Books on the topic 'European interference'

The epilogue sketches a few scenarios on potential geopolitical consequences of the global paradigm shift toward multiple online platform “spheres.” Currently, the neoliberal US-based platform ecosystem dominates. This ecosystem revolves around the promotion of individualism and minimal state interference, leaving checks and balances to the market. On the other end of the ideological spectrum is the Chinese ecosystem, in which the autocratic regime controls the platform ecosystem via regulated censorship of tech corporations. Squeezed between the US and the Chinese models is the European Union, whose member states neither own nor operate any major platforms in either ecosystem. For European democracies to survive in the information age, its cities, national governments, and supranational legislature need to collaborate on a blueprint for a common digital strategy toward markets and public sectors.

Section 5.3 of the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts (PICC) deals with conditional obligations and conditional contracts. It consists of five articles concerned with five basic issues: the types of condition covered by Section 5.3, the effects of such conditions, interference with conditions, the duty to preserve rights pending the fulfilment of conditions, and restitution for the fulfilment of ‘resolutive conditions’. The introduction of a Section on conditions is in line with the approach taken by a number of legal systems that have well-settled and codified rules on the topic. Such rules have a long lineage in the European legal tradition that can be traced back to Roman law.

This chapter analyses the European Court of Human Right’s Grand Chamber judgment in Fernández Martínez v. Spain. Although the author agrees with the outcome of the judgment, he does not share part of the decision’s rationale. Among other things he argues that there was no actual interference with the applicant’s right to private and family life; that the case should have been examined from the perspective of the State’s positive obligations under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights; and that the conflict of rights approach was probably not the best way to decide the case, taking into account that the applicant’s job consisted in performing a strictly religious function and not ordinary teaching duties. The chapter concludes with some remarks about how to deal with the practical difficulties raised by systems of religious education such as the one in Spain.

During the 1920s and 1930s radio was transnational in its reach and appeal, attracting distant listeners and encouraging hopes that broadcasting would foster international understanding and world peace. As a new medium, radio broadcasting transmitted speech, music, news, and a range of exotic and authentic sounds across borders to reach audiences in other countries. In Europe radio was regulated through international consultation and cooperation to restrict interference between stations and to unleash the medium’s full potential to carry programmes to global audiences. A distinctive form of ‘wireless internationalism’ emerged, reflecting and reinforcing the broader internationalist movement and establishing structures and approaches which endured into the Second World War, the Cold War, and beyond. Distant listeners, meanwhile, used new technologies and skills to overcome unwanted noise, tune in as many stations as possible, and comprehend and enjoy what they heard. The BBC and other international broadcasters sought to produce tailor-made programmes for audiences overseas, encouraging feedback from listeners and using it to inform production decisions. The book revises our understanding of early British and global broadcasting, and of the BBC Empire Service (the precursor to today’s World Service), and shows how government influence shaped early BBC international broadcasting in English, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese. It also explores the wider European and global context, demonstrating how fascism in Italy and Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the Japanese invasion of China, combined to overturn the utopianism of the 1920s and usher in a new era of wireless nationalism.

Studying the history of syncretism’s use indicates wider interpretative problems in religious studies and theology regarding race and revelation. It also indicates the importance of seeing “tradition” as adaptive and amalgamating rather than static. In theology and religious studies alike, discourses of syncretism are positioned within racialized perceptions which construct a center and periphery based upon white European knowledge. In Christian theology more specifically, syncretism’s use also shows ways that theologians try to protect the category of divine revelation from human interference, leading to interpretative problems that sidestep material history. The book makes this case through an intellectual history of the word syncretism, tracking its changing associations and especially its pejorative turn in Christianity in the early twentieth century. After diagnosing challenges related to syncretism, the book makes two constructive arguments. First, it defends the concept of “tradition”—for religious studies and theology alike—as a means of understanding cultural continuity amid the perpetual flux of syncretism. Second, in Christian theology specifically, it offers a constructive response to syncretism drawing from theologians Jean-Marc Éla and Rowan Williams. The Holy Spirit, through tradition, builds knowledge of the divine Logos across history often by way of contested religious mixtures with culture. The book concludes by examining positive examples of syncretism in Christianity like the incorporation of ancestor reverencing.

This study analyses the presence of American ships, merchants, and interests in the Mediterranean region in the first decades following the independence of the United States, and seeks to understand whether or not the English, Dutch, Scandinavians, and Americans invaded the region and its shipping industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It considers the following topics: the benefit of American neutrality during the French Revolutionary wars which enabled the growth of their shipping activities; the organisation of protection for American ships post-independence, particularly from Barbary privateers; the diplomatic efforts of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the relationships of convenience fostered by American powers when requesting European assistance; the development of American consular services to assist merchants and captains; the avoidance of incidents through peace and commercial treaties through to ship seizures and crew enslavement; and the impact of the Tripolitanian War (or Barbary War) on American-Mediterranean shipping. The works in this volume attempt to determine whether or not these actions can be considered an ‘invasion’. They explore the mutually beneficial aspects of American-Mediterranean trade whilst also considering the strength of the Mediterranean trade (particularly Greek) prior to American interference. It concludes by confirming the dual objectives of the American presence - to ensure open markets for their goods, and to enhance their political and military power against British, French, and North African regencies.

