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After heavy rains and rapid thaw in February 2012, the dam of an artificial lake broke and the water flooded the village Biser. It took the lives of six people, destroyed 56 houses and damaged many others. What does this flood tell us about society is the general question of this paper. Empirically, it is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Biser and in other Bulgarian villages and small towns that have been flooded over the past ten years as well as on the analysis of publications in the media. The first section of the paper uses as a starting point the conceptual definition of natural disasters as phenomena that occur at the intersection of nature and society. It shows that political, economic and social practices have a share in the causation of floods. Mismanagement or neglect of infrastructure, improper or unauthorized use of reservoirs, illegal exploitation of sand and gravel from the rivers, and disposal of household waste and building rubble in the rivers belong to the “potentially destructive agents” that accumulate problems, create unsafe conditions and generate “natural” disasters. From another theoretical point of view, disasters are conceptualized as “empirical windows upon the inner working of society” that give us insights into values, attitudes, practices, and processes which are dominant in a particular society. In the Bulgarian case, these include indifference and even irresponsibility of politicians, experts, and “common” people towards the public sphere (outdoor space, infrastructure, regulations, laws, common interests, welfare), lack of long-term planning, and focus on short-term profits that is characterized by both disrespect of legal norms and disregard of safety rules and measures. The second section deals with the political use of rescue operations, social assistance, and reconstruction in Biser. Disaster management was simultaneously carried out as a political image campaign and reconstruction became an arena for political activism. The central government pushed itself into the spotlight in the role of local crisis manager. Using the media, politicians focused public attention on their assisting and rebuilding projects (material and financial aid, compensation, reconstruction of damaged houses, construction of new houses). The third section shows how aid and reconstruction caused a new disaster, a social one. The recovering projects and the resource allocation turned into “destructive agents” that triggered social conflicts. The initially single group of flood-affected people was disintegrated into several groups that were defined by the type and the amount of material and financial aid they received. Envy, mutual distrust, competition and even hostility broke out. Since the reconstruction followed a top-down approach and was guided by political decisions, it largely neglected local social reality. It did not return the village back to normal, as the government wanted, but rather it reshaped and restructured the village both physically and socially. Thus the reconstruction has some similarities with the 25 years long post-socialist transition: It created winners and losers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the internet project "Digitalisation of Prussia's official press". It was funded by the DFG. The project deals with the "Provinzial-Correspondenz" (PC, 1863-1884) and the "Neueste Mittheilungen" (NM, 1882-1994). Both papers were founded in an immense political crisis; both papers were important propagandistic instruments of Otto von Bismarck. The project enables access to a central source material of the late 19th century. It works on commentaries for subjects, persons and locations. Condensed abstracts offer surveys for both correspondences. A systematic index provides navigation from topic to topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at the European Union's involvement in the Western Balkans and points out some of the imminent problems when dealing with a region with disputed territorial issues and trying to support reform processes in countries with divided societies. Although the Western Balkans and the South Caucasus can hardly be compared with each other, at least when it comes to the engagement of the EU, it can be assumed that similar strategies will be pursued and policy instruments deployed. Therefore, it is useful to identify some lessons taken from the Western Balkans that are applicable for the South Caucasus. The paper deals 1) with the controversies on Kosovo's independence and the problems of the EU to deal with its consequences, and 2) with the EU's efforts to support the constitutional and police reform processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to illustrate the challenges the EU faces when it has to deal with a "divided" country. In the second part, the paper looks at the EU's engagement in the South Caucasus, where the EU might play a similar role in the future as it does in the Balkans. The investigations demonstrate that European foreign policy has often lacked consistent strategies towards the Western Balkans, which prevented the EU from achieving "satisfactory" outcomes in its neighbourhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Journal of Sociology / Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of Sciendo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Swiss Journal of Sociology / Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of Sciendo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Jazz has been an integral part of the Austrian music scene since the postwar era and has found wide acceptance in the Austrian cultural landscape over time. This paper presents an overview of the most important developments and personalities in Austrian jazz history. The sources for this information include musicological texts on jazz in Austria as well as interviews with observers and active members of the jazz scene; online research is also of particular relevance, especially concerning more recent history. The first section, »From the beginnings to the end of World War II«, deals mainly with the early development of jazz until the Nazi era. The second, »Postwar and the 1960s« traces the beginnings of an independent scene and important Austrian expatriate musicians as well as discussing Graz as a stimulating force and academic institutionalization. The section »The late 1960s to the generational change of the late 1970s« deals with the Vienna scene as well as the influence of the »Vienna Art Orchestra« and its leading soloists from that period. The final section, »Stylistic pluralism - the 1980s to the present« examines various trends and musicians from the 1980s and 1990s as well as introducing the first generation of the new millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European crisis is giving rise to highly controversial statements on the role of Germany. The paper highlights Germany's role as the single most important problem maker, rather than problem taker, in the course of the current revival of neoliberal economic policy reforms in Europe. Major roots of the deepening imbalances in the Eurozone are ascribed to a reshaped German model of capitalism which is analysed as a hybrid of surviving powerful features of 'Rhenish' capitalism and neoliberal upheavals in the labour market. As a consequence, the austerity regime imposed on other countries by the German government may be economically beneficial for Germany in the short run but will most presumably prove to be a disaster in the longer run both for individual countries and for Europe as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern monetary policy nearly every central bank has an output driven task to fulfil. This could be