Return to reason: reviving political realism in western foreign policy

Twenty‐first‐century political crises stretching from Europe to the Middle East and the Asia–Pacific have undermined the worldview that governed post‐Cold War western thinking about a liberal end of history. This worldview assumed that shared norms and transnational institutions would transform the state based‐order. In this context, the use of force is considered appropriate only for humanitarian ends meeting a set of predetermined axioms laid down in chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Yet for any strategy to be effective—in an international order subject to change—a clear political aim is required, which might deviate from the general rule. Preoccupied with universal postulates, legal normativism has lost sight of the particular. The argument put forth in this article is that the failure of contemporary western foreign policy in the twenty‐first century to address this limitation or to prioritize political ends has led to strategic confusion from Afghanistan to Syria and Ukraine. In this context, it might be useful to reappraise the utility of abstract rationalist approaches to global governance and return instead to an earlier understanding of statecraft that avoided premature generalizations and treated norms as maxims of prudence rather than axioms requiring universal application.     

Visible and Invisible Cultures of Parliamentary Ethics: The 'Sports Rorts' Affair Revisited

A growing body of research has examined the ethical cultures of liberal democratic legislatures via interview studies of parliamentarians. Mancuso's recent study of British parliamentarians distinguishes between four ethical types-Puritans, Entrepreneurs, Servants and Muddlers. Such studies, while valuable, appear to have two shortcomings when applied to Australia. First, they underestimate the centrality of political parties in most parliamentarians' ethical perspectives. A fifth ethical type, the Party Servant, is needed to remedy this deficiency. Second, the studies risk overestimating the diversity of ethical views effectively operating in parliaments because of their methodological focus on individual interview responses. Parliamentarians' individual responses form invisible cultures of legislative ethics. The visible cultures found in the everyday discourse of legislatures contain considerably less ethical variety. Here parliamentarians generally appear limited to Puritan and Party Servant perspectives. These arguments are explored through a systematic investigation of parliamentary discourse on the 'sports rorts' affair.     

METROPOLITAN DOMINANCE AND FOREIGN OWNERSHIP IN THE CANADIAN URBAN SYSTEM

This paper examines the concept of metropolitan dominance as measured by the concentration of corporate activity in large urban centres in the Canadian urban system. Specifically, it explores the extent of corporate concentration in various sectors of the economy; isolates those urban centres in which that concentration occurs; and identifies the extent and location of international penetration of the Canadian economy.
Dans cette étude, nous examinons le concept de l'importance des métropoles en fonction de la concentration des diverses entreprises dans le systeme urbain du Canada. Plus spécifiquement, nous examinons le degré de cette concentration dans divers secteurs économiques; nous isolons les centres urbain ou a lieu cette concentration; nous identifions l'étendue et les points de pénetration internationale dans l'économie du Canada.     

Greetings from the cybercaliphate: some notes on homeland insecurity

One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government's attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the willing whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism's key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude in the United Kingdom itself. This indicates a number of contradictions in official policy that simultaneously recognizes the globalized threat from violent Islamic militancy while, under the rubric of multiculturalism, tolerating those very strains of Islamist radicalism, some of which draw upon the interdependent and transnational character of conflict, to render the UK vulnerable to those very same violent forces. Consequently, the British authorities displayed a studied indifference towards this developing transnational phenomenon both during the 1990s and in some respects even after the London bombings. To explore the curious character of the government's response to the Islamist threat requires the examination of the emergence of this radical ideological understanding and what it entails as a reaction to modernization and secularism in both thought and practice. The analysis explores how government policies often facilitated the non-negotiable identity politics of those promoting a pure, authentic and regenerated Islamic order both in the UK and abroad. This reflected a profound misunderstanding of the growing source and appeal of radical Islam that can be interpreted as a consequence of the slow-motion collision between modernity in its recent globalized form and an Islamic social character, which renders standard western modernization theory, and indeed, the notion of a 'social science' itself, deeply questionable.     

European Policy and the Regions: A Review and Analysis of Tensions

This article explores a series of tensions inherent in the series of European policies that are designed to improve the competitiveness of regions in the face of globalization. Its focus is the co-existence of interventionist policies intended to overcome problems of lagging regions such as cohesion policies and those, for example competition policy which are designed to remove barriers to market integration and that are anti-interventionist. Moreover, the changing relationship between the European Union (EU), member states and the regions and problems of how regions are defined complicate policy implementation. To review these issues, the article adopts an agent-centred approach to understanding economic behaviour in the face of globalization in particular geographical and sectoral contexts. This methodology is used to highlight five sources of tension relating to the reality of the experience of globalization. These are illustrated by evidence from a recently completed EU Fifth Framework Programme study of regional adjustment strategies and technological change in five European countries.