This thesis investigates conceptions of nature and their relationship to politics in nineteenth-century Italy. I claim that, in the context of nation-building that followed Italian political unification in 1861, Italian nature was used as an instrument of legitimisation of the nation. This happened in different ways and involved the creation of the very concept of Italian nature, which until then met with little correspondence on either the scientific or cultural level, and only had meaning when referred to the Italian peninsula as a geographical entity. Within the context of the politicisation of nature in Risorgimento and liberal Italy, science played a central role. The production of knowledge about Italian nature was the basis for giving legitimacy to the national territory through the definition of a naturalistic unity of the peninsula, the mapping of its natural resources for exploitation and, finally, the invention of the Italian landscape and the creation of an imagery still partly operating today. These three perspectives, which correspond to the three parts into which the thesis is divided (‘Territorialising Italian Nature’, ‘Exploiting Italian Nature’, ‘Experiencing Italian Nature’) define what I refer to as Patriotic ecology, which I consider to be a crucial moment for Italy’s history of science and environmental history. This thesis aims to be a contribution in the field of the history of science, yet it recognises environmental history as an essential component, showing the inextricable link between the history of nature, science, and politics in nineteenth-century Italy. The choice of archives was determined by a preliminary selection of key figures in the scientific panorama of nineteenth-century Italy, considering both the history of institutions and the contributions of single individuals. Sources include published and unpublished material dated between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This study examines two ongoing developments in outer space: the deterioration of near-Earth space through increasing use, increasing complexity, and the proliferation of space debris; and the return to the Moon to use, exploit, and extract lunar resources. The issues arising from these developments – from environmental tragedy and competition over resources to conflict and the (re-)production of socio-economic inequality – raise the question whether governance can be realised that addresses these developments. Employing a critical legal approach and building on (global) commons scholarship, this study asserts that powerful states, particularly the US, impede the development of outer space governance that is egalitarian and addresses the unsustainable use of outer space. Rather, these states – driven by capital and national security interests – entrench and maintain the norm that brings about inegalitarianism and unsustainable use: the unfettered freedom of use. Although there are approaches that seek to counter the influence of powerful states on the international legal order, they are unlikely to succeed in light of the structural issues posed by capital and national security interests, the uniquely dominant position of the US (especially in outer space), and the lack of bargaining power of weaker states. Revealing these structural issues contributes not just to thinking about outer space governance but also to thinking on the global commons more broadly.
The present thesis explores the inter-polity peace-making norms and practices during the lateseventeenth century through the first comprehensive analysis of the Peace Congress of Carlowitz (1698-1699), which ended the Sixteen Years’ War between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Christian powers, the so-called Holy League. It perceives reconciliation as a process that must pass through various determined phases to achieve completion and as a theatrical play containing specific and particularly choreographed acts. It equally contends that the Carlowitz Congress, the first genuinely multi-religious such diplomatic gathering of the early modern period, reveals the extent to which inter-cultural diplomatic encounters were primarily based on supra-cultural and long-established peace-making procedures and attests that congress diplomacy, far from being the cultural monopoly of a specific geographical area, was quickly supra-culturally appropriated and evolved as a practice across Europe during the second half of the seventeenth century.
This thesis examines transnational adoption in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from a comparative historical perspective in the context of the Nordic welfare state. The international research on transnational adoption is heavily focused on North America. However, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have seen some of the highest rates of transnational adoptions in the world when measured per capita, and these countries have received the most children relative to their population size. This thesis seeks to contribute to the growing scholarship on transnational adoption as well as to bring it into conversation with research on the Nordic welfare state. It uses adoption to break away from the top-down statist perspective on welfare states and demonstrate how private associations and families in Scandinavia both shape the services that they receive and play a crucial role in how these services are delivered and regulated. A main finding of this comparative study is that transnational adoption in Scandinavia has been primarily promoted by private actors (adoptive parents, associations) who successfully forced the authorities to not only accept but also assist with the adoption of foreign children from abroad during the latter half of the 20th century.
Chapter 1 investigates the impact of foreign language proficiency on brain drain in Albania. It leverages the accidental exposure to Italian television signals in the country, which led to increased Italian proficiency. The study finds that this exposure significantly increased the migration of highly skilled individuals, while other skill groups were not affected. Chapter 2 explores the market for machine data (MD) generated by ICT and AI, highlighting issues such as fragmented datasets, externalities, and fuzzy property rights. It examines how data aggregators can contract with various data producers to share data and analytics, considering factors like producer heterogeneity, preference for anonymity, and market competition. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between price discrimination and tacit collusion in the U.S. airline industry using data from 2000 to 2019. The study reveals that the impact of price discrimination on collusion varies over time, influenced by the quality of information available. In periods of poor information quality, price discrimination inhibits collusion, but the effect reverses as information quality improves.
This thesis exposes and explores the disconnection between the strong legal and constitutional potential of the EU’s reproductive prohibitions (on eugenics, reproductive cloning and heritable genome editing) and the political reality of bioethical subsidiarity. These prohibitions, contained in the Charter and in secondary law, are typically understood teleologically: as the result of international human rights law on the one hand, and as evidence of EU biolaw’s inexorable and continuing rise on the other. Based on legal historical and doctrinal analysis, this thesis proposes a new understanding. First, it shows that the prohibitions were enacted during the high-water mark of EU bioethics (1994-2004). Context, contestation and contingency, not inevitable inference from human rights, explain their emergence. Yet the tide has since subsided and bioethical subsidiarity now reigns. Second, it shows that the prohibitions are not only good law, but potentially very powerful. The classical interpretative techniques and the drafting history support a wide reading with constitutional ramifications. Third, it develops three paths open to the legislature. The legislature can remain inert, thereby ceding authority to the Court of Justice. It can restrain the prohibitions, repealing secondary law and seeking to limit primary law’s bite so as to return power to the Member States. Or it can take control itself by explicitly implementing the EU primary law prohibitions, thereby contributing to the construction of the EU’s identity. In developing these arguments, the thesis offers a revised history of EU biolaw as a whole. It also contributes to the history and interpretation of EU fundamental rights. Finally, it highlights the importance of rigorous historical analysis of EU law’s emergence. Alongside enriching our understanding and interpretation of that law, such analysis reveals the degree of agency that actors still enjoy – albeit in an entangled way – to write the future.
Scholarship on the Irish in Europe has flourished in recent decades and studies examining the network(s) of Irish Catholic continental colleges and their members have formed a significant part of this. However, much of the existing literature focuses on the early modern period, while the nineteenth century has been comparatively neglected. While patterns of Irish migration began to shift in the eighteenth century and legislation previously imposed on Catholics and dissenting Protestants in Ireland was gradually repealed, this thesis shows that these institutions and their residents remained important nodes connecting Irish people and continental Europe. Drawing on material from a mixture of state, church and newspaper archives in Paris, Rome and Ireland, this thesis builds on earlier literature and constructs a fuller analysis of the two Irish Colleges during the first half of the nineteenth century. It establishes why they proved to be so enduring; how they navigated the challenges they faced and the extent to which the nature of their role in relation to their host cities and Ireland was transformed by the process of adaptation and development. It highlights the connections and disconnections within and between the Colleges, as well as with their host cities, the broader Irish community in Europe and, of course, with Ireland itself. These relationships could be shaped—indeed in some cases strained—by the revolutions, regime changes and wars that punctuated the period, and also by political, social and economic developments back in Ireland. As Catholic institutions, the Colleges were frequently impacted by changing relations between the church and the state. Moreover, as Irish institutions composed of subjects of Britain, shifting relations between states, whether France and Britain, Britain and the Papal States or the Papal States and France, were also significant.
The European Union's budget is a transfer budget, unlike the budget of a fiscal (federal) state. Its role is to maintain a level of equality between member states and to sustain the functioning of the single market. But the ongoing agreement and institutionalisation of welfare related spending takes place at the national level and within national communities. The emergence of this transfer budget is not an incidental process. We know that member states are reluctant to integrate core state powers, and fiscal powers are core state powers. But the categorisation does not explain why and how member states have retained power over their fiscal capacities over the last seven decades. Based upon freshly collected archival material covering the time span from 1950 until 1979, five case studies show that preventing the integration of fiscal capacities was achieved through active political work by the member states. A period of institutional openness between 1950 and the 1970s shaped a path-dependency that, from then on, was not altered anymore but only reinforced. This pathdependency, here referred to as an underlying budgetary logic, steers what is considered appropriate for the budget. Maintaining this logic allows member states to predict their gains and losses through their budgetary contribution, the juste retour dynamic. Changes in the budget system frequently take place, but the underlying budgetary logic always remains the same. When there is a functional need for budgetary instruments that do not follow this logic, for example to stabilise the single market or to facilitate aid in times of crisis, the EU institutions resort to two strategies that can be traced throughout European budgetary history. Either they agree on budgetary instruments outside of the budget in fiscal galaxies, or they temporarily deviate from the underlying budgetary logic, which in the long-run safeguards the underlying budgetary logic.
The world evolves in twists and turns, and not even the simplest of lives or the humblest of regions are spared from this evolution. Such is one of the lessons of contemporary globalization. Growing economic interdependence, the rise of international finance, or the shaking of post-Cold War international relations are all emblematic elements of a global order that is now destabilized and destabilizing. In the face of this reality, tracing the origins of contemporary globalization has been one of the central tasks of scholarship over the past decade. This dissertation follows in the footsteps of this current in its approach to Spanish history and Western multilateralism. It sets out to explain the fall of the Franco regime and international cooperation over Spain in the 1970s in the light of the radical new challenges confronting the world on the wake of the 1973 oil shock. One main conclusion stands out: it was the world economic crisis in the 1970s that led the Franco regime to its final crisis. It was also this force, and the exhaustion of the Cold War consensus in Europe, that compelled the American, French, West German, and British governments to work together on Spain. Why the Franco regime fell the way it did, what were the main challenges facing post-Franco Spain, why the Big Four group emerged to coordinate Western strategies toward Spain, and how this new form of cooperation evolved over time are all questions that this thesis explores by looking at the foundations of the post-war multilateral order and its demise in an increasingly globalized world. This is not a triumphalist story of globalization, however. Viewing Spain's recent past through the lens of capitalism and the Cold War seeks not only to understand Spanish history and international cooperation in a global light. Crucially, it also reveals how Spain's profound changes during the tumultuous 1970s lie behind many of the country's political and economic problems today.
This thesis analyses the history of oil palm development in Dahomey/Benin since the French conquest of the territory until the late 1970s, with a particular focus on its socio-environmental consequences. In particular, it seeks to answer the question of why decades of efforts to increase the productivity of what was considered the country’s main wealth have not led to its prosperity. It also aims to illustrate the material and social impacts of the various development projects. Thus, the dissertation argues for the importance of the environment as a crucial subject of any history of development, while trying to take into account as much as possible the role played by actors involved 'on the ground', and by economic interests and policies 'above'. Treating development as an inherently multifaceted topic, this dissertation provides new insights into the environmental, social and colonial history of Dahomey, as well as to the economic history of the country and of palm products in general. It begins with the attempts made by French traders and the colonial administration to increase the production of the palm groves at the beginning of the twentieth century, and describes how they evolved after the First World War, when African palm products had to face Asian competition. It analyses the instruments adopted to implement the colony’s first development plan during the Great Depression, based on the selection of improved palm trees and the mechanisation of extraction, and its impact during the 1930s and the war years. It then analyses the increasingly ambitious efforts of the French in the 1950s, when the first large oil mills were built. Finally, it examines the implementation and impact on Dahomean society and the environment of the schemes carried out by independent Dahomey and funded by international development agencies and France in the 1960s and 1970s.