The conclusion draws on the book’s key themes to revisit models of the policy process in early modern Europe, particularly that of rent-seeking as understood by public choice economists. It shows that the fight against monopoly was co-constituted with the origins of a science of commerce during the Enlightenment. If the mercantilist state of the Ancien Régime was an outgrowth of a rent-seeking society, it was because the rent-seekers themselves enjoyed a monopoly on economic expertise until the eighteenth century. The new science of economics did not expel local merchants from regime counsels as much as reformers might have desired, however. It gave merchants a powerful rhetorical arsenal concerning economic liberty that helped secure localities from unwanted interference by the central government.

Drawing on four decades of research, the book traces on earlier models and offers an expanded and updated theory of language policy and management. The book surveys the language practices and planning efforts of individuals, families, private and public institutions, local and national advocates and managers, and regional and national governments. By starting with the individual (rather than as in traditional models with the state) and moving through different levels and domains, the book shows the many other policies with which a state government must compete and helps reveal why national language management is so difficult. It draws on detailed descriptions of many countries in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and deals with language endangerment and shift, the power of treaties and international movements, and the interference of natural and man-made non-linguistic forces like earthquakes, wars, and corruption.

This chapter examines the influence that the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR or the Covenant) and the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have had on domestic law in Europe. It focuses on the Covenant’s legal influence in Germany, Russia, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and examines three issues that uncover broader trends and challenges: first, it shows that the extent to which the direct effects of the ICESCR have been recognized reveals positive and negative influences; second, it indicates how the particularities of the political and legal systems of the four countries shape the ICESCR’s influence; and third, it tentatively highlights the possibility that the recent financial and economic crises, which led to far-reaching interferences with economic, social, and cultural rights in Europe and elsewhere, may have nonetheless raised awareness of the ICESCR, which could lead to an increased positive influence of the Covenant in the future.

This chapter is intended as a basic reference guide for lawyers, legislators, and advocates approaching the issue of mass surveillance—or surveillance more generally—through the lens of international human rights law for the first time. It focuses on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the human rights treaties that apply in Europe and the Americas, with a particular emphasis on the rights to privacy, freedom of expression and opinion, and an effective remedy for violations. Although the exact parameters of the right to privacy are still being decided, it appears increasingly clear that state interferences with any kind of communications data will generally be subject to a standard of strict necessity applied on an individualized basis, and there is presently a trend toward finding that mass surveillance—including systematic state access to data held or transmitted by the private sector—violates the human rights treaties.

In their homelands in what is now New York state, Iroquois and their issues have come to dominate public debate as the residents of the region seek ways to resolve the multibillion dollar land claims against the state. This initial dispute over territorial title has grown to encompass gambling, treaties, taxation, and what it means to claim Native sovereignty in a world experiencing fantastic technological change. New York's influence is such that the experiences of Iroquois interaction with the state will surely affect how Natives and other states deal with similar issues. This is an essential volume for those wishing to better understand these issues, written from an Iroquois perspective by someone who has taken an active role in tribal affairs and who is dedicated to preserving the philosophies of his people. Douglas George-Kanentiio, a member of the Mohawk Nation and an activist for Native American claims, details the history of his Nation from initial contact with the Europeans through to the casino crises. As a key figure in events of the last two decades, George-Kanentiio uses aspects of his personal story to highlight issues of public interest: the land, family and community, geography, federal interference in tribal affairs, religion, political activism, land use/claims, and connections to organized crime.

Cybersecurity is a complex and contested issue in international politics. By focusing on "great powers"--the US, the EU, Russia and China--studies in the field often fail to capture the specific politics of cybersecurity in the Middle East, especially in Egypt and the GCC states. For these countries, cybersecurity policies and practices are entangled with those of long-standing allies in the US and Europe, and are built on reciprocal flows of data, capital, technology and expertise. At the same time, these states have authoritarian systems of governance more reminiscent of Russia or China, including approaches to digital technologies centred on sovereignty and surveillance. This book is a pioneering examination of the politics of cybersecurity in the Middle East. Drawing on new interviews and original fieldwork, James Shires shows how the label of cybersecurity is repurposed by states, companies and other organisations to encompass a variety of concepts, including state conflict, targeted spyware, domestic information controls, and foreign interference through leaks and disinformation. These shifting meanings shape key technological systems as well as the social relations underpinning digital development. But however the term is interpreted, it is clear that cybersecurity is an integral aspect of the region's contemporary politics.

