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In February 1989 I gave a talk at the IWM in Vienna which was entitled ‘After Communism, What?’ Its main thesis was that the crumbling of communism in East-Central Europe brings with it the prospect of democratic change but that its success will depend on the new balance found between the democratic ethos of opposition to totalitarianism and the resurfacing of deeper undercurrents of the region’s political culture. Just as the term ‘return to Europe’ was ambiguous, so the term ‘return of democracy’ was problematic for anybody who had studied pre-communist politics of East-Central Europe. The test case, I thought, would be Poland, and I had ventured the following proposition: The mix of Catholicism and nationalism that prevailed in Polish society had made it particularly resistant to communism (certainly in comparison with the egalitarian, social-democratic ethos of the legacy of Masaryk’s pre-war Czechoslovakia).
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There is a poem by the famous Austrian poet Ernst Jandl that can be used as a summary of all populist political appeals. The poem is called ‘Answers to Seven Unasked Questions’ and goes like this: ‘No / No / No / No / No / No / No’. My (not particularly original) thesis is that populist parties are, above all, parties of negation and that the moment they enter government they lose much of their energy and persuasiveness. I will try to illustrate this with somewhat unsystematic observations on the common aspects of populist parties and their development after they enter government. I will also offer a few remarks on populism in Germany, where I live.
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The rhetoric born of the French Revolution and the new concepts of popular sovereignty, public opinion and the rights of the people played an important role in the formation of modern Bulgarian political culture. The purpose of this text is to trace the ways in which the power-holders in the Principality of Bulgaria strove to legitimate their power through ‘the people’ in the 1880s and 1890s. It will try to describe the struggle in the public political sphere as a contest for the right to interpret and represent the ‘will of the people’. The different uses, senses and meanings of the term ‘people’ in the Bulgarian public political sphere in the period under review will be sought and revealed.
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Why is not voting a shameful thing? One of the few points of consensus that have emerged in the Bulgarian public sphere in the last fifteen years or so is that voting in elections is something good in principle, while non-voting is a sign of civic immaturity, social autism or plain indifference and cannot be a valid, publicly defensible position. Why is distancing oneself from the political a bad thing, while the childish enthusiasm that can bring to power a king or a general is considered to be something entirely acceptable? Why do even Ataka’s critics insist on pointing out that Ataka’s electorate must be treated with respect?
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Boyan Znepolski interviews Michel Wieviorka Boyan Znepolski: Populism is a term used quite often these days. Sometimes it is even misused. At the same time, populism is a ‘slippery’ term whose meaning remains vague. It is used either as a synonym for demagogy or in association with nationalism – as in the phrase ‘national populism’. What is your definition of populism? What is its significance in contemporary social sciences? Michel Wieviorka: It is very difficult to give a satisfactory definition of populism because the term has different historical meanings, it refers to different historical experiences in different parts of the world and therefore seems to elude definition. And then, while the term has recently acquired quite negative, denigrating connotations, it may also have much more positive meaning.
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The phenomenon of new populism has been the subject of many studies and analyses in recent years. Despite the great variety of approaches, their purpose may be summed up as follows: defining populism and its main forms, identifying the new forms of populism in the contemporary world, and analysing the specific risks posed by populism today.
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On 26 November 2000 Corneliu Vadim Tudor took everyone by surprise when he won more than a quarter (28.3%) of the vote in the first round of the Romanian presidential elections. Having made it to the runoff, the leader of the political party România Mare (Partidul România Mare, PRM, Greater Romania Party), who entered politics in 1991, scored his biggest win to date (33%). In the subsequent parliamentary elections his nationalist party polled 20% of the vote. Incapable of repeating their 2000 success, România Mare and its leader have since managed to retain the support of around 13% of the electorate by embodying the aspirations of national pride combined with an authoritative presence of the nanny state. Five years later, in June 2005, Bulgaria likewise saw a nationalist vote: Ataka, a party created two months before the parliamentary elections, won 8.93% of the vote and twenty-one out of a total 240 seats in parliament. The emergence of this radical xenophobic party provoked a huge outcry from the public and the political class, with some MPs even calling for a boycott against the elected nationalists. Even so, in the October 2006 presidential elections Volen Siderov, the leader of Ataka, made it to the runoff owing to the absence of a credible political alternative to the outgoing president, Socialist Georgi Parvanov. Securing 24.05% of the vote (just 3% more than in the first round), the xenophobe tribunician seemed to have reached his limit – which is only half good news.
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‘A spectre is haunting the world: populism. A decade ago, when the new nations were emerging into independence, the question that was asked was, how many will go communist? Today, this question, so plausible then, sounds a little out of date. In as far as the rulers of the new states embrace an ideology, it tends more to have a populist character.’ This observation was made by Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner exactly forty years ago. A time long enough for ‘populism’ first to disappear and then to re-emerge as the major player in global politics. And now, like then, there can be no doubt about the importance of populism. But now, like then, no one is clear about exactly what it is. Is there one phenomenon corresponding to this one name?
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In the sources on which this study is based, the first high-level mention of the 1,300th anniversary of the foundation of the Bulgarian State (in 1981) is found in a statement made at the July 1968 plenum of the Central Committee (CC) of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) in connection with a resolution of the Politburo of the CC of the BCP on the writing and publication of a multi-volume history of Bulgaria. By that time professional discourse about the past had begun to emancipate itself from the ideological discourse, a process that would continue in the years to come. The late sixties also saw changes in the mode of sharing and articulation in public of the ‘historical’ truth that had been valid in the previous two decades; in a way, the dominant ideology adjusted itself to the ‘new discourse’ on history, gradually assuming responsibility for ‘Bulgaria’s entire past’.