price stability or the attainment of a stable inflation rate. In order to establish whether the monetary policy has reached its goals, it is possible to use monetary rules ex post as a benchmark. For this we will use the Taylor rule and interest rate to describe the European interest rate policy from 1999 to 2009. The main result is that from 2000 till 2008 the Taylor interest rate is much higher than its benchmarks EONIA and EURIBOR. Only for the year 1999 a neutral interest rate emerges. Furthermore the paper shows that the European interest rate policy missed its Taylor interest rate benchmark every time except 1999. So it is possible to state that the European interest rate policy was too expansive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Familienforschung (ZzF) is the property of University of Bamberg Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of International Law & Politics / Uluslararasi Hukuk ve Politika is the property of International Strategic Research Organization and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Ten years after the inauguration of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), its aim of creating a Security Community based on common democratic values has still not been achieved. One of the causes for the EMP's modest results, namely in the security baskets (I) and (III), is the absence of democracy in the region and the EU's reluctance to push authoritarian regimes towards political reform. This reluctance contradicts the EU's conviction that democracy is a prerequisite for the creation of a zone of peace, stability and prosperity, the three explicit goals of the Barcelona Declaration. How can the EU's incoherence be explained? This paper argues that role theory might be a key to the answer. The conflict between the EU's normative role as a promoter of democracy conflicts with its newly established role as an international promoter of security and with the role of every single member state as a guard of its national interest. However, since role concepts are not static, there is a chance for change. Western policies of democracy promotion have triggered off high expectations in the Arab world which have led to a lively discourse on political reform. Unfortunately, these dynamics have not yet resulted in concrete changes on the political ground, as the latest regional policy approaches of the EU prove. The path towards a zone of peace, stability and prosperity therefore still seems to be long. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU's development strategy towards their southern partner countries between 1995-2005 resembles the economic development Leitmotiv of the early Nineties, i.e. the Washington Consensus with its three pillars of macro-economic stabilisation, structural adjustment and liberalisation, and rests on the modernisation theoretical basis paradigm developed by Seymour Martin Lipset in 1959. In accordance with the optimistic convergence hypothesis, both the European Commission and the Council of Ministers assume that economic development correlates positively with the creation of democratic structures in the Third Countries of the Mediterranean (TCM). In other words, economic liberalisation, as a prerequisite for both the introduction of Euro Mediterranean Free Trade and the expansion of the Euro-Mediterranean trade exchange, should lead to increasing prosperity as well as to an increase in the number of middle class actors. These should, in turn, due to their newly acquired participation rights in the economic area, almost inevitably demand further participation in the political realm. Ideally, this would be followed by a political liberalisation process that encompasses the whole Southern Mediterranean area and that will result in a democratisation of all the TCM. Based on this assumption and the concept of incomplete contracting, this article aims to show two interrelated insights: 1.) that the main goal of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership's second basket, i.e. to contribute to the socio-economic development in the TCM, has not been achieved during its first ten years; 2.) that the envisaged modernisation theory-inspired spill-over from the economic to the political level was severely hampered. It will be shown that the Euro-Mediterranean trade nexus, which appears as the primary tool for the realisation of the EMP's above mentioned objective, has been adjusted to the needs of EU-European market providers while the asymmetrical structure of Euro-Mediterranean trade has been further aggravated to the disadvantage of the TCM. The paper concludes with some remarks related to the linkage between the structure of Euro-Mediterranean trade relations and the explanatory power of modernisation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The euro-mediterranean partnership is a broad regional policy framework developed in order to tackle major economic, political and social gaps between the EU and its mediterranean partners. It is innovative because of its regional and multilateral design. Still 10 years after the start of the so called Barcelona-Process, the partnership failed to produce tangible outcomes in most of its three baskets. The article argues that the political, social, institutional, and conceptional asymmetries which structure the relationship between the two unequal partners of the EMP constitute important reasons for these shortcomings. In addition, rhetorical action accounts for the slow and uneven attempts to implement some degree of political reform on part of the Arab governments. The paper addresses both, the power and resource-asymmetries and the level of norms and identity from the perspective of the Arab EMP-states. The article draws on interviews with politicians, civil society actors, diplomats, journalists and academics of different political orientations from Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with issues of migration and migrant rights in Germany and Europe. Even if many scholars have elucidated with convincing clarity that Western nation states can improve migrant's rights due to the autonomy of the legal system, this paper's focus is to point out a cotemporary opposite process. Because of the transformation of the former welfare states to 'competition states' migration policies are now likely subsumed under the principle of competitive advantage. In this article I reaffirm that steering migration process has to be understood still in terms of the nation state and the economic conditions of these states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Journal of Sociology / Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of Sciendo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Collected Papers of the Faculty of Law in Split / Zbornik Radova Pravnog Fakulteta u Splitu is the property of Split Faculty of Law and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Collected Papers of the Faculty of Law in Split / Zbornik Radova Pravnog Fakulteta u Splitu is the property of Split Faculty of Law and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article compares the electoral law for the Carinthian Assembly with electoral laws of other European realities. The focus is on the impact of these laws on the representation of minorities in the respectively elected bodies. The author looks into the question of whether measures for the effective participation of minorities in public and political life are requested not only because of democratic but also legal considerations regarding the principle of equality. The article ends with suggestions on how the Carinthian legislator could reform the electoral law in order to allow for the representation of the Slovene minority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]