孙中山“训政”思想与现代政治民主

以革命手段推翻专制制度和逐步地建立＂民主政治＂,是孙中山民主革命的基本内容之一。而颇有特色的是,孙中山把这一建设过程分为军政、训政、宪政三个阶段。训政时期是进入宪政时期、实现五权宪法的必经阶段,是一种程序设计,也是在革命三阶段中别出心裁而又最具争议的部分。尽管它与孙中山毕生追求的民权目标存在内在冲突,但在一定程度仍对现代民主政治建设具有积极意义。     

Institutionalizing the democratic party-state: political parties as ‘public utilities’ in Italy and West Germany, 1945–75

This article argues that the rise of parties as ‘public utilities’, that is, semi-state organs crucial in the functioning of democracy, which is currently observed by political scientists, has long historical roots. It looks from an institutionalist perspective to the development of party–state relations in Germany and Italy since the Second World War, paying specific attention to how institutional reform corresponded to changing normative assumptions about the position of political parties in twentieth-century democracy. The first notions on the ‘statist’ dimension of parties were put forward as an answer to the challenges of mass politics in the interwar era. After 1945, politicians and constitutional judges drew upon this tradition in their efforts to stabilize mass democracy. They deliberately constructed ‘party-state democracies’, in which parties influenced the state and the state managed individual parties and the party system. This became visible in the constitutionalization of political parties, as well as in the enactment and normative justification of party (finance) laws in the 1960s and 1970s. The advent of parties as public utilities, even though fiercely criticized today, was therefore embedded in an ideological tradition that sanctioned the ‘party-state’ as crucial for the stability of modern democracy.     

The case for extending measures of democracy in the world “Beneath”, “Above”, and “Outside” the national level

This article applies spatial theory, or the view that phenomena are distributed in space, to democracy. This analysis demonstrates that plural (two or more) democratic practices are evident in three spatial categories: (1) vertical stratification (i.e. at different levels of governance), (2) horizontal separation (i.e. among different agents operating at each level of governance), and (3) social association (i.e. in workplaces, families, schools). This finding, that plural democratic practices are demonstrated by agents operating at multiple levels of governance and in various non- or quasi-governmental associations prompts us to argue that measures of democracy in the world should be extended to spaces “beneath”, “above”, and “outside” the national level – presently the dominant locus for regular batteries that test the quality and extent of democratic practices globally. However, global data on the quality and extent of democracy at these other levels needs to be built before such an extension can happen.     

“Vote with your feet”: Neoliberalism,the democratic nation-state,and utopian enclave libertarianism

This paper examines a series of emerging utopian discourses that call for the creation of autonomous libertarian enclaves on land ceded by or claimed against existing states. These discourses have emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and can be seen as a response to the crisis on the part of free-market advocates who critique previous waves of neoliberal reform for failing to radically transform the existing structures of the state. Enclave libertarianism seeks to overcome neoliberal capitalism's contradictory relationship to the liberal democratic state by rethinking the state as a “private government service provider” and rethinking citizens as mobile consumers of government services. Citizens are thus called to “vote with their feet” by opting-in to the jurisdiction that best fits their needs and beliefs. The paper argues that these utopian imaginaries are key to understanding specific new manifestations of post-crisis neoliberalism, and calls for more research into the diversity of discourses and imaginaries that circulate through networks of neoliberal actors beyond specific policy initiatives.     

贵族话语与雅典民主政治的关系——以“刺杀僭主”叙事为中心

传统观点认为,虽然古典时期的雅典人创造了民主制,但并未发展出相应的民主政治话语,贵族的传统价值观和意识形态始终在民主政治中居于主导地位。然而,对"刺杀僭主"叙事的分析表明,贵族发明的话语传统可以在公共空间内被大众转化为城邦的政治话语,进而在新的历史语境中被民主化,为民主政治话语提供符号、仪式和形象,成为民主制的有机组成部分。这说明,古典时期雅典民主政治对旧时代政治符号的继承,并不等于贵族话语对民主政治的胜利。能够在新的政治语境中对旧叙事进行创造性改编,反而说明民主政治有能力利用旧传统的养分,创造出属于自身的政治话语。     

Blinded like a state? Urban sanitation,improvement and high modernism in contemporary Myanmar

