Basic Principles and Advancing the Popularization of Marxist Philosophy in Contemporary China

With the current domestic reform and opening-up, China has increased the construction and development of social economy whereas Marx’s philosophy has become a key research topic for social research scholars. This article focuses on the basic principles of the widespread practice of Marxism in the Chinese society and conducts a brief analysis on its journey of popularization.

Milton and Radicalism

In the half-century before the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth in 2008, the dominant attention to his poetry and prose was of a historical nature and focused on exploring in detail his career as an apologist for aspects of the English Revolution: versions of radical Puritanism; republicanism; and domestic reform in the shape of the divorce argument. Yet the recent resurgence of formalist approaches, with particular focus on the poetry, has obscured or banished the politics, and work on Milton and philosophical/scientific reform has produced a picture not of the seventeenth-century Voltaire or Jefferson but of a republican Newton. This chapter insists on Milton’s identity as a radical religious and political thinker, writer, and actor, over and against some recent contrary arguments, taking account of a more recent return to historical scholarship, where some of that work has been inspired by changing definitions of radicalism in our own time.

The Economic Interpretation and Realization Form of the Integration of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Industries under the Strategy of Rural Revitalization

With the continuous deepening of domestic reform and opening up, rural development has also been paid more and more attention by the state, and rural revitalization has also attracted widespread social attention. Under the strategy of rural revitalization, the integration of rural primary, secondary, and tertiary industries is critical to the development of the entire rural area, and it also contains many economic theories. This article mainly analyzes the economic interpretation and realization form of the integration of rural primary, secondary and tertiary industries under the strategy of rural revitalization in order to provide reference for the development of related industries.

The ‘China Shock’ revisited: insights from value added trade flows

We exploit a decomposition of gross trade flows into their value added components to reassess the relationship between increased imports from China and manufacturing jobs in US local labour markets following the seminal paper of Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013, ADH). Decomposed trade flows enable us to address identification and measurement issues inherent to gross trade data. In particular, it allows us to remove US value added in Chinese exports from the exposure measure which is mechanically correlated with the dependent variable and overstates the volume of the trade shock. In addition, the decomposition permits to correct for double counting, to remove primary and services inputs in manufacturing exports, and to assign competition to the upstream industry that supplied the value added rather than the final exporting industry. This further reduces the volume of the shock and improves the accuracy of the import exposure measure. Consequently, we find considerable differences in the pattern of regions that are most affected by the trade shock and show that imports from China can explain less of the decline in US manufacturing than what gross trade data would suggest. We then separate the shock into a China-driven domestic reform and a third-country-driven value chain component, and find in line with ADH that the smaller, but still negative labour market effects are indeed China driven. Finally, we observe that the negative effects identified in ADH are not present in the 2008–2014 period, which is in line with the hypothesis that labour market adjustment has largely concluded.

The Politics of Europeanization

‘Europe’, ‘Europeans’, and ‘Europeanness’ have been crucial themes in the history of modern Greece, from the creation of the new state in 1832 to the sovereign debt crisis of 2010. As elsewhere, these notions have served as référentiels in questions of national identity, progress, capability, legitimation and strategic interest. In the Greek case, the European dimension to these questions has been felt acutely. This chapter considers Greece’s political development in the context of its membership of the European Union, assessing the extent to which the latter has prompted domestic reform. A general theme that emerges from the scholarly literature in this area is of Greece’s uneven adaptation across different sectors, a feature that provokes interesting research contrasts, but also challenges of interpretation. To understand how EU pressures for adaptation have been received domestically, the chapter opens with a discussion of the changing images and meanings of ‘Europe’ in Greece. This is followed by an assessment of the range and significance of the domestic adaptation of policies and regulations to EU legislation, as established by existing academic studies and policy papers. We note the current state of knowledge of Europeanization impacts on Greece, the implications of the findings, and pointers for future research. The unevenness of adaptation is an essential lens for analysis.