At the beginning of the 16th century, some of the most important figures of Renaissance Rome gathered around a recent discovery. At the church of San Pietro in Montorio, the cardinal and ambassador de facto of the Spanish Catholic Kings, Bernardino López de Carvajal, and his most trusted acquaintances congregated in secret. There, after a private mass, the cardinal ordered to open and to read out the content of the freshly discovered manuscript. The sealed book contained the revelations allegedly given to a Franciscan friar of Portuguese origins, the so called Beato Amadeo Mendez da Silva (1420-1482), confessor of Pope Sixtus IV and a prominent member of the Franciscan order. His revelations, written in first person, are built around a series of raptures containing the conversation between Amadeo and the angel Gabriel about theological, exegetical and sacred history issues. The exact title and contents of that original manuscript are unknown: however, under the name of Apocalypsis Nova (“new revelation”), an alleged version of these raptures quickly gained great popularity and diffusion.
This thesis consists of three independent essays in applied political economy and historical economics. The first chapter examines a 2014 reform extending term limits for Italian mayors in towns with populations under 3,000 from two to three consecutive terms. Utilizing the unanticipated nature of the reform, I assessed its effect on local governance through three avenues: mayoral tenure, electoral accountability, and electoral selection. The results suggest a detrimental impact on voters' welfare. Specifically, there's a decline in the performance of third-term mayors in areas like investment spending speed and general administrative service provision. This decline could be due to dwindling motivation over extended tenures, with the role becoming monotonous. In the second chapter, co-authored with Nikolaj Broberg, we use the same reform to evaluate its impact on public finance. Mayors in their second term increased revenue via debt and channeled resources to prominent areas like waste management. Conversely, first-term mayors boosted revenue through asset sales and invested more in public housing. Our analysis suggests varying motivations: second-term mayors may be appeasing voters for re-election, while first-term mayors might be investing for future electoral gains or due to heightened re-election ambitions. This latter motivation seems more pronounced in southern Italy. The third chapter, co-written with Francesco Colombo and Marco Cozzani, explores the long-term effects of the World War I demographic upheaval on female labor force participation in Italy. Using the INPS database, we discovered that women born between 1916 and 1930 in areas with higher soldier casualties were likelier to enter the labor force. However, in municipalities with greater war exposure, women exhibited reduced earnings and lower divorce rates. This suggests that such regions might've seen subtler socio-cultural shifts due to compromised human capital investments.
After thirteen long years in opposition, the West German Christian Democrats returned to power in the fall of 1982. At the time, it was widely discussed whether a turn in relations with Eastern Europe had to be expected since the Christian Democrats had been staunch opponents of Willy Brandt`s Neue Ostpolitik. Today, there is a scholarly consensus that a change did not occur. Consequently, this thesis addresses the questions when, why, and how did the West German Christian Democrats (namely the CDU and the CSU), cross the ostpolitikal Rubicon? The thesis highlights the various developments and changes that influenced the conduct of Ostpolitik from 1969-1983, and particularly from 1974-1983, over the course of four chapters. The main argument is that Ostpolitik had become a national policy by the mid- to late-1970s, once the Christian Democrats finally had accepted the premise of the Eastern Treaties as the foundation for West German foreign policy. While there still were strands within the CDU, and especially within the CSU, that voiced their criticism and demanded an ostpolitikal turnaround, these strands constituted a vocal minority. In the best outcome, Willy Brandt`s Neue Ostpolitik was complementary to Konrad Adenauer`s Westbindung. Finding the right balance between these two cornerstones of West German foreign policy was a delicate balancing act throughout the Cold War. Whereas the balancing act was managed with remarkable success during Brandt`s chancellorship and initially also under his successor Helmut Schmidt, the international climate changed significantly during the late 1970s, which necessitated rethinking the balance between Westbindung and Ostpolitik. Ultimately, a leftwards drift among the West German Social Democrats opened the door for the Christian Democrats to return to power, with the liberal party FDP being the harbinger of stability. The turn in the fall of 1982 was therefore a return where change facilitated continuity
This thesis scrutinises the governance of non-personal data in the European Union. First, it shows that the fundamental dimension of data governance is data access, which is a relation of power of someone (an access granter) over something (non-personal data), and between an access granter and someone who seeks to access data (an access seeker). Large access seekers such as machinery manufacturers, OEMs and big techs restrict access to non-personal data by utilising private law modules such as IP standards, contracts, and TPMs. These form ‘unilateral data control’, and ultimately cause problems in terms of interpersonal and social injustices. The central inquiry driving the research is then how non-personal data should be regulated to address interpersonal and social injustices in data governance. To answer this question, it is shown that there exist various normative approaches to data governance, ranging from more market-friendly ones (eg libertarian, liberal-egalitarian, and welfarist data governance) to those emphasising human flourishing and political participation (eg communitarian, institutionalist, republican and critical data governance). Examining the EU data governance laws, the thesis then finds that they primarily focus on market completion. This perspective overlooks other rationales for regulation. Contractually constructed collaborative forms of data governance (such as data sharing pools, data commons, and data trusts) in smart agriculture, smart manufacturing, and the smart city, on the other hand, show that there exist practical ways to open up data access and increase participation and democratic representation for access seekers. Lastly, the thesis proposes a just data governance system for the EU. Its core components include treating non-personal data as a commons, valuing democratic participation in data governance, positing access rights for seekers, circumscribing data uses, and enhancing fair value distribution.
The fate of European integration hinges on the governance of its industries. In the 1980s, marketoriented regulation became dominant, aiming for competitiveness and efficiency through open markets. However, a series of highly visible interventions in markets reveal a shift in the EU’s stance against industrial policy. The dissertation argues that geopolitics and climate change have exposed the limits of a market making Europe, leading to a greater role for the state in correcting and directing markets, vested at the European level. Similar to the 1980s, the fear of industrial decline and the actions of national executives, business leaders, and EU bureaucrats are driving this change. The thesis captures the shift to an EU-level, market-directing industrial policy in both discourse and policy. Notions of strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty have rallied a coalition of neo-mercantilist and socially oriented actors in favor of a more interventionist industrial policy. In terms of policies, the thesis focuses on the green and digital transitions, showcasing the launch of industrial alliances and the reorientation of state aid rules as ways to overcome the limited fiscal and bureaucratic capacities at the EU level. The thesis also emphasizes the need for destruction alongside creation in the green transition, explaining the move away from a market-only emission-trading system. The thesis documents political conflict between EU Commission DGs, member states, and policy domains. Finally, the thesis shows that at the member state level, the reorientation of Germany to EU-level industrial policy since 2016 has been the driving force for many initiatives. Overall, the dissertation calls for a reassessment of global political economy dynamics in EU integration studies, the integration of business power and industrial policy perspectives, and a deeper understanding of the shift in EU economic governance towards market-correcting and market-directing policies.
Political theorists have often maintained that the pursuits of justice, freedom or democracy give states moral rights to exclude would-be immigrants. But it is not clear if such general considerations can decisively answer the question if states can generate morally legitimate authority over the particular subjects of their migration control regimes, that is, hold an enforceable right to their compliance with such regimes’ directives. This thesis provides three essays to argue that such authority is often absent. All three essays contend that a liberal conception of legitimate authority in migration control requires that states treat those whose compliance they seek according to certain moral principles, and that entrenched features of states’ migration control regimes habitually stand in the way of the realization of these principles. The first essay argues that states operating according to dominant conceptions of sovereignty cannot robustly respect migrants’ basic human rights. The second essay contends that the international behavior of at least some states is characterized by their perpetration of ‘colonial norms,’ and thus undermines the moral equality of some of the people they later come to claim migration control authority over. Finally, the third essay argues that global power relations sometimes condition the bargaining processes that precede the conclusion of bilateral migration management (or ‘border externalization’) agreements between migration destination and origin and transit states in a way that undermines the latter states’ sovereign equality. These arguments have significant upshots for adherents of liberal political thought. The first two essays imply that there are many migrants who have no moral duties to comply with the migration rules of the states they strive to migrate to. The third essay implies that migration management ‘partner states’ in the Global South often have no moral duties to treat contractual agreements as binding.
This thesis investigates various aspects of the effects of technological change, capital subsidies, and firm dynamics on labor reallocation, wage inequality, the gender pay gap and, coworker learning in Italy. The first chapter uses a matching model that partitions the workforce into white and blue-collar workers, and firms hire both types while optimizing their labor composition based on a quality-quantity trade-off. Technological change leads to increased capital investment, affecting labor composition and wage distribution. Results from simulation modeling on Italian data show that worker-capital complementarities drive inequality changes within firms, while worker-capital complementarities, worker-teammates complementarity, and compositional effects account for shifts in the between-firms component. The second chapter further investigates the impact of capital subsidies on the gender pay gap, highlighting the distribution of the pay gap between and within firms over time. A theoretical model explains the connection between pay gap distribution, capital intensity and skill pay gap. Reducing capital rental prices can decrease gender pay gap by allowing female workers to sort into better-matched jobs at the expense of an increased skill gap. The last chapter explores coworker learning opportunities, acknowledging firms as the ultimate arrangers of a worker’s group of colleagues. A firm dynamics general equilibrium model with human capital spillovers among colleagues is used. The model human capital allocation is efficient, as it balances learning and production complementarities based on firm productivity level. Using employer-employee data, the study reveals stylized facts on coworker spillovers conditional on firm growth and size, emphasizing the importance of a large pool of small growing firms to generate coworker learning opportunities.
Throughout the 20th century, German nationalists romanticised the national dedication of Germans coming from multilingual regions of Europe. Imagined as living colonial bulwarks against other nations, these Germans were supposed to be particularly loyal both to the territory they claimed as the Heimat and to its people. This loyalty should not be lost through the act of migration or of the territorial changes that took placer after the fall of the empire in 1918. German Nationalists assumed, for example, that self-professed German migrants from the former Habsburg crownlands living in the territory of the Republic of Austria after 1918, were particularly prone to be “most active in völkisch matters”. Both their selfproclaimed national representatives as well as local nationalist activists in Austria expected these migrants to act as a united community – a union that was often assumed to have been reinforced through the act of migration itself. At the same time though, both the representatives of these migrants as well as their local Austrian political counterparts dedicated considerable energies to creating those very expected communities in the first place. Through a series of case studies, this dissertation explores the history of this type of German migrant activism in Austria from the early 1900s and until the end of the 1960s. Focussing on ideological continuities that are particularly evident in the Austrian case, the dissertation seeks to show that German migrant activism was a specific political tradition in Central Europe with a longer history. In so doing, it connects the nationalist mobilisation of German Inner-Imperial migrants in the Habsburg Monarchy with the efforts of the post-1945 ethnic German expellee activists and their claims for national recognition.
