The dramatic series of protests and political events that unfolded in Ukraine in the fall of 2004--the "Orange Revolution"--were seminal both for Ukrainian history and the history of democratization. Its effects have already been felt from Kyrgyzstan to Lebanon and are likely to travel even further. Yet few anticipated such a dramatic democratic breakthrough in Ukraine. Revolution in Orange is a pioneering effort to describe and explain the events leading up to and through December 2004 from authors who had on-the-ground experience interacting with the various Ukrainian, Western, and Russian dramatis personae of the Orange Revolution. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed, and insightful volume with lasting value as an explicator of this remarkable episode in the history of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

In this report we examine the role of internal and external factors in advancing or preventing "democratic rule of law" reforms in Turkey over the last decade. We focus particularly on the role of the EU in trying to influence domestic reforms. We underline the interaction between domestic actors and this external actor. We primarily aim to figure out why, when, where and how has the EU managed to influence rule of law reforms and where it has failed to make a real impact. In conceptualizing this influence we distinguish between direct (through government-to-government pressure etc.) and indirect (through empowering domestic reformists strengthening pro-reform civil society, or coordinating with other international organizations to maximize external pressures) impacts.

Prepared for the workshop organized by Sabanci University, Stanford University and Centre of European Excellence - University of Florence on "Europeanisation and Democratisation: The Southern European Experience and the Perspective for New Member States of the Enlarged Europe", Istanbul 10-11th December 2005.

This paper was discussed at the Global Justice workshop on December 15, 2006.

Excerpt from page four of Sebastiano Maffettone's "Universal Duty and Global Justice":

We could uphold that, as a rule, cosmopolitans subscribe to the global distributive justice model, reducing the socio-economic rights to a corollary of their theorems on justice. Statists, instead, always as a rule, fully reject the idea of a global distributive justice and, sometimes, even the possibility that the socio-economic human rights might have considerable soundness and effectiveness. In short, this third option of mine recognizes that, in this historical time, a comprehensive ideal of global distributive justice - founded on the domestic distributive justice model - is not yet theoretically justifiable, although it entails a lower degree of skepticism that the statist thesis about its progressive establishment. However, my thesis dwells above all on the fact that a broad and convinced interpretation of socio-economic rights may do much to lessen social injustice in today's globalized world, being sufficientist in the way above defined, starting from a reduction of extreme poverty and, over time, enabling peoples to decide their fate. It may be affirmed that this thesis, moving our attention from relative inequality to radical deprivations, is based on a more modest ideal than global equality, an ideal inspired to 'weak global distributive justice.'

In my opinion, this intermediate option meets another requirement of some significance, at least for a political theorist with a liberal background. Cosmopolitans have a propensity for a radical moralization of international politics, whose institutions are considered at the service of their favorite moral ideals. Statists, on the contrary, tend to cut to a minimum the space of morals in international politics. I believe that, for a liberal, both positions should prove scarcely convincing. This is the reason why I have called this third position of mine - based on a weak ideal of global justice and being neither moralistic nor skeptical - 'liberal conception.'

About the Author

Sebastiano Maffettone is professor of political philosophy at Luiss University, Rome. He specializes in political philosophy, ethics, bioethics, business ethics, philosophy of international relations, environmental ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, history of philosophy, and analytic and continental philosophy.