The rise of populist movements in Europe is partly explained by the power of mass media. The press, public and politicians keep each other prisoner. The media increases incidents and looks for personal stories while politicians respond to those stories in order to be noticed by the public. Therefore …

After 2001, nine years after the fall of the Taliban, women's socio-economic position in Afghanistan has hardly improved. To this day, women are subjected to many cruelties such as torture and rape. After the Taliban had been defeated in 2001, the total amount of development assistance by the international …

The Dutch society of today is a very mixed one. Different cultures from all over the world come together in one small country. One of the reasons that the Dutch society contains so many different cultures is because of its colonial history. The Surinamese population is one of the many ethnical minorities …

Norway rejected EC/EU membership in 1972, and then again in 1994. The aim of this report is to investigate why Norway has chosen to remain outside the union. The majority of the Norwegian government has supported a membership ever since the issue first was raised. Nevertheless, the people of Norway have …

I started this particular project with an internship at the European Commission in Beijing, China. Experiencing China's enormous growth myself in the last seven months it was clear to me that China will have an even greater impact on both the economic and political agendas of the Western world and its …

In this chapter the autor explores the contours and possible effects of the WMO for the local government level. First she gives a short overview of the main features of the WMO (PAR. 2.5). Then she describes the challenges that local government is confronted with, especially the political decisions that …

In the past years there have been many affairs involving ministerial responsibility. Sometimes the ministers had to resign and sometimes they resigned themselves. The fire at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport which caused two ministers to resign, gave me reason to do research on this subject and to find out …

This paper provides an overview of the United States policy and its potential results in Iraq. The objective of this research is to establish to what extent has the ambitious US plan for the introduction of democracy in Iraq been accomplished. At the heart of the study lies the question of the effectiveness …

Ever since the fall of communism Russia has been going through periods of transition. Gorbatchev brought 'glasnost' to the country. Yeltsin brought private ownership, immense freedom but pulled the country into a complete post-communist chaos. Putin restored the sense of order and stability and brought …

Before the change of the system in 1989 decisions were made by the communist state-party and all citizens of Hungary had to do was simply obeying these decisions; publicly questioning the communist rule was not done. What followed in the years after was a somewhat passive state of mind. Consequently, …