Conditions of European Solidarity: What holds Europe together?

Conditions of European Solidarity: What holds Europe together?
Author: Krzysztof Michalski
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9789637326479

The book addresses contemporary developments in European identity politics as part of a larger historical trajectory of a common European identity based on the idea of 'solidarity.' The authors explain the special sense in which Europeans perceive their obligations to their less fortunate compatriots, to the new East European members, and to the world at large. An understanding of this notion of 'solidarity' is critical to understanding the specific European commitment to social justice and equality. The specificity of this term helps to distinguish between what the Germans call "social state" from the Anglo-Saxon, and particularly American, political and social system focused on capitalism and economic liberalism. This collection is the result of the work of an extremely distinguished group of scholars and politicians, invited by the previous President of the European Union, Romano Prodi, to reflect on some of the most important subjects affecting the future of Europe.

Biocultural Diversity in Europe

Biocultural Diversity in Europe
Author: Mauro Agnoletti
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2016-02-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319263153

The book collects a selection of the papers presented at the meeting held in the context of the Joint Programme on the Links between Biological and Cultural Diversity (JP-BiCuD). Recognizing the inextricable link between biological and cultural diversity, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD) joined forces, and in 2010 launched the Joint Programme on the Links between Biological and Cultural Diversity (JP-BiCuD). The first meeting for the implementation of the JP-BiCuD was held in Florence (Italy) in April 2014 and produced the UNESCO-sCBD Florence Declaration, which highlights the concept of biocultural diversity. The European rural territory is predominantly a biocultural, multi-functional landscape, providing a crucial and effective space for integration of biological and cultural diversity, suggesting the need to revise some of the current strategies for the assessment and management of biodiversity.

Negotiating Unity and Diversity in the European Union

Negotiating Unity and Diversity in the European Union
Author: Florian Bieber
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2020-10-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030550168

This book explores how the European Union has been responding to the challenge of diversity. In doing so, it considers the EU as a complex polity that has found novel ways for accommodating diversity. Much of the literature on the EU seeks to identify it as a unique case of cooperation between states that moves past classic international cooperation. This volume argues that in order to understand the EU’s effort in managing the diversity among its members and citizens it is more effective to look at the EU as a state. While acknowledging that the EU lacks key aspects of statehood, the authors show that looking at the EU efforts to balance diversity and unity through the lens of state policy is a fruitful way to understand the Union. Instead of conceptualising the EU as being incomparable and unique which is neither an international organisation nor a state, the book argues that EU can be understood as a polity that shares many approaches and strategies with complex and diverse states. As such, its effort to build political structures to accommodate diversity offers lessons to other such polities. The experience of the EU contributes to the understanding of how states and other polities can respond to challenges of diversity, including both the diversity of constituent units or of sub-national groups and identities.

The Politics of Diversity in Europe

The Politics of Diversity in Europe
Author: Gavan Titley
Publisher: Council of Europe
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9789287161710

Diversity has become a key term in contemporary social politics, and is often used as both a description of complex social realities and a normative prescription for how those realities should be valued, influenced by the politics of multiculturalism and by social movements asserting "the right to be different" diversity has emerged as an open, fluid discourse that challenges reductive visions of legitimate identities and human possibilities.It is this apparent acceptance of diversity as a fact and value that this book looks at in several ways, it offers a countervailing assessment of diversity, seeing it less as a unifying social imaginary and more as a cost-free form of politics attuned to the needs of late capitalist, consumer societies.The essays collected here are developed from a research seminar entitled "Diversity, Human Rights and Participation" organised by the Partnership on Youth between the Council of Europe and the European Commission. The studies gathered here are embedded in 10 different national contexts. They track dimensions of 'diversity' in education, social services, jurisprudence, parliamentary proceedings and employment initiatives, and assess their significances for the social actors who must negotiate these frameworks in their daily experience.

