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Are national legal cultures in Europe converging or diverging as a result of the pressures of European legal integration? Åse B. Grødeland and William L. Miller address this question by exploring the attitudes and perceptions of the general public and law professionals in five European countries: England, Norway, Bulgaria, Poland and the Ukraine. Presenting new findings, they challenge the established view that ordinary citizens and people working professionally with the law have different legal cultures. Their research in fact reveals that the attitudes of citizens in Eastern and Western Europe towards 'law-in-principle' are remarkably similar, whereas perceptions of 'law-in-practice' differ by country and often correlate with GDP per capita and country ranking in rule of law indices. Grødeland and Miller's innovative methodological approach will appeal to both experts and non-experts with an interest in legal culture, European integration, or European elite and public opinion.

With an internal market economy, exposed externally to world markets, and with a plethora of international organisations deciding political and economic policy, what role is left for the nation state? This chapter looks at public perspectives on the state: the role that the public in developing or transitional countries feel it should play in the life of their nations, and their perceptions of its actual role and performance in practice. They see at least four possible roles for the state in an era of globalisation: as national economic entrepreneur, as physician or protector, and as advocate – all of which they would support; and as a conspiracy against the public, which they condemn. To explore that fourth role more fully, we take a closer look at the differences between public and officials. ‘Decline of the state’ or transformation? Robertson (1985: p. 307) suggests that ‘the State may be the most commonly-used and the most opaque term in the whole of political vocabulary’. Its meaning certainly varies according to context. It can be distinguished from transient ‘government’ in the narrow sense of a small group of ministers. But it is not so different from ‘government’ in the wider sense of the ministry plus all the civil and military servants at their command. In Vietnam it is equated with the Party, and both Party and government are regarded as permanent insofar as any socio-political structure is ever permanent.

There is a vigorous debate about the merits of globalisation for developing countries. Based on numerous focus-group discussions and over 10,000 interviews, this book studies economic and cultural openness from the perspective of the public in four developing or 'transitional' countries: Vietnam, (South) Korea, the Czech Republic and Ukraine (both before and after the Orange Revolution). It finds many supporters of opening up, but also many who are discontented with its downsides and who expect states to tackle the exploitation and unfairness that accompany it. Among the most fervent enemies of openness there is support not just for peaceful public protest to tackle the problems it brings, but for violence or sabotage. The methodology provides a unique opportunity for the public in developing countries to 'speak with their own voices' about markets and openness - and highlights the subtlety, ambiguity, tensions, conflicts and emotion that statistics alone fail to capture.

Globalisation is a contentious subject, much criticised in street protests as well as in seminar rooms. But though many of the critics claim to defend the interests of ordinary people in the developing world, the voices of those people themselves have seldom been given as much attention as those of western protestors and academics. Globalisation – in Stiglitz's working definition: ‘the closer integration of countries and peoples of the world’ (2002, p. 9) – is a process usually viewed from above. Our own perspective is less Olympian. We are interested in globalisation not viewed as a world-wide process but from the perspective of the public in developing countries, who see it as an external challenge to their own country or locality. For them, the key questions are about greater economic and cultural ‘openness’ to an external, rapidly integrating world; about participation in multi-national or supra-national organisations; and about embracing or resisting the inward flow of foreign ideas, customs, symbols, capital, and personnel, as well as foreign technology, economic goods and services. From a democratic perspective, grass-roots public opinion is important in itself. But even in countries that are only partially democratic, or not democratic at all, grass-roots opinion can be important. Indeed governments may be more exposed to public opinion in such countries just because they have so little ‘process-legitimacy’. The climate of public opinion affects elites and elite policy in most contemporary societies. It can always influence, if not determine policy.