Globalization Studies

This article examines the way the ‘anthropocentric-ecocentric’ dualism has come to bear on the history of the American presidency since the turn of the century, with special focus on three American Presidents, namely Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Barak Obama. The major argument in this paper is that this duality constitutes not only a philosophical divergence of views, but also a determinant factor that has guided the beliefs, decisions, and policies of American presidents over more than a century. On account of their contradictory environmental records, both Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan are believed to stand for the two extremes of an ‘anthropocentrism-ecocentrism’ spectrum while Barak Obama ambivalently oscillates in the middle. Coming to power with different, sometimes conflicting, agendas, Presidents Roosevelt, Reagan, and Obama used the presidency as a bully pulpit to implement their ideological vision of nature, the environment, and economic growth in line with either ‘ecocentrism’ or ‘anthropocentrism.’ Spotlighting both their rhetoric and policies, this article delineates the three presidents’ differentiation along the ‘anthropocentric-ecocentric’ continuum and discusses the divergence of their respective political and philosophical beliefs as well as their concomitant implementation strategies. Ultimately, mapping the ‘anthropocentric-ecocentric’ dualism in the history of American presidency provides a valuable insight into how this divide has been transferred from the philosophical realm to the political one.

The integration of the countries of eastern and southeastern Europe into global flows of migration has become a major issue not only in migration policy debates , but also in analysing longer term social change in the region. Changes in the magnitudes of migrant remittances can be of crucial social and political importance. In this study, I link a conceptual contribution with a three-step empirical inquiry. First, I conceptualize migrant remittances as a form of external economic dependency. Next, I describe recent changes in the strength of the empirical relationship between migrant remittances as percentages of the GDP and per capita GDP for all societies of the world utilizing data from two online data sets. Employing what Charles Tilly (1984) called " variation-finding comparison, " I examine, next, the – as it turns out, quite sizeable – residual variation in the relative magnitude of remittances that remains after controlling for per capita GDP, and interpret it as a marker for patterns of remittance dependency. Finally, I trace the recent trajectories of the societies that had, until one generation ago, constituted the Soviet " bloc " against the backdrop of the global distribution in remittance dependency. The data have been adopted from two sources: Estimates for migrant remittances as percentages of the GDP of their home country come from the online World Develop

The rise of modern capitalism, which is based largely on Enlightenment thinking and the primacy of exponential economic growth, has usually been considered the starting point of environmental degradation and the abuse of nature.
Post-industrial societies, therefore, have been characterized by a disturbed environment-society relationship manifesting itself as ecological disasters as well as the prevailing instrumental view of nature under the current neoliberal capitalist
paradigm of development. Using this framework, this article aims to discuss whether or not the current environment-society relationship is wholly at odds with the holistic view of nature within the sustainability discourse. Some important features of globalization, such as ‘time-space distanciation,’ rising ‘corporatism,’ and ‘global consumerism’, are also relevant to this discussion. Special emphasis is placed on the increasingly conspicuous aspects of human alienation from nature within
modern societies as well as the concomitant social and cultural dislocations that the lingering Man-Nature divide has engendered. Ultimately, the potential of new initiatives to bridge this divide and promote sustainability is highlighted and
research questions are thrown up for further scholarly investigation.