This book explores the history, current relevance, and future implementation of the monumental idea of an elected global parliament. The second edition brings the book up to date and incorporates extensive revisions and additions.
Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.
Since 1990, significant political changes in Europe have also had an impact on the functioning of the Parliamentary Assembly. This publication emphasizes the practical way in which the Assembly operates and describes its political and institutional context.--Publisher's description.
The creation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly as an initial step towards a world parliament is a key goal of Democracy Without Borders. This study examines the proposal and presents official recommendations
"The story of the Council of Europe can be divided in two main periods, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first - which is the subject of this book - saw the Council's membership grow from 10 to 23, taking in nearly all the democracies in western Europe by the time Finland joined on 5 May 1989. Throughout that period, the Assembly played a unique role in shaping the new Europe and giving it a voice. It was also the ever-watchful guardian of the Council's principles, playing a major part in producing its numerous conventions, and securing the abolition of the death penalty. It never forgot the founders' dream of bringing all the countries of Europe together within the Organisation. The year 1989 was certainly a watershed. After having invited Pope John Paul II, who addressed it in October 1988, the Assembly anticipated the massive political upheavals in the East by creating the "special guest status" and conferring it at once on the parliaments of Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The representatives of these countries were in the Chamber on 6 July 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev expounded his vision of the "common European home", an idea which connected with Winston Churchill's celebrated Zurich speech of 19 September 1946"- publisher's website.
This book offers a general framework for a better understanding of the differences and similarities between the institutional rules of intergovernmental organizations that include parliamentary elements, and analyzes the role of various types of international parliamentary assemblies in the system of global governance, as well as insights into the process known as “parliamentarization of international organizations.” Firstly, it presents a case study of various types of international parliamentary assemblies, which is then used to analyze the law of particular international organizations that include parliamentary assemblies or relate to them. Secondly, the book compares two parliamentary assemblies of international organizations – the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA) and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) – in terms of structure, powers, and relations with their IGOs. It also investigates the activities of assemblies and their cooperations for the purpose to explore the positive effects of the work of international parliamentary assemblies and their potential for having an impact at the national level. Lastly, the book analyzes the tangible and desirable powers of international assemblies by comparing examples of existing international parliamentary assemblies with the UN Parliamentary Assembly project. Based on that, the author compiles a list of essential requirements and principles for effective international parliamentary assemblies.
The effects of the information revolution on freedom, job creation & the future of humanity. A clarification of the new situations created & the new role of politicians to civilise cyberspace & bind the Internet to values of human liberty.
In Parliamentary Diplomacy in European and Global Governance, 27 experts from all over the world analyse the fast-expanding phenomenon of parliamentary diplomacy. Through a wealth of empirical case studies, the book demonstrates that parliamentarians and parliamentary assemblies have an increasingly important international role. The volume begins with parliamentary diplomacy in Europe, because the European Parliament is one of the strongest autonomous institutional actors in world politics. The study then examines parliamentary diplomacy in relations between Europe and third countries or regions (Mexico, Turkey, Russia, the Mediterranean), before turning attention to the rest of the world: North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia. This pioneering volume confirms the worldwide nature and salience of parliamentary diplomacy in contemporary global politics.
Growing numbers of scholars, practitioners, politicians, and citizens recognize the value of deliberative civic engagement processes that enable citizens and governments to come together in public spaces and engage in constructive dialogue, informed discussion, and decisive deliberation. This book seeks to fill a gap in empirical studies in deliberative democracy by studying the assembly of the Australian Citizens’ Parliament (ACP), which took place in Canberra on February 6–8, 2009. The ACP addressed the question “How can the Australian political system be strengthened to serve us better?” The ACP’s Canberra assembly is the first large-scale, face-to-face deliberative project to be completely audio-recorded and transcribed, enabling an unprecedented level of qualitative and quantitative assessment of participants’ actual spoken discourse. Each chapter reports on different research questions for different purposes to benefit different audiences. Combined, they exhibit how diverse modes of research focused on a single event can enhance both theoretical and practical knowledge about deliberative democracy.
Parliamentary theory, practices, discourses, and institutions constitute a distinctively European contribution to modern politics. Taking a broad historical perspective, this cross-disciplinary, innovative, and rigorous collection locates the essence of parliamentarism in four key aspects—deliberation, representation, responsibility, and sovereignty—and explores the different ways in which they have been contested, reshaped, and implemented in a series of representative national and regional case studies. As one of the first comparative studies in conceptual history, this volume focuses on debates about the nature of parliament and parliamentarism within and across different European countries, representative institutions, and genres of political discourse.