Middle East Studies Online Journal

The European Union’s center-piece of economic policy making is the Lisbon process, which tries to make Europe the most competitive economic region in the world economy by 2010. EU-Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso recently presented a Centre for European Reform (CER) study that maintained that Denmark, Sweden and Austria are the best performing Lisbon process countries for 2005 and that Romania, Poland and Malta are the lowest ranked countries in the European Union in the same year. Due to lacking data, practically no serious conclusions can be drawn about Turkey. In the study, presented by the Commission President, some real finger pointing is made, with the “good” performers being called “heroes” and the “bad performers” being called “villains”. In the study, Poland was made the European chief “villain” (henceforth called, in keeping with this tendency towards abbreviations in the eurocracy, the ECV, for 2005). Our rigorous re-analysis of the data leads us to the … . . . → Read More: REVISION: Correctly Finger-Pointing the Lisbon-Process-Villains

While there is a never-ending debate on Islamism, Islamist terrorism and the identity of Europe vis-à-vis growing Muslim communities in Europe, there are hardly any solid cross-national data being presented on the real extent of the Islamist threat facing Europe, and on the social conditions that lead to Islamist radicalism. By and large, our rigorous quantitative results, based on the first systematic use of the Muslim community data contained in the European Social Survey (ESS) all support a socio-liberal view of migration and integration, compatible with much of the rest of current European political economic thinking regarding the future alternatives for the European Union, and contradict the very extended current alarmist political discourse in Western Europe.

First we show with new data that the much hailed European social model is a myth, when you compare poverty rates in OECD countries and in Europe on the basis of absolute income data, and not just poverty lines in terms … . . . → Read More: REVISION: Why Europe Has to Offer a Better Deal Towards its Muslim Communities: A Quantitative Analysis of Open International Data

In this article, we draw some optimistic, socio-liberal conclusions about Islam in the world system. Countering some alarmist voices in the West, neither migration nor Muslim culture are to be blamed for the contemporary crisis, but the very nature of unequal capitalist accumulation and dependency that is at the core of the world capitalist system. For one, our analysis is based on current thinking on Kondratiev waves of world political development inherent in recent work by IIASA and the NATO Institute for Advanced Studies.

First we present a rigorous re-analysis of United States Department of State data on acts of global terrorism in the framework of Kondratiev cycle waves. The data presented show that before the present war in Iraq the global war on terrorism already showed very positive effects, and that the strong linear downward trend in global terrorism, to be observed during the last two decades, coincided with rising globalization in both the centers and the peripheries of … . . . → Read More: REVISION: Quantitative World System Studies Contradict Current Islamophobia: World Political Cycles, Global Terrorism, and World Development

The article analyses further develops the neo-dependency approach already presented by the same author and looks at recent time series trends in the structure of international capital penetration, international savings, and the dynamics of unequal transfer and their effects on social well-being today. It emerges that the European Center is going to become the main loser in the structural changes that affect the position of Europe in the 21st Century. The world system approach, pioneered today, above all by Giovanni Arrighi and the late Andre Gunder Frank, teaches us that the centers of gravity in the world economy are dramatically shifting towards the Asia- Pacific region, and that the days of Eurocentrism are outnumbered. Foreign savings become an important indicator of the center-periphery structure of the world system and its changing nature (with its ongoing shifts favoring mainly the Asia – Pacific region) as well. Savings rate in Europe almost everywhere decline. It is simply … . . . → Read More: REVISION: Tectonic Shifts in the Structures of International Inequality?