This thesis studies the impact of working processes and working culture at the Court of Justice of the European Union on the stabilisation and destabilisation of its decision-making. The theoretical framework is a Bourdieu’s theory of practice. I argue that the simultaneous relative indeterminism and determinism of decision-making, i. e. the fact that it produces relatively consistent outcomes and despite lawyers’ persistent disagreement, can best be explained by seeing it as a struggle among judges who try to enshrine their own perception of the case. However, I consider this struggle as more than a game of politics. The Judges perceptions are based on deeply inculcated schemata of perception. On the national level, these are primarily created by shared legal education and professional socialisation. But Judges at the Court of Justice come from diverse sets of legal systems and professional backgrounds. Hence, the structural factors of the practice at the Court have to carry much of the burden. I identify ten specific factors, such as the assignment of Judge-Rapporteurs, the chamber system, the single voice approach or the Court’s approach to case-law. In two case-studies on gender equality and childcare-related leave cases, I study the impact of these factors. In this area, the Court’s caselaw has often been criticised as incoherent, which allows me to identify competing perceptions. I then examine which structural factors can help to understand periods of increase convergence around a dominant schema, and which are related to periods of more contest and divergence. I find that the impact of the factors varies depending on their mutual interaction with other factors and that, for example, the often-studied Judge-Rapporteur alone cannot explain periods of convergence. The thesis thus furthers our understanding of the judicial process at the Court of Justice by revealing the comprehensive interrelationships between these factors.
Ce travail se propose d’étudier dans la perspective d’une histoire intellectuelle les rapports entre jansénisme et Lumières. La résistance contre la bulle papale Unigenitus constitue un moment de mutation politique du jansénisme. Ceux qui se revendiquent comme les héritiers de Port-Royal mènent une intense entreprise de publication visant à mobiliser le clergé et les laïques dans la controverse religieuse, participant ainsi à l’émergence de discours remettant en question l’autorité de l’Église et de la monarchie absolue dans le contexte du développement d’une sphère publique en France. Nous-nous proposons de mettre au jour l’élaboration d’une identité résistante en plaçant la focale de l’étude sur le cas des femmes et de la défense de leur droit à raisonner des matières religieuses. L’apparition des convulsionnaires, mouvement perçu par les acteurs comme largement féminin, divise le parti appelant et entraîne un débat interne sur l’enthousiasme religieux qui met aux prises le rationalisme avec l’expérience charnelle de la vérité divine. Notre travail s’attache à dégager la complexité de la catégorie d’enthousiasme, lieu d’un questionnement épistémologique central au XVIIIe siècle. Perçu comme un danger pour l’autorité, il articule un ensemble de champs et de problématiques dépassant le cadre de la discussion religieuse, et participe à l’élaboration de l’anthropologie des Lumières.
This dissertation argues that it is by accounting for culture in its intangible and societal aspects that EU law can address the critique as to the standardising effect of the cultural industries. This is because only if the law can detach itself from a purely market rationale and interact with the societal sphere can it account for broader cultural and societal considerations. The dissertation analyses the application of European state aid law and audiovisual media services regulation to culture and sport to explore the extent to which EU law perceives intangible aspects of culture when it regulates cultural goods and services in the internal market. Intangible aspects of culture are broader cultural and societal implications attached to cultural goods and services. They include anthropological considerations around behaviours and traditions, or societal considerations, where culture relates to other concepts such as identity, community building or intercultural dialogue. The thesis identifies three techniques through which EU law accounts for intangible aspects of culture when regulating culture. Each technique is associated with a role of culture in EU law, and a legal notion of culture. The first technique is the accommodation of culture, which corresponds to the role of culture as an economic sector wherein the relevant legal concept is ‘works’. The second is the development of a narrative, which is attached to the role of culture in disseminating a European cultural dimension and the associated legal concept is that of cultural diversity. The third is the EU’s approach to the notion of culture in a broader sense, which corresponds to the role of culture as part of growth and the concept of the cultural sector.
This dissertation is a collection of three empirical studies adopting elements from the life course framework for the investigation of immigrants’ mental health in European destination countries. I use nationally representative survey data from the UK (Understanding Society) and France (Trajectoires et Origines 2) to study immigrants’ mental health as a dynamic process, as well as how present and past experiences of transnational family separation affects immigrants’ mental health. In the first chapter, I use data from the United Kingdom to test whether the “immigrants’ paradox in mental health”, the finding that established immigrants tend to have worse mental health than recently arrived ones, is reflective of within-individual mental health deterioration with tenure, or if it rather due to compositional differences between cohorts. I find that the latter is true, and that immigrants’ within-individual mental health variation over time does not differ from that of natives. The second and third chapters investigate the association between transnational family separation and mental health in the UK and in France, respectively. In the second chapter, I study whether adult immigrants that experienced transnational separation from a parent in childhood have worse mental health compared to adult immigrants who migrated with their parents as minors. I find that this is the case for women, but not for men. In the third chapter, I study differences in mental health among immigrant parents by experience of transnational separation from a child. I find that immigrants who are transnationally separated from a child under 16 years old have significantly worse mental health than non-transnational immigrant parents. On the other hand, parents who experienced transnational separation from a child but then reunited have similar mental health as other nontransnational parents, suggesting that reunification is – among parents – a sufficient condition for recovery.
In this thesis, I contend that the changing structure of voter preferences in recent decades has provided liberal parties with the potential to gain considerable electoral support, based on a combination of economically free-market and culturally libertarian policies. Such a policy agenda not only fits well with liberal ideological values held by a growing number of voters, but would effectively distinguish the liberal family from its major competitors. Yet while I find that many liberal parties (whom I term ‘social liberals’) occupy such ‘rightlibertarian’ positions, this has not resulted in an increase in support for these parties, as the voters that share these positions continue to support more ideologically distant alternatives. I argue that this apparent defiance of a spatial logic of voting can be put down to two key factors. Firstly, social liberals’ attempts to win support tend to be hampered by poor ‘valence’ images, relating to these parties’ perceived lack of governing competence and ideological clarity. Secondly, the right-libertarian voters themselves have developed strong partisan ties to other parties, ties which have endured in spite of decreasing ideological congruence as a result of right-libertarians’ relatively favourable socio-economic circumstances. While these factors have tended to undermine liberal parties’ chances of making significant electoral gains, however, I conclude by noting that the potential remains for social liberals to systematically increase their vote shares through demographic change and the eventual weakening of right-libertarians’ pre-existing partisanship.
Activists and some states lobby for the recognition of conduct as internationally criminal. They are optimistic, it appears, that such recognition might bring about justice and morality. My close reading of efforts to mobilize international criminality’s promises for human trafficking shows that international criminalization has come to stand for transcending the legal obstacles that limit international responses to crimes considered “only” ordinary or transnational crimes. Specifically, international criminality has become a placeholder for a set of legal effects seemingly unavailable to other acts: individual criminal responsibility under international law, special rules on states’ and international criminal bodies’ jurisdictions, and exceptions to the immunity of state officials from foreign criminal jurisdiction. My doctrinal study challenges the belief that international criminalization could secure these effects. I demonstrate that international criminality is, at most, a prerequisite for the intended legal rights and obligations; they can, and often already do, attach to human trafficking through suppression treaties and international human rights law. To reflect on activists’ and some states’ attachments to the vernacular of international criminality despite its lack of legal effects, my thesis draws on Sara Ahmed’s and Lauren Berlant’s theories of the role of affect in political discourse. I claim that the value of international criminalization lies in the affective dimension. The circulation of international criminality as a sign of horror constitutes and authorizes an affective subject – a horrified humanity – that ordinary and transnational crimes lack the power to invoke. I argue, however, that hope in this humanity is underpinned by ‘cruel optimism’. Both affectively and legally, international criminalization ascribes horror to individuals, deflecting attention from the complicity of the horrified.
This dissertation explores political persuasion in Europe against the backdrop of increased issue-based polarization. Leveraging two survey experiments, the first chapter shows that ambiguous appeals decline in effectiveness as voters attribute greater importance to issues. This suggests that during periods of increased polarization, mainstream political actors may struggle to form broad coalitions of voters with diverse preferences. The second chapter builds on this implication and discusses which persuasion strategies Green parties may use to appeal to a more diverse part of the electorate. It uses two survey experiments and a field experiment in collaboration with the German Greens. The third chapter uses a survey with Dutch party members and politicians to shed light on another consequence of increased issue-based polarization—the declining membership numbers of mainstream parties—and examines whether party members or politicians have a more accurate perception of voter positions. Findings indicate that party members, being less biased, may contribute significantly to improving the quality of representation. The final chapter builds upon this conclusion, using two field experiments to explore how parties might motivate their members to greater activism.
Europe is generally seen as a continent with well-developed welfare state systems and social protection buffers. Nevertheless, disadvantaged and marginalized groups are disproportionately affected by poverty and social exclusion. According to international human rights law, states need to adhere to the minimum core doctrine by realising minimum essential levels of rights without discrimination. My thesis conceptualises the minimum core doctrine as a substantive right to a social minimum. I define this right to a social minimum as non-discriminatory access to minimum essential levels of subsistence and argue that conceptualising the minimum core doctrine as a substantive right makes it more tangible, less abstract, and frankly, easier to realise. In order to answer the research question how EU Member States should realise the right to a social minimum, I compare the Concluding Observations of five UN human rights treaty bodies across all EU Member States in the period of 2009-2019. In three case studies, I address the particular challenges of realising the right to a social minimum for persons with disabilities, children, and Roma. I demonstrate that the European survey on income and living conditions (EU-SILC), which is the official instrument to measure poverty and social exclusion across the EU, is insufficient to satisfy the human rights requirements for disaggregated data. However, it is still a useful tool for cross-national comparisons. Besides doctrinal analysis, I engage in qualitative content analysis with the software MAXQDA. By integrating the human rights analysis with a statistical reading of EU-SILC data across the EU, I address the divide between human rights lawyers and social policy scholars. The final argument of my thesis is that in order to realise the right to a social minimum, EU Member States need to prioritise the collection of disaggregated data for persons with disabilities, children, and Roma.
The last two decades have seen a surge in the institutionalization of new political parties, yet low levels of political engagement are persistent in many Western democracies. This raises questions about whether new parties can effectively channel political discontent and promote participation. This thesis argues that new party entry has distinct implications for different forms of political engagement. While new parties can increase electoral participation, they can also reinforce democratic dissatisfaction in affectively polarized environments. The empirical chapters provide evidence to support these arguments. Chapter 2 demonstrates that obtaining parliamentary representation does not significantly increase satisfaction with democracy and even reinforces political discontent among anti-establishment radical party voters. Chapter 3 introduces the concept of disruptive elections and shows that rapid electoral shifts can hinder changes in democratic satisfaction by introducing uncertainty into the government formation process. Chapter 4 proposes that considering an in-group/out-group logic is critical to understanding post-electoral changes in satisfaction with democracy among affectively polarized voters. It provides evidence that the establishment party win fosters political discontent among radical party voters despite electoral success. Finally, chapter 5 offers causal evidence that new party entry increases electoral turnout. These findings contribute to the growing literature on the effects of electoral change on political attitudes and behavior and highlight concerning implications for normative democratic theory. While new political parties may bring new forms of engagement, they can also exacerbate polarizing competition patterns that put democracy at risk. Ultimately, their impact depends on the specific conditions that led to their entry, urging us to consider ways to incorporate new political demands while reducing partisan animosity.
