of globalisation. We hope that at the end of it, this will be a fitting study in honour of our departed icon but also a commentary on the key issues the 15th General Assembly explored.
Ympäristökysymys ja aseveliakseli on tutkimus suomalaisen kaupunkiympäristön politisoitumisesta. Väitöskirja vastaa kysymykseen miten ympäristöstä tuli politiikkaa? piirtämällä tarkan kuvan neljästä ympäristön politisoitumisen vuosikymmenestä 1960-luvulta lähtien, kasvukonsensuksesta ympäristökiistoihin. Tamperelaisia ympäristökiistoja ja paikallista politiikkaa käytetään teoksessa laboratoriona, jossa tiivistyy laajempia suomalaisen lähihistorian muutostrendejä. Paikallisten ympäristöongelmien synty kietoutuu muuttuvan yhteiskunnan arvostuksiin ja puhetapoihin sekä sukupolvien välisiin jännitteisiin. Erityisesti teos analysoi jännitteitä, joita voimistuva ympäristöliikehdintä synnytti haastaessaan Tampereella pitkään vaikuttaneen valtakoalition, ns. aseveliakselin, paikallisen hallintatavan. Ympäristökysymys ja aseveliakseli sukeltaa ympäristön politisoitumiseen viiden tamperelaisen tapauksen kautta: 1. Pyynikin moottoritiehanke (1959 - 1974) 2. Näsijärven saastuminen ja vedenoton siirtäminen Roineeseen (1960 - 1972) 3. Kauppahallin virastotalon purkamiseen liittynyt kiista (1972 - 1983) 4. Epilän kivihiilivoimalahankkeeseen liittynyt kiista (1981 - 1984) 5. Tampellan alueen kaavoituskiista (1989 - 1995) Tapaukset kertovat ympäristöongelmien yhteiskunnallisesta muotoutumisesta ja oman aikansa toiveista, tavoitteista ja ristiriidoista. Ympäristön pilaantumisen ja -suojelun nousu yhteiskunnalliseksi kysymykseksi liittyy kiinteästi Suomen ja Tampereen sodanjälkeiseen kehitykseen ja vaurastumiseen, jonka kääntöpuolena ympäristöhaittoja voidaan pitää. Useamman paikallisen tapaustutkimuksen yhdistäminen paikallisen hallintatavan analyysiin tuo uuden näkökulman ympäristöongelmien ja paikallisen poliittisen kulttuurin historiallisen rakentumiseen. Ympäristöongelmia käsitellään yhteiskunnallisina ongelmina, joille toimijoiden väliset jännitteet ja määrittelykamppailut sekä erilaisten vaatimusten esittäminen ovat ominaisia. Politisoitumisen analyysissä tukeudutaan sosiologi Pierre Bourdieun ja politiikantutkija Kari Palosen käsitteisiin. Politisoitumisen käsitteellä ei viitata puoluepolitiikkaan, vaan pikemminkin vakiintuneiden ajatus- ja toimintamallien kyseenalaistumiseen. Tutkimus etenee teoreettisten ja metodologisten lähtökohtien kautta tapaustutkimuksiin, joiden lomassa taustoitetaan ympäristöliikehdinnän historiaa paikallisella tasolla. Tapausten jälkeen käsitellään paikallisen hallintatavan teoreettista näkökulmaa ja paikallisen hallinnan historiallisia muotoja Tampereella. Ympäristön politisoituminen tapahtui Tampereella vaiheittain. Ensimmäiset ympäristöliikehdinnän merkit näkyivät Tampereella ns. ympäristöherätyksen myötä 1960- ja 70-luvun taitteessa. Ympäristöliikkeen jakautuminen oikeisto-vasemmisto -ulottuvuudella kuitenkin jarrutti ympäristöjärjestöjen kasvua 1970-luvun puolivälissä. Vuosikymmenen lopulta lähtien alkoi uusi ympäristöprotestien vaihe. Jännite suoraviivaisen johtajakeskeisen hallintavan ja uusien, rauhan aikana kasvaneiden sukupolvien edustajien kuten vihreän liikkeen välillä kävi ilmeiseksi paikallisissa ympäristökiistoissa 1980-luvun alusta alkaen. Tämä jännite huipentui tutkimuksen viimeisessä tapauksessa, Tampellan kiistassa 1980- ja 90-lukujen taitteessa. Sosiaalidemokraattien ja Kokoomuksen muodostaman kunnallispolitiikan valtakoalition, aseveliakselin, näkökulmasta ympäristöprotestit näyttäytyivät vastustuksena, ei uutena yhteiskunnallisena kysymyksenä. Väitämme, että tämä johtui sekä aseveliakselin historiallisesti muodostuneista arvostuksista ja suhtautumistavoista että tamperelaisen politiikan kentän jakautumisesta aseveliakselikoalition ja sen vastustajien välillä. Nämä tekijät vaikeuttivat ympäristökysymysten nostamista paikallisen päätöksenteon piiriin ja supistivat ympäristöliikehdinnän toimintatilaa. Ympäristön politisoituminen ilmeni Tampereella useammalla ulottuvuudella, joista ensimmäisenä voi pitää ympäristöherätyksen synnyttämää uutta tulkintakehystä. Se antoi kaikupohjaa paikallisille ympäristön muuttamista politisoiville vaatimuksille. Luonto politisoitui ympäristöksi ja ympäristö politisoitui yhteiskunnalliseksi protestiksi ja kritiikiksi, joka ilmeni vaatimuksina paikallisissa ympäristökiistoissa. Toiseksi politisoiminen liittyi yksittäisten ympäristön muutoksia koskevien suunnitelmien kyseenalaistamiseen. Tätä tapahtui Tampereella 1970-luvulta alkaen ja selvemmin 1980-luvun ympäristökiistoissa. Määrittelykamppailut koskivat esim. Kauppahallin virastotalon tapauksessa paitsi talon purkusuunnitelmia, myös talon esteettistä arvoa kaupunkimaisemassa. Tampereen kasvoja voimakkaasti muuttanut modernisaatiokehitys ei enää näyttänytkään väistämättömältä. Samalla voidaan puhua myös laajemmasta kaupunkimaiseman muutosten kyseenalaistumisesta. Ympäristöherätys ja yksittäiset tapahtumat kuten Verkatehtaan purkaminen 1970-luvun lopulla muuttivat tamperelaisten tapaa katsoa kaupunkiaan. Kolmanneksi kiistoissa nousi esiin tiedon ja asiantuntemuksen politiikka. Tiedon politiikka ilmeni selvästi 1980-luvun kiistoissa, joissa (tieteellisen) tiedon ja asiantuntijuuden rooli kyseenalaistui. Kauppahallin virastotalon kiistassa kyseenalaistettiin rakennusten huonokuntoisuuden kriteerit. Epilän voimalakiistassa politisoitui asiantuntijoiden tuottama tieto voimalavaihtoehtojen edullisuudesta. Tampellan kiistassa kriisiytyi kaupunkisuunnittelijoiden asiantuntemus ja rooli yleisen edun vaalijoina. Neljäs politisoitumisen ulottuvuus koskee yksittäisten kysymysten toimintavaihtoehtojen kyseenalaistamisen laajenemista koskemaan koko paikallista hallintatapaa ja paikallista poliittista kulttuuria. Selvimmin yksittäiseksi hallintatavan kyseenalaistumisen tapaukseksi muodostui tutkimuksessamme Tampellan tapaus, jossa suuret rakentamissuunnitelmat ja paikallisten poliittisten eliittien toimintamallit joutuivat ennen näkemättömän kritiikin kohteeksi. Paikallinen hallintatapa ei kyseenalaistunut vain ympäristökysymysten vaikutuksesta, mutta ympäristökonfliktit näyttäytyvät kiinnostavina teollisuuskaupungin perinteiden rapautumista ilmentävinä tapahtumina. Viidenneksi ympäristön politisoituminen kosketti laajemmin kaupungin habitusta kaupunkimaiseman, paikallisen perinteen ja itseymmärryksen tasoilla. Kyse ei ole vain ympäristökohteista vaan laajemmin paikallisesta kulttuurista ja identiteetistä. Paikalliset ympäristöliikkeet toimivat kuten yhteiskunnallisilta kaupunkiliikkeiltä voidaan odottaa: ne synnyttivät konflikteja ja muuttivat osaltaan kaupungin merkityksiä. Kaupungin habituksen muutokseen liittyy selvästi perinteisen tamperelaisen ns. savupiipputeollisuuden hiipuminen. Jälkiteollistuvan kaupungin ympäristökonfliktit olivat sekä tämän yhteiskunnallisen murroksen indikaattoreita että sen katalysaattoreita. Teollisuuskaupungin traditioiden kyseenalaistuminen voidaan nähdä osana laajempaa yksinkertaisen modernin projektin kritiikkiä. Tutkimus perustuu laajaan asiakirja- ja lehtiaineistoon sekä ympäristökiistojen ytimessä vaikuttaneiden kansalaisaktivistien ja paikallisten päättäjien haastatteluihin. Paikallisen historian kuvauksessa on käytetty sekundaarilähteitä ja haastatteluja, tapaustutkimukset perustuvat pääasiassa lehti -ja asiakirja-aineistoihin ja haastatteluihin. Tapausten käännekohtia on lisäksi analysoitu määrällisellä sisällönerittelyllä sekä diskurssi -ja argumentaatioanalyysin keinoin. ; ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND THE "BROTHERS IN ARMS AXIS" POLITICISATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN TAMPERE FROM 1959 TO 1995 This study examines the politicisation of the environment in the context of one Finnish locality, Tampere. It is a study on the politics of the environment, i.e. the historical developments and contestations that preceded the institutionalisation of environmental policy. The politics of the environment is examined at the local level in the context of the tension between the rise of environmentalism and the traditions of local politics and governance. The locality of Tampere, thus provides a laboratory for understanding how environmentalism took place and what kind of tensions it caused. Theoretically the study draws on both sociology and political science. The theoretical frame is set by combining Kari Palonen s terminology of politics and Pierre Bourdieu s theory of action. Politicisation is a central notion in the study. It is understood as a process of questioning the rules of the game, i.e. claiming something to be playable and contingent. In Bourdieu s terms this implies a process of questioning the givenness of the doxa and provoking orthodox arguments from the political elite. Politicisation may take place at different scales, from the local disputes to broader patterns of governance and political culture. The central research question was the following: ·How has the environment become politicised at the local level? This question was divided into the following questions: ·What events have contributed to the politicisation of the environment? ·What kinds of disputes and actor coalitions emerged in these events? ·How did the patterns of local governance influence the definition of environmental problems? And, vice versa, how did the environmental problems effect local governance? ·What was the role of environmental movements in the politicisation of the environment? The research was carried out in the form of five case studies, all in the same locality, touching on different aspects of environmental issues, and covering the temporal scope of the study, from the 1960s to the 1990s. The cases studied were the following: 1. The Pyynikki highway construction plan (1959-1974) 2. The pollution of lake Näsijärvi by a local pulp plant and the moving the municipal water intake to lake Roine (1960-1972) 3. The dispute over the planned demolition of the old Jugendstil Office block in the city center (1972-1983) 4. The dispute over the plan to build a coal power plant in Epilä (1981-1984) 5. The conflict over the planning of the Tampella industrial area in the city center (1989-1995) The cases cover the time from the pre-history of environmentalism, i.e. when the environment was still a non-issue, through the rise of environmentalism (the so called environmental awakening ) to the institutionalisation of environmental issues in the 1990s. The research data comprised sources on local history including archives and official documents, newspaper materials and 35 interviews of local actors. Methodologically, the study was structured in relation to different levels: 1) in the context of local history (secondary sources on local history and interviews), 2) the case studies using thick description out of which, 3) detailed instances of discourse analysis, especially argumentation (or claims-making ) were extracted. Environmental problems were studied in a contextual constructivist frame as social problems constructed in processes of claims-making, involving argumentation and discursive struggle. Local environmental movements were studied as urban social movements whose activities affect the collective production of the city while being aimed at contesting and challenging the prevailing social order. The local movements in Tampere were key actors in politicising the environment, contributing to a change whereby previously undisputed environmental change and related social practices were no longer seen as inevitable or normal. Movements created new meanings not only for their participants, but for the larger community, also extending beyond the time frame of their most active presence. Since the late 1960s, the rise of environmentalism became manifest through locally based movements and organizations. The purely scientific orientations of local conservationist associations were challenged by more socially and politically oriented civic activities and associations. An important milestone was the founding of Pirkanmaa nature conservation association in 1969. Since 1970, environmentalism gathered momentum with rapidly growing membership figures and local initiatives. It soon suffered, however, from ideological divisions in the mid-1970s, as the radical left-wing students took over the nature conservation association. The divisions started to recede when the Koijärvi bird lake conflict (in Forssa) marked the rise of the Finnish green movement. This had its effect in Tampere as well: the ideological divisions between right- and leftwing environmentalists were reconciled in the early 1980s, which marked the beginning of an active period of environmental contestation. The emergence of the Finnish Green movement in the 1980s made such contestation increasingly visible at the local level. In