Jeremy Leaman

Racism, ethnicity and politics in contemporary Europe

Racism, Ethnicity and Politics in Contemporary Europe includes an overview of contemporary racism, investigations into its socio-economic and ideological roots, analyses of its role in party politics and studies of multilateral and non-governmental initiatives designed to promote anti-racism. The contributors provide case studies of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. They consider both the experience of racism in specific countries and common issues thrown up by the resurgence of racism at a time of profound socio-economic restructuring and political uncertainty.

Managing Poverty: Great Britain in Comparative Perspective

This article examines the record of the British Labour Partys flagship policy aimed at reducing poverty and social exclusion in one of the most unequal societies in western Europe. It seeks to show that, despite an increasingly refined official view of poverty—as a multidimensional phenomenon—and despite extensive measures involving educational and labour market reforms, new activation strategies and considerable fiscal transfers, social mobility and persistent poverty remains stubbornly resistant. The article ascribes these disappointing outcomes to the simultaneous pursuit by New Labour of macro-economic policies which promote income inequality.

Central banking and the crisis of social democracy ‐ a comparative analysis of British and German views

With the demise of the post‐war ‘Keynesian accommodation’, social democratic parties are having to come to terms with the increasingly key role of central banks in the political management of markets. This article examines the differing views of the SPD and the British Labour Party to government‐central bank relations in terms of their differing national contexts. The second part interprets the results of a postal survey of MPs and MEPs from both parties relating to recent developments in national and supranational central banking and identifies significant contrasts between the two and important contradictions in perceptions of policy processes, notably within the SPD group. Such contradictions relate above all to the popularisation of the Bundesbank model of autonomy and the feasibility of (social) democratic politics.

Editorial: In Defence of Interdisciplinarity

This editorial marks a transition in the thirty-four-year development of the Journal. It is namely the last issue presided over by the authors of the editorial as retiringmanaging editors. Forthcoming issues will be in the hands of Gill Allwood and Jan Windebank, with the assistance of Paul Flenley, Martha Wörsching as members of the editorial board, and Zoë Walker, the Journal’s editorial assistant. Launched originally by a pioneering group of area studies specialists at Portsmouth in 1980, the then Journal of Area Studies established a strong reputation for critical scholarship in interdisciplinary area studies, drawing on research pursued by academics, predominantly in the UK and Europe, involving single-country and cross-national studies, the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of those studies and the pedagogical practice of delivering area studies programmes. This and related journals were supported institutionally by a network of departments of modern foreign languages and cultural studies in European universities which challenged both the traditional pairing of MFLwith high culture literature and the dominance of the disciplinary ‘trinity’ of economics, politics and sociology in the division of labour in ‘western’ universities (Taylor 1997). This challenge was rooted in a shared conviction concerning the artificial boundaries of explanatory models of social and cultural phenomena and processes common within the tripolar social ‘sciences’ and of language programmes that accounted for a given linguistic environment primarily through the medium of the works of great poets, novelists and dramatists. Accordingly, the Journal featured articles by social, political and economic historians, economic geographers, political economists, interdisciplinary cultural theorists, anthropologists, radical sociologists, post-colonial theorists and many others. The Portsmouth editors sustained the Journal, with fifteen memorable issues, in its striking A4 orange format, establishing an international core of committed readers and supporters. After a brief hiatus, colleagues and supporters at Loughborough persuaded the Portsmouth editors to relaunch the Journal under joint editorship, with an unaltered editorial policy committed to critical interdisciplinary area studies but in a compact book format. The relaunch was informed both by the urgency of developments within the European region—post-communism, German unification, Single Market, Maastricht Treaty, the fragmentation of Yugoslavia—and the worrying evolution of higher education policy in Britain and in the rest of Europe. The latter developments reflected an increasing commodification and marketisation of HE, particularly in the UK, with the proliferation of league tables, based initially on the assessment of the research quality of UK scholarship, followed by sector-wide monitoring of teaching quality, but now supplemented with all manner of market-driven yardsticks, the varied (and confusing) results of which festoon the webpages of most universities. The effect of this process on interdisciplinary scholarship in area studies has been marked. While the relevance of area studies research has been increasingly acknowledged

Market distribution, fiscal distribution and inequality: a case study of Britain

Widening social disparities represent a fundamental danger to the viability of civilized societies. They are corrosive of social solidarity and economically dysfunctional. Combatting such disparities should be a primary function of modern democratic states. The task is multi-faceted, however, and not simply confined to the optimal use of state transfers to increase the household income of the poorest sections of society. This chapter focuses, in particular, on the need to reverse the widening of market income disparities typical of the neoliberal era, as well as the priority of guaranteeing sufficient tax revenues for states to eradicate the evils of poverty and social deprivation. This would require an end to tax competition between European and other states, the elimination of tax and regulatory arbitrage by transnational corporations and the restoration of viable systems of progressive income tax in all European countries.

