The party of European socialists and the identity of European social democracy
Essay - 9 pages - Political science
The question wether there is currently something that can be called the crisis of social-democracy is arguable: after all, social-democractic and socialist parties are still the counterpart of Conservatives and Christian-democrats, sharing alternaltively government responsibilities at national...
Is there room, and how much, for immigrants in the European social model?
Essay - 11 pages - Social, moral & civic education
Immigration is deeply rooted in the European history. In the post-war times several West European governments - especially in big and devastated countries - resorted to immigration to cope with important needs for labour force the after-reconstruction economic boom. Immigrants, mostly from...
Is the Washington consensus dead ?
Essay - 10 pages - Economy general
“The Washington Consensus has been dead for years,” said the World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn at the opening of a conference on ‘Scaling up Poverty Reduction' in Shanghai on 25 May, 2004. “It's been replaced by all sorts of other consensuses. But today we're...
Is NATO still relevant ?
Essay - 7 pages - International relations
General De Gaulle once said that all alliances are like roses: they wither and decay. NATO might be a counter-example or it might not. While during the Munich Conference, the US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, claimed “As an alliance we have never been stronger. We have never...
The economic results of the 2004 enlargement of the European Union
Essay - 15 pages - Economy general
Two years ago, the European Union was joined by 10 new members whose 8 were former communist countries (plus Malta and Cyprus). The fifth enlargement has been the most ambitious in the history of the European Union. It was the largest ever in terms of number of countries (10) and population (75...
The political influence on organization decision making towards corporate social responsability: a socio economic approach
Essay - 30 pages - Economy general
This research will look at the political influence on organization decision making towards social responsibility. To do so, a combination of social and economic theories will be used. In chapter three, the political field and the political actors in this research will be discussed. Chapter...
Knowledge, growth without scale effects, and the product life cycle
Dissertation - 260 pages - Economy general
For several reasons, knowledge cannot be treated like any other commodity. One of these reasons is the nonrivalrous nature of knowledge, which means that one person's use of certain knowledge does not diminish another person's use of the same knowledge (at the same time). This important property...
Can we have a world government?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
To answer the question “Can we have world government”, we must understand two questions: one is “What would be the use and necessity of a world government”; the other one is “In what extent would it be possible?” “A government is a system, form or organization...
Critically examine the factors that ultimately led to the enlargement of the EU in 2004. What are the stages and debates?
Essay - 5 pages - European union
According to the article 43 of the European Community treaty, 'any European State may apply to become a member of the Union[...]the conditions of admission and the adjustments to the Treaties on which the Union is founded which such admission entails shall be the subject of an agreement...
What is the role of the state in international Politics?
Essay - 4 pages - International relations
International Politics are based upon two main theories, Realism and Liberalism, which are conventionally opposed, and therefore give two different interpretations of world politics. This essay will focus on the stances of these theories upon the role of the state. But before assessing their...
Deliberative democracy is theoretically plausible and institutionally impracticable
Essay - 5 pages - Political science
What we mean today when referring to 'democracy' is, according to some scholars, 'a way of organising the state that has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices' . The problem with...
Is there a 'responsibility to protect'? Is the UN capable of protecting the victims of internal conflicts?
Essay - 6 pages - International relations
Civil wars are, today, since the end of the Cold War, the dominant form of conflicts all around the world. For instance, as Stephen John Stedman explains, 'all thirty-five of the wars in 1997 were primarily internal' . Massive violence, destruction and killing tend, so, nowadays, to...
How have social democratic parties changed over the last 25 years?
Essay - 6 pages - Political science
The changes of the last 30, and especially 25 years have produced an unexpected and important indentity crisis for all parties rooted in the tradition of Western European reformistsocialism. In fact, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the world experienced great changes such as new expectations...
Do we need feminist theory in International Relations? If so why?
Essay - 6 pages - Political science
Feminism is a critical social and political movement who first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth with women's claims of equal rights in society and in the political sphere, with the right of vote. But now, since approximately the end of the...
Is the United Nations running the same risk as its predecessor the League of Nations of being made marginal or even irrelevant? Why or why not?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
'The League is dead, long live the United Nations!' This is with these words that Lord Robert Cecil, one of the architects of the League of Nations, commented on the dissolution of the organization, in the spring 1946, expressing the apparent readiness to write the League off as a failure...
Why has the UN Charter remained a central plank of international order, even though it was formulated in wartime by only a few of the victorious powers?
