After Integration

Collective identity, the emotionally powerful sense of belonging to a group, is a crucial source of popular legitimacy for nations. However efforts since the 1990s to politically support European integration by using identity mechanisms borrowed from nationalism have had very limited success. European integration may require new, post-national approaches to the relationship between culture and politics. This controversial and timely volume poses the logical question: if identity doesn't effectively connect culture with European integration politics, what does? The book brings together leading scholars from several of the disciplines that have developed concepts of culture and methods of cultural research. These expert interdisciplinary contributors apply a startling diversity of approaches to culture, linking it to facets of integration as varied as external policy, the democratic deficit, economic dynamism and the geography of integration. This book examines commonalities and connections within the European space, as well as representations of these in identity discourses. It will be useful for students and scholars of sociology, geography, anthropology, social psychology, political science and the history of European integration.

This book gives a complex description and discussion of today’s populist attacks against the European Union (EU) following the financial crisis of 2008, which opened the floodgates of dissatisfaction, and the migration crisis which destabilized the traditional solidarity basis of the EU. The problem of Brexit is also explored. Each chapter presents one of the main elements of the crisis of the EU. These include West European populism, Central European right-wing populism in power, and the exploitation of the EU’s mistake during the migration crisis of the mid-2010s. These also include the discovery of Christian ideology against immigration and hidden anti-Semitic propaganda using a hysterical attack against the liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and Brexit. There is a detailed discussion of the failures of the EU to pacify the neighbourhood in the South and North, especially in Ukraine, and the rising hostile outside enemies of the EU, including Russia and Turkey, bad relationships with Trump’s America, the uncertainty of NATO, and the emergence of a new rival, China, that enters into the Central European edge of the EU. The author explores strategies for coping with, and emerging from, this existential crisis and ends with the alternative plans and possibilities for the future of the eurozone. This will be an invaluable resource for understanding the crisis of the EU, one of the central questions of contemporary international politics for undergraduate and graduate students, and readers interested in the discussion surrounding an endangered European integration and difficult world politics.

DIVExplores the consequences of postmodernity for Latin American social theory and public policy./div

This book analyses and assesses the Agadir Agreement’s impact on economic integration, its effect on political cooperation, and its role in promoting peace between participating countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Since the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, the geo-political situation in MENA has further drifted towards instability and uncertainty. Expert analysis of the region seems to lurch from one crisis to another without moving beyond a focus on conflict. Few scholars have recognised that the MENA governments have long regarded regional economic integration as a chief policy objective to facilitate intra-regional trade and promote political cooperation and peace. Realising the shortcomings of the various integrative processes, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan signed the Agadir Agreement in 2004. To this date, it stands as one of the most significant economic agreements in the MENA region. Taking into account this variety of factors, this book offers a new assessment of the pull between unity and disunity in the Middle East and North Africa region

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: This working paper shall investigate the trade integration between Turkey and the EU. The plan of this book is as follows. At first the historical background of the development concerning the trade relations between the two parties is conveyed. This includes the period from first association to implementing a customs union (CU) between Turkey and the European Union (EU) and to deeper integration abolishing barriers of trade until today. Subsequently an evaluation of the influence of the customs union follows in chapter 3 which constitutes the main part of the paper. Hereby the analysis is divided into the short-term static and long-term dynamic effects of the CU with the EU that Turkey entered on 1st January 1996. To analyze the static effects this paper adopts Viner s traditional approach, by comparing the trade creation effects with the trade diversion effects resulting from the removal of trade restrictions for Turkey and the EU as a whole. Thus, the predominant economical theory applied in this paper is the neoclassical customs union theory. This theory was chosen because it still is the predominant and widely recognized theory in analyzing trade data providing a variety of tools. Within the neoclassical theory Ricardo as well as Heckscher-Ohlin play an important role as a tool of analysis. In the relevant passages in the text the most important theoretical principles will be explained with the help of the Turkish example. At the limits of the neoclassical theories the new trade theory is supposed to help out especially where the assumptions of the neoclassical theory limit further analysis. It is the purpose of this paper to analyze the question how the trade liberalization in form of the CU between Turkey and the EU influences the development of Turkish welfare, specialization in different sectors, economies of scale, competitiveness, technological transfer and direct foreign investment. In some parts of the paper the analysis also refers to some effects for the EU, but main emphasis shall clearly be laid upon the effects on the Turkish economy. For the analysis foreign trade data is used which was compiled by the Turkish Undersecretariat of the Prime Ministry for Foreign Trade, the Prime Ministry Undersecretariat of Treasury, the Turkish Statistical Institute and Eurostat. Finding the adequate data created difficulties because of different time spans available and data from different sources being not comparable. [...]

Database technology is an important subject in Computer Science. Every large company and nation needs a database to store information. The technology has evolved from file systems in the 60’s, to Hierarchical and Network databases in the 70’s, to relational databases in the 80’s, object-oriented databases in the 90’s, and to XML documents and NoSQL today. As a result, there is a need to reengineer and update old databases into new databases. This book presents solutions for this task. In this fourth edition, Chapter 9 - Heterogeneous Database Connectivity (HDBC) offers a database gateway platform for companies to communicate with each other not only with their data, but also via their database. The ability of sharing a database can contribute to the applications of Big Data and surveys for decision support systems. The HDBC gateway solution collects input from the database, transfers the data into its middleware storage, converts it into a common data format such as XML documents, and then distributes them to the users. HDBC transforms the common data into the target database to meet the user’s requirements, acting like a voltage transformer hub. The voltage transformer converts the voltage to a voltage required by the users. Similarly, HDBC transforms the database to the target database required by the users. This book covers reengineering for data conversion, integration for combining databases and merging databases and expert system rules, normalization for eliminating duplicate data from the database, and above all, HDBC connects all legacy databases to one target database for the users. The authors provide a forum for readers to ask questions and the answers are given by the authors and the other readers on the Internet.