The European Union in the flows of international students: attractiveness and inconsistency

This paper aims to describe the overall pattern of flows of international students and to determine the factors that can explain the variation of countries' attractiveness. In a second step, it assesses the position of the European Union as a whole in these flows at the global level. Is the EU strong enough in the global competition to attract the best brains? Besides, it shows how attractiveness factors can vary according to the profile of a sample of European Union member countries. In the third section of the paper, we raise some reflexions on the relations of the EU with its neighbourhood with respect to the flows of international students. In fact, the EU may not be able to maintain its status as a major power if it does not better regulate its relations with neighbour countries, especially in the domain of higher education and students' mobility.     

Inclusive schooling: fostering citizenship among immigrant students in Europe

Growing ethnic and cultural diversity within Europe has brought increased attention to the impact and inclusion of immigrant populations and has also presented societies with valuable opportunities for intercultural learning between diverse groups. Using the International Civic and Citizenship Study data from 24 European education systems, in this paper we explore whether fostering an atmosphere of inclusion in schools relates to select attitudes and behaviours typically associated with an inclusive society, particularly among immigrant students. Our study is able to tease out some of the differences related to social class among immigrant students, opening up important avenues for discussion and future research. According to our findings, first generation immigrant students from higher socio-economic status backgrounds tended to have significantly more negative attitudes toward their resident country. Findings also collectively suggest that local-level practices, such as improving immigrant student participation in schools and positive relations between immigrant students and teachers, could be significant factors in fostering an inclusive society. Based on these results, we describe several education policies and practices that can promote greater inclusion, such as encouraging increased civic participation within the school and community, and providing a forum where students can contribute to school governance.     

欧洲主权债务危机与欧洲中央银行制度上的缺陷

中央银行最后贷款人职能是现代中央银行的一个重要职能,尤其在经济下降并发生市场恐慌时期,中央银行发挥这一职能是维持金融体系安全稳定的重要保障。由于欧洲中央银行缺乏这一职能,欧元区主权债务危机很难在短期内被彻底平息。欧盟只有进行改革,赋予欧洲中央银行这一职能,才能让其在解救欧元区高负债国家的债务危机中发挥更大的作用。同时,现代中央银行履行最后贷款人职能时,还必须遵循应有的原则以及处理好与中央银行货币政策目标的关系。     

The impact of the European Youth Guarantee on active labour market policies: A convergence analysis

The European Union’s (EU) Youth Guarantee aims to improve the labour market situation of young people. Rather than prescribing a uniform policy model, it acknowledges that supportive measures need to align with national, regional and local circumstances. It thus seeks to promote mutual policy learning through the open method of coordination. As an innovative measure, the EU has deployed funding programmes to support the domestic measures related to the Youth Guarantee. We therefore examined in this study whether this mix of recommendations and financial incentives has entailed a convergence of member state policies. Our analysis of policy outputs for the period 2007?2014 yields a mixed empirical picture. There is catching‐up convergence regarding policies’ sectoral coverage but increasing divergence concerning the number of adopted policy instruments. The first two years of financial incentives did not produce any effect on enhancing policy experimentation among less active member states. We offer an optimistic and a pessimistic interpretation of these findings.     

Redefining membership: restrictive rights and categorisation in European Union migration policy

This article analyses European Union (EU) policy-making on the rights of third-country nationals (TCN) against the backdrop of theoretical literature on the transformation of citizenship. The aim is to evaluate why and to which extent EU policy expands citizenship rights to TCNs, thus redefining the criteria for membership in the European polity. The research emphasises the role of norms and frames in policy-making and is based on secondary sources, primary documents and semi-structured interviews. The analysis reveals how the combination of a principled conflict over citizenship and a strategic conflict over competence led to a legal framework characterised by ‘restrictive rights’ and ‘politics of categorisation’. ‘Restrictive rights’ means that membership rights are granted to TCN in principle, but subject to very restrictive conditions. ‘The politics of categorisation’ refers to the political construction of migrant categories that are subject to different rights-regimes. Both phenomena have the ambiguous effect of enabling the expansion of rights to non-citizens while at the same time creating new lines of division and mechanisms of exclusion.     

