Browsing by Subject "Itä-Eurooppa"
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(2011)Since begging East European Roma became a common view in the streets of larger Nordic cities, vivid discussions about their presence and activities have been carried out in the mass media. This thesis examines the public debates in Finland and Norway through a discursive analysis and comparison of press content from the two countries. The aim of the study is firstly to identify the prominent discourses which construct certain images of the beggars, as well as the elements and internal logics that these discourses are constructed around. But in addition to scrutinizing representations of the Roma, also an opposite perspective is applied. In accordance with the theoretical concept of ‘othering’, debates about ‘them’ are assumed to simultaneously reveal something significant about ‘us’. The second research question is thus what kind of images of the ideal Finnish and Norwegian societies are reflected in the data, and which societal values are salient in these images. The analysis comprises 79 texts printed in the main Finnish and Norwegian quality newspapers; Helsingin Sanomat and Aftenposten. The data consists of news articles, editorials, columns and letters to the editor from a three-month period in the summer of 2010. The analysis was carried out within the theoretical and methodological framework of critical discourse analysis as outlined by Norman Fairclough. A customized nine-step coding scheme was developed in order to reach the most central dimensions of the texts. Seven main discourses were identified; the Deprivation-solidarity, Human rights, Order, Crime, Space and majority reactions, Authority control, and Authority critique discourse. These were grouped into two competing normative stances on what an ideal society looks like; the exclusionary and the inclusionary stance. While the exclusionary stance places the begging Roma within a frame of crime, illegitimate use of public space and threat to the social order, the other advocates an attitude of solidarity and humanitarian values. The analysis points to a dominance of the former, although it is challenged by the latter. The Roma are 'individualized' by quoting and/or presenting them by name in a fair part of the Finnish news articles. In Norway, the opposite is true; there the beggars are dominantly presented as anonymous and passive. Overall, the begging Roma are subjected to a double bind as they are faced with simultaneous expectations of activity and passivity. Theories relating to moral panics and ‘the good enemy’ provide for a deepened understanding of the intensity of the debates. Helsingin Sanomat, Aftenposten, Norman Fairclough
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(2012)The thesis construes the cultural field of transitology from the point of view of its historical development and characteristics. Transitology specifically and transition studies generally mushroomed in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. Transitology is a specific term for a field of transition studies to which particular attributes are controversially connected. These attributes include nomotheticity, ahistoricity, positivism and determinism. Of interest is the fact, that transitology represents a field of academia concerned with guiding policy recommendations in a process that aimed to democratize and market liberalize post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union. This instigated a close connection between the social scientific debates and actual policy. The thesis advances in a twofold manner to investigate the effects of the connections and historical factors behind the nature and applicability of transitology. First, it constructs a historical narrative of the developments of social sciences, transition studies, socialist social sciences and post-socialist space. Through different conjunctures each of these levels brought about its own meaning to the manner in which transitology consolidated its existence. Secondly, the thesis observes the form and nature of the relation of transitological research to its own premises and to its subject matter. A historical and radical perspective of social scientific thought is applied to detect the form of the relations. These perspectives are mainly world-systems analysis and the political economy of Stephen Gill. The relations under observation are then set into a wider context of social sciences and cultural competition with the help of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological thought. Academic labour is perceived analogously to a Marxist perspective of labour as a social process. The thesis concludes transitology to have attained specific character for a variety of reasons. In general these reasons are seen to stem from an interaction of the state of social scientific thought in the late 80s and early 90 and the historical state of the post-socialist space. Observing the effects and developments occurring from this interplay, the thesis claims transitological thought to have consolidated itself as a constituting cleavage of the post-socialist cultural and political space rather than dissolved into a myriad of approaches. In such a situation, in which a dislodgment between the temporal and spatial dimensions of the cultural field of research and academia and the object if its study has occurred, it becomes vehemently important to focus on the relation and type of research conducted and its direct and indirect implications to its subject matter.
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(2012)In my thesis, I was interested in exploring how and why the quality of democracy varied in Central and Eastern European countries after they became EU members. Throughout the accession process, these countries have, for the most part, successfully moved away from post-communist legacies and became increasingly more democratic. There is ample evidence in literature suggesting that this positive trend in democratic quality might be expected to continue post-accession. However, as data from major indexes of democracy shows, this has not been the case. A declining trend in democratic quality is at present prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe. In order to identify possible causes, I examined a sample comprising of the ten countries that gained EU membership in 2004 and 2007. Using crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis on data from the 2004-2011 period, I found that the main explanation for democratic quality variation among cases is economic in nature. Specifically, inflation can explain both the decline and the improvement of democratic quality: countries well equipped to deal with the consequences of high price fluctuations, in particular those caused by the economic crisis, were also able to improve their democratic quality slightly. Countries where the negative impact of inflation proved stronger saw a decline in democratic quality. Additionally, corruption emerged as an alternative explanation for decline. This thesis also briefly examines the post-accession influence of the EU on democratic quality in these countries. It finds that, while diffuse and difficult to quantify, this influence continued to be both significant and positive. These findings lend empirical support to Wolfgang Merkel’s theoretical framework of embedded and defective democracies. In particular, they support his claim that internal embeddedness – the interdependence of sound democratic institutions and practices – can be either reinforced or weakened by a sphere of external embeddedness containing elements such as economic development and international integration.
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