Slovak national communism as a specific approach to the problem of Czech-Slovak relations gained a significant position within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia soon after its establishment in 1921. This article analyzes the foundations of this phenomenon and the evolving attitudes of the first generation of Slovak communist intellectuals and Party functionaries. The article’s primary focus is on the Slovak communists’ views regarding the official state doctrine of a unified Czechoslovak nation, Czech-Slovak relations, and the issue of Slovak autonomy. The study highlights the significant external influences, particularly the directives of the Communist International and the pre-existing national stereotypes, that shaped the worldview and nationalist tendencies of Slovak communists.

This article analyses the scholarly results concerning the social phenomenon of intermarriage. It specifically focuses on the similarities and differences in the latter in Europe, between migrants and host society members, and between national minorities and majorities. The study shows that while intermarriage between migrants and host society members is often seen as a vehicle for bridging social gaps and promoting social cohesion, intermarriages between national minorities and majorities is more likely to lead to erosion of minority identities and cultural traits. Common challenges faced by intermarried couples include resistance from family members and bureaucratic obstacles, with gender dynamics playing a crucial role, particularly in traditional societies where women often bear the brunt of cultural assimilation. Intermarriage also promotes the perspective of the integrative nature of nation-states without requiring intervention by the states themselves. The article underscores the importance of deepening the discourse on intermarriage and focusing on the impact of the latter on both migrant and national minority communities through both quantitative analyses and qualitative approaches. This may improve the understanding of the transformative potential and challenges of these unions.

After its initial founding by the Council on Religion and Law at Harvard, the Journal of Law and Religion had its first life at Hamline University School of Law beginning in 1983. This essay is a history of its second life—from 1987/1988 to 2013—describing the vision and the people who pursued that vision through the journal in those years and some of the roundtables and symposia it published.

Turkey’s Europeanization process provides a particularly interesting case study of the extra-jurisdictional impact of European Union (EU) law, both through policy convergence and through the so-called Brussels effect. Formally, Turkey must adopt certain EU rules due to its status as an EU candidate country, but its candidacy process has been lengthy and uncertain, resulting in partial and uneven adoption of EU rules. Nevertheless, EU-style policymaking has persisted in various policy areas, including environmental and climate policy. This paper aims to analyze the convergence of climate change policies between the EU and Turkey by employing multidimensional scaling, a method that enables the visualization and examination of the connectivity and intensity of cooperation between states. For the period from 2007 to 2023, our comparative analysis demonstrates that policy divergence occurs when the EU’s share of Turkey’s total trade decreases and when political challenges are experienced. On the other hand, periods of policy convergence coincide with periods of increased trade volume and expanded trade opportunities. The results suggest that through its market size and regulatory capacity, the EU exerts soft power which forces Turkey to align its climate policies with the EU to protect and maintain its competitiveness in the European marketplace.

One of the most immediate effects of the Russian war against Ukraine was the unprecedented influx of Ukrainian refugees in some countries. This article analyzes temporary protection for Ukrainian refugees in two countries—the Czech Republic and Poland, which represent the countries most exposed to immigration from Ukraine. The authors compare the political and legal response of both countries to the institute of temporary protection to reveal similarities and differences in the scope, tools, and nature of temporary protection, including causes and consequences. Both countries go beyond the minimum standards set in the EU Temporary Protection Directive and differ in their approach to its implementation. The authors claim that although the concept of temporary protection has expanded with the current situation, it allows significant benefits in allowing fast-track integration into the labor market, which aligns with the concept of refugees’ “deservingness.” However, the duration of temporary protection is a major limitation to refugees’ integration due to the emphasis on voluntary return to the country of origin.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was concerned about both poverty and race, inextricably linked because of the long and brutal history of racial injustice in housing, employment, and education. What Dr. King called the beloved community reflected a vision of a world built on peace, human dignity, and shared material abundance for all people. To explore this linkage of poverty and race, I employ two related Christian theological concepts: the universal destiny of the goods of the earth and the social mortgage that encumbers all private property to ensure the equitable provision of those goods to all and for all generations. I analyze the ways in which the universal destiny of goods can be mediated through U.S. property law by structuring the ownership and use of land and buildings within the context of social obligation. But while the law has the capacity to ensure ownership, security, and infrastructure for all, U.S. society has failed to make the necessary payments on the social mortgage that would create this reality—a failure due primarily to severe racial and economic injustices, both historical and contemporary. Yet there is hope: I present examples that offer glimpses of the beloved community.

Power at Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja, marks an important moment in the trajectory of labour history over the last half century. Writings on labour have seen a shift from a focus on institutional history to social history in the 1960s, to the cultural and linguistic turn of the 1980s, and, over the last decade or so, a move to reclaim the material in new ways.1 In the 1970s, the labour process and shopfloor politics was an important theme in writings on labour – Marxist and non-Marxist – but these were often framed in reductive and teleological narratives derived from the experience of the Global North.2 Recent writings demonstrate a renewed interest in workplace politics from fresh perspectives that look at the relationship between the production process and cultural transformation in complex ways.

Liberal neutrality compels governments to respect individual preferences. Yet health-promotion campaigns, such as modern tobacco control policies, often seek to cultivate a preference for a healthy lifestyle. Liberal theorists have attempted to justify these policies by appealing to the concept of ‘means paternalism’, whereby these policies align with existing preferences. In contrast, this article argues that shaping preferences can be not only permissible but also morally required. Governments can preserve neutrality while influencing preferences by promoting generic goods valued in diverse societies and considering the preference-formation of future generations. This argument provides a stronger rationale for tobacco control policies.