Abstract This book is a primer on the history of subversion—hostile domestic interference to undermine or manipulate a rival—among rival great powers. It provides a conceptual apparatus for understanding why and when great powers meddle in each other’s domestic affairs and examines subversion via compact case studies exploring 2,000 years of mischief and manipulation. Evidence from classical antiquity and early modern Europe to the great-power rivalries of the nineteenth century, the 1930s, and the Cold War illustrates subversion’s allure, its operational possibilities, and the means for fighting back against it. The book helps readers understand how hostile meddling in rivals’ domestic politics has shaped great power politics from Ancient Greece through the Cold War. With this unique transhistorical conceptual and empirical base, the book then dives deeply into subversion’s brief exit after the Cold War and its role in the return of great power rivalry after 2008. It places Russia’s 2016 operation against the United States in historical perspective, and it assesses subversion’s role in great power rivalry in the past, present, and future. As the first study of this phenomenon that is focused on subversion among great power peers, the book fills key gaps in scholarship on international relations, history, and intelligence studies.

This GSoD In Focus Special Brief provides an overview of the state of democracy in Asia and the Pacific at the end of 2019, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, and assesses some of the preliminary impacts that the pandemic has had on democracy in the region in 2020. Key fact and findings include: • Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across Asia and the Pacific faced a range of democratic challenges. Chief among these were continuing political fragility, violent conflict, recurrent military interference in the political sphere, enduring hybridity, deepening autocratization, creeping ethnonationalism, advancing populist leadership, democratic backsliding, shrinking civic space, the spread of disinformation, and weakened checks and balances. The crisis conditions engendered by the pandemic risk further entrenching and/or intensifying the negative democratic trends observable in the region prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. • Across the region, governments have been using the conditions created by the pandemic to expand executive power and restrict individual rights. Aspects of democratic practice that have been significantly impacted by anti-pandemic measures include the exercise of fundamental rights (notably freedom of assembly and free speech). Some countries have also seen deepened religious polarization and discrimination. Women, vulnerable groups, and ethnic and religious minorities have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and discriminated against in the enforcement of lockdowns. There have been disruptions of electoral processes, increased state surveillance in some countries, and increased influence of the military. This is particularly concerning in new, fragile or backsliding democracies, which risk further eroding their already fragile democratic bases. • As in other regions, however, the pandemic has also led to a range of innovations and changes in the way democratic actors, such as parliaments, political parties, electoral commissions, civil society organizations and courts, conduct their work. In a number of countries, for example, government ministries, electoral commissions, legislators, health officials and civil society have developed innovative new online tools for keeping the public informed about national efforts to combat the pandemic. And some legislatures are figuring out new ways to hold government to account in the absence of real-time parliamentary meetings. • The consideration of political regime type in debates around ways of containing the pandemic also assumes particular relevance in Asia and the Pacific, a region that houses high-performing democracies, such as New Zealand and the Republic of Korea (South Korea), a mid-range performer (Taiwan), and also non-democratic regimes, such as China, Singapore and Viet Nam—all of which have, as of December 2020, among the lowest per capita deaths from COVID-19 in the world. While these countries have all so far managed to contain the virus with fewer fatalities than in the rest of the world, the authoritarian regimes have done so at a high human rights cost, whereas the democracies have done so while adhering to democratic principles, proving that the pandemic can effectively be fought through democratic means and does not necessarily require a trade off between public health and democracy. • The massive disruption induced by the pandemic can be an unparalleled opportunity for democratic learning, change and renovation in the region. Strengthening democratic institutions and processes across the region needs to go hand in hand with curbing the pandemic. Rebuilding societies and economic structures in its aftermath will likewise require strong, sustainable and healthy democracies, capable of tackling the gargantuan challenges ahead. The review of the state of democracy during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 uses qualitative analysis and data of events and trends in the region collected through International IDEA’s Global Monitor of COVID-19’s Impact on Democracy and Human Rights, an initiative co-funded by the European Union.

Conventional wisdom dictates that Ukraine’s political crises can be traced to the linguistic differences and divided political loyalties that have long fractured the country. However, this theory obscures the true significance of Ukraine’s recent civic revolution and the conflict’s crucial international dimension. The 2013-14 Ukrainian revolution presented authoritarian powers in Russia with both a democratic and a geopolitical challenge. In reality, political conflict in Ukraine is reflective of global discord, stemming from differing views on state power, civil society, and democracy. Ukraine’s sudden prominence in American politics has compounded an already-widespread misunderstanding of what is actually happening in the nation. In the American media, Ukraine has come to signify an inherently corrupt place, rather than a real country struggling in the face of great challenges. Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know® is an updated edition of Serhy Yekelchyk’s 2015 publication, The Conflict in Ukraine. It addresses Ukraine’s relations with the West, particularly the United States, from the perspective of Ukrainians. The book explains how independent Ukraine fell victim to crony capitalism, how its people rebelled twice in the last two decades in the name of democracy and against corruption, and why Russia reacted so aggressively to the strivings of Ukrainians. Additionally, it looks at what we know about alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, the factors behind the stunning electoral victory of the political novice Volodymyr Zelensky, and the ways in which the events leading to the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump have changed the Russia-Ukraine-US relationship. This volume is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces that have shaped contemporary politics in this increasingly important part of Europe, as well as the international background of the impeachment proceedings in the US