In recent years, we have seen an increase in public discussions regarding how democracies should deal with, and celebrate, their past. This thesis studies how public commemorations of the past are used by elites and citizens, and how they influence attitudes and behavior. At the elite level, I argue that political leaders have an interest in disseminating their preferred narrative for political gains. At the citizen level, I argue that attitudes, emotions and behaviors are influenced by exposure to memory objects, which citizens also use to make inferences that shape their beliefs about the world. I test these arguments using state-of-the-art causal inference methods. Using a regression discontinuity, Paper 1 finds that public spaces do not simply follow citizens’ preferences. Instead, political elites manipulate public commemorations to reflect their ideological preferences. Paper 2 uses an experiment to check how places of memory affect citizens. Using a video of an unnamed American town, the experiment manipulates whether individuals are exposed or not the town’s Confederate commemorations. The findings show that citizens use the commemorations to infer information about the residents and elites of that town, and that those monuments and place names affect their emotions, attitudes, and behavior. Finally, Paper 3 uses a different experiment to test whether exposure to monuments can foster tolerance. The treatment exposes respondents to German Stolpersteine placed on the ground, close to the residence of victims of the Nazi regime. The findings show that even these small monuments can significantly affect emotions. Although results are mixed, the stones may be effective in promoting the inclusion of groups that face the most intolerance, but may also cause backlash within some groups. These findings show that public commemorations condition how individuals make up their minds about social and political groups, and that they are used strategically by elites.
This thesis investigates the limitations that the proportionality test imposes on a patentee's entitlement to injunctive relief under European Union (EU) law. It has long been established orthodoxy that a patentee whose valid patent is infringed is entitled to injunctive relief requiring immediate termination of the infringement. In recent years, however, that orthodoxy has come under fire. Industry stakeholders and legal scholars worry that in some circumstances such injunctions can have disproportionate effects. Courts seem receptive to these concerns. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has emphasised that courts must make case-by-case assessments when issuing remedies for intellectual property (IP) infringements. National courts have followed suit and acknowledged that exceptions exist to the patentee's entitlement to injunctive relief. The tide is therefore clearly turning, but little is known about this proportionality test's substance. This thesis makes the case for a European proportionality framework with three dimensions: overreach, abuse, and conflicts with rights of third parties. Underlying each element of the framework is the principle that a patentee's effective sphere of exclusivity should be commensurate with their inventive contribution. The framework's scope is circumscribed not only by this principle but also by the problems with contemporary patent law that proportionality can legitimately be called upon to resolve. It derives from EU law and its principal legal basis is Directive 2004/48/EC (the Enforcement Directive). The ambition of this thesis is to offer a proportionality framework that is workable for patent courts, predictable for litigants, effective in practice, and in conformity with EU law. It hopes to be a source of inspiration in years to come for courts and scholars as they grapple with the limits that proportionality must set on patent enforcement.
This thesis comprises three independent essays in applied macroeconomics. The three papers examine unemployment insurance policy, monetary policy transmission to real economic activity, and how government spending passes through production networks.
Job Search and the Threat of Unemployment Benefit Sanctions examines the impact of the threat to cut jobseekers’ unemployment benefits in order to spur search effort and accelerate the return to work. Faster exit from unemployment is often associated with worse reentry characteristics associated with a substitution of social insurance transfer payments towards “market insurance". 
Sectoral Volatility and the Investment Channel of Monetary Policy investigates how the dispersion of individual-level fluctuations in firms’ productivity affects their investment responsiveness to monetary policy operations, with consequences for when monetary policy is more or less powerful over the business cycle.
Goverment Spending in Production Networks: Size versus Centrality examines how government spending propagates through the production network. We ask what are the consequences for fiscal spending multipliers when we account for both the networked structure of production and the heterogeneity of firms which occupy important nodes simultaneously. Specifically, we examine whether there is a race between centrality (implying large network effects) and firm size (dampening responsiveness due to slacker constraints).
In the first chapter, joint with Daniele Angelini, we analyze the effect of a change in the age composition of consumers on growth through competition. To identify the effect coming from the demand side of the economy, we instrument changes in the age composition of demand with unexpected foreign demographics shocks. We find that middle-aged consumers reduce competition. We rationalize our results in a general equilibrium heterogeneous agent model. Focusing on the USA, we estimate that changes in the age composition of consumers have contributed to a reduction in GDP growth of 8.7% in the period 1995-2004 and an increase of 10.3% in the period 2005-2019. In the second chapter, joint with Philipp Kircher and David Koll, we estimate labor market responses to local sector-level shocks as proxies for place-based policies. We show that local policy maker could face a trade-off between subsidising low-growth sectors with large short-term employment benefits or subsidising high growth sectors with initially smaller but persistent labor market improvements. Finally, in the third chapter, I present a model of consumer search that captures firms’ endogenous growth along two margins: customer capital and product range. The model provides micro-foundations for the existence of within-firm heterogeneity in terms of prices, sales and markups. Consistent with recent empirical evidence, firms do not increase markups over their growth path; instead, I show that they achieve a higher surplus from each match by increasing their product range and, therefore, buyer’s loyalty. Nevertheless, as a firm grows larger, its share of incumbent buyers increases and demand spreads more homogeneously across goods, mechanically reducing its average markup. I called this novel mechanism the curse of the large firm.
This thesis is born out of a question was raised by the 2011 revolution in Egypt: ‘why are Egyptian intellectuals silent?’ However, there was a manifest proliferation of cultural and artistic production carried out by a younger generation of artists, journalists, novelists, musicians and others. It was clear that the questions required a methodological lens that was no longer relevant in reading Egypt’s current intellectual milieu. This meant that when we asked: “where are the Egyptian intellectuals?”, we were searching for the now obsolete figure of the Nahdawi intellectual. Instead, this thesis asks a different question: If the figure of the Arab intellectual is absent, where is the debate taking place, who are the agents of these debates – the new intellectuals? What does this new and emerging, intellectual look like? The answers proposed in this thesis were found in three instances of intellectual production: parallel educational initiatives, novels, and political satire shows. This thesis will focus on agents of intellectual critique, who, being under heavy censorship of the state, are turning to the cultural field as an outlet for their intellectual production. First, this thesis traces the social conditions that underlie the genesis of Egyptian intellectual collectives, which are(1) censorship, and (2) critiquing through culture. It will subsequently detail the characteristics of these new intellectuals as (1) belonging to a separate generation, (2) distancing themselves from publicness, and (3) engaging in self-criticism. Lastly, it will explain their social role through (1) carrying out public pedagogy, (2) breaking the fourth wall between audience and politics, and (3) maintaining the revolutionary momentum through structures of abeyance.
This thesis supplies a new interpretation of the theory of popular sovereignty developed by Johannes Althusius in his Politica, methodice digesta, showing how it is underpinned by a particular understanding of civil liberty as well as re-examining its polemical character. The thesis begins with a full account of the development of humanist political thought in Renaissance Germany, and then moves on consider Althusius’s contribution to each of the topics singled out for debate by the German humanists. Although Althusius is chiefly known as a Calvinist political theorist, he turns out to be addressing a range of issues more characteristic of the Renaissance than of the Reformation. By approaching Althusius’s treatise in this way, the thesis is at the same time able to offer a richer account of what he is doing in presenting his central constitutional doctrine, his theory of popular sovereignty. Althusius’s theory first of all embodies a critical response to some prevailing assumptions about the character of well-instituted communities and about the role of citizens in the creation and maintenance of such an ideal. But Althusius’s theory also embodies a forceful reaction to the arguments put forward by the contemporary theorists of absolute sovereignty. Althusius is often claimed to be at least partially indebted to the work of these writers. By emphasising Althusius’s reliance on a Roman-law understanding of civil freedom, however, this thesis is able to challenge this interpretation. It argues that what Althusius lays out is a theory not of absolute but of ‘limited’ popular sovereignty. By focusing on Althusius’s contribution to the political debates of the Renaissance, the thesis is thus able at the same time to illustrate the different ways in which the concept of popular sovereignty was discussed by contemporary political theorists.
This Thesis aims to define the concept of a legal ‘sanction’ and develop the sanction theory and principles that are connected with this definition. Part I of this Thesis therefore establishes the theoretical, constitutional and international architecture for sanctions, whereby the philosophical and traditional views on punishment from the old theoretical discussions of the justification for punishment is providing the broader context for the legal concept of sanctions; the case-law of European Court of Human Rights on Articles 6 and 7 and Article 4 of Protocol 7 to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) is providing the main foundation for establishing the constitutional concept of sanctions by providing the architecture and principles for constructing a legal concept of sanctions; and the international standards and principles on sanctioning which the EU Member States has agreed to comply with under the Financial Sector Assessment Program, a task jointly charged on the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, is providing the international aspects on financial sanctions. The conclusions made in Part I will be applied in Part II of this Thesis, which will discuss the EU regimes of sanctions in the financial sector by first establishing the concept of ‘sanction regimes’ and determine its structures and principles. Second, the general requirements for the imposition of sanctions will then be established and discussed just as the constitutional framework will be applied in order to assess the classification of the EU financial law. Third, the specific types of EU financial sanctions will then be analysed and discussed by the application of the Engel-test and the principles establishing the constitutional concept of sanctions. Finally, the last Chapter will bring it all together and answer the research questions examined in this Thesis.
In 1952, at the Symposium on the Renaissance held at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Roberto Lopez claimed that, after a long period of economic expansion, the Italian economy experienced a ‘great depression’ starting in the third decade of the fourteenth century and lasting until 1530. During this period, the Italian economy experienced a contraction in the aggregate output of all its economic activities and wealth was increasingly concentrated into fewer hands. According to the Genovese scholar, the economic difficulties of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would have encouraged the Renaissance elites to invest in land, art and culture. This kind of ‘investment in culture’ was aimed at obtaining social status at a time when business opportunities and profits were declining. His claims challenged the conventional belief that art and culture could only flourish in prosperous times, by linking the artistic splendor of the Renaissance to an economic depression. However, Roberto Lopez went even further and declared that the pursuit of cultural activities would have led the Renaissance elite to neglect their economic affairs, which would have ultimately resulted in the ruin and bankruptcy of many businesses and, above all, the Medici bank. The idea that the Renaissance was a period of economic decline was soon challenged by Carlo Cipolla. While Roberto Lopez has seen a steep decline of the per capita trading volume and a reduction of the total cloth output which surpassed the fall of the European population, Carlo Cipolla believed that the decline of certain industries in traditional manufacturing regions was the result of the industrial development of peripheral European regions.
