林宜亭：Left-Right Politics in the EU

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Christine I. Lin

Integration, as Aspinwell puts it, is a process that binding rules lead to a reducion or a potential reduction in state power.  Actors in various levels are involved in the process, and whether their political backgrounds make a difference of their preferences in the integration is often asked.   This essay will first review the actors’ behaviours in European integration under the scope the cleavage theory.  Further, it examies whether the Euoprean institute representing its people, and does the European parliament reflects the left-right policy in European politics? Lastly, it looks into how does the Euro Crisis influence on left-right policy on the EU level.    The left-right policy dimension serves one of the indicators in European integration as Knutsen words “ the  language of left and right helps citizens as well as elites to orient themselves in a complex political landscape”.

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譚偉恩：The Need for International Food Security Legal Norms

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Wei-en Tan
Slow Food NYC board member

Introduction

The international community undoubtedly has made progress over the past 40 years by reducing the population worldwide who suffer from starvation; however, as is known to us, the total number of people living with hunger continues to increase.

In 1996, the World Food Summit impressively concluded that the right to food is “firmly established in international law, but its operational content and means of application are generally little understood.”[1] More than 10 years later, global hunger has now seriously expanded to over 1 billion people, and the international community is far from achieving the goals of reducing famine.

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宋承恩：如果釣魚台主權爭端走上國際法庭

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宋承恩
英國牛津大學國際法博士候選人

在兩岸四地與日本社會因釣魚台所起風波不斷之際，馬總統8月21日接受日本 NHK 專訪時，在堅持中華民國對釣魚台列島之主權主張以外，力陳「擱置爭議、共同開發」為最符合各方利益之暫行措施，並拋出「訴諸國際法院」作為爭端和平解決之方式之一。在民族主義情緒熾烈感染的時刻，馬總統結合長期鑽研與深思而來的洞見，以總統的高度，提出冷靜務實的主張，是值得肯定與歡迎的。畢竟，至遲自1960年代末期浮上國際檯面以來，釣魚台的主權爭端即存在於台、中、日三方；歷年來的大小事件，至多是爭端持續存在的佐證，並不構成法律上決定主權歸屬的相關事證。各方的「積極作為」，固然增加了各政府當下危機處理的壓力，長遠的對策為何，仍將形塑未來方案的可能走向。在此意義上，我政府之「東海和平倡議」仍是值得各方思考的。

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