Essay - 6 pages - International relations
'If we had had this Charter a few years ago-and above all, the will to use it- millions now dead would be alive. If we should falter in the future in our will to use it, millions now living will surely die.' (Truman) This quotation shows the ambition the Charter has and the hope its...
Is each age blessed or doomed with the presence of an empire?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
“Veni, vidi, vici...”[I came, I saw, I conquered] Julius Caesar. This quote from one of the most famous Roman generals reflects the principle of a major phenomenon in international relations: empires, a phenomenon which dates back as far as 2334 BC with the reign of Sargon of Akkad, and...
Is capitalism a positive or negative force in International Relations?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
In 1995, the 200 most powerful multi-national corporations controlled approximately one third of the world GNP The turnover of these companies sometimes exceeds the GNP of some countries: one example is General Motors which with a turnover of 132 billion dollars surpasses the GNP of Indonesia....
Contrast and compare the political ideology, support base and political strategy of the Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami and the Iranian Islamic Revolution
Essay - 8 pages - Political science
The events of this beginning of century have shown the resistance and the diversity of an Islamism, which certain had already buried. According to Bobby S. Sayyid, ‘Islamism is a discourse that attempts to centre Islam within the political order. Islamism can range from the assertion of a...
Does social constructivism really add anything new to debates about security?
Essay - 6 pages - Political science
During the late 1980s, when debates between neorealists and neoliberals seemed to exhaust themselves, so-called ‘constructivist' researches made their appearance. By asserting themselves as an alternative to realism, they reinterpret its main concepts (power, national interest,...
To what extent did the colonial state openly side with metropolitan capitalist interests and missionaries lobbies against indigenous interests?
Essay - 9 pages - Political science
Ghana was a victim of the British Empire's colonialism, from the establishment of the South as a Crown's possession in1874 to the independence of the country in 1957. Basically, colonialism can be defined as a particular form of imperialism: the colonial imperialism, notion mainly developed by...
The European Union and organized crime
Essay - 8 pages - European union
With French and Dutch voters' recent rejection of the proposed constitutional treaty for the European Union, a number of proposals in the field of Justice and Home Affairs have been watered down or considerably postponed. However, both EU leaders and the general public continue to place high...
Iran's nuclear program
Essay - 9 pages - International relations
As diplomats from the 190 signatory countries gather in New York this week for the five-yearly review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran will surely be present in many minds. Although some warning signs had been issued by various intelligence services during the previous decade,...
The American bureaucracy on national security
Essay - 6 pages - Political science
In his book The Power Game, Hedrick Smith speaks of the foreign policy game in the United States as a “bureaucratic tribal warfare”, using a tribal metaphor to describe the fierce fights which take place in Washington, DC. The notion of bureaucracy emerged in the early 20th century,...
The European Union and national sovereignty
Essay - 3 pages - European union
The birth of the modern sovereign state is usually associated with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, after which modern nation-states began to constitute in Europe. Today, some scholars argue that state sovereignty has been challenged by trends such as globalization and European integration not...
The UK and the Euro
Essay - 3 pages - European union
Exposé en Anglais sur le Royaume-Uni et un passage éventuel à l'euro, qui examine les différents arguments favorables et opposés à l'adoption de la monnaie européenne. Soon after election, in 1997, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, said that four of the five tests had not been met (only the...
The integration of the European Union
Thesis - 6 pages - European union
On the 16th April, 2003, ten new members were signing the adhesion treaty to the European Union, in front of the Parthenon in Athens. The adhesion of these ten new countries, among which eight were ex-communist countries, represented a historic moment : the European unification eastwards, so much...
Landmines in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Thesis - 5 pages - International relations
The conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina began shortly after the republic declared its independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in March 1992 and lasted nearly four years. A cease-fire was called in September 1995. A general framework agreement (the “Dayton...
Is multilateralism still viable today?
Thesis - 5 pages - International relations
After WWII, various multilateral organizations have been promoted by the US and implemented through many international organizations such as the UN, the GATT and the IMF. Overtime, multilateral co-operation dramatically developed in different forms (Summits, Conferences, etc...). However, critics...
To what extent is the clausewitzian account of war a political instrument relevant in the twenty-first century ?
Thesis - 5 pages - Political science
Clausewitz's description of war as a means to an end or, to use his own formulation, “the continuation of politics by other means”, must be interpreted against the contemporary intellectual background: the majority of enlightenment writers had regarded war as an aberration, an...