This dissertation is a collection of three empirical studies motivated by the persistent intergenerational transmission of educational inequalities worldwide. Focusing on the first educational transitions in Spain, the United Kingdom and Germany, this dissertation applies a design-based approach to evaluate family SES’ moderating effects in the prevalence and penalties of grade retention, gendered traits and school entry age. The first study focuses on the prevalence and penalty of grade retention in Spain and its heterogeneity across family socioeconomic status. To study the heterogeneity in its prevalence, it uses two exogenous traits linked to a higher prevalence of grade retention: gender and school entry age. To study the heterogeneity in its penalty, it uses an Instrumental Variable approach to account for selection bias in educational transition models. Results show selection and moderation effects of family SES, suggesting that grade retention fails as a remediation policy. Using data from the Millennium Cohort Study in the UK, the second study shows how high SES families reduce the prevalence of negative traits associated with the male gender, such as externalising behaviours and school detachment. High-SES families also moderate the male penalty in enrolment into sixth-form colleges, net of students’ prior abilities. The third study investigates the school entry age penalty in Germany using data from the National Educational Panel Study. After accounting for selection into school entry age, we find no moderation in the penalty of school entry age by family SES. Results suggest that school entry age has no consequences for inequality of achievement in Germany. This dissertation brings new empirical evidence on the social stratification in prevalence and penalties in three European contexts. These exemplify two essential mechanisms for understanding the intergenerational transmission of educational inequalities.
This thesis analyses how ongoing European economic integration affected practices of international statistical harmonization at the level of the European Communities between the 1950s and late 1970s. This study is made up of two parts. The first part analyzes the history of the Statistical Offices of the European Communities and its predecessor, the Statistical Division of the European Community of Coal and Steel within the context of ongoing European integration. The second part analyses and assesses the activities and contributions of the SOEC through three different case studies in the fields of household budget research, international frameworks for national accounting, and surveys into the structure of agricultural holdings. Through these analyses, this thesis argues that international statistical harmonization at the level of the European Communities ran parallel to the development of the European Communities themselves both with regard to the statistical subfields that the EC engaged with as well as the strategies through which the EC and SOEC engaged with them. Furthermore, this thesis shows that throughout the 1960s and 1970s the SOEC contributed to international statistical harmonization by manifesting itself as a hub between the DGs of the European Communities, national statistical offices, and international statistical offices.
This thesis analyzes one of the most disputed subjects of late Ottoman historiography: namely secret intelligence activities and state espionage during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r.1876- 1909). So far, the topic has been evaluated in terms of contemporary political debates in Turkey. However, this dissertation approaches the topic by focusing on the transformation of Ottoman secret intelligence activities as a consequence of Ottoman modernization, advances in technology and as a response to the internal and external threats that the Ottoman Empire perceived at the turn of nineteenth century. The focus of this thesis lies on Istanbul as the capital of the Empire, and the three extremely volatile frontier regions of Bulgaria (in the Balkans), the Province of Erzurum (in Eastern Anatolia), and Egypt and Sudan (in Northeastern Africa). By concentrating on these geographically separated outposts of the Ottoman Empire, this dissertation reveals the transnational intelligence networks created by the Ottoman imperial administration, and how the Empire crafted different networks for different regions according to its capacities and needs. Furthermore, by following such an approach this dissertation unearths the organizational structure and the operational scheme of intelligence activities during the Hamidian Era. Finally, the thesis focuses on the transformation of state espionage and its institutional character at the end of Abdulhamid II’s reign with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and the abolition of spying in the Ottoman Empire.
The 2015 European migration crisis seemingly made it obvious that Migration and Asylum policy in the EU had to be reformed in order to overcome the persistent problems in policy implementation, burden-sharing, and solidarity among the Member States. However, no such reform of the Common European Asylum System and Dublin III Regulation has been adopted until now. This thesis investigates why the Member States did not manage to solve this integration problem and opposed the reform of the CEAS proposed after the peak of the crisis at the end of 2015. It does so in three steps, using a multimethod design. First, a comprehensive analysis of the 25 countries of the EU participating in the CEAS is done with the help of QCA to arrive at the combination of conditions that lead to the opposition to the reform. This is the first systematic analysis of the conditions and positions of the Member States participating in Migration and Asylum integration. Through this analysis, the thesis tests major European integration theories, including Liberal Intergovernmentalism, Postfunctionalism, and the Core State Powers approach, for their capacity to explain the problems and successes of integration in a particular policy area. The QCA results produce two sufficient pathways for opposition to the reform and show that while Liberal Intergovenmenatlism largely accounts for much of the variation in the decision on the CEAS reform, Postfunctionalism rightly stresses the importance of domestic public opinion for the EU integration processes.
How did we end up with an economy that fuels the gap between the privileged and the rest while bypassing the negative externalities that boost financial instability? In the context of escalating wealth inequalities, the role played by law in the construction of markets and its discontents has become a recurrent theme. Building upon qualitative empirical research in the EU banking sector, this thesis describes the role of the law in underpinning an overgrown financial leverage that ultimately nourishes the gap between the rich and the poor. This instrumentalization of the law corresponds with a market thinking paradigm that was unleashed by the Chicago School of Economics in the 1960s. But most notably, the market thinking has provoked two important changes in the law. First, this thesis argues that, in line with a tendency to embrace data-driven methods, EU financial law has adopted a deterministic approach towards complex questions that lie outside the legal system itself. In the post-2007/2008 world, EU law is increasingly evidence-based and responds to technical demands coming from outer systems (in the present case, from economics) rather than to legal principles or ethical customs. Second, this thesis describes how this technocratic turn results in deviations from the rule of law. This rule of emergency does not happen by accident. It benefits wealthy households that, thanks to market thinking, see their companies grow into big oligopolies that have the power to produce sophisticated knowledge with which they seize the responsive governance framework. The thesis concludes that, by revisiting market thinking through legal morality, financial governance can aspire to rebalance the market-society equilibrium, thus restoring the rule of law and dwindling inequalities.
Placed in the global context of emerging borders and modernizing immigration policies, this dissertation on the regulation of Chinese migration to the Netherlands East Indies and the British Straits Settlements aims to show how both regional continuities and global developments have shaped the history of Chinese migration in Southeast Asia between 1870 and 1914. Where at first Chinese migrants roamed relatively freely within this region and regulation of their migration was limited, the Dutch and British gradually started imposing heavier restrictions with various results. Equipping both a transimperial approach and a regional framework, this dissertation addresses the difficulties the Dutch and British colonial states had in carefully regulating the movement and migration of Chinese to, within, and beyond the borders of their territories in Southeast Asia. The complexities, contradictions, and near impossibility of such attempts to regulation stand at the heart of this research project. It aims to address that migration regulation of Chinese coincided and merged with various systems and logics of migration control, ranging from the erection of a labor-exploitative indentured labor system to discussions of full exclusions and immigration stops borrowed from a global context wherein Chinese were increasingly excluded from white settler states and colonies. This dissertation argues that Chinese migration to Southeast Asia played an important part in the globalization of borders that took place in response to the ‘Asian mobility revolution’ in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth century. But the increased regulation and/or exclusion of Chinese migrants on a global scale also heavily impacted the Southeast-Asian colonies of the Dutch and British. Stuck between competing interests of various actors and from forces on different scales, regulation of Chinese immigration in these two colonies was far from an easy and uncontested affair.
This thesis analyzes major political crises and their outcomes throughout the entire process of European integration. Its objective is to provide a theoretically informed and empirically grounded explanation to the main research question: why has there been such variation in crisis outcomes? It finds that the nature of the crisis origin, the level of member-state interdependence, and the presence or absence of French-German leadership determine a crisis outcome. Overall, this thesis compiles a systematic and comparative analysis of major crises and crisis outcomes that so far has been missing in the scholarly literature. The findings show that crises vary greatly in their outcomes and the impact they have on European integration and the polity of what today is the European Union (EU). Other than conventional wisdom might have it, crises have been an inherent part of European integration since the beginning. Moreover, only a few crises led to ‘more’ European integration, notably to an increase in the power of supranational institutions and procedures, while the majority did not. This thesis follows a political understanding of crises and assesses change to the system, that is, to European integration and the EU polity. It scrutinizes why and how crises of European integration came about; how they were dealt with and resolved; and in which way they affected the system.
For sociologists, social class determines life outcomes in a myriad of different ways. But for the general public, class has never mattered as little. Class has become the “dark matter” of society, a potent yet invisible force shaping social reality. What accounts for the persistent, yet invisible power of class? In this thesis I argue that much of contemporary class inequality is driven by the widespread belief that “class = competence”. This belief biases third party assessment of performance, directly affects performance and decision-making through internalising expectations, and buttresses the status quo by legitimising inequality as the result of meritocratic processes. Yet, potent as it is, the effects of this belief are not obvious because it appears to be nothing more than the common sense observation that those who achieve positions of power, wealth, and prestige are highly competent. In this thesis, I explore how this belief is driven by social cognitive processes. In particular, I look at psychological heuristics designed to facilitate social action in the context of uncertainty. Each empirical chapter sets out to address three important mechanisms related to the “class = competence” belief. The first empirical chapter establishes that the “class = competence” belief leads to biased third party evaluations of performance. The second empirical chapter shows that working class students internalise the “class = competence” belief, decreasing their likelihood of attending university. The third chapter explores how the belief emerges by testing a mechanism based on cognitive dissonance reduction.
This thesis explores the transformative impact of AI in criminal trials and questions whether procedural fairness can be preserved in the automation age. This work aims to contribute to the academic debate on AI and fundamental rights, stimulate discussions concerning AI regulation at the EU level, and anticipate legal issues that member states will increasingly face in the years to come. By focusing on the use of AI systems to generate criminal evidence, this thesis provides a reconstruction of fairness in criminal trials as a normative and legal concept and reframes the rights enshrined in Article 6 of the ECHR for the automation age (Ch. II). Secondly, it conducts a doctrinal analysis of the EU legislative measures regulating AI according to three key themes: secrecy, transparency and the reliability of AI systems (Ch. III). Finally, it shows how AI challenges the core principles of a fair trial, focusing on the redefined roles of trial actors (Ch. IV), and advances proposals to counterbalance such a transformation whilst preserving fairness in criminal trials (Ch. V). In this thesis, I contend that the use of AI systems to generate evidence in criminal trials leads to a threefold transformation: 1) new actors enter the scene, bringing commercial interests into the proceeding; 2) criminal trials become increasingly mediated by experts; 3) the traditional model of evidence examination is fundamentally changed: from inside the courtroom, audi alteram partem, to outside the trial, in absentia of the parties. To address this transformation and preserve the core principles of a fair trial, I argue for the need for legal reforms to guarantee access to information and experts for the defence. In the sector of criminal justice, a multi-level legal response, encompassing EU law, human rights law and national criminal law, is necessary to face the challenges brought by AI.