Tampere, the first greens were elected in the local council in 1984. During the different disputes beginning from the 1970s, but especially in the 1980s, environmental protest challenged local political traditions and political culture, especially the traditions of the local governance. In Tampere, the scene of local politics in Tampere had virtually ever since the Second World War been dominated by a particular, unofficial institutional arrangement, which was commonly known as the brothers-in-arms axis. Adopted in the mid-1950s, the notion referred to the co-operation between the conservative National Coalition party and the Social Democrats in local politics and municipal government. This coalition was held together through a shared habitus based on wartime experiences and held a promise of welfare. The brothers-in-arms axis became an important player in local politics in the 1960s when the central figures of the coalition gained important position in city government. The study examines both the processes that enabled the stabilization of this co-operation into a local growth regime and those that have, especially since the 1980s, contributed to its weakening. The politicisation of the environment was a novelty in the modernist political landscape of Tampere. In the eyes of the governing coalition, however, environmental protest was perceived as mere opposition, not as a new issue on the agenda. We argue that this was due to the local traditions of an industrial city, divided between left and right and a political sphere divided between the brothers-in-arms coalition and the communists, which allowed little space for new social movements. Environmental protest, however, was not the only factor to challenge the regime. The regime was also weakened through the loosening of ideological division s between the left and the right, as the communists had gradually lost political ground. The politicisation of the environment gathered momentum in the late 1970s when the growth of Tampere had slowed down and when there was a growing discrepancy between the mode of governance and its increasingly postindustrial social environment. This tension, and the inertia of the closed style of governance, became visible in the Tampella dispute in 1989, the biggest local environmental conflict to date. The politicization of the environment took place at different levels. It happened both at the level of individual disputes as alternatives were demanded to the straightforward mode of local planning, but it also expanded into a broader critique of local governance. Furthermore, we argue that the politicisation of the environment was not only an agent-driven phenomenon, since it depended on the cultural resonance of claims presented in local disputes. The study allows us to indicate critical events in the politicization of the environment. These were events sine qua non, i.e. events that set the stage and sensitized local actors for future contestations. The demolition of the old broadcloth factory (Verkatehdas) in 1976 and the dispute over Tampella were critical events in this sense. The former was retained in the memory of then activists-to-be and the latter both signaled the crisis of the closed-style decision-making and served to stabilize the local greens as a credible political alternative. Finally, the contestations, together with the restructuration of the locality, resulted in altering the modern industrial habitus of the city.
Tras las primarias de Montana y Dakota del Sur, Barack Obama se convierte en candidato a la presidencia de los Estados Unidos.Barack Obama ha puesto el pasado martes punto final a cinco meses de intensa batalla entre él y su rival Hillary Clinton, durante los que han votado casi 38 millones de personas en más de 50 Estados. El senador por Illinois ha hecho historia tras ganar la nominación demócrata a la Casa Blanca y convertirse en el primer candidato negro con aspiraciones reales de llegar a la presidencia de Estados Unidos. Lo ha logrado después de superar la marca de 2.118 delegados necesarios tras las primarias celebradas en Dakota del Sur y Montana. Varios medios informan al respecto:NEW YORK TIMES"Obama Claims Nomination; First Black to Lead a Major Party Ticket":http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/us/politics/03cnd-elect.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin"Clinton Donor Base Is Obama's Next Prize":http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/us/politics/04donate.html?hpCNN"CNN projects Obama clinches nomination":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/03/election.democrats/index.html"Obama: I will be the Democratic nominee":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/03/election.democrats/index.html?iref=mpstoryview"Clinton wins South Dakota as Obama clinches nomination":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/03/democrats.southdakota/index.html?iref=mpstoryview"Obama going strong in Montana":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/03/dems.montana/index.html?iref=mpstoryviewMSNBC"Obama claims Democratic nomination.Clinton refuses to concede; aides, colleagues say she's considering No. 2":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24944453/"Clinton hails Obama but doesn't concede. Earlier, she said she would consider VP role to help Democrats win":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24953561/LE MONDE"Interrogations sur la stratégie de fin de campagne d'Hillary Clinton":http://www.lemonde.fr/elections-americaines/article/2008/06/03/les-dernieres-primaires-democrates-ont-commence_1053282_829254.html#ens_id=904503"En fin de campagne, Bill Clinton s'énerve":http://www.lemonde.fr/elections-americaines/article/2008/06/03/en-fin-de-campagne-bill-clinton-s-enerve_1053370_829254.html#ens_id=829615EL PAIS DE MADRID"La carrera hacia la Casa Blanca.El sueño de Bill se desvanece con la derrota de Hillary":http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/sueno/Bill/desvanece/derrota/Hillary/elpepuint/20080604elpepiint_2/Tes"Obama promete unir a los demócratas :Los jefes del partido se pasan en masa a la candidatura del senador de Illinois - Clinton afirma que tras las primarias "comienza una nueva fase de la campaña" ":http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Obama/promete/unir/democratas/elpepuint/20080604elpepiint_1/Tes"Obama gana la nominación demócrata a la Casa Blanca":http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Obama/gana/nominacion/democrata/Casa/Blanca/elpepuint/20080604elpepuint_4/Tes""No tomaré ninguna decisión hoy": La senadora Hillary Clinton descarta renunciar tras perder la nominación demócrata a la presidencia de EE UU ante Barack Obama":http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Obama/gana/nominacion/democrata/Casa/Blanca/elpepuint/20080604elpepuint_6/TesTIMES"Barack Obama wins Democrat nomination":http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4061628.ece"Hillary Clinton faces the final curtain":http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4061628.ece"Obama on brink of victory in Democratic race":http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4061451.eceEL UNIVERSAL DE MEXICO"Comienza una nueva travesía: Barack Obama":http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/511976.html"Asegura Barack Obama candidatura demócrata: Consigue los 2 mil 118 delegados necesarios para asegurar la candidatura presidencial demócrata, según CNN, lo que lo convierte en el primer negro que competirá por la Casa Blanca":http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/511944.htmlLOS ANGELES TIMES"Obama secures Democratic presidential nomination":http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-campaign4-2008jun04,0,7608030.storyMIAMI HERALD"Obama seals nomination: 'This is our moment'":http://www.miamiherald.com/political-currents/story/556053.htmlCHINA DAILY"Obama clinches US Democratic nomination":http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2008-06/04/content_6733029.htmLA NACION"Las primarias demócratas llegan a su fin: Obama busca consolidar su candidatura en Montana y Dakota del Sur ante los rumores de que Hillary estaría cerca de abandonar la pelea":http://www.lanacion.com.ar/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1018044"Hillary, más cerca de abandonar la pelea: Crece la presión sobre la ex primera dama y Obama suma más apoyos; Bill Clinton insinuó que sería inminente la renuncia":http://www.lanacion.com.ar/edicionimpresa/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1017907 AMERICA LATINAAl menos siete muertos y 13 desaparecidos por un alud de tierra en Colombia. Las precipitaciones que afectan a Colombia desde hace quince días han causado otros 16 muertos, 43 heridos y miles de damnificados, "El País" de Madrid informa: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/muertos/desaparecidos/alud/tierra/Colombia/elpepuint/20080601elpepuint_3/TesBolivia"CNN" publica: "Bolivia's Morales faces autonomy votes":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/06/01/bolivia.vote.ap/index.html"La Nación" informa: "Tras los referéndums Morales y la oposición se disputan la victoria: Ganó el sí, pero la abstención fue alta": http://www.lanacion.com.ar/edicionimpresa/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1017875"El País" de Madrid publica: "Evo Morales ve a Alan García "gordo y poco antiimperialista"":http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Evo/Morales/ve/Alan/Garcia/gordo/poco/antiimperialista/elpepuint/20080604elpepuint_1/Tes"El Mercurio" de Chile informa: "Bolivia: Gobierno y oposición se disputan la victoria en Beni y en Pando":http://diario.elmercurio.com/2008/06/03/internacional/internacional/noticias/114D1DC0-E72D-47B3-9DD7-D0D481281561.htm?id={114D1DC0-E72D-47B3-9DD7-D0D481281561}Conflicto entre gobierno y ruralistas en Argentina"CNN" publica: "Argentine farmers say no to tax changes":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/05/31/argentine.farmers/index.htmlEl defensor del Pueblo intercederá en el conflicto del campo con el Gobierno: Las entidades del agro se reunieron con Mondino y le pidieron que medie en el conflicto; "voy a buscar instancia de diálogo", sostuvo Mondino; antes, Buzzi declaró que el sector quiere que "se resuelva el conflicto","La Nación" informa: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/nota.asp?nota_id=1018113"El Mercurio" de Chile publica: "Dirigentes ruralistas refuerzan la embestida contra el Ejecutivo al prolongar paro agrario":http://diario.elmercurio.com/2008/06/03/internacional/_portada/noticias/FC2EBE1C-1FB7-4BD4-B706-B2A2A25E30BE.htm?id={FC2EBE1C-1FB7-4BD4-B706-B2A2A25E30BE}"The Economist" analiza: "Angry farmers v an obstinate president": http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11465492"MSNBC" analiza: "Peru's Shining Path guerrillas on the rise again: Unlike before, Shining Path rebels have almost unlimited financial support":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24914067/"El Mercurio" de Chile informa: "Perú insta a Chile a reducir el gasto militar":http://diario.elmercurio.com/2008/06/03/internacional/internacional/noticias/D952D69A-F4F8-47C4-B1ED-D8A92D4EE995.htm?id={D952D69A-F4F8-47C4-B1ED-D8A92D4EE995"MSNBC" informa: "Brazil reveals 'uncontacted' Amazon tribe; government decides to release photos to alert world to threats on Indians":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24895872/"The Economist" analiza: "South American defence: Speak fraternally but carry a stick. Is there a new arms race—or just overdue retooling of armies?": http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11455155"MSNBC" informa: "Central America hit by historic tropical storm: Alma was first on record to make landfall on region's Pacific coast":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24874471/"La Nación" informa: "Asesinan al vice de un diario de Venezuela. Pierre Fould Gerges, de 48 años fue acribillado por 17 balazos en el auto de su hermano, el presidente del diario Reporte de la Economía , crítico del oficialismo":http://www.lanacion.com.ar/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1018112"La Nación" publica: "Tenso debate en Venezuela. Polémica ley de inteligencia de Chávez: Obliga a todos los venezolanos a colaborar, de manera encubierta, con los servicios de seguridad": http://www.lanacion.com.ar/edicionimpresa/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1017924"El Universal" de Méjico informa: "Impone Chávez sistema de inteligencia basado en espionaje: Afirman que la ley obligará a los ciudadanos a convertirse en informantes del gobierno so pensa de ser encarcelados; abre la posibilidad a que en Venezuela se constituyan grupos similares a los Comités de Defensa cubanos, en los que