This article explores urban sanitation in the city of Mandalay, upper Myanmar, as an entry point to better understand the issue of improvement in the country in the current era of political change. Based upon qualitative data gathered in Mandalay between 2015 and 2018, the article focuses on the state's ways of seeing urban improvement after 2016, when the National League for Democracy government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi took office. The article builds upon James Scott's work on statecraft to frame the analysis, and it uses this framework to argue that a localized form of authoritarian high modernism is emerging and shaping urban improvement in Mandalay today. The case is noteworthy as high modernism in Mandalay is not associated with attempts to render the city more legible; on the contrary improvement seems to be carried out by a state unwilling, or unable, to see and thus being blinded. The article develops this argument to make a twofold contribution, to discussions on statecraft and the “failure of development” in contemporary Myanmar from the perspective of political geography; and to debates on states' ways of seeing and the practice of improvement in postcolonial contexts.     

Myths and the political use of religion in Christian Democratic culture

Abstract

In this essay, the author will attempt to analyze the overall relationship established between the party of Christian Democracy (so named for its affiliation with a traditional religion) and the phenomena of the sacralization of politics that have so profoundly shaped the character of mass parties in the twentieth century. The quest for consensus led the Catholic party to adopt a new language, based on mythical thinking and profoundly indebted – in content and mode of communication – to the experiences of totalitarianism. The active rivalry with political religions marked, both in the phase of development and in the process of communication, the forms of mass political expression of Christian Democracy. De Gasperi's proposal concerning the definition of new identities and political affiliations, both on the national level and on the broader Western level (both in European and Atlantic terms) was the product of a unique ideological development in keeping with the requirements of modern mass politics.     

The Austrian idea: An idea of nationhood in the kingdom and realms of the emperor Franz Joseph I

This article considers the nature of communitarian thought in late twentieth century Anglo-American political philosophy. It argues that communitarianism arose out of a critique of modernist theories of justice such as that of John Rawls shared by a group of writers committed to idealist principles that emphasised narrative approaches to the study of political thought, the importance of historical context, and popular participation in political life. It then focuses on one particular American strand of communitarian thought, exemplified by the work of Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel, which draws on a tradition of radical democracy and, in so doing, helps both to create and to transform a new American republicanism. An important connection between Walzer and Sandel is that they share the view that egalitarian politics must draw on shared traditions of social criticism rather than on the abstract individualism that they associate with Rawls. A key difference is that Walzer's vision of American life is pluralist and enthusiastic about difference, whereas Sandel's is republican and concerned above all with fostering civic virtue and identification with the state and political community.     

Assemblage-democracy: Reconceptualising democracy through material resource governance

This article furthers political geographic thinking on democracy by generating and employing a conceptualisation of ‘assemblage-democracy’. Bringing an assemblage perspective to democratic thinking brings to the fore three key dimensions: the co-constitution of material and non-material connections; connectivity and associations, in particular engagement with multiple heterogeneous ‘minoritarian’ publics; and the (re)construction of spatial configurations such as scale. We employ these three dimensions of materiality, publics, and scale, in combination with the concept of (de)territorialisation to produce a geographic conceptualisation of democracy as emergent, precarious, and plural.We operationalise and refine the concept of assemblage-democracy through an empirical analysis of democratic experiments with energy resources. Specifically, we analyse negotiations involved in emergent democratic energy experiments through in-depth qualitative empirical study of community-owned energy projects in the UK, asking what kind of democracy emerges with new technologies and how? In answering this question, we demonstrate the fragile, contingent, and contested nature of democratic practices and connections produced in the (re)enactment of energy infrastructures. In doing so, this article also shows how an assemblage lens can offer a renewed understanding of how democratic politics is configured through material resource governance.     

A Conflicted Nation. Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978)

This roundtable assesses the arguments and importance of Guido Formigoni’s book Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978). This book is essentially composed of seven 70–80-page broadly chronological chapters, each of which might almost be expanded into a short book in its own right. The chapters perform the difficult feat of shifting constantly between the foreign policy of the Italian state (which was so often driven by domestic political considerations) and the political consequences of international events on the debates (or polemics) taking place in the Italian polity. There can be few works of international history in which the linkage between the domestic and foreign policy ‘levels’ is so clearly demonstrated. Indeed, one of the key objectives of the book plainly is to show that although there may be countries where foreign policy is carried on with blithe indifference to domestic politics, Italy is certainly not one of them, or was not during the Cold War years. Mark Gilbert introduces the book on which Federico Romero, Maud Bracke and Michele Marchi engage in a detailed commentary, to which the author replies.