Commercial surrogacy continues to grow in popularity. Lack of legal provisions at the international and domestic levels, however, has given rise to myriad problems. This has increasingly caused states and academics to consider whether regulation may be the preferable approach. Yet despite the extensive sociological and anthropological literature that has conceptualised contract pregnancy as a form of work, the question of whether and how this might translate into a new legal framework remains underexplored. This thesis seeks to bridge this disciplinary gap by investigating the merit of treating surrogates as the employees of their intended parents, therein regulating contract pregnancy through labour law. To do so, it addresses numerous issues through five substantive Chapters: the controversies with marketizing reproductive labour, the current legal landscape, whether surrogacy could really be regulated as labour, what labour law might have to offer, and finally what the challenges might be with this approach to regulation. It draws on a range of secondary sources to answer these, but also integrates analysis of both Californian surrogacy contracts and interviews with industry actors conducted as part of this research. Overall, I argue that particularly for states which do not currently regulate surrogacy – whether because it is prohibited, ignored, or they ascribe to a Free Market approach – labour law has real potential as a pre-existing solution to help ensure that these arrangements operate as ethically as possible. Certainly, exploring this possibility would help to overcome the exceptionalisation of reproductive labour, which this thesis shows is detrimental not only to gestational carriers, but also the coherency of labour law itself.
This thesis explores the topic of anti-Jewish violence and memory empirically, using three dierent methods of inquiry. The first chapter employs a deductive approach to study how insurgent presence influences survival of genocide targets. I explore the case of the Holocaust in World War Two France using archival collections on Jews’ arrests and La Résistance members’ presence. I employ an instrumental variable method in which I instrument insurgent presence with soldier deaths from World War One. I probe my findings with qualitative analysis of chosen typical cases in order to investigate the mechanisms that govern the relationship. I find that insurgents helped Jews survive by providing them with information, help networks, and sharing the skills they developed to evade their common enemy, the Nazi occupier and collaborating Vichy state. The second chapter employs an exploratory approach and asks whether Wikipedia captures collective memory. Drawing on anthropological and historical literatures, it proposes a way to operationalise collective memory as actor-role associations and measure it with Wikipedia data. Comparing our findings with the qualitative research on Poles’ collective memory of World War Two, we conclude that Wikipedia serves as a unique data source to describe the content of national collective memories. In the third chapter I review literature on anti-Jewish “pogroms” to establish what the term means. I find considerable disagreement about the definition of the term in extant literature and propose to substitute it with other vocabulary from the wider literature on conflict – “mass categorical violence,” “state repression,” and “communal attacks.” I review two recent studies that used the word “pogroms” when seeking to explain their occurrence. I argue that the proposed typology would better capture the main characteristics of the violence typically called “pogroms” and enable better future sample specification and analyses.
This thesis offers an innovative insight into the analysis of the state-building processes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by analysing the making of Absolutism in the Hispanic and French monarchies. Comparing the cases of Cartagena during the central years of the sixteenth century and Marseille during the seventeenth century, I explore the disputed nature of Absolutism focusing my attention on the performativity of agents, practices, and discourses. First, I use the case of Sebastián Clavijo (C. 1580-1554) and his role on the transformation of Cartagena into a naval base in the service of the king of the Spains to analyse how the king’s power was constructed on a periphery of the monarchy through a complex system of political competition among a myriad of jurisdictional agents. Second, I focus my attention on the ideological conceptualisation of the relationship between the republic of Marseille and the jurisdiction of the king of France through the critical reading of a series of literary sources. By doing so, I underline the existence of diverging concepts of Absolutism mobilised by supporters and antagonists of the jurisdictional supremacy of the king. Consequently, the thesis seeks to provide an elaborated case study for the comprehension of the complex and diverging paths followed by western European societies during this period. It, consequently, aims to provide with a valuable contribution to our understanding of the political making of early modern monarchies.
This thesis explores the trade in and consumption of Lyonnais silks in the Italian peninsula in the 18th century. Questioning the reasons and mechanisms behind the success of these fabrics, the thesis resituates this trade in the context of the European silk production. If the fabrics manufactured in Lyon were indeed successful in Italy, this thesis argues that their success was however precarious and limited to the niche of fashionable, patterned silks for clothing. Although the Italian weaving centres lost their leadership following the rise of the Lyonnais manufacture in the late 17th-century, they managed to adapt and remain strong contestants. Due to this competition, the Lyonnais manufacture had to rely more than ever on its strategy of fashion changes to keep an advantage over its rivals and the preference of consumers. Indeed, with the continuous renewal of patterns, their fabrics became the embodiment of taste and refinement, encouraging consumers eager to display such characteristics to sport them. The use of fashion, however, brought significant challenges to the Lyonnais merchant manufacturers. The quick rhythm of pattern changes put this trade under a constant time pressure. The Lyonnais merchants had to rely on a large and diverse network to ensure the quick circulation of their silks in the Italian peninsula. Furthermore, the preference of consumers was fragile, and Lyon had to constantly adapt to their changing demand. To keep this market, the Lyonnais merchants played on the price/quality ratio and incorporated different production techniques. This thesis argues that by doing so, the Lyonnais silk manufacture actively participated in the multiplication of goods made available to a wider range of consumers which characterised the evolution in production and consumption of 18th-century Europe.
This dissertation sheds new light on the role of social media in radical right mobilisation. While existing studies on online mobilisation presume a uniformity of social media platforms, little research exists on how digital architectures, the design and technological features of these platforms, enable or constrain political mobilisation. This study shows how the radical right uses social media platforms for consensus mobilisation. A systematic cross-platform analysis of the activities of radical right actors on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram shows how the built-in features of the platforms—their algorithmic filtering, network structures, and functionalities—enable mobilisation online. It explains how radical right party leaders in six European countries use these platforms to motivate their online audiences to undertake action by using frames, rely on rhetoric to convince audiences of their views and share personalised visuals to identify with them from a distance. Social media has changed radical right mobilisation in several ways. First, social media platforms provide new opportunities for the radical right to share their ideas at low costs with large audiences. Second, social media has provided an opportunity for new actors to enter the political sphere. These actors actively contribute to mobilisation by popularising the radical right ideology. Third, radical right actors, such as parties, movements, politicians, alternative media, and communities use a variety of social media platforms for mobilisation, but do so depending on the technological features which these platforms offer.
This thesis explains the four modalities in which the European Union projects its power in its external gas policy by drawing from the theory of protean and control power formulated by Katzenstein and Seybert (2018b, 2018d). Therefore, this study adds to the scholarship on the EU’s foreign policy by developing the concepts of the EU’s power and contributes to a better understanding of the EU as an international actor. The central argument of my dissertation is that the EU acts externally in four forms, conceptualized as four EUs: Geoeconomic Power, Occasional Geopolitical Power, Constrained Underachieving Power, and Broker of the Strongest. Therefore, this thesis poses three questions: How do control and protean power affect which of the EUs is acting externally? Why do the EUs act to different degrees of effectiveness in the external gas policy? How does the dynamic among the four EUs work? To answer these questions, I examine the EU’s external gas policy from 2006 until 2021 by breaking it down into thirteen cases. In the analytical process, I applied a Foreign Policy Analysis to extract four models and then examined models with explanatory factors. In the thesis, I came to the following conclusions. First, each of the EUs is shaped by a combination of protean and control power and possess relevant properties: Geoeconomic Power is formed by control power, Occasional Geopolitical Actor by protean power, and both Constrained Underachieving Power and Broker of the Strongest are molded by combinations of those two. Second, the EUs acting predominantly as control or protean power exercise the most effective power projection. Yet, the EUs representing other combinations of powers produce mixed or ineffective results. Third, in terms of the dynamic among the EUs there is a strong influence of protean power in shaping the coexistence of the four EUs.
This thesis aims to analyze the composition of the elite in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and seeks to understand how their actions shaped the Estado do Brasil's administration during the period when the Portuguese empire belonged to the Hispanic Monarchy (1581- 1640). Focusing on the practices of Bahian elites, this thesis explores the political, institutional, and economic administration of Habsburg Brazil through the dynamics and practices of a colonial city’s elite. In examining Bahian elites as agents caught in between imperial and local agendas, this work uncovers the “collective construction” of the Spanish empire, and labels it as a polity built upon the interactions woven by a wide variety of sociopolitical actors acting at the ground. Elites and networks are presented as the pillars of the empire, and, consequently, their study provide an updated understanding of the construction of early modern empires, like the Hispanic Monarchy, in America and, more specifically, in Brazil.
Climate change poses new risks for global public health, but some subpopulations are in higher danger. Extreme temperatures and air pollution are tightly related to climate change and main sources of environmental hazard due to their detrimental effect on several important life outcomes. Moreover, current social inequalities often map existing or emerging environmental inequalities. In my PhD thesis, I contribute to the burgeoning literature interested on the population consequences of climate change and socioeconomic inequalities with four chapters. In the first and second chapter, I study how socioeconomic status moderates the effect of extreme temperatures on birth outcomes and mortality in Spain. In the third chapter, I focus on disparities in the exposure to air pollution at schools in Italy. In the fourth chapter, I inquire how a policy improving air quality in London benefitted children school attendance. Overall, the thesis shows socioeconomic status to importantly affect vulnerability to environmental risks with concerning implications on how climate change could affect existing social inequalities in the future.
This thesis deals with the digitization of public services. It seeks to explain why some countries appear to digitize their public service offer at greater speed and with more ease than others, despite similar backgrounds in terms of wealth, IT infrastructure and administrative capacity. For this, the cases of Denmark, France and Germany are compared with respect to their implementation of encompassing, national systems for the provision of citizen-friendly public services online. The time frame under observation roughly covers the years 2000 until the late 2010s. Expert interviews and governmental documents form the basis for the analysis. The dominant administrative culture as well as the politicoadministrative structure that governs responsibility for administrative service provision emerged as the principal forces to explain the speed and success of states’ digitization efforts. A bureaucratic cultural legacy slows down the drive to digitize public services. A decentralized and incoherently organized administrative structure renders digitization more difficult, time-intensive and costly and leads to a disjointed service offer.
What is the role of the Advocate General (the AG) in bringing about jurisprudential change? This thesis provides a comprehensive and systematic account of AG influence on doctrinal development in EU competition law. Empirical legal research has dedicated some attention to AG influence by studying how often and to what extent the European Court of Justice (the Court) follows her opinions. The main difficulty of these existing accounts lies in the precise determination of when the Court reached a certain conclusion at the behest of an AG and when it arrived there on its own. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the present thesis examines the impact the AG can have by illuminating her role within the Court – both as an initiator and driver of change. For this purpose, this thesis develops an institutionalist theory of jurisprudential change that fleshes out two distinct modes of change: disruptive and continuous change. These modes are associated with permissive conditions that arise from different combinations of contextual factors. Depending on how specific factors are combined, stronger or weaker incentives for either type of change emerge. This thesis combines quantitative methods with case study evidence to corroborate the hypotheses on which the proposed theory rests. Based on an original dataset containing 263 hand-coded observations, it uses statistical modelling to identify paradigmatic opinions in which the AG opted for change over consolidation. In line with the theory developed, it concludes that disruptive change is more likely in cases where the AG enjoys little discretion, but barriers to change are low. In turn, continuous change is more likely when the AG has a wide margin of discretion, but barriers to change are high. The thesis finds that it is the AG’s role as an actor of change that renders her presence distinct and indispensable for the Court.