las personas naturales deben cumplir con tareas de vigilancia y suministro de información a las autoridades estatales": http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/511724.html"El País" de Madrid publica: "La población cubana decrece por tercer año consecutivo. Entre las causas están la emigración constante de jóvenes y las carencias materiales, que hace que muchas mujeres en edad fértil no quieran tener hijos": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/poblacion/cubana/decrece/tercer/ano/consecutivo/elpepuint/20080601elpepuint_10/TesMartín Kanenguiser escribe su análisis en "La Nación": "Ante una sinuosa marcha hacia el liderazgo regional: El protagonismo de Chávez desafía a Lula"http://www.lanacion.com.ar/edicionimpresa/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1017922ESTADOS UNIDOS/CANADÁ"El Universal" de México informa: "Defiende secretario de Agricultura de EU uso de biocarburantes":http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/511828.htmlObama deja su iglesia de Chicago por sus polémicos sermones.El candidato demócrata decide romper todos sus vínculos con la iglesia de su antiguo pastor Jeremiah Wright, informa "El País" de Madrid: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Obama/deja/iglesia/Chicago/polemicos/sermones/elpepuint/20080601elpepuint_2/Tes"CNN" publica: "Obama quits church, citing controversies":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/31/obama.church/index.html"The Economist" analiza situación de Canada: "Much ado about not much: Multiculturalism debated in Quebec":http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11465485McCain critica a Obama por Irán:Lo acusó de "falta de experiencia" por proponer un diálogo, "La Nación" informa:http://www.lanacion.com.ar/edicionimpresa/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1017908Washington exige a Pekín la liberación de los presos de Tiananmen. Entre 400 y 2.000 manifestantes murieron en 1989 durante las protestas pacíficas que exigían el fin de la corrupción y más libertades en China, "El País" de Madrid informa: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Washington/exige/Pekin/liberacion/presos/Tiananmen/elpepuint/20080604elpepuint_3/Tes"Times" publica: "Polygamist sect children start returning home":http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4053569.eceEUROPA ETA hace estallar una bomba en Zarautz contra una empresa de la 'Y' vasca. Tres personas, entre ellas dos agentes de la Ertzaintza, han resultado heridas leves.- El artefacto, cargado con tres kilos de explosivo, ha explotado frente a la sede de Construcciones Amenábar.- El ayuntamiento de Zarautz condena el atentado y convoca a una concentración silenciosa mañana. "El País" de Madrid informa: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/ETA/hace/estallar/bomba/Zarautz/empresa/vasca/elpepuesp/20080601elpepunac_1/TesBritain"The Economist" analiza coyuntura económica británica: "Will high oil prices tip the economy into recession?":http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11455807"The Economist" analiza: "France and its Muslims: The graveyard shift. Official representation of Islam works better at regional than at national level":http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11460109"The Economist" analiza el futuro de Kosovo: "The European Union runs into roadblocks in its plans for Kosovo":http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11460102"The Economist" analiza : "The European Union and Russia. Uneasy partnership":http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11460118"La inmigración ilegal. Críticas por la mano dura de Berlusconi: Preocupación del Vaticano y la ONU", informa "La Nación":http://www.lanacion.com.ar/edicionimpresa/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1017924Berlusconi da marcha atrás y descarta que la inmigración ilegal sea delito. Zapatero cuestionó en su reunión con el primer ministro italiano el uso de la vía penal contra la inmigración ilegal, "El País" de Madrid informa: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Berlusconi/da/marcha/descarta/inmigracion/ilegal/sea/delito/elpepuint/20080603elpepuint_14/TesASIA – PACÍFICO Y MEDIO ORIENTE"La Nación" informa: "Atacan la embajada danesa en Paquistán: 10 muertos":http://www.lanacion.com.ar/edicionimpresa/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1017911Hezbolá entrega los restos de soldados israelíes muertos en la guerra de 2006. Esto coincide con la llegada a Líbano de Nesim Naser, un libanés preso durante seis años en Israel, "El País" de Madrid informa: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Hezbola/entrega/restos/soldados/israelies/muertos/guerra/2006/elppgl/20080601elpepuint_5/Tes"CNN" publica: "Israel deports Hezbollah spy amid rumors of prisoner swap":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/06/01/spy.release/index.html "The Economist" analiza: "The Palestinian economy: It all depends on the politics":http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11465508"New York Times" informa: "Iraqi Military Extends Control in NorthernCity":http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/world/middleeast/01mosul.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin"CNN" publica: "Car bomb explodes near Iranian Embassy in Iraq":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/06/01/iraq.main/index.html"El Mercurio" de Chile informa: "Australia inicia el retiro de sus tropas desde Irak": http://diario.elmercurio.com/2008/06/03/internacional/internacional/noticias/58010758-28F3-4178-98D9-A7A18A59F9BB.htm?id={58010758-28F3-4178-98D9-A7A18A59F9BB}"MSNBC" publica: "Journalist sent to hospital over torture claim. The Afghan student faces death for allegedly insulting Islam in his writings":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24917547/"China Daily" publica: "Quake inflation to be temporary":http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-06/04/content_6733024.htm"CNN" informa: " Hope that 'quake lake' plan will save Chinese city":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/01/china.earthquake/index.html"CNN" publica: "Gates could withdraw Navy ships after Myanmar 'neglect'":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/01/gates.myanmar.ap/index.html"MSNBC" informa: "Myanmar junta defends cyclone response. In response to global criticism, the junta says aid was prompt":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24917924/"La Nación" informa: "La ONU reclama más apoyo en Myanmar. El organismo advirtió que aún es insuficiente la ayuda internacional que se reparte tras el devastador paso del ciclón Nargis":http://www.lanacion.com.ar/exterior/nota.asp?nota_id=1018033"CNN" publica: " Clashes over U.S. beef in S. Korea":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/01/skorea.usbeef/index.htmlÁFRICA"CNN" publica: "U.N. donates tents for those displaced by xenophobic attacks":http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/05/30/south.africa.immigration.ap/index.html"MSNBC" informa: "Zimbabwe opposition: 50 killed over election: March 29 presidential results remain in dispute; runoff set for June 27":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24839297/"Times" publica: "Robert Mugabe accuses West of trying to starve him out":http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article4059411.ece"MSNBC" informa: "U.S.Africa Command trims its aspirations. Nations loath to host force; aid groups resist military plan to do relief work":http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24911801/ ECONOMIA "El País" de Madrid publica: "Microsoft pierde vista. Las dudas sobre Yahoo! y los problemas con Windows amenazan al gigante": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/empresas/Microsoft/pierde/vista/elppgl/20080601elpnegemp_1/Tes"The Economist" publica su informe semanal: "Finance & Economics":http://www.economist.com/finance/"The Economist" publica su informe semanal: "Business this week":http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11461676&CFID=8277248&CFTOKEN=98321699OTRAS NOTICIAS Con respecto a la crisis alimentaria, "El País" de Madrid informa: "Ban Ki-moon: "Las políticas alimentarias no deben empobrecer al vecino" La Cumbre de la FAO busca soluciones a la crisis alimentaria causada por el alza de los precios de los alimentos.- La receta contra la escalada pasa por eliminar barreras a la exportación de productos agrícolas": http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Ban/Ki-moon/politicas/alimentarias/deben/empobrecer/vecino/elpepuint/20080603elpepuint_11/Tes"Times" publica: "Leaders at UN food summit tone down menu over fears of hypocrisy":http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4058305.ece"El Universal" de Méjico informa: "Debate ONU medidas para combatir industria del tráfico humano. El presidente de la Asamblea General, el macedonio Srgjan Kerim, instó a los 192 países miembros de la organización a poner en práctica mecanismos para proteger y asistir a las víctimas": http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/511910.html
Summary The report focuses on solidarity between adult generations, more specifically what responsibility adult children have towards older parents, how responsibilities should be divided between the family and the welfare state, and how the two impact on each other. Data was collected through the European comparative study OASIS, Old age and autonomy - the role of services systems and intergenerational family solidarity. The project was financed through the EU fifth framework program, and carried out in Norway, England, Germany, Spain, and Israel. Individual level data were collected via parallel surveys (interviews) among the urban populations aged 25 and over in each of the five participating countries. National samples counted about 1 200, around 6 100 in total. The older participants (aged 75+) were oversampled to represent around 1/3 of the samples.The project was motivated by the assumed threat to family solidarity in late modern and individualist society (Chapter 1). Of particular interest is the relationship between the family and the welfare state. What is a reasonable and sustainable balance? These questions need be studied in context, hence a comparative approach was seen as appropriate. The countries were therefore selected to represent different family cultures and welfare state regimes. They are located along a north-south axis, which according to Reher (1998) divides European families into a southern more collectivist form, and a northern more individualist type. The five countries also represent different welfare state regimes; the social democratic (Norway), the liberal (England, and the conservative-corporatist (Germany), to stay within the Esping-Andersen typology (1990). Spain has as yet a less mature welfare state, while the fifth country, Israel, is a mixed model.The macro conditions of the countries are assumed to be reflected on the invidual and interpersonal (family) levels. Preferences and practices are assumed to be more or less congruent with the already established traditions, and to be more conform for the older than for the younger generation. The present balance is assumed to be fluid and under pressure from demographic and social change in all countries, but more so in countries that are later in these developments and are now confronted with more rapid changes. These assumptions are in OASIS explored in the strength and character of intergenerational family solidarity, and in the ideals and realities of the family-welfare state interaction.Welfare states differ in the responsibility they ascribe to families (Chapter 2). Some put the family in a dominant position, others assume that the welfare state should protect against dependency upon the family. The OASIS-countries are differently located along this dimension, hence they represent different opportunity structures for family life and elder care. They are facing similar challenges, but are inclined towards different solutions. Germany and Spain tend to favor familistic solutions, and give the state a subsidiary (Germany) or even a residual (Spain) role. They have legal obligations for adult children towards older parents and low levels of services on areas that are by tradition a family responsibility, like long-term care. England and Norway have no legal obligations between generations and higher levels of services on traditional family areas, in particular in Norway. Israel is a mixed case, with legal obligations as in Spain and Germany, but also with rather generous service levels.Are these patterns reflected in public opinion and personal preferences? Do people support the established policies, or do they push for change? Of interest is also