Ethnic Diversity in Europe

Ethnic Diversity in Europe
Author: David Turton
Publisher: Universidad de Deusto
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8498305020

Ethnic diversity is on increase in Europe; at the same time, there is evidence of growing anti-immigrant feeling in some countries, such as Spain (especially in the Southern provinces). In order to build a politically united and democratic Europe, the accommodation of ethnic diversity and the integration of ethnic minorities are both key challenges. This book tries to explain ethnic problems in Europe.

United in Diversity?

United in Diversity?
Author: Jens Alber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2009-10-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199704104

Since the advent of the European Union, politicians have increasingly emphasized the notion of a European social model as an alternative to the American form of market capitalism, which is seen as promoting economic growth without regard for solidarity and social progress. As this political discourse has advanced, social scientists and academic policy analysts have raised questions concerning the extent to which the E.U. and U.S. social models exist outside the minds of diplomats and politicians seeking to stitch together a common identity. How much unity is there still within Europe after the Eastern enlargements have considerably increased economic and cultural diversity? To whatever extent one might discern a distinct set of commonalities that represent the core of a European approach, how different are the European characteristics of social, economic, and political life from those of America? Addressing these issues, this book systematically analyzes how much European countries and the United States have in common and how much variation we find within the enlarged European Union in eight central spheres of socio-economic and political life: employment, equality/mobility, educational opportunity, integration of immigrants, democratic functioning, political participation, rights to welfare, and levels of public spending. Drawing on empirical analyses by U.S. and European scholars who represent multi-disciplinary backgrounds, each of these topics is put under scrutiny. The results of this study illuminate points of convergence and divergence as seen from the perspectives of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic.

Culinary Cultures of Europe

Culinary Cultures of Europe
Author: Darra Goldstein
Publisher: Council of Europe
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9789287157447

The study of culinary culture and its history provides an insight into broad social, political and economic changes in society. This collection of essays looks at the food culture of 40 European countries describing such things as traditions, customs, festivals, and typical recipes. It illustrates the diversity of the European cultural heritage.

Diversity and Dissent

Diversity and Dissent
Author: Howard Louthan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 085745109X

Early modern Central Europe was the continent’s most decentralized region politically and its most diverse ethnically and culturally. With the onset of the Reformation, it also became Europe’s most religiously divided territory and potentially its most explosive in terms of confessional conflict and war. Focusing on the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this volume examines the tremendous challenge of managing confessional diversity in Central Europe between 1500 and 1800. Addressing issues of tolerance, intolerance, and ecumenism, each chapter explores a facet of the complex dynamic between the state and the region’s Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Utraquist, and Jewish communities. The development of religious toleration—one of the most debated questions of the early modern period—is examined here afresh, with careful consideration of the factors and conditions that led to both confessional concord and religious violence.

Diversity in European Marketing

Diversity in European Marketing
Author: Thomas Rudolph
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2012-03-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3834969761

This case book offers a non-traditional issue-centered perspective to European marketing. Focusing on some of the key challenges faced by managers charged with developing pan-European marketing strategies, marketing problems are placed into the context of these challenges and capture the multiple facets and implications for European marketing in an integrative manner.

Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery

Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery
Author: Dorothee Bohle
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-08-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801465222

With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and institutions. They also evaluate the impact of three regional shocks: the recession of the early 1990s, the rolling global financial crisis that started in July 1997, and the political shocks that attended EU enlargement in 2004.Bohle and Greskovits show that the postsocialist states have established three basic variants of capitalist political economy: neoliberal, embedded neoliberal, and neocorporatist. The Baltic states followed a neoliberal prescription: low controls on capital, open markets, reduced provisions for social welfare. The larger states of central and eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics) have used foreign investment to stimulate export industries but retained social welfare regimes and substantial government power to enforce industrial policy. Slovenia has proved to be an outlier, successfully mixing competitive industries and neocorporatist social inclusion. Bohle and Greskovits also describe the political contention over such arrangements in Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia. A highly original and theoretically sophisticated typology of capitalism in postsocialist Europe, this book is unique in the breadth and depth of its conceptually coherent and empirically rich comparative analysis.