Borders and Orders in Europe: Limits of Nation- and State-Building in Estonia, Macedonia and Moldova
The breakdown of communist rule provided new opportunities for the restoration of statehood and for national self-determination. Estonia, Moldova and Macedonia have in common a 'minority' large enough potentially to claim a share in nation- and state-building rather than being granted minority rights. Numerous cases of ethnic strife within post-communist states and beyond their borders have demonstrated that domestic ethnicity can easily internationalize ethnic relations. In the 1990s, however, the EU has entered Rogers Brubaker's classic triangle (state-nation, minority and homeland) as a fourth variable rather than a constant. Evidently, a country's contractual relation with the EU and its location in a newly divided Europe are relevant for the effectiveness of the EU's expanding toolbox for conflict prevention. Moreover, a mode of EU enlargement strictly based on conditionality implies a separation of regions of 'insiders' and 'outsiders' where different norms and strategies apply to minority issues.
'Building Fortress Europe? Schengen and the Cases of Ceuta and Melilla'
Because of their unique geographical location, Ceuta and Melilla are the only places from which Africans can reach European soil without risking their lives in the Mediterranean. As a result, both enclaves are territories in which EU migration policies have a special significance. The fact that they were fenced off by the Spanish government, has rendered the enclaves paradigmatic examples of various metaphors used to conceptualise the external EU border, Fortress Europe being the most successful among them. Apart from scrutinizing the concept and the policies which lie behind it, I claim that the ‘gated community’ metaphor, which is the lesser used, is more accurate on the basis that it takes into account cooperation and interaction between both sides of the border. In the case of the enclaves this interaction becomes evident in the selective permeability applied to the enclaves and their Moroccan hinterland.
Numerical Simulation of Induction Heating Process of Continuous Casting Slab
Compared with traditional blazing furnace, the Continuous Casting-Direct Rolling is an advanced manufacturing steel technology, which can reduce energy waste, decrease pollution and enhance efficiency. The characteristics of steels during induction heating are complex, the change of material properties with temperature makes exact analysis methods very difficult to implement. Therefore, a powerful computer aided numerical tool (i.e., finite difference analysis) is selected to numerically model the induction heating process in this paper. The mathematic model coupling with electromagnetic field and thermal field was established, and it was solved by finite difference method (FDM), thus the slab temperature distribution and its variation with time were obtained, and the characteristics in whole induction heating process were studied. To validate the program feasible, the results were evaluated and compared with experiment results, which showed that the simulation results are reliable and effective. The skin effect in heating process from the two results was studied and demonstrated, the temperature change caused by different parameters such as the induced power intensity and the corner radian were also presented, which indicate that the slab temperature can be heated uniformly through adjusting these parameters, thus the continuous casting slab can meet the rolling requirement.