Legitimation, regime survival, and shifting alliances in the Arab League: Explaining sanction politics during the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring marks a puzzling shift in the sanction politics of the Arab League: for the first time, the Arab League suspended member states for matters of internal affairs by majority vote. This article argues that survival politics can explain the changing sanction politics of the Arab League. To re-legitimize rule during this unprecedented moment, member states selectively supported some protest movements to signal their understanding of public demands for change without committing to domestic reform. Contrasting case studies of the Arab League’s suspension of Libya and Syria and its simultaneous support for military intervention against protestors in Bahrain illustrate how concerns for regime legitimation and a short-lived alliance between Saudi Arabia and Qatar contributed to the sanctioning decisions. The Arab League can thus be considered a case of negative democracy protection, where regional sanctions are employed to selectively preserve authoritarian rule.

New Arab Maids: Female Domestic Work, “New Arab Women,” and National Memory in British Mandate Palestine

The “new Arab woman” of the early 20th century has received much recent scholarly attention. According to the middle- and upper-class ideal, this woman was expected to strengthen the nation by efficiently managing her household, educating her children, and contributing to social causes. Yet, we cannot fully understand the “new Arab woman” without studying the domestic workers who allowed this class to exist. Domestic workers carried out much of the physical labor that let their mistresses pursue new standards of domesticity, social engagement, and participation in nationalist organizations. This article examines relationships between Arab housewives and female domestic workers in British Mandate Palestine (1920–1948) through an analysis of domestic reform articles and memoirs. Arab domestic reformers argued that elite housewives, in order to become truly modern women, had to treat maids with greater respect and adjust to the major socioeconomic changes that peasants were experiencing, yet still maintain a clear hierarchy in the home. Palestinian memoirists, meanwhile, often imagine their pre-1948 homes as a site of Palestinian national solidarity. Their memories of intimate relationships that developed between elite families and peasant maids have crucially shaped nationalist narratives that celebrate the Palestinian peasantry.

Recognition: China’s Long March to Global Integration

This paper provides a framework for China’s gradual global integration. From historical exclusion, China became initially and partly incorporated to the world in the 1950s and 1960s while ignored by most of the countries. A quantitative breakthrough in the 1970s has led to a universal recognition, still formal and restricted throughout the 1980s and 1990s, making China a great power by the early twenty-first century. China’s rise and gradual integration in the international community is interpreted here based on Marx’s theory of ownership and Professor Charles Taylor’s theory of recognition. Both regard status as a property which is an outcome not just of a unilateral individual claim but of multilateral social relations. Adapted to the international society, these theories underscore China’s global integration. Therefore, China is now entitled to, and capable of, playing a more active and, moreover, leading global role, not just because of its unilateral claims and remarkable achievements, but also, and perhaps much more, because of its multilateral recognition—not in the formal diplomatic sense—of China’s entitlement and capabilities of doing it. Also, in addition to joining, and occasionally heading, international organisations, China introduced its One Belt One Road initiative as a unique contribution of a model for the West, and especially for less-developed countries. While it is post-Mao China’s domestic reform which attract most international attention and are regarded a revolutionary breakthrough with the past, the real and most innovative breakthrough is China’s integration in the world. Domestic reforms were undertaken throughout Chinese history; international integration is new and unprecedented.

International Investment Agreements and National Governance: The Case of Egypt

The current international investment legal regime results from the interplay between international investment norms, embodied mainly in international investment agreements (IIAs), and the legal regime of the host country. This article will outline two major impacts IIAs can exert on national governance in Egypt: first, the domestic reform impact that refers to domestically initiated reform measures taken to compliment IIAs objectives, such as establishment of Economic Courts as well as limitation of third-party challenge of Investor–State contracts; and, second, the Supra-National Impact which involves situations where IIAs constrain the regulatory powers of the host state usually by imposing legal obligations that go beyond international standards, such as alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms as well as trade-related investment measures-plus (TRIMS-Plus) and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights-plus (TRIPS-Plus) provisions. Understanding the profound effects of IIAs on national governance will beneficially inform policy makers when concluding IIAs.