Why and how did modern states emerge in Southwestern Europe? These are the main questions that this thesis answers by examining the debt of six municipalities of the Crown of Aragon during the 18th century through a multiscale, transversal, and comparative approach. The ancient practices which constituted the Aragonese polity appeared in the mid-fourteenth century and survived at least until the mid-eighteenth century partially thanks to the debt of the municipalities. Towns and kingdoms were in many cases ruled by assemblies of creditors by virtue of debt restructuring agreements. Debt accounts for the long survival of the Aragonese polity, but also for its sclerosis. The financial situation of the debtholders, mostly ecclesiastical institutions, prevented rulers from defaulting on municipal debt and adopting drastic measures against the Church, as they feared a financial meltdown. The emergence of the modern state was an intricate process which started by 1750, mainly due to the collapse of the ancient mechanisms. The modern state appeared as a set of practices devised and implemented by a myriad of actors who tried to recompose social and political life. State formation was first and foremost a local process in which municipal debt proved crucial too. The examination of local dynamics reveals that modern states in Southwestern Europe followed similar paths during the early phases of their formation.
Cette recherche porte sur le positionnement public des musulmans de France sur le terrain des valeurs, dans un contexte où les études ont démontré une forme plus aiguë de conservatisme chez les musulmans français (comme dans d’autres catégories religieuses) que dans la moyenne nationale. En interrogeant un échantillon de personnalités que je qualifie de « musulmans vocaux », j’observe les difficultés pour ceux-ci à porter une parole publique « en tant que musulmans » auprès du public musulman français et de la sphère publique. Une difficulté qui concerne en particulier les débats publics autour des valeurs, dans un contexte où islam et Occident sont bien souvent construits de façon antagonique. Je démontre que le public musulman, lui-même clivé sur le terrain des valeurs, participe bel et bien aux clivages existants dans la sphère publique. Plutôt qu’une opposition entre islam de France et République française, on retrouve des clivages qui se superposent aux clivages nationaux. En menant une étude de cas ciblée sur les positionnements adoptés par ces personnalités durant les débats sur le Mariage pour tous, je démontre enfin que des considérations d’ordre stratégique, politique et citoyen ont conditionné les positionnements des uns et des autres, audelà même du spectre des valeurs.
In recent decades the cultural underpinnings of the European integration process have attracted more in-depth attention as scholars have unpacked the European Community’s efforts to stimulate the process of cultural Europeanisation. My research builds on the literature underlining the importance of political symbolism in the consolidation of the Community. I argue that international exhibitions, traditionally understood as diplomatic theatres for the display of symbolic nationhood, fulfilled a similar function for the European Community. This thesis is the first comprehensive study of an important platform for the discursive legitimation of the Community: namely, the European Community’s pavilions in Universal Expositions. More specifically, it examines Europe’s contributions to the Expos in Brussels in 1958, Montreal in 1967, Seville in 1992 and Shanghai in 2010. This thesis is based on research carried out in over a dozen archives in Europe and Canada, as well as oral history interviews with the European officials, architects and designers involved in developing the pavilions and curating the exhibitions. The chapters dealing with the four case studies analyse the preparations that preceded the Expos, and the products of these negotiations. I reveal that the exhibitions included narratives on the Community as both a modernising force in Europe and a protector and promoter of European culture. Furthermore, I illustrate how the Community pavilions argued for a stronger global position for Europe, whilst spreading an image of the Community’s positive influence throughout the world. I use a visual methodology which leans heavily on the analysis of sources such as photographs of the pavilions and exhibition displays, videos and brochures. By focusing on the discursive legitimation strategies in the Community’s Expo participation, this thesis sheds new light on the history of European cultural policy and public diplomacy.
The utility of horsepower did not end with the invention of the coal-powered steam engine in the eighteenth century. The British economy remained horse-drawn until the 1950s. Drawing on archival research in the UK, the thesis contributes to an understanding of the material basis of the economy through a history of consumption. This thesis frames human reliance on horsepower following Erich Zimmermann’s functional resource theory, whereby resources acquire or lose (social) value depending on social, cultural, political, or technological change. Resources in this sense are not fixed, but open-ended and reversible. Thus, horsepower is made in the way society perceives, experiences, and knows this animal resource. The thesis starts by discussing the varying uses of horsepower in the British economy and its eventual demise. It shows how producers and users of horsepower both influenced and were affected by the horse’s disappearance. Moreover, the thesis highlights the role of institutional actors in this process. It eventually studies the decision of businesses to replace horsepower with fossil fuel powered technology and the impact that had on those working closely with the horse. Furthermore, the thesis pays attention to the external factors that unmade horsepower, such as the role of globalisation, social structures, users’ preferences, or shocks. The study considers the lessons from previous energy transitions, the reasons for the longevity of horsepower, and its (dis-) use. It argues firstly that shifts in energy usage take a long time. Secondly, this process needs to be situated its regional, national, and global context, and thirdly, requires a high degree of political and entrepreneurial imagination and willingness to take risks. Lastly, shifts and dynamics in the cultural perception of horsepower in society determine its use.
This thesis contributes to the debate over the role, impact, and limitations of regulation as a tool for shaping innovative markets. This contribution delineates the issues that arise at the intersection of innovation that takes place in the markets and regulatory intervention in such markets prompted by the dual objective of removing existing inefficiencies in the functioning of the markets, and of facilitating further innovation. The specific foci of the thesis are the concerns arising from the demand-side of the market, notably consumer choice and decision-making. This emphasis on the demand-side is prompted by the changing role of consumers within the process of innovation in the realm of digital and data-driven economy, the regulatory implications of which are currently underexplored in the legal scholarship. The premises for the problematics addressed in this thesis are twofold: the first concerns the presumption of markets’ efficiency in delivering welfare-enhancing innovation as the outcome of the supply-side market mechanism, notably market competition; the second stems from the role of regulation as a value-free tool for facilitating innovation by removing supply-side obstacles. Although policy papers, impact assessments and legislative proposals dazzle with references to ‘more and better choice’ for consumers by means of more innovation, no substantive and systematic analysis of the impact of innovation on consumer welfare is undertaken. Welfare-enhancing effects are largely assumed, following ‘the more, the better’ approach as a paragon for market efficiency. However, such approach to regulating innovation is only seemingly value-free and instead diverts the innovation and market shaping function from regulation to market forces. This thesis argues that the current approach is suboptimal in the context of digital innovation and attempts to make the first steps towards a more demand-conscious approach to regulation.
This thesis examines whether and when social media increases polarization. The first empirical chapter looks at the association between social media use and changes in polarization over time. Using data from nine waves of the British Election Study (2015-2019), it shows that self-reported exposure to political information on Facebook and Twitter is associated with increased polarization during each of the last three UK general elections. The second and third empirical chapters explore the conditions under which exposure to political information on social media increases polarization. Using data from two online experiments in the United Kingdom and Ireland, the second chapter shows that exposure to pro-attitudinal information on social media increases polarization, whereas exposure to counterattitudinal information on social media decreases polarization. Furthermore, it finds that the effects of pro- and counter-attitudinal information on polarization are not moderated by the information’s emotional tone. Finally, the third empirical chapter shows that people’s choice of what information to read on social media can have a polarizing effect. Using data from the online experiment in the United Kingdom, it finds that pro-attitudinal information increases polarization to the same extent when people are forced to read the information and when they can choose if they want to read it or not. In contrast, counter-attitudinal information decreases polarization significantly less when people can choose to read the information or not compared to when they are forced to read it. A growing list of political observers worry about the polarizing impact of social media. The thesis contributes to our understanding of social media’s impact on polarization by showing when social media is more likely to increase polarization and when it is less likely to do so.
This thesis investigates the negotiations over Spanish accession to the European Community, which ran from 1979 to 1985. It focuses on the economic dimension of membership negotiations and explores three economic sectors (industry, fisheries, and agriculture). By adopting this approach, this thesis aims to go beyond purely political perspectives which have predominated in the literature. In doing so, this doctoral dissertation challenges traditional accounts of how Spain joined the EC. These accounts focus on the political meaning of the enlargement toward a newly established democratic country and the diplomatic disputes over the intra-Community agro-budgetary issues, which are traditionally portrayed as the main reason behind delays in achieving the overall political objective of securing the Spanish democracy through the EC membership. Instead, this thesis shows a much more complex account in which both parties struggled to Europeanise Spain according to their material interests, and often contrary to the public discourses coming from the main actors at the time. The Community made efforts to force Spain to open its highly protected industrial market, to discipline the large and disobedient Spanish fishing fleet, and to postpone Spanish incorporation into the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy. At the same time, Spanish governments were reluctant to Europeanise Spain’s economy by prioritising short-term benefits of maintaining the status quo over taking painful but necessary measures. Finally, this thesis sheds new light on the Community-Spain relations during the first half of the 1980s, the role of Spain within the EC’s southern enlargement, and the way that Spain transitioned from an authoritarian regime with a protected domestic economy to a democratic system with an economic structure comparable to other Western European states.
Increasingly, the environmental impact of animal agriculture is being recognised. In the past, climate criticism was largely reserved for the fossil fuel sector, or even the transport and aviation sectors. However, now it is being realised that the agricultural sector is also a major contributor to climate change, particularly in terms of livestock production. Despite this, little attention has been paid, either in academic writing or in policy making, to improving the climate impacts of the livestock sector. This thesis begins to address this gap. Using a novel critical frame analysis approach, it seeks to provide a broad macro-level analysis of various legal regimes on the international and European level that affect emissions from cattle (and where relevant, livestock more broadly). On the basis of this critical frame analysis, tensions, synergies and common themes for livestock emissions mitigation across these regimes can be identified and investigated. It is hoped that this can help to strengthen productive synergies and to reduce damaging tensions while promoting fairer and more effective emissions mitigation for the sector. Most importantly, the thesis highlights affluence as the ‘forgotten’ problem in reducing cattle emissions. The importance of this key insight in terms of tackling future livestock emissions trajectories is significant, particularly in relation to the climate justice dimension of climate mitigation.
This dissertation examines the concept of human rights due diligence (HRDD) under international soft law and its transposition into business regulation, with a particular focus on the European Union context. It traces the evolution of HRDD – starting from the work of the United Nations to the recent contributions of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The inquiry finds that HRDD is a concept of remarkable depth, whose features make it suitable to address human rights abuse in the globalised economy. Yet, there are also a number of practical and conceptual concerns. For instance, it is argued that the concept of HRDD features a high level of abstraction, which leads to ambiguities at the stage of implementation. In view of these findings, the transposition of HRDD into business law provides an opportunity, not only to build on the strengths of the concept, but also to counter some of its weaknesses. In addition, the thesis addresses two questions of international law concerning, first, the legality of HRDD legislation in view of its extraterritorial implications and, second, the relationship between relevant legal acts and the duties of states under international human rights law. It is held that regulators enjoy considerable leeway under international law to facilitate or require HRDD even beyond their own borders. Yet, states are presently under no international obligation to regulate HRDD processes – even though new developments are in sight. Finally, drawing on the findings of this research, the dissertation reviews Directive 2014/95/EU and Regulation (EU) 2017/821 as two precedents of HRDD legislation in the European Union. The two legal acts pursue very different strategies to promote HRDD processes with, it is argued, a varying degree of success. Through these assessments, the thesis provides a set of recommendations that may inform the transposition of the concept into business law.