to investigate consensus and contrasts in attitudes within the five countries, for example between women and men, the younger and the older. Knowledge about actual help provision is important, but so also is knowledge about norms and attitudes because people tend to act accordingly if opportunity allows it.The intergenerational solidarity model (Bengtson & Roberts 1991) is employed as a research instrument and measures solidarity along six dimensions - structural, associational, consensual, affectional, functional, and normative solidarity. Ambivalence has more recently been introduced as an alternative perspective (LöƒÂ¼scher & Pillemer 1998). Intergenerational relations are seen as inherently ambivalent and characterised by mixed feelings and contradicting expectations that family members need to cope with. These adaptive changes may have been misinterpreted as a breakdown of family solidarity in stead of a change in how solidarity is expressed.Affectional solidarity (Chapter 3) is considerable. Both parties say they feel very close, but parents more so than children. Conflict levels are low as seen from both sides of the relationships, while both parties - and in particular the children - allow a difference of opinion without this being seen as a threat to the relationship. The presumably tighter spanish family shows primarily in structural and associational solidarity. Generations live closer and have more often contact in Spain compared to the more northern countries. This is mainly explained by the higher co-residence rates in Spain, but shared living is often enforced more than chosen, and is then more likely an indicator of (lack of) opportunity than of solidarity.Exchange of help and support (functional solidarity) is substantial in all five countries, and not less so in the northern family (Chapter 3). Exchanges are integral parts of daily life of nearly any family, but roles and resources change over the life course. Older people tend to be in the receiving end, but act also as providers of support. Starting out from the adult child perspective, the findings show that most adult children have provided one or several types of support to older parents during the last year. Emotional support is the most frequent form of support, followed by instrumental help. Only few children provide personal care to older parents, probably because few parents are this frail, and if so, they may already have moved to an institution. Adult children are as a general rule the net providers in the exchange relationship to older parents; they give more than they receive. Older parents provide first of all emotional support to adult children, and in some countries (Norway, Germany, Israel) also money. Instrumental help is flowing upwards in the family line, financial support flow downwards if and when pension levels allow it.Normative solidarity (Chapter 4) is indicated by the support for filial obligation norms; the extent to which adult children are obligated to help their older parents. The majority support such norms in all five countries, but more so in Spain and Israel than in Norway, England, and Germany. This trend is consistent with Rehers (1998) suggestion that the southern family are tighter than the northern. The main impression is, however, that normative solidarity is substantial also in northern countries, even in a universalist welfare state like Norway. This is even more so as the samples were drawn from large cities, and do not include smaller towns and rural areas which may be assumed to be even more familistic. Hence, neither urbanisation nor welfare state expansion seem to have eroded filial obligations.The focus in Chapter 5 is on what people find is a reasonable balance of responsibilities between the family and the welfare state, and what their personal preferences are. Public opinion is found to vary considerably between the countries. The welfare state is seen as the main responsible in Norway and by a (smaller) majority also in Israel. A more even split is favoured in the other three countries. A common trend is that the majority in all five countries favours some form of complementarity between the family and the welfare state, but the complementarity takes different forms. The welfare state is assumed to have the major responsibility in Norway and Israel with the family in a supplementary role. Itö''s the other way around in Germany and Spain, with England in an intermediate position. Attitudes are more or less congruent with the actual policies, but public opinion leans more heavily towards a welfare state responsibility than is presently implemented. The contrast between ideals and realities is greater in low-service countries, implying a greater tension between policy and opinion in these countries.Gender differences are small; hence the female dominance in actual care provision is more likely imposed upon them, not chosen. Age differences are also modest. Older people are not more traditional (familialistic) than are the younger. Spain is an exception, while Norway has high degree of consensus in these matters across gender and age. The older generation is in fact more inclined to push responsibilities on the welfare state than are the younger. Personal preferences lean even more towards services than do the more general attitudes. The great majority of Norwegians state a preference for services over family care if they should come to need help in old age. A corresponding majority would prefer institutional care over living with a child if they could no longer live by themselves. Preferences are more moderately biased towards the welfare state in three of the other four countries. Spain stands out with a majority in favour of family care, but only among the older generation.Chapter 6 analyses the actual distribution of help to elders in need. The family and the organised services are the dominant sources of help, but in different combinations. Families are dominant on all leves of needs in Spain, while services - and then mainly public services - are the major source of help among the most needy in Norway. The total help rate (from all sources) is higher in a high-service country like Norway than in a family dominated system like Spain, while the volume of family care is only moderately lower in Norway, indicating that service systems and families tend to supplement rather than substitute each other. There is little or no support in these trends for the idea that older people are diserted by their families and pushed over on services as a secondary option. Family solidarity need not be threatened by alternative or complementary services, and each party may have qualities that are not easily replaced by the other. Hence complementarity is more likely than substitution.Considering that affection and exchange levels are rather substantial in five otherwise different countries, they indicate that solidarity is general and considerable although not universal. While country differences are moderate in the more general features of solidarity, they are far larger in the more concrete attitudes about how policies and services should be organised. If this is a valid observation, then intergenerational family solidarity may have a rather stable and general character, but find different expressions in practice when circumstances and conditions change. This suggestion indicates a need to clarify what should indeed be ment by solidarity. We have therefore in the concluding Chapter 7 conducted a series of factor analysis in order to explore the solidarity concept and model. The findings give conditional support to a simplified variant of the solidarity model. A general finding is a four factor solution. Affection comes out first and includes consensus. Conflict comes out next as a distinct factor. Third is a joint factor for structural and associational solidarity, while giving and receiving support (functional solidarity) is the fourth factor. Normative solidarity is in most cases not included in any of these factors, and is apparently a distinct aspect of intergenerational relationships that may be combined with different ways of relating to each other.Family life has been, and to some extent still is, structured by material necessities and enforced duties which makes it difficult to separate the truly solidary motivations from external pressures. These are among the reasons why it is difficult to compare families across time and cultures. Solidarity may be easier to observe and separate from external pressures today than in earlier times, but the mechanisms and processes that have produced the solidary patterns may have become more complex. ; Rapporten belyser solidaritet mellom familiegenerasjoner, nærmere bestemt hvilket ansvar voksne barn har for eldre foreldre, hvordan ansvarsdelingen mellom familien og velferdsstaten er, og hvordan den etter befolkningens syn bør være. Ligger det en trussel mot familiesolidaritet i framveksten av velferdsstaten og økt individualisering? Rapporten tar også opp hvordan familien og velferdsstaten påvirker hverandre, og hva vi i mer teoretisk forstand skal forstå med familiesolidaritet. Dataene ble samlet inn gjennom det europeisk komparative prosjektet OASIS, Old age and autonomy - the role of services systems and intergenerational family solidarity. Fem land med ulik familiekultur og velferdspolitikk deltok i studien, Norge, England, Tyskland, Spania og Israel. Dette gir muligheter for å studere forholdet mellom familie, velferdsstat og aldring under ulike betingelser. Et tilfeldig utvalg av storbybefolkningen i alderen 25 år og over ble intervjuet i hvert land, ca. 1 200 i hvert land, til sammen ca. 6 000.
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The videos and speeches of the Bradley prize winners are up. My video here (Grumpy in a tux!), also the speech which I reproduce below. All the videos and speeches here (Betsy DeVos and Nina Shea) My previous interview with Rick Graeber, head of the Bradley foundation. Bradley also made a nice introduction video with photos from my childhood and early career. (A link here to the introduction video and speech together.) And to avoid us spending all our talks on thanking people, they had us write out a separate thanks. That seems not to be up yet, but I include mine below. I am very thankful, humbled to be included in such august company, and not so boorish that I would not have spent my whole talk without mentioning that, absent the separate opportunity to say so. Bradley prize remarks (i.e. condense three decades of policy writing into 10 minutes): Creeping stagnation ought to be recognized as the central economic issue of our time. Economic growth since 2000 has fallen almost by half compared with the last half of the 20th Century. The average American's income is already a quarter less than under the previous trend. If this trend continues, lost growth in fifty years will total three times today's economy. No economic issue — inflation, recession, trade, climate, income diversity — comes close to such numbers.Growth is not just more stuff, it's vastly better goods and services; it's health, environment, education, and culture; it's defense, social programs, and repaying government debt.Why are we stagnating? In my view, the answer is simple: America has the people, the ideas, and the investment capital to grow. We just can't get the permits. We are a great Gulliver, tied down by miles of Lilliputian red tape. How much more can the US grow? Looking around the world, we see that even slightly better institutions produce large improvements in living standards. US taxes and regulations are only a bit less onerous than those in Canada and the UK, but US per capita income is 40% greater. Bigger improvements have enormous effects. US per capita income is 350% greater than Mexico's and 950% greater than India's. Unless you think the US is already perfect, there is a lot we can do. How can we improve the US economy? I offer four examples.I don't need to tell you how dysfunctional health care and insurance are. Just look at your latest absurd bill. There is no reason that health care cannot be provided in the same way as lawyering, accounting, architecture, construction, airplane travel, car repair, or any complex personal service. Let a brutally competitive market offer us better service at lower prices. There is no reason that health insurance cannot function at least as well as life, car, property, or other insurance. It's easy to address standard objections, such as preexisting conditions, asymmetric information, and so on.How did we get in this mess? There are two original sins. First, in order to get around wage controls during WWII, the government allowed a tax deduction for employer-based group plans, but not for portable