Why are some regional development strategies adopted and others rejected? Only limited systematic attention has been paid to the politics of regional policy, including the role of institutions, discourse, and political debate in shaping this major area of public policy. The book develops an institutionalist approach to the study of regional policy, capable of spanning major European development paradigms and accounting for the dynamic relationship between organisations, policies and political discourse.
This conceptual framework is then applied to the Scottish Development Agency, a...

The enlargement of the EU with the Balkan countries has aroused the skepticism of many. Although EU admission is primarily a matter of economic and political concerns, questions of cultural import are readily brought into play: Does the country in question conform sufficiently to -our- standards of a -European identity-?
The problematic status of the Balkans in this respect largely consists in their common Byzantine and Ottoman legacies. By focusing on Bulgaria and its neighbours Romania, Greece and Turkey, the authors of this collection attempt to elucidate how mutually incompatible the...

This volume seeks to map an understanding of the Italian experience onto the broader picture of diasporic stories, though with an anchor in the Australian-Italian experience. It brings together key essays and testimonials that frame a picture of Italy s rich legacy at -home-, in Europe more widely, and in the (post)colonial sphere, with a particular emphasis on the Australian experience.
The essays collected here focus on the way an Italian Australian story has emerged and evolved in its own unique way. In some respects it might be possible to define Australia, through this community, as...

Today s world is a world of nation-states; few have survived since the early modern period, some have existed for three hundred years, most came into being during the second part of the last century. Yet the equation between the state and the nation does not go back far in history, despite the prevailing tendency to view the state as closely linked to ethnicity.
To challenge the latter this book attempts to examine statehood separately from the concept of ethnicity; it asks what is non-ethnic about statehood by looking at statehood before and beyond ethnicity . A non-ethnic statehood is...

Responding to the comprehensive topic Old Environments New Environments, scholars from a variety of disciplines reflect the various connotations that the term environment carries in a Canadian context.
Whether moving within the realm of foreign policy, visual arts, constitutional questions, tourism, nature preservation or aboriginal rights, these essays put the capaciousness and cohesiveness of the nation to the test by illustrating the pressures enforced upon it by multiculturalism, the claims for self-determination, anti-confederate agitation and globalisation. The environments...

This book presents a series of extremely stimulating analyses of the process of corporate restructuring in the new Member States of the EU. Particularly noteworthy is the book's focus on the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) that have joined the EU since 2004, an area which has not been prominent in the research on corporate restructuring conducted in Western Europe in the last twenty years. As with their Asian counterparts, these States have generally been perceived as a threat to employment in Western Europe due to the former's benefiting from outsourcing away from the latter....

Le processus d union europeenne voit aujourd hui un point d arret sur le plan politique et institutionnel, malgre les etapes decisives realisees apres la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Il reste en effet a affronter des themes et des problemes qui, pendant l entre-deux-guerres, animerent le debat entre les pionniers de l europeanisme. Si, a l epoque, leurs propositions resterent sans suite, ayant une issue destructrice pour la paix et l Europe, cet heritage ideal si precieux a permis une continuite et de germer par la suite.
Ce livre a pour but de presenter une serie d idees, d initiatives, de...

This book explores what happens with ethnic and national identifications built on the same ethnocultural grounds, but under different socioeconomic circumstances. Territorial and non-territorial minorities have traditionally been considered not susceptible to comparison because it was assumed that groups organized on different grounds were distinctively separate phenomena. In this study, the comparative method is used to throw new light on how ethnic and national identifications are constructed, negotiated, and re-constructed in territorial and non-territorial minority contexts. The author...

This book contains contributions from the Stockholm triennial conference of the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies and presents Joy Kogawa s compelling plea for peace and a sheaf of poems by Heather Spears along with twenty essays using a variety of approaches in dealing with a wide range of Canadian writers. The origins and circumstances of travel books and of diaries written by pioneering women are explored as are the functions of sports and science fiction. Among the offerings are also investigations of the Canadian landscape and its metaphors in a large selection of drama, poetry and...