The thesis narrates the transformation of international arbitration in the late 19th century, from 1863-1888. By deciphering unpublished archives and manuscripts, and contextualising legal texts, political debates and social movements, the thesis argues that international arbitration was constructed as a politically and legally productive framework in European diplomacy and international law in the course of the late 19th century. The thesis examines how different professional groups — pacifists, politicians, and international lawyers — played their parts in articulating and promoting arbitration as a legal solution in international dispute settlement in order to eradicate war and maintain peace. To understand how different ideas and projects of arbitration had made this general transformation possible, we need to trace the trajectories where ideas were formulated and contested. The thesis starts from the 1863-1872 Alabama dispute by arguing that its final settlement — the 1872 Alabama arbitration — inspired a handful of in-depth contemporary reflections and optimism about international legal reform and the progress of civilisation in the late 19th century. The thesis then separately traces the contours of social, intellectual and political projects of international arbitration in Britain, France and Italy, through which it aims to explain how different stances towards international arbitration were shaped by their particular regional backgrounds. On these bases, the thesis explores how multiple political and intellectual imaginations of international arbitration confronted each other and helped to consolidate the legal frameworks of arbitration in two important international law institutions in the late 19th century — the International Law Association and the Institut de droit international.
The sixties witnessed many youth unrests across the globe. Compared to previous decades, a distinctive decisional category emerged: youth. They gained a central role by defining themselves in opposition to other generations and perceiving themselves as a unique one with a purpose to change history through ‘revolution’. At the same time, the youngsters considered themselves to belong to a movement that transcended their local city, the national borders, and ideological barriers. Yet, there were different ways to express the discontent against the values of the ‘gerontocracy’. This dissertation creates a local, regional, and comparative analysis of the history of sixty-eighters from Hungary and Romania. It will focus on their childhood experiences and on the impact of political decisions. A significant determinant was the cultural and psychological background of each of the protagonists. The group cohesion and the cultural and psychological background of each protagonist determined their protest tactics. Some youngsters were not interested in politics, but the state considered their activities, such as listening to Radio Free Europe or playing in a rock band to be a threat. A variety of cultural genres were involved in this process: music was an essential component of the late 1960s, which had a notable role in challenging the Establishment. Thus, another line of inquiry will explain how musicians and artists used different protest expressions, such as Maoism, rock music, or ‘passive resistance' as protest tactics. The relationship between artists and the state was not always an oppositional one. Instead, this project will use James Scott’s concepts of infrapolitics and hidden transcripts to show there was always a negotiation and a compromise between various networks.
This dissertation addresses the legal framework and social embedding of the Basque language. As a minority language located between two European states (France and Spain) with different approach towards minority languages, the task of understanding the legal framework of the Basque language and its relationship with the community of speakers is challenging. In fact, this legal framework results in a vast array of legal rules for Basque speakers. This research examines the fundamental and linguistic rights of these minority language speakers (norm users), from international and European legal frameworks to national or regional ones. It carries out a comparative analysis between France and Spain, and between the three Basque regions to examine the legal framework. This doctrinal analysis is complemented by the study of key actors participating in the context and implementation of the legal norms regulating the Basque language. An emphasis is placed on the analysis of the relationship between the legal framework of the Basque language and the Basque society, applying a sociolegal methodology. By focusing on the examples of education and media, this thesis aims to shed light on the relationship between law and context in the case of the Basque language. It displays the tension and collaboration between norm givers and norm users in the case of a minority language. Studying the examples of education and media exposes the difficulties that Basque speakers face, as well as their commitment to the survival of their language. At the same time, progressive legal frameworks for Basque have enabled the creation of linguistic policies favouring the recovery and development of this language, where active collaboration between the three Basque regions is increasing. Ultimately, this research showcases a contextualised understanding of the legal framework of the Basque language, telling the story of this minority language in law.
This research deals with the legal responsibility of states to provide climate finance to developing countries in order to facilitate climate mitigation and adaptation. The research demonstrates that the area of climate finance has not escaped globalization, where global actors operating at a level beyond the state (the UNFCCC and several Climate Funds) have increasingly taken over some of the climate finance functions previously performed by states. Against this backdrop, the thesis also examines the role of international bodies in providing climate finance, assesses to what extent these bodies are accountable to affected local stakeholders, and puts forward recommendations to foster increased accountability. The research project employs Global Administrative Law (GAL) as a normative framework for assessing and fostering accountability. This thesis is relevant, first and foremost, as an examination of the extent to which global climate finance is adequate for addressing climate change impacts in developing countries. To this end, it engages in a detailed analysis of the international legal framework for climate change and of the relevant financial instruments. It also engages in a normative evaluation of these instruments using the standards proposed by GAL. In keeping with this, the research gives substance and a better definition to these standards. As such, the thesis has the potential to contribute not only to the literature on climate finance, but also to the literature on GAL. It also sheds light on the relationship between climate finance and GAL, a topic that has been largely neglected in the academic literature so far.
Few materials have preserved so much of the visualisation and friendship-practice of the cult of friendship as the album amicorum (friendship album). The albums earned their name from their role in the practice of friendship, remembrance, networking, and the creation of social communities and identities, and above all the visualisation of the same. This thesis examines the social function of images in friendship albums in the latter part of the centuries-long practice of the genre. It focuses on the years between the end of the Seven Year's War and the period before the German Revolution (1763–1830s), a time period when the album practice became particularly pronounced in the material culture of friendship. The sources for this study are c. 7000 individual entries, from 282 German albums in three collections; the city archive (Stadtarchiv) in Göttingen (180 albums), the city library (Stadtbibliothek) in Nuremberg (67 albums) and the city museums (Städtische Museen) in Jena (35 albums). The aim of the thesis is to identify the shared visual literacy within album communities and explore how and in what way images have been employed to create, maintain and display friendships and social belonging. By analysing common themes, motifs and artistic techniques, the thesis discusses how artistic and thematic choices had the potential to visualise shared emotional ideals and visual literacy, social belonging and aspects of individual relationships and social identity. In addition to materiality, the chapters are divided by theme within which the social aspect of the album images are explored: nature and imagery relating to the natural landscape as a mediator of friendship and belonging; student circles, masculinity and depictions of memberships; the visualisation of the cult of friendship and the complexity of the friendship concept; and remembrance, friendship and the inclusion of mourning iconography.
This thesis focuses on the political and economic thought the seventeenth century diplomat and author William Temple (1628–1699). His works have previously been analysed mainly from the point of view of literary studies, diplomatic history. What is missing is a work dissecting his views on human nature and the consequences of that view on his political and economic thought. Using Temple’s published works as my sources, my aim is to show what Temple was trying to do with his views of human nature in particular, and how these views affected his political and economic perspectives. This thesis shows, that Temple was trying to convince not only of political elite but also the general public. This thesis is structured around two specific research questions: 1) which elements make up Temple’s political and economic ideas? and 2) what was Temple trying to with his ideas of human nature and how did it affect his political and economic thought? I have chosen to answer these questions with two independent but intertwined themes: 1) Temple’s view of human nature and 2) the consequences of human nature unto his political and economic thought. Both themes break into smaller categories which are analysed as their own entities. My main aim is to show that Temple maintained that due to human nature change was inevitable, and he tried to find ways to support and defend the existing society but also prepare it for change. As a result Temple tried to not only to manage and control change but also to embrace change. In the political sphere he wished to establish and maintain a structure that allowed people to act on policy according to their motivations, but ensure that structures themselves would remain untouched. He used the sphere of economy in two different manners: it was to accumulate wealth for polity but also to serve as a diversion from political activity.
In the last decades, the EU has gradually become Member States’ preferred vehicle through which they deepen intra-European cooperation. In that context, they act mainly through the European Union and its institutional apparatus, which they have endowed with defined missions and for the benefit of which they have limited their sovereign rights. Yet the establishment of the Union has also given rise to a Union system lato sensu outside the Union legal order stricto sensu but within the broader system of public international law within which that order is situated. In this grey area, Member States act collectively, alongside, below and above the Union in close connection with its integration agenda, by way of treaties governed by international law. In a cases-based analysis, this research unpacks those forms of intergovernmental action, from the early days of the EEC up until now. The thesis investigates the following questions: How to differentiate action through and outside the Union? Why do Member States take the intergovernmental route when they could have acted through the Union? What is the effect of ‘reverting to international law’ on the development of the Union and its institutional balance? And conversely how does Union law and its development affect the ways in which Member States act collectively outside the Union framework? The thesis ultimately nuances the dominant view that sees intergovernmental action in a negative normative light. In the current constitutional context, acting intergovernmental does carry significant risks in terms of legal compliance, accountability, and transparency. Yet many intergovernmental accords, it is argued, enhance, or protect the foundational trust between Member States and vis-à-vis the Union that makes common action possible.
This doctoral thesis is a social history of the Greek migrant workers in West Germany, with an emphasis on the role of the sending country in all the stages of their migration journey. It examines the different ways the Greek migrants’ transnational bonds were formed, expressed and preserved in their daily life in West Germany in the period 1960-1989. Heated debates about the desirability of emigration and return, confrontations and divisions in the realms of the Greek migrant community in West Germany, manipulation efforts and failed initiatives of the sending state are at the centre of my investigation. Starting from the postwar reconstruction period, I set the background of the political and social transformations in Greece and West Germany, which made up the push and pull factors of the Gastarbeiter system. In the three Cold War decades, the Greek Gastarbeiter were present in West Germany and continuities and ruptures in policymaking and social attitudes determined their fate. In a nutshell, this research project seeks to answer the following questions: who were the Greek Gastarbeiter? What did the Greek state do for them? How was their agency expressed? The Greek Gastarbeiter might have been “birds of passage”, but their imprint in the evolving realities of postwar Greece was indelible.
There are currently three regional human rights courts active on three continents. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights are already well-established courts within their regional frameworks, whereas the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights only started issuing judgments in the last decade. Operating in different contexts, the three courts are now engaged in a continuous development of their case law to fulfil their task of protecting human rights. The question arises as to what extent these regional courts refer to the jurisprudence of each other, and that of other international courts, as part of their judicial reasoning. The use of external decisions in the case law of these regional courts is an example of judicial borrowing. Whereas legal mechanisms facilitate this practice, contextual factors shape it. This thesis unravels the role of judicial borrowing in the development of the courts’ jurisprudence. Thus, it assesses both the authority of specific actors in the development of international human rights law, and the institutional contexts surrounding these courts. The research highlights the interplay between the internal structures of the regional systems and the external international legal sphere. The thesis’ methodology builds on the premise that international law is best understood by combining the internal doctrinal study of the law with the study of external, contextual factors. The combined study of the internal and external perspectives reveals the practice of international law and its changes over time. Thus, the study is supplemented by a citation network analysis of the reference to external judicial decisions by each of the courts. The thesis shows the evolving patterns and relationships formed by the citation practices of the three regional human rights courts, and thus provides a novel and empirical understanding of the interaction between the regional human rights courts.
This thesis examines women’s participation in the Legionary Movement or Iron Guard, a far-right, anti-Semitic movement active in interwar Romania. Over four chapters, I analyze how the participation of women changed over time, the different forms this participation took, and how these different forms shaped and redefined political relations within the movement. The first chapter focuses on women’s participation in the student activism that characterized Romanian universities throughout the interwar period. University politics