insurance. Thus preexisting conditions were born: if you lose your job, you lose health insurance. Patch after patch then led to the current mess. Second, the government wants to provide health care to poor people, but without visibly taxing and spending a lot. So, the government forces hospitals to treat poor people below cost, and recoup the money by overcharging everyone else. But an overcharge cannot stand competition, so the government protects hospitals and insurers from competition. You'll know health care is competitive when, rather than hide prices, hospitals spam us with offers as airlines and cell phone companies do. There is no reason why everyone's health care and insurance must be so screwed up to help the poor. A bit of taxing and spending instead — budgeted, appropriated, visible — would not stymie competition and innovation. Example 2: Banking offers plenty of room for improvement. In 1933, the US suffered a great bank run. Our government responded with deposit insurance. Guaranteeing deposits stops runs, but it's like sending your brother-in-law to Las Vegas with your credit card, what we economists call an "incentive for risk taking." The government piled on regulations to try to stop banks from taking risks. The banks got around the regulations, new crises erupted, new guarantees and regulations followed. This spring, the regulatory juggernaut failed to detect simple interest rate risk, and Silicon Valley Bank had a run, followed by others. The Fed and FDIC bailed out depositors and promised more rules. This system is fundamentally broken. The answer: Deposits should flow to accounts backed by reserves at the Fed, or short-term treasuries. Banks should get money for risky loans by issuing stock or long term debt that can't run. We can end private-sector financial crises forever, with next to no regulation. There is a lesson in these stories. If we want to improve regulations, we can't just bemoan them. We must understand how they emerged. As in health and banking, a regulatory mess often emerges from a continual patchwork, in which each step is a roughly sensible repair of the previous regulation's dysfunction. The little old lady swallowed a fly, a spider to catch the fly, and so on. Now horse is on the menu. Only a start-from-scratch reform will work.Much regulation protects politically influential businesses, workers, and other constituencies from the disruptions of growth. Responsive democracies give people what they want, good and hard. And in return, regulation extorts political support from those beneficiaries. We have to fix the regulatory structure, to give growth a seat at the table. Economists are somewhat at fault too. They are taught to look at every problem, diagnose "market failure," and advocate new rules to be implemented by an omniscient, benevolent planner. But we do not live in a free market. When you see a problem, look first for the regulation that caused it.Example 3: Taxes are a mess, with high marginal rates that discourage work, investment and production; disappointing revenue; and massive, wasteful complexity. How can the government raise revenue while doing the least damage to the economy? A uniform consumption tax is the clear answer. Tax money when people spend it. When earnings are saved, invested, plowed into businesses that produce goods and services and employ people, leave them alone.Example 4: Bad incentives are again the unsung central problem of our social programs. Roughly speaking, from zero to about sixty thousand dollars of income, if you earn an extra dollar, you lose a dollar of benefits. Fix the incentives, and more people will get ahead in life. We will also better help the truly needy, and the budget.Some more general points unite these stories:Focus on incentives. Politics and punditry are consumed with taking from A to give to B. Incentives are far more important for economic growth, and we can say something objective about them. Find the question. Politics and punditry usually advance answers without stating the question, or shop around for questions to justify the same old answers. Most people who disagree with the consumption tax really have different goals than funding the government with minimum economic damage. Well, what do you want the tax system to do? State the question, let's find the best answer to the question, and we can make a lot of progress.Look at the whole system. Tax disincentives come from the total difference between the value your additional work creates and what you can consume as a result. Between these lie payroll, income, excise, property, estate, sales, and corporate taxes, and more, at the federal, state, and local level. Greg Mankiw figured his all-in marginal tax rate at 90%, and even he left out sales, property, and a few more taxes. Social-program disincentives come from the combined phaseout of food stamps, housing subsidies, medicaid or Obamacare subsidies, disability payments, tax credits, and so on, down to low-income parking passes. And look at taxes and social programs together. A flat tax that finances checks to worthy people is very progressive government, if you want that. Looking at an individual tax or program for its disincentives or progressivity is silly. The list goes on. Horrible public education, labor laws, licensing laws, zoning, building and planning restrictions, immigration restrictions, regulatory barriers, endless lawsuits, prevailing-wage and domestic-content rules, are all sand in the productivity gears. Oh, and I haven't even gotten to money and inflation yet! And that just fixes our current economy. Long-term growth comes from new ideas. Many economists say we have run out of ideas; growth is ending; slice the pie. I look out the window and I see factory-built mini nuclear power plants that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is strangling; I see a historic breakthrough in artificial intelligence, facing an outcry for the government to stop it. I see advances in biology that portend much better health and longevity, but good luck getting FDA approval or increasingly politicized research funding.Many conservatives disparage this "incentive economics" as outdated and boring. That attitude is utterly wrong. Incentives, and the freedom, rights, and rule of law that preserve incentives, remain the key to tremendous and widespread prosperity. And it is hard work to understand and fix the incentives behind today's problems.Yes, supply is less glamorous than stimulus. "Fix regulations" is a tougher slogan than "free money for voters." Efficiency requires detailed reform in every agency and market, the Marie-Kondo approach to our civic life. But it's possible. And we don't need to reform all the dinosaurs. As we have seen with telephones, airlines, and taxis, we just need to allow new competitors, to allow the buds of freedom to grow.Many people ask, "How can we get leaders to listen?" That's the wrong question. Believe in democracy, not bending the emperor's ear. Take action. My fellow prizewinners have grabbed the levers of influence that belong to citizens of our free society, and done hard work of reforming its institutions. And ideas matter. The Hoover Institution motto is "ideas defining a free society." The Bradley Foundation tonight celebrates good ideas, and is devoted to spreading them. When voters, media, the chattering classes, and institutions of civil society understand, advance and apply these ideas, politicians will swiftly follow. Notes:Growth: Real GDP 1950:I was $2186 billion, and per capita $14500; in 2000:I, $12935 and per capita $45983; in 2022:IV, $20182 and per capita 60376. From these numbers, average log real GDP growth 1950-2000 was 3.56% From 2000-2002, 1.96%. In per capita terms, 2.31% and 1.20%. (2.31-1.20)x22 = 24.4. Cross-country comparison: Calculations based on purchasing-power-adjusted GDP per capita: US $69,287, Canada $52,790, UK $50,890, Mexico $19,587, India $7,242. Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD The PPP adjustment tries to take account that some things are cheaper in other countries. Converting at the exchange rate produces even larger differences. US $70.248, Canada $51,987, UK $46,510, Mexico $10,065, India $2,256. Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CDMankiw: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/economy/10view.htmlThanksI have been fortunate to benefit from the effort, time, wisdom and affection of so many people, and many institutions that supported their efforts.Of course it starts with my parents, Eric and Lydia Cochrane. They expected children to think and speak at the family dinner table. They exposed me to different cultures, on the south side of Chicago and in Italy, sometimes beyond my desires. They set an example by how they lived: They steadfastly followed their intellectual pursuits with extreme honesty. They treated people with a radical egalitarianism. And then left me alone to pursue my own passions. I was lucky to learn from some extraordinary and dedicated teachers, at the Ancona Montessori School, the U of C Lab school, Italian public schools, and Kenwood high school. There, in an inner city public school, Arlene Gordon (Math), Judith Stein (English) Walter Sherrill (Chemistry) and especially Joel Hofslund (Physics) gave me absolutely first rate experience. Thanks also to Ed Shands' patient coaching of our swim team. I moved on to MIT to study physics. This was more impersonal, and a difficult time for me, but as it turned out a superb education in the kind of mathematical modeling essential to economics. I went on to study economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Faculty took PhD teaching seriously, not just of their own research, and I soaked it up. I thank especially my advisers, Roger Craine, Tom Rothermberg, and George Akerlof. Many of their lessons are vivid today, but like my parents they provided only gentle guidance and feedback on my own imperfect quests. I was supremely luck to land a job at the University of Chicago. I learned a tremendous amount in the wide open collegial atmosphere at Chicago, thanks in large part to Lars Hansen and Gene Fama, but also colleagues too numerous to mention in this short space. Generations of MBA and PhD students also pushed me hard to understand economics and became lifelong friends and colleagues. At just the right moment Hoover came calling, allowing me the time and institutional support to blossom as a public intellectual and commenter as well as an academic. A special thanks to John Raisin for that. No man is an island. The world of ideas is a conversation. Everything I know has been shaped by teachers, friends, colleagues, collaborators, students, journal editors, referees, and others who took the time and effort to help me think about things. Many small interactions have had a crucial effect on my life. A coffee conversation at a conference with John Campbell resulted in our best known academic paper. A lunch conversation with Luigi Zingales produced my first public writing during the financial crisis. As a result, Amity Shlaes invited me to a conference. Howard Dickman, then at the Wall Street Journal, liked my presentation and asked, "Why don't you write opeds for us?" I answered, "Why don't you stop rejecting them?" My oped career was born. And so forth. I thank these and many more, and lady luck who put us together. Of course my greatest thanks go to my wonderful wife, Elizabeth Fama. We met the night I returned to Chicago. It was love at first sight. We were engaged on the second date. She has been my best friend and constant companion ever since, though marriage to a passionate researcher, busy teacher and lover of time consuming sports cannot have been easy. Together we raised four amazing children, Sally, Eric, Jean, and Lake, who fill my heart with love, and now that they are grown a bit of nostalgia.