Ulrich BUSCH/ Wolfgang KÜHN/ Klaus STEINITZ, Entwicklung und Schrumpfung in Ostdeutschland. Aktuelle Probleme im 20. Jahr der Einheit

With this excellent survey of the progress of the eastern region of the united Germany, the authors present a sober and sobering account of ‘development and shrinkage in East Germany’ (the main title). The book is organized in two clear parts, the first charting the development of the primary indicators for economy, demography, social infrastructure and public sector finances in the region, the second examining the options for a reversal of fortunes and the need to persuade the population in both East and West of the urgency of a new beginning for the East. The unique character of the transition of the GDR from state socialism to capitalism is a key point of departure. While all other members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) were allowed to pursue transition strategies directed predominantly at their own national needs and managed by the usual instruments of sovereign economic policy, the GDR was absorbed into an existing political economy with its established statutory norms and policy preferences. The mercantilist cushions of exchange rate adjustment, tax sovereignty, tariff and non-tariff barriers and autonomous policy-setting by regional policy-elites were denied to the five new Länder and east Berlin. This made the nurturing of the East’s residual economic strengths and social arrangements effectively impossible. The transition process was rather determined by the policy priorities of Europe’s strongest industrial and trading economy, its autonomous central bank and the naive triumphalism of its neo-liberal ideologues. The results were a catastrophic economic recession in 1990 and 1991, widespread and rapid deindustrialisation and, despite costly piecemeal countermeasures, the emergence of chronic structural unemployment. More significant was the confounding of optimistic expectations that privatization and liberalization would promote a speedy convergence of east and west German productivity. That convergence – forecast by some to arrive as soon as 2000 – has now moved into the distant future. Some of the disparities – most notably levels of investment in moveable assets (machinery and equipment) have widened; having almost reached parity with the West in 1995, the per capita ratio declined to just 55.2% in 2006. Thus, the much trumpeted and undeniable ‘islands of growth’ around the major cities

Überholen Ohne Einzuholen: Die Ddr-Wirtschaft Als Fußnote Der Deutschen Geschichte? Edited By André Steiner

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: LEAMAN, J., 2007. Andre Steiner (ed.), Uberholen ohne einzuholen : die DDR-Wirtschaft als Fusnote der deutschen Geschichte? [review]. Economic History Review, 60 (2), pp. 422-424, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2007.00384_15.x. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.

Soziale Gerechtigkeit in Großbritannien — ein Modell für Deutschland und Europa?

„Soziale Gerechtigkeit“ scheint ein beliebig dehnbarer Begriff zu sein. Er darf auf jeden Fall in keinem Wahlmanifest oder Regierungsprogramm fehlen. Er gehort ganz selbstverstandlich in das taktische Vokabular eines jeden Populisten. Aber trotz dieser Vieldeutigkeit last er sich kaum ersetzen, weder in der politischen Praxis noch im Diskurs der modernen Gesellschaftswissenschaften. Die „soziale Gerechtigkeit“ kann etwa in der Tradition des politischen Liberalismus so eng ausgelegt werden, das sie sich mit der formalen Gleichheit des Burgers vor einem autonom (gerecht) verwalteten unparteiischen Gesetz erschopft. Andererseits impliziert die soziale Gerechtigkeit im kommunistischen Gedankengut so etwas wie einen Gini-Koeffizienten von 0,0, bei dem jedes Gesellschaftsmitglied theoretisch oder praktisch einen gleichen Anteil am Volkseinkommen bzw. -vermogen geniesen soll. Den grostmoglichen Interpretationsspielraum bietet John Rawls’ Definition der Gerechtigkeit, welche die Zulassigkeit von Ungleichheit betont: „Falls bestimmte Ungleichheiten des Reichtums und der Macht jeden besser stellen als in dem angenommenen Ausgangszustand, stimmen sie mit der allgemeinen Gerechtigkeitsvorstellung uberein“ (Rawls 1994: 84).

Editorial: travel and migration

The Journal of Contemporary European Studies is moving from two to three issues per year. This issue represents the first in the new pattern of publication, which will increase the Journals thematic coverage and allow more non‐thematic articles to be included in each annual cycle. There are two major thematic issues being presented this year, the first—the current one—on Travel and Migration, the next on Prostitution, due out in August. The third issue, to be published in December, will not be centred around one core theme.

Autonomy and German Traditions of Liberalism

’Market democracy, in its silent precision surpasses the most perfect political democracy’. This key statement by one of the intellectual fathers of German ordo-liberalism, Wilhelm Ropke,1 expresses in a very obvious way the fundamental ambivalence within liberal intellectual traditions towards ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ as social phenomena. The power to act as a free economic agent, to produce, buy and sell in a market driven by supply and demand, is presented by Ropke as more ‘democratic’ than the power to elect political representatives and hold them answerable. There is a greater ‘equality’ for Ropke in the aggregate of market decisions, because all economic agents are involved all of the time, whereas elections are sporadic, electoral majorities leave sizeable minorities unrepresented and political processes of influence and decision-making are haphazard. It follows that market ‘freedom’ must be the core measure of a culture’s democratic credentials, supported to a greater or lesser degree by the ‘less precise’ institutions of political democracy. This ambivalence as to what constitutes true liberal democracy is by no means confined to the idiosyncratic German tradition of liberalism but is shared by early British exponents of liberalism from Hobbes through to the younger Mill, indeed by modern exponents of ‘neo-liberalism’. The ambivalence derives from differing perceptions of the central theoretical concepts of liberalism, namely of liberty, equality and property and from associated problems of defining the role of the state as a social institution in the framework of an ideology directed towards the individual.