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With more than 10 million Muslims living in Western Europe, states are struggling to accommodate the religious needs of Muslims in state-supported institutions. Such issues include whether to fund separate Islamic schools and how or whether to teach Islam in state-supported schools. Despite these common concerns, national governments vary widely in their response to the religious needs and practices of Muslim citizens and permanent residents. This paper looks at how Britain, France and Germany have resolved these issues. We explore how pre-existing Church-State practices and institutional arrangements structured the politics of state accommodation of Muslims' religious needs in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationships between the migratory policies of the EU countries with more experience of immigration and their national political cultures. It focuses on France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It then looks at Italy, a relatively new country of immigration, which, with 3,000,000 legal immigrants, has become the fourth country of immigration in Europe and the first in the Mediterranean basin. In its final part it highlights the incipient process of 'communitarisation' of the immigration policies of EU countries in the last decade. This process, which has already entailed a significant convergence of their migratory policies, is expected to continue after the recent enlargement of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the prospects for trilateral concord among Britain, France and Germany in terms of defence policies? Would more institutionalised links among them lead to more convergence of their defence policies? To answer these interrogations, this article investigates the relation between policy convergence and institutionalised cooperation, in particular by studying whether and when one is a prerequisite to the other. First, this article examines the extent to which these countries' defence policies have converged since the end of the cold war based on several indicators: their attitudes towards international forums, their defence budgets, the structure of their armed forces and their willingness to use force. Second, we study each of the bilateral relations between the three states to qualitatively analyse their degree of institutionalisation and the convergence of their defence policies. This article concludes that contrary to the arguments of many discussions, think-tank reports and political actors, there is no evidence that institutionalised cooperation leads to policy convergence as far as defence is concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article provides information from various aspects of the field of international serials and electronic resource management. Abstracts for several research articles are included on topics such as scholarly electronic books (e-books) and open source data in academic publishing. Additionally, awards and grants presented by the American Library Association (ALA) in 2011 are highlighted along with notes on the reorganization of the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG). Brief information regarding the 2012 conference for the UKSG and a list of online resources related to serials librarians are also included.

This article explores UK and German positions in the debates on European defence in the Convention on the Future of Europe and in the Intergovernmental Conference that followed. It also has a subsidiary interest in France, and develops a framework for exploring why UK, German and French positions on defence cooperation diverge, but also for plotting how those positions moved significantly towards convergence during the constitutional debate. The move towards more convergent positions is traced through a discussion of Common Foreign and Security Policy, the Petersberg Tasks, the solidarity clause, structured cooperation and the European armaments and strategic research agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic thought has often regarded business cycles as asymmetric. This study examines the existence of asymmetries over the business cycle in seven European countries: France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. To analyse this issue, industrial production in these countries from 1957 to 1998 is examined, and quarterly contractions and expansions in this variable are compared. The results obtained with both parametric and non- parametric methods allow the existence of asymmetries in these countries to be questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent investigations concerning the productivity of the UK construction industry and its performance compared with other European and world-wide nations have reported conflicting findings. These investigations have utilized various methodologies in attempting to measure and compare productivity levels. The present investigation uses a customized method to gauge the productivity at site level of three European national construction industries, namely Germany, France and the UK. Analysis of variance is employed to compare the productivity rates used by contractors' planning engineers for a specific concreting operation. The performance of UK contractors is found to be more disparate than those of contractors in either France or Germany. Although leading UK contractors can compete with the best on the continent, there are a number of companies whose performance is far worse than any in France and Germany, due mainly to the construction methods used by UK contractors. It is concluded therefore, that a best practice recommendation for UK contractors would be for them to avoid using traditional timber formwork methods to beams, and instead adopt more productive approaches afforded using either proprietary or prefabricated systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]