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In March 2013, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond announced that the long-awaited referendum on Scottish independence would take place on 18 September 2014. More often than not, those in favour of an independent Scotland present their fight as a constitutional means to a socio-economic end. In the words of Alex Salmond himself: “Progress to independence. Not for its own sake, not ‘let’s be independent so we can hoist the Saltire’. Let’s be independent so we can better the lives of the Scottish people.” (quoted by Tom Peterkin, “Alex Salmond: ‘I’d be a labourer if it wasn’t for Mum’” – Scotland on Sunday, 16 January 2011) If, as suggested by the quote, breaking with the rest of the UK automatically means improved socio-economic performance, one consequently has to accept that there is only one constraint weighing Scotland down, and that it is the Union. However, is it all really that simple? Another commonly overlooked difficulty is that independence – that is to say, a Scottish state for a Scottish nation – inevitably goes hand in hand with a redefinition of national solidarity within a strictly Scottish context. This begs the question: how do Nationalists justify this redefinition when their country has been an integral part of a particularly fluid group of nations since the early 18th century? The last delicate issue raised by the Scottish referendum has to do with state building and the Nationalists’ heavy reliance on the promotion of civic nationalism despite the notion’s inherent limits.
As recently as the mid-2000s, Catalonia was described and analysed by scholars as exhibiting a non-secessionist nationalism and was seen within Europe and beyond as a role model for successful devolution which had much to teach other parts of the world. The Spanish state seemed to be on a journey towards an authentic federal order and was generally admired. However, the new century has been marked by an ever-growing independence movement, with 47.8 per cent of Catalonia voting in favour of independence in September 2015. Pro-independence mobilization has produced a rupture in political relations with the rest of Spain leading to a sovereignty struggle with Madrid. This book explores how an accumulation of long-, medium- and short-term factors have produced the current situation and why the Spanish territorial model has been unable or possibly, unwilling, to respond. The Catalan question is not purely a Spanish problem: it has direct implications for the traditional nation-state model, in Europe and beyond.
This collection of essays surveys the full range of challenges that territorial conflicts pose for constitution-making processes and constitutional design. It provides seventeen in-depth case studies of countries going through periods of intense constitutional engagement in a variety of contexts: small distinct territories, bi-communal countries, highly diverse countries with many politically salient regions, and countries where territorial politics is important but secondary to other bases for political mobilization. Specific examples are drawn from Iraq, Kenya, Cyprus, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, the UK (Scotland), Ukraine, Bolivia, India, Spain, Yemen, Nepal, Ethiopia, Indonesia (Aceh), the Philippines (Mindanao), and Bosnia-Herzegovina. While the volume draws significant normative conclusions, it is based on a realist view of the complexity of territorial and other political cleavages (the country's "political geometry"), and the power configurations that lead into periods of constitutional engagement. Thematic chapters on constitution-making processes and constitutional design draw original conclusions from the comparative analysis of the case studies and relate these to the existing literature, both in political science and comparative constitutional law. This volume is essential reading for scholars of federalism, consociational power-sharing arrangements, asymmetrical devolution, and devolution more generally. The combination of in-depth case studies and broad thematic analysis allows for analytical and normative conclusions that will be of major relevance to practitioners and advisors engaged in constitutional design.
The Handbook of Scottish Politics provides a detailed overview of politics in Scotland, looking at areas such as elections and electoral behaviour, public policy, political parties, and Scotland's relationship with the EU and the wider world. The contributors to this volume are some of the leading experts on politics in Scotland.
How is ‘crisis’, one of the most resonating words in the modern world, related to the mass media? Is crisis independent of the discourse practices of media text and talk? This book is a collection of studies that brings together current research into the ways in which crisis is constructed and communicated in contemporary media discourse. Studies in this book advance our understanding of crises as social events that are discursively constructed, performed, responded to, but also ‘rehearsed’ as a form of social practice. Relying on the application of techniques of discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA), including visual analysis, the book provides a wealth of empirical evidence on how crisis is mediated across a range of written, oral and visual media. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of media, who combine an interest in discourse analysis with disciplines as diverse as media and cultural studies, political communication, and sociology.
There has been a lively debate amongst political theorists about whether certain liberal concepts of democracy are so idealized that they lack relevance to ‘real’ politics. Echoing these debates, Lois McNay examines in this book some theories of radical democracy and argues that they too tend to rely on troubling abstractions - or what she terms ‘socially weightless’ thinking. They often propose ideas of the political that are so far removed from the logic of everyday practice that, ultimately, their supposed emancipatory potential is thrown into question. Radical democrats frequently maintain that what distinguishes their ideas of the political from others is the fundamental concern with unmasking and challenging unrecognized forms of inequality and domination that distort everyday life. But this supposed attentiveness to power is undermined by the invocation of rarefied models of political action that treat agency as an unproblematic given and overlook certain features of the embodied experience of oppression. The tendency of radical democrats to define democratic agency in terms of dynamics of perpetual flux, mobility and agonism passes over too swiftly the way in which objective structures of oppression are often taken into the body as subjective dispositions, leaving individuals with the feeling that they are unable to do little more than endure a state of affairs beyond their control. Drawing on the work of Adorno, Bourdieu and Honneth, amongst others, McNay argues that in order to make good the critique of power, radical democratic theory should attend more closely to a phenomenology of negative social experience and what it can reveal about the social conditions necessary for effective political agency.
Should Scotland be an independent country? Choosing an answer to that question, as Scotland's electors will on 18 September 2014, is a choice of huge significance. So how will we come to a decision? Many voters know more or less by instinct. Plenty of us are convinced that being independent is right and good for our country and not being independent is wrong. Plenty of others believe the opposite: that what is right and good is staying as part of the UK. But there are more still - probably the biggest single group - who don't have such conviction either way and are puzzling their way through what voting Yes or No might mean for them and their families. This book is for them. We have taken sixteen questions, which seem to us to be central to the referendum debate, and asked impartial experts to look at them. We do not aim to provide definitive answers - and we certainly do not intend to tell anyone how to vote - but rather to enable readers to better judge the claims that are made by either side.
A major new statement of deliberative theory that shows how states, even transnational systems, can be deliberatively democratic.
Although referendums have been used for centuries to settle ethnonational conflicts, there has yet been no systematic study or generalized theory concerning their effectiveness. Referendums and Ethnic Conflict fills the gap with a comparative and empirical analysis of all the referendums held on ethnic and national issues from the French Revolution to the 2012 referendum on statehood for Puerto Rico. Drawing on political theory and descriptive case studies, Matt Qvortrup creates typologies of referendums that are held to endorse secession, redraw disputed borders, legitimize a policy of homogenization, or otherwise manage ethnic or national differences. He considers the circumstances that compel politicians to resort to direct democracy, such as regime change, and the conditions that might exacerbate a violent response. Qvortrup offers a clear-eyed assessment of the problems raised when conflict resolution is sought through referendum as well as the conditions that are likely to lead to peaceful outcomes. This original political framework will provide a vital resource in the ongoing investigation into how democracy and nationalism may be reconciled.
This volume brings together several leading scientists and practitioners from around the world to discuss the ecological and salutogenic design principles for creating a healthy built environment. These principles and applications are the most important scientific topic of health promotion that provides the context for a healthy lifestyle. The challenge for ecological design is to provide a green context for a healthy society dealing with built infrastructure that creates clean air, clean water, clean food, and clean land, which in turn are necessary for human health and wellbeing. In this book, these principles are intertwined with those of salutogenic design, which support human health globally.