The subject of this study – The Youth in Croatia and the European Integration – is the relationship of youth toward the European integration process, including the Croatian accession to the European Union, as well as their sociopolitical readiness for integration into a united Europe. The analysis is based on a section of data gathered in early 2004, on the entire Croatian territory, and conducted within the scientific and research project Youth and the European Integration Process. The basic sample of youth, aged 15 to 29, consisted of 2000 examinees, and the control sample of persons older than 30 consisted of 1000 examinees. The obtained findings on youth have been systematically compared to results from the previous research project, The Value System of Youth and Social Changes in Croatia, conducted in early 1999, on an identically structured sample of 1700 young examinees. Data on Croatian youth has also been compared to the corresponding findings of several European researches. European integration is a dynamic and multidimensional process, and in this research, the accent was on the political and normative dimensions of integration. The genesis of the political development of European Union has indicated that, in spite of the oscillations in the process of integration, there is a recognizable progress toward the construction of a Europe of values, where all the included countries meet with equally high democratic demands. The existing research into the European integration process has undoubtedly shown that the relationship of citizens toward the EU varies as a function of time, and depends on the specific situation in certain countries or societies. Croatia is a transitional country that has stepped into the process of democratic consolidation, and after the year 2000, it had also stepped out of a certain kind of international isolation. Today, Croatia is a country trying to join the united Europe, which has managed to obtain the status of a candidate country for accession into the EU, albeit with an uncertain date for accession negotiations. Even though the main obstacle for the start of negotiations is supposedly the lack of satisfaction of the EU with the Croatian cooperation with the Hague Tribunal, the existing tendencies and events in the country indicate that Croatia is not adequately prepared to join the Union: not at the political, nor the social, and especially not at the economic plain. The indicated findings are also the starting points in the research of the relationship of Croatian youth toward the European integration process. A valid analysis of this relationship demands a previous insight into some aspects of the political readiness of youth for European integration of Croatia. With that in mind, special attention was dedicated to political values, attitudes and participation of youth, whose longitudinal monitoring enables a detection of changes that took place during the past five years. The data comparison showed that during the observed period of time, the young people' s otherwise relatively high acceptance of almost all the constitutional values, as well as the harmonious perception of politics and institutional trust have increased, while the lack of hard work, discipline and responsibility are now perceived as a social problem to a greater extent than before. The recent data also indicates that today' s youth perceive the existence of educational, gender and age inequalities in the Croatian society to a larger degree, as well as the worsening of political representation of all marginal groups. On the other hand, the understanding of conflicts and democratic rules (especially the role of the opposition) has weakened, the perception of crime in ownership conversion and privatization as a problem has decreased, there is also a weaker perception of the existence of social and religious inequalities, the social activism and political participation have decreased, and the attitude about inclusion into youth organizations of political parties and the establishment of independent youth parties as forms of activities that might contribute to a more active participation of youth in the society has decreased. From hence comes the conclusion that certain changes tend to lead to further social, most of all political, (self)passivization and marginalization of young people. The continuity of tendencies established in the previous research projects, confirm the finding that the young are not a monolithic group when it comes to acceptance of political values, expression of political attitudes and the level of political participation. The greatest differentiation is present regarding the not so present tolerance toward most observed social phenomena and groups, the perception of unemployment as the most important social problem and the cause of existing difficulties, the perception of existence of political inequalities and the stated interest in politics, as well as the perception of the role of the " diaspora" in the Croatian political life. When these results are observed integrally, it is obvious that the young are mostly differentiated by the level of obtained knowledge and their socio-professional status, then party identification, social origin and the phase of maturity. All the mentioned differentiations of youth can simply be summarized by outlining two large, relatively polarized groups: one consists of socially more competent youth, inclined to the ideological and political options of the left center, and the other consists of a socially inferior youth, inclined toward the right pole of the ideological-political spectrum. The socially more competent youth is more liberal, more critical toward the social reality and the political actors, they manifest a greater respect for democratic institutions and procedures, which is an indicator of the importance of favorable circumstances in the process of political socialization. The recent data enabled us to establish the existence of inter-generational differences, which are not enormous but are significant. The comparative analysis of the attitudes of both the young and the older examinees, demonstrated that the young state a higher degree of trust in the media than the older examinees, that they are more tolerant toward a number of social phenomena and groups, which cause dispute both in the Croatian and the European public opinion arena, as well as more sensitive regarding ethnic inequalities. The young perceive war as the main cause of current difficulties to a greater extent than the elders, they have considerably more trust in their own generation as a social force that could initiate positive trends, they express a greater readiness for inclusion in different civil society activities, and believe more that television and youth organizations could mobilize them into active participation in social affairs. At the same time, the young are slower than the older examinees to accept the value of a democratic order, however, they are also less prone to have a harmonious understanding of politics, they are less socially sensitive, they express less trust in the institutions of power, the socioeconomic goals and the preservation of tradition are less often among their political priorities, they less often think immorality and criminal activities in the privatization process are the cause of current problems, they perceive a smaller level of corruption in all areas of social life (aside from education), they believe less in the positive contribution of experts and entrepreneurs to overcoming the trends of crisis, they are less interested in politics and participate less in political parties, and they have a smaller level of faith in the mobilization role of education for democracy, volunteer work, political parties and non-governmental organizations, as well as the contribution of the family and education system in the stimulation of the young people' s social engagement. The established inter-generational differentiation can be explained through the life cycle theory, meaning the mentioned differences are mostly the effect of differing social statuses and the complete experiences of the young and the older examinees. That means that most young people have not assumed some of the permanent social roles, and that their immediate experiences are limited only to some social areas among which politics do not have a prominent place. The existing inter-generational differences are also the result of the fact that most older examinees draw on their experience gained in a different social and political regime, which to a certain measure forms their existing system of political values that is, in certain elements, especially those related to the social dimension, different than the youth' s system of political values. On the other hand, the congruence of the young and older examinees is contributed to by a common experience of an era, that is, life in a specific socio-historic period. The absence of deep inter-generational ambiguities also indicates that, in spite of the radical changes that have appeared through the decomposition of the old and the set-up of a new social and political order, the mechanism for transposing political values from the older generations to the young ones, functions to a considerable degree, along with the transfer of the shortcomings that exist in the structured political awareness of the older generation. Even though it was established that the youth in Croatia accept the traditional values to a smaller degree compared to the elders, the young are at the same time somewhat more conservative in certain areas than their European counterparts. Pointing to this finding is the greater orientation of the Croatian youth toward the family and a smaller extent of tolerance of certain phenomena and groups in the contemporary society. At that, the social participation of the Croatian young generation is at a lower level than the participation of their European peers. The attitude toward human rights is also one of the indicators of political preparedness of Croatian youth for integration into a democratic Europe, which promotes high standards in the protection of human rights and freedoms. The research results about the evaluation of individual human rights and freedoms, show that the youth accept the right to an education, the right to work and personal security, the right to privacy, the social protection of the elderly and those in other precarious situations, the equality before the law, the rights of women and the right to ownership the most. The analysis has shown that the preference of individual human rights and freedoms is not caused by the observed socio-demographic and socio-structural characteristics of the young, aside from education, which points to the significance of the education system as an agent of improvement of the state of human rights. Approximately a third of the young examinees were not satisfied with the respect for human rights in Croatia today nor were they satisfied five years ago, the percentage of the undecided has decreased in that period of time, and the number of those that think human rights in Croatia are mostly or completely respected has increased. The results of the analysis of social attributes of youth indicate that the ability of assessment and a higher degree of criticism toward the status of human rights in Croatia is related to life in economically more prosperous regions, a left ideological-political orientation as well as the female gender. The comparison of the evaluation of the contribution of institutions, organizations and significant individuals in the population of youth in 1999 and in 2004, established that the generation of youth today perceives a higher level of contribution of all observed participants (except for the opposition) to the protection of human rights and freedoms in Croatia. More precisely, most of the young assess that all the participants, completely or mostly, contribute to the realization of human rights in Croatia, which especially refers to the perception of the contribution of the highest institutions of power. The perception of the status of human rights in Croatia and the contribution of the observed actors to the realization of those rights, are considerably highly influenced by regional affiliation and party identification, followed by their social background, their gender and the religious self-identification of the young. The comparison of acceptance of the observed human rights and freedoms of the populations of young and older examinees in Croatia, indicates that the elders accept most individual human rights and freedoms more than the young, and that they also express less criticism toward today' s respect for those rights and freedoms in Croatia, while validating the contribution of all the observed actors to a higher degree. To summarize, the analysis has shown that the young accept human rights and freedoms very highly at the level of principle, but that there is a certain disagreement when it comes to concrete rights and practices in Croatia. Even though the degree of acceptance of the value of human rights and freedoms is high among the young, there are also deviations indicating an increased need for additional engagement of certain agents of socialization, especially the education system and the political actors. The national affiliation of youth is another indicator relevant to its relationship toward the European integration. The research has shown that the attitude most represented with the youth is one of moderate national identification, then the ones signifying an openness toward the world, while ethno-centric statements are at the back of the obtained hierarchy. The