ZENAF Arbeits- und Forschungsberichte : (ZAF)
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2009,2
The privatization of Old Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance was a top priority on president Bush’s domestic political agenda. Although Bush’s reform initiative has failed and president Obama has declared not to privatize social security, the system of public old age security in the United States is still in crisis, mainly because of demographic factors and the ensuing financial problems but also because of the recent and deep economic recession in the United States. This article reviews the initiative of the Bush-Administration to partially privatize social security and analyzes the main objectives behind Bush policy as well as the main arguments against and obstacles to it. By placing Bush politics of privatizing social security in a broader context of comparative welfare state reform, this article discusses the consequences of privatizing social security systems on equality and poverty, as well as on the legitimacy of the political system in general.
2009,1
The paper aims at presenting research about Neo-Conservatism, in particular about the origin(s), history of development, ideas, and foreign policy goals. The core argument of the paper is that the discipline of International Relations (IR), in particular the North American Research and the Peace and Conflict Research, should take the Neoconservatives seriously. Three arguments can be made for this: First of all, Neoconservatives such as Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, and Normen Podhoretz are participating in the debates about US foreign policy, and they introduce their ideas (e.g. "democracy promotion", "unipolar moment", and "benevolent empire") into the discourse. The foreign policy of the Reagan administration as well as the foreign policy of George W. Bush was highly influenced by neoconservative ideas. To sum up, Neo-Conservatism is the fourth influential school of US foreign policy beside Isolationism, Liberal Internationalism, and Realism. Secondly, Neoconservatives are proponents of a war-prone-US foreign policy, and advocates of the "war on terror" and the Iraq War. And finally, Neoconservatives are characterized by ideas, in particular the idea of democracy promotion, as the purpose of American politics and historic mission. Along with this, a neoconservative misunderstanding of IR theories becomes apparent. The "Democrat Realist" Krauthammer and the "Wilsonianist" Podhoretz both refer to "Realism", "Liberalism" and Wilson’s doctrine "to make the world safe for democracy" in a way which is not only misleading, but deceptive. Neoconservatives suggest that Realism is a sole power politics-theory without normative bias, and that the scholars of the liberal peace theory as well as Wilson and his successors claim for a policy of democracy promotion by using force and waging war. Against this background, a critical examination with Neoconservatism is presented in the paper. To reveal the neoconservative misunderstanding of IR discipline and its two important school of thoughts, the few similarities but numerous differences between Neo-Conservatism on the one hand and realist and liberal approaches in IR on the other hand are worked out.