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Jarosław Kaczyński, speaking at a rally of his supporters on November 1 2006 at the Gdańsk Shipyard, the cradle of the Solidarity movement twenty-five years ago, said that ‘we stay where we stood then, while they stay where the ZOMO stood.’ By ‘we’ he meant his party, Law and Justice (PiS), and the government he heads, and by ‘they’ – all those who are his opponents. ZOMO, of course, is the acronym of the infamous communist riot police, one of the symbols of martial law introduced in 1981 to suppress Solidarity. Kaczyński’s statement provoked cries of protest from many of the former anti-communist opposition members who now disagree with the PiS and who thought Kaczyński had gone too far, but that did not seem to detract him. In fact, he specialises in using strong words and categorical judgements to describe and attack his opponents, and his close collaborators follow with zeal.
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Network organisations are analysed on the basis of scientific literature analysis, distinguishing their features, types, functions, advantages, and comparing with other organisations. The Lithuanian Labour Exchange as a network organisation is presented in the second part of the article,.
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Im Rahmen der wissenschaftlichen Begleitung des Modellversuches „Kooperatives Lernen im Berufsschulunterricht“ (vgl. Bauer / Bernard 1997) war es u.a. erforderlich, Konzepte für die Gestaltung kooperativer Unterrichtsprozesse auf der Basis neuer Erkenntnisse der Berufspädagogik, der Kognitionswissenschaften und anderer Wissenschaftsdisziplinen in enger Verbindung mit den Erfahrungen der Lehrenden an der Modellversuchsschule zu entwickeln. Ergebnisse dieser Entwicklungsarbeit sollen nach den sogenannten „W-Fragen“ zusammengefaßt werden: • Was ist kooperatives Lernen? • Warum soll, • wie und • wann kann im Berufsschulunterricht das kooperative Lernen realisiert werden? Unter pragmatischem Aspekt werden wesentliche Erkenntnisse nur in Form von Thesen formuliert. Auf eine ausführliche Darlegung von Implikationszusammenhängen wird verzichtet.
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With a relatively recent history, the concept of framing has known a flourishing development, being without any doubt one of the key theories in current mass communication research. Although the growing number of studies on the topic of framing, seeking to understand what framing is and how frames manifest themselves in a number of different sites and across a number of domains, there is no consensus regarding the meaning of this powerful concept. With few exceptions, most of the scholars reduce framing only to written words, fully ignoring the visual cues within news stories. This study aims at filling this gap, bringing new theoretical explanations and trying to make some clear conceptual clarifications. Thus, the paper will address the following questions: How have meanings of framings have evaluated across time?; What are the limitations of these definitions?; How do visual cues function as agents of framing? As a theoretical paper, this article explores the integrative approach on framing, urging researchers to start conducting more framing analysis which combine both verbal and visual elements in news coverage.
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In the last two decades, the concept of public sphere has reached international academic debates, its meanings have constantly changed and have been adapted to various domains. Particularly, in media studies, the question that needs to be addressed is this: to what extent the public sphere represents an arena of deliberative communication and equal access, as Jürgen Habermas had envisaged it? Thus, many authors claim that the mediated public sphere provided by television today no longer values the aforementioned elements, leading to its dissolution. However, the meanings of this concept have been constantly reviewed, which requires a more careful consideration of this claim. Hence, the paper aims at understanding how the initial criteria of the public sphere have been assessed by academics in order to develop a personal definition of the concept. We argue that a main prerequisite of the mediated public sphere is that of deliberative communication, understood as equal representation granted by the media to political actors. Inspired by media bias theories, the empirical part of the paper addresses the following question: To what extent is the mediated public sphere a deliberative one? In order to answer it, the present paper examines the visual means used for portraying the political candidates and their supporters in the last Romanian presidential debate.
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Terrorism is one of the essential problems of our times. Most commonly, terrorist organizations have their origins in social movements that presume that they cannot reach their goal of promoting political change other than through violence. This paper deals with the use of the Internet, and especially social media, by terrorist groups. Social media seem to be an essential part in the groups’ strategic communication concepts. They do not only use it for the groups’ internal organization but mainly for the dissemination of ideas to a broader public. If the government wants to counteract terrorist movements, it also has to counteract their use of social media. Therefore, theoretical concepts of terrorism as communication, PR and propaganda will be presented as well as results of case studies in order to show the interconnectedness of terrorism and social media.
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As an interdisciplinary field, sports activate and re-contextualize a wide repertoire of symbolic elements, among which war and show ethos seem to be the most prominent. The aim of this study is to go beyond the “war” and the “show” frames duality and to discuss the emergence of a new hybrid construct: the sports war-show. Based on a discourse analysis of textual and visual units – images and their corollary captions, the study outlines the way in which media frame an international sports event, i.e. the 2011 Women’s Handball World Championship. While the evaluative potential of the textual component proves to be underused in media’s coverage of sports competitions, the visual component is defined by a clear tendency to dramatization and personalization, using the war and show elements in order to stress out the affective loading and the competitive tension of sports events as global war shows.
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