attitude that had demonstrated the highest representation of national identification is for the first time at the top of the rank in all our research projects, just as it is evident that nationally tinted attitudes, both moderate and extreme, are more represented now than in 1986 or in 1999. Such an increase of the national affiliation of the young can be interpreted by the fact that there is more emphasis on existential problems and that there is a higher uncertainty regarding the future, then the increase of differences between the rich and the poor, as well as a smaller degree of trust in the political leadership. The immediate confrontation with this type of social instability, results in a search for safer modes of relationships with other people, the society as a whole and some of its parts, where the nation represents one of the safe havens, much like family and church. However, it is necessary to emphasize that the attitudes of openness toward the world are quite stabile, and that they are often complementary instead of being opposite to attitudes of national identification. At the same time, this points to the complexity of the problem of national affiliation and the fact that it does not have to be exclusive, but can actually coexist with attitudes that enhance the process of European association. Regarding their national affiliation the young are, of course, not homogenous. The results of the analysis have shown that the nationally oriented youth is significantly more religious than the others, they prefer the conservative parties, live in Dalmatia, Central and Eastern Croatia, they originate more often from rural areas and families, where the father has a lower degree of education, they personally have a lower level of education and, within the youth sample, they belong to the youngest age cohort (age 15 to 19), and the groups of pupils and the unemployed. On the other hand, a significantly lower national affiliation is expressed by youth coming from the Istrian, Zagreb and Northern Croatia provenience, those indecisive about religion or atheists, youth of urban background and a higher family and personal education status. However, regarding cosmopolitism, the young demonstrate significantly more homogenous results. It is especially indicative that the more ethno-centric examinees and, to a smaller degree, those with a pronounced national identification, more often have a negative perception of the European Union, while the nationally more exclusive examinees refuse to even support the accession of Croatia into the European Union. The examination of the social (ethnic) distance toward certain nations has demonstrated that the young have put members of the former Yugoslav federation and Russians at the back of the scale, while, with an under-average evaluation, the center of the scale is occupied by members of certain Central and Eastern European nations (the Czech and the Hungarian). Inhabitants of the European Western and Southwestern territories, especially the Italians, which occupy the first position after form the Croats, and the Germans, demonstrate satisfactory results just by being evaluated by average grades. However, the degree of social closeness that the young citizens of Croatia feel toward other Croatian men and women, indicates a certain dose of self-criticism, because approximately one third of the young do not feel an especially high level of affinity toward, for the most part, their own nationals. The older examinees differ from the young in that they more pronouncedly represent attitudes at the center of the national affiliation scale, as well as indicate a higher ethnical distance on average. However, the fact is that, in spite of the existence of inter-generational differences when it comes to national affiliation where the older examinees dominate, there are also inter-generational differences that indicate a better position of the youngest examinees in our sample (aged 15 to 19). This phenomenon has already been described in literature by the so-called U-curve, which vividly illustrates a higher national affiliation of individuals at their earlier and later periods of life. Thus, the greater national affiliation, on the one hand, seems to appear as an expression of an adolescent transitional crisis, and on the other, as a consequence of a long-term perseverance of the perception and production of (most probably) negative experiences with a specific out-group. The relationship of the examinees toward the European integration and the European Union has been investigated via numerous indicators, where the emphasis was on the perception of the possible consequences of Croatian accession to the EU. However, other aspects of the relationship toward Europe and the EU have been the object of research, presenting a wider context for understanding the perception of consequences of joining the Union. The obtained results demonstrated that most of the young and of the older examinees in Croatia actually had a neutral image of the EU, even though those with a positive image exceed those that perceive the EU negatively. Actually, nine tenths of the examinees have in the beginning of 2004, supported the Croatian integration into the Union, but among those examinees, there is a highest number of euro-skeptics, that is, those that believe that too much is expected from the accession. At the same time, there were considerably less euro-enthusiasts (those that expect all-around benefits from the integration) and euro-realists (who believe that integration is inevitable for the survival of small countries). As for the difficulties standing in the way of the Croatian road to a united Europe, the examinees had equally addressed them to both Croatia and the European Union, however, the number of young emphasizing the accountability of the EU has increased from 1999 to 2004, and the number of those accenting Croatia' s responsibility has, in the same period of time, decreased. The finding that the young expect significantly more positive than negative consequences after the Croatian accession into the European Union, is especially important. However, in this regard, there has been a mild decrease in the expectation of the positive, and an increase of the negative consequences among the young during the last five years. The highest positive expectations have been registered at the individual and the socio-cultural planes, while the optimism regarding the socio-economic progress has decreased. Indeed, the lack of socio-economic preparedness of Croatia for the entrance into the developed European surrounding is expected to yield the most negative consequences. The research of the expected development of the EU in the coming ten years, has shown that only the possibility of easier travel, work, study and life in Europe is expected by most of the examinees, especially the young ones. The young are quite fearful of the costs Croatia might have from the integration and of the worsening position of the agricultural population. The negative conesquences expecting their own country are, however, less perceived by the youth in Croatia, than by their counterparts in Europe. Related to the fears from the construction of a united Europe and European Union, we have established that the youth in Croatia is most afraid of the abolition of the Croatian currency and the increase of crime, and its smallest fear has to do with the potential loss of social privileges. The fears of examinees in the enlarged Europe are somewhat different – the most expressed fear is that of labor transfer into other countries, the increase of crime and drug trade, the difficulties expecting the farmers and the price their country has to pay due to the development of the EU. Both the young and the old examinees in Croatia are less worried about the loss of national identity, language and their social privileges than the European examinees. All our examinees emphasize the multiple benefits of the EU enlargement, followed by the positive effects of that enlargement for Croatia, while the efforts of the Croatian government, regarding the accession to the Union, are valued quite poorly. The potential accession of Croatia into the European Union shall also signify a change in the decision-making process, meaning that some of those decisions will be reached at the national level, and some jointly with the EU. Our examinees have, in this regard, demonstrated a high level of readiness for integration, because more than half of them believes that four fifths of the observed areas should be the object of joint decision-making by the EU and Croatia. The only areas in which, in the opinion of the young examinees, Croatia should decide autonomously are the acceptance of refugees, the judiciary, culture, agriculture, fisheries and the police. The Europeans differ in their opinions on these issues from the Croats, and believe two thirds of the observed affairs should be decided on jointly by their country and the EU, while their country should be autonomous in deciding about education, basic rules about the media, health and social care and unemployment. Different social groups have, based on the perception of youth, been grouped into potential losers of the integration (farmers, the retired, workers, the unemployed), potential winners of the integration process (such as the inhabitants of the capital and certain regions, the young, as well as the Croatian population as a whole), and certain winners of the process of integration, which are also the best prepared for Croatian accession into the EU (experts, foreign language speakers, the political elite, managers, large companies). Actually, it was shown that the young consider the social groups which are in a relatively better position in the Croatian society today to be the greatest winners of EU integration, and those whose current status is unenviable, who are in the greatest need of a better future, were perceived as those that will potentially gain the least. The only encouraging fact is that the young are seeing themselves as the potential winners, meaning they believe the existing abilities and potentials of the young generation only need optimal circumstances in order to reach their peak. However, the data about the knowledge of foreign languages in Croatia are not very exhilarating, especially compared to the knowledge of foreign languages of the youth in the European Union countries. Within this research, we have also found that approximately three quarters of our examinees are proud of being Croatian citizens, while around half of the young, and somewhat less of the elders are proud to be European. The young are the ones to be more critical toward their national identity, and at the same time they lead in the positive validation of their European identity. However, the most interesting finding concerns the fact that all the Croatian examinees feel less national pride than the inhabitants of the European Union, while it is understandable that the examinees in the EU emphasize their pride of being European more. The answers of the examinees regarding the question about the contents of the concept " being a citizen of the European Union" indicate that neither the young, nor the older examinees posses a coherent understanding of the EU citizenship. Still, the right to work, live and study in any EU member, represents the key element for the understanding of EU citizenship, both with the young people in Croatia and with the youth in the Union. The young and the older Croatian examinees believe that active suffrage is the least important, regardless of whether the elections in question include the European Parliament, the national or the local representative bodies. Only one out of four Croatian examinees believes the Croatian membership in the EU might benefit them personally, while almost half of all the young and a third of the older examinees do not posses a defined opinion on this issue. It is clear that this feeling is closely related to the question of the personal meaning the European Union holds for the examinees, where neither the young nor the elders have a homogenous perception of the meaning of the EU. A single response appeared in an above-average number of cases – the EU is a way of creating a better future for the young – while the claim that the EU signifies a sort of " European government" , superimposed to the national states which are members of the Union, received a small level of support. Unlike that, the young from the Union countries emphasize the freedom of movement most often, while in time, the very concept of " European government" became more pronounced in the attitudes of the European youth. The young people in Croatia, as well as in the EU, express an equally small level of fear of the euro-bureaucracy, the loss of cultural diversity and the utopian idea of Europe. Considering the readiness of the young to live outside of Croatian borders, we have found that almost two fifths of them would like to live (and work and study) abroad for a while, while a quarter of the Croatian youth would like to leave the country forever. The older examinees, on the other hand, demonstrate a higher level of conservativeness toward the possible departure of their children into one of the countries of the Union, but they are, however, ready to accept their possible studying and training in the EU, while only one out of seven examinees would like his/her children to permanently live or spend their entire working life in one of the countries, which are members of the European Union. The analysis of the differentiation of the young in their relationship toward the European integration and the EU, has indicated that the used social characteristics have a limited influence. In other words, the young are relatively homogenous in their perception of a united Europe and the expectations from the Croatian accession to the European Union. However, certain differences do exist, and they are mostly caused by party identification, socio-professional status, regional affiliation and religious self-identification. This means that the most influential attributes, when it comes to attitudes toward the European integration process, are the ones consisting of ideological-political attitudes and the current social status along with the specifics of the wider environment. Thus, we have found that the sympathizers of parties that belong to the left center, then pupils and students, the inhabitants of the more developed regions and the non-religious examinees are more inclined toward the EU and the integration process, and at that, they emphasize the positive consequences and the potential gains from the Croatian accession into the Union, more than they express their concerns with the negative consequences. Hence, the concise conclusion would be that the greater social competence of the young is reflected in the establishment of a stable and more consistent pro-European orientation. Otherwise, the young differ from their older counterparts in their higher expectance of positive effects from the Croatian integration into the EU and, at the same time, in the lower perception of expected problems and undesirable consequences. Considering information sources and the level of information of the young in Croatia, the results show that the young follow the news in all the media outlets relatively often, but that they do lag behind the older examinees, and the examinees coming from the former EU candidate countries. This finding does not apply only to the use of the Internet as a source of information, where the young people are far superior to the older examinees. With that in mind, it is interesting that the young differ the most among each other, in the use of Internet and the reading of daily newspapers, where the socially more qualified young examinees (the more educated, coming from an urban environment and richer regions and averagely older ones) are the ones that use both media for obtaining information more often. As for the contents the examinees look for in the media, it is visible that the young are much more interested in events from the social and cultural life, and much less in issues related to politics. A comparison with the examinees from 13 countries that were EU candidates, demonstrated that they are far more interested in all the contents (aside from sports) than the Croatian examinees. Regarding the assessment of their own level of information about the EU, somewhat more than half of the young have stated that they are well informed about the European Union and events in it, compared to two thirds of the older examinees believing they are well informed. On the other hand, the results of both the young and the older examinees are surprisingly high, compared to the data on the level of information of the inhabitants in the 25 countries of the European Union, where three quarters of the examinees thought they were poorly informed about the issue. Closely related to the question of the level of information about the European Union itself, is the question about the general level of information about the Croatian accession to that association. The results demonstrate a somewhat different trend than the previous finding. In this case, less than half of the young consider themselves to be well informed about the process. It is interesting that the identically gathered data on this issue, from the former EU candidate countries, yielded a much lower evaluation by the examinees on their own level of information. Regarding issues and problems related to the EU that the examinees would like more information on, we have established that both the youth in Croatia and the examinees from the former EU candidate countries, find issues related to the Union' s policy on youth and education to be the most interesting, followed by the economy and social policy. Along with that, the issues regarding the enlargement of the EU, the cultural policy, the international relations, the regional policy and the EU budget are the ones the young find to be the least interesting. The manner in which the examinees gather information on the European Union mostly include the mass media outlets (the press, the television and the radio), and only then other forms of information gathering, such as discussions with their families and friends, surfing the Internet, specialized books and other published material, and the activities of non-governmental organizations. There are no significant differences in the use of the stated sources of information between the young and the older examinees, except in the case of the Internet. Considering the examinees from the 25 EU member countries, they use all of the observed sources as a way of getting information about the European Union, its policies and institutions, in a smaller amount. The examination of the objective knowledge of the examinees on specific issues related to the European Union has yielded devastating results. Thus, when asked about the phase Croatia was in, regarding the accession process into the EU, at the moment the research was being conducted, the correct answer was given by only a third of both the young and the older examinees. The second question asked, dealt with the familiarity of certain institutions of the European Union. The young and the older examinees do not differ very much from each other regarding their knowledge of this issue: the most familiar institution to both of them is the European Parliament, followed by the European Commission, then the EU Council of Ministers, then the European Central Bank, while all the other institutions were familiar to less than two fifths of the Croatian examinees. The examined citizens of the European Union are, understandably, more familiar with each of the observed institutions. The social attributes of the young, causing the greatest differences regarding their level of information, are mostly the ones connected to their level of socio-cultural qualifications (the socio-professional status and the level of education), followed by gender, and then provenience, regional affiliation and the age of the examinees. The highest level of information and knowledge belongs to men from the oldest age cohort of youth, those born and living in large cities, the inhabitants of the most developed regions, students and the employed examinees, as well as those with a higher education degree, the non-religious and examinees preferring liberal and left-wing parties. Along with all that, it is important to stress that a better level of knowledge and information about the European Union, its policies, institutions and enlargement process, correlates to positive attitudes about the different aspects of the European Union (the image of the EU, the following of issues related to it, the support for the Croatian accession to the Union, and so on), which, most probably, means that they are mutually determined. The inter-generational comparison has, on the other hand, indicated that the older examinees are more interested in most issues appearing in the media, especially politics, and that they assess their level of information to be better than do the young examinees. To put it shortly, the results of the research on the information level and knowledge of the Croatian citizens – both young and old – about the European Union, have indicated that they are not that interested in the European Union issues, as much as their level of presence in the media and the political agenda might imply, and the examinee' s knowledge about the relationship of Croatia and the EU is at an even lower level. Henceforth, it is necessary to conduct a strong and comprehensive public campaign directed precisely at the increase of the level of information and knowledge of the citizens about the European Union and what it represents, so that when the issue comes to the agenda, the Croatian inhabitants might make an educated decision about their country' s accession to that community of European states. The research results presented above may be summarized into a number of tendencies and statements of a wider nature. The political culture of the young testifies, in a number of aspects, to an approximation to the desirable democratic standards – especially regarding the acceptance of basic liberal-democratic values and the readiness for social engagement, at lease in principle – however, their social power and social capital are at a low level. At that, the young are aware of their own social and political marginalization, and recognize an entire plethora of measures that might help them gain a certain measure of power and become active citizens, as is desirable in a democratic society, but they do not use sufficiently the channels of social and political promotion, which are at their disposal. Today' s generation of youth expresses a lower level of social sensitivity and is more oriented toward individual efforts and family resources in the realization of life goals. At that, it seems that the young are not aware of the fact that an unequal access to existing social resources of the young generation today will have generated an unequal social status when they come of age. Hence, we can expect a widening and deepening of the process of social decomposition, that should be corrected through mechanisms that are supposed to ensure the highest possible equality of chances in the access to social resources (most of all, education). What we mean to say is that human capital is what Croatia, as a small and an insufficiently developed country, should deal with very thoughtfully. This, at the same time, signifies a maximum of investment into the development of human potentials, where the young generation certainly comes first. The inter-generational differences regarding the readiness of Croatia for accession into the European Union, and the relationship toward the European integration, are not of such a type and scale that there could be any mention of a generational gap, however, they are indicative. The most visible fact is that the young have demonstrated a more liberal, tolerant and flexible disposition, that they have a higher belief in the potentials of their own generation, and that they are consistent in their pro-European orientation, where they see their own generation as one of the certain winners of the Croatian accession into a united Europe. These trends suggest that the potentials of the young are a resource to be seriously reckoned with on the Croatian road into the EU. The process of the Croatian accession into the European Union is linked to different difficulties that affect the attitudes of citizens about the importance of Croatian entrance into the EU. Through this research, we have clearly detected that, unlike the Croatian political elite, both the young and the older citizens do not consider the Croatian integration into EU, to be the most important political goal. The political priorities of the citizens seem to be quite different, and their support to the project of European integration is weakening. It is, then, realistic to expect this trend to continue if the problematic events in the European Union persist, just as the difficulties in the relationship of Croatia and the EU, as well as the unfavorable economic and social trends in Croatia itself. This is why there are two equally important political tasks facing the ruling political elite: the initiation of the development of Croatia and an well-argumented explanation to the Croatian citizens why the country' s integration in the united Europe is purposeful.