The Promethean role of Europe: changing narratives of the political and scholarly left

ABSTRACT

The gradual abandoning of the ‘socialism in one country’ doctrine during the post-war period and the intensive transformation of European social democracy in the 1990s pushed social democratic politicians and intellectuals into the front line of advocates of a unified and powerful Europe. They contributed to the inclusion of social democratic and environmentalist values in the EU’s official narrative. The success of European integration and George W. Bush’s presidency created the narrative of the Promethean role of Europe. Scholars with a social democratic or environmentalist background created this narrative and it was also shaped by authors’ national contexts.     

A Blueprint for Full Collective Flood Risk Estimation: Demonstration for European River Flooding

Floods are a natural hazard evolving in space and time according to meteorological and river basin dynamics, so that a single flood event can affect different regions over the event duration. This physical mechanism introduces spatio‐temporal relationships between flood records and losses at different locations over a given time window that should be taken into account for an effective assessment of the collective flood risk. However, since extreme floods are rare events, the limited number of historical records usually prevents a reliable frequency analysis. To overcome this limit, we move from the analysis of extreme events to the modeling of continuous stream flow records preserving spatio‐temporal correlation structures of the entire process, and making a more efficient use of the information provided by continuous flow records. The approach is based on the dynamic copula framework, which allows for splitting the modeling of spatio‐temporal properties by coupling suitable time series models accounting for temporal dynamics, and multivariate distributions describing spatial dependence. The model is applied to 490 stream flow sequences recorded across 10 of the largest river basins in central and eastern Europe (Danube, Rhine, Elbe, Oder, Waser, Meuse, Rhone, Seine, Loire, and Garonne). Using available proxy data to quantify local flood exposure and vulnerability, we show that the temporal dependence exerts a key role in reproducing interannual persistence, and thus magnitude and frequency of annual proxy flood losses aggregated at a basin‐wide scale, while copulas allow the preservation of the spatial dependence of losses at weekly and annual time scales.     

Pension reforms in EU11 countries: An evaluation of post‐socialist pension policies

This article evaluates the pension policy pathways of the 11 former state socialist nations that have joined the European Union since 2004. Focusing primarily on the post‐2004 period, the analysis discusses the most important measurable outcomes of these countries’ pension reforms, in terms of poverty alleviation, pension adequacy and fiscal sustainability. Going beyond the quantifiable concepts, we also investigate the quality of the 11 countries’ pension systems in terms of equity as well as efficiency, emphasizing the less conspicuous design errors present in these systems. Although these errors have received little attention to date, they may harm pension schemes along several dimensions, including their fiscal sustainability.     

西欧主要政党干部的培养与选拔探析

一个政党能不能不断培养和推出大批优秀的领导人才,在很大程度上影响着该党的政治能力。西欧政党在对干部的物色与发掘、提名与选举、监督与管理、干部的教育与培训等环节都形成了自己的突出特点,其干部培养选拔体现了突出的“选举导向”,干部选拔过程突出了公开性与竞争性原则,干部来源体现了一定的开放性与多元性,干部角色遵循了“非兼职”原则,保持了专业化、职业化。     

审美现代性视野中的米兰·昆德拉

与卡林内斯库的审美现代性理论不同,米兰·昆德拉提出的“欧洲小说”观念,是以审美现代性对抗“资产阶级的现代性”的源头所在。米兰·昆德拉在小说理论和创作实践中展现出了对资产阶级的启蒙现代性的批判,和对审美现代性立场的坚执中产生的反省,阐述了他独特的“欧洲小说观”与审美现代性起源新说。他站在小说家的立场上,以审美现代性的态度,审视和评判现代生活,深入地考察了现代人生存中的一系列现象：媚俗,舞者,轻与重,快与慢,记忆与遗忘,革命、鸟托邦与抒情姿态,等等,犀利地揭示出其中的现代性悖谬。