Commissioning A Series On ‘Identity Politics’ Inevitably involves making contentious, if hopefully defensible, editorial choices about what each of these terms involves. Issues relating to ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ have figured ever more prominently on both the political and academic agendas over the past thirty years. These terms are often employed to describe a wide range of somewhat heterogeneous phenomena. For example, a recent UK Economic and Social Research Council Programme on ‘Identity and Choice’ lists under this rubric everything from ethnicity, nationality, gender and religion, to class, disability, shopping and musical preferences. However, such usage risks broadening the concept of identity to the point of vacuity. Therefore, the scope of this series is somewhat narrower: namely, political identity. Of course, the concept of the ‘political’ is itself contested and likewise seemingly infinitely expandable to all issues and areas of life. Consequently, a more restricted meaning applies here too, with politics limited to the making of collectively binding decisions amongst people holding divergent opinions and interests.

The 2002 Elections In France Were A Gripping Drama Unfolding in four acts. Each act has to be understood as part of a whole, as each election was ultimately dependent upon the results of the first round of the presidential election on 21 April. However untypical in the context of Fifth Republican history, the first round of the presidential election strongly inf luenced the peculiar course of the subsequent contests. The outcome of the first election on the 21 April – at which the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen won through to the second ballot against Jacques Chirac, narrowly distancing the outgoing premier Lionel Jospin – created an electric shock which reverberated around the streets of Paris and other French cities and sparked a civic mobilization without parallel since May '68. The end-result of this exceptional republican mobilization was to secure the easy (initially rather unexpected) re-election of Chirac as president at the second round two weeks later. The election of 5 May was unlike a typical second-round election. Rather than a bipolar contest pitting left and right over a choice of future governmental orientations, it was a plebiscite in favour of democracy (hence Chirac) against the far-right (Le Pen). Chirac was re-elected overwhelmingly as president, supported by at least as many leftwing as right-wing voters. This enforced plebiscite against the extreme right allowed a resurgent Jacques Chirac to claim a renewed presidential authority. At the parliamentary election of 9 and 16 June, the Fifth Republic reverted to a more traditional mode of operation, as a new ‘presidential party’, informally launched just weeks before the elections, obtained a large overall majority of seats to ‘support the President’ in time-honoured Fifth Republican tradition.

Globalization – Simply The Growing Intensity, Extent And deepening impact of worldwide interconnectedness – poses anew the classic questions of political life, namely: who rules, by what means, in whose interests and to what purpose? This is not to suggest, as some do, that the forces of globalization are eclipsing sovereign states but it is to acknowledge that the necessary conditions for sovereign and democratic self-government are undergoing a significant transformation. This is especially evident in Europe where, at the great intersection of regionalism and globalism, a novel continental political order is crystallizing: not quite federalism in its orthodox form but clearly something more than classic intergovermentalism. Caught between two worlds – a Europe of nation-states and a Europe of Citizens to use Joschka Fischer's construction – the future political trajectory of the continent, in part, will depend upon how effectively regionalism mediates the dynamics of globalism and localism.

In This Article I Do Two Things. I Begin With A Brief Discussion of the nature of political community in general, and argue that a political community is defined and constituted by the common public commitments of its citizens. Its identity is political not ethnic or cultural in nature, an important distinction that is obscured by the term ‘national identity’ and often ignored in much of the discussion of it. Its identity has an inescapable moral content. Although the latter is often shared with other communities, what distinguishes a political community is the way in which it interprets and institutionally articulates these moral principles. I then apply this general analysis to Britain and suggest how we might best define its identity.

In The Debate That Continues To Rage Over The Question Of American exceptionalism, two facts are historically well established that have distinguished the United States from European countries: the United States failed to develop and to institutionalize an electorally viable social democratic or labour party that represents the interests of its unionized working class and aspires to achieve a socialist society; and the United States has lagged behind its European counterparts in building the institutions of a comprehensive welfare state.

This Article Considers The Social Responsibility Of Business, why it exists, why governments might be interested in it, and its place in new governance. The discussion is primarily conceptual, informed and stimulated by empirical findings from Australia and the UK, countries which have been associated neither with the extent of business social responsibility long-witnessed in the USA nor with the extent of neo-corporatism characteristic of parts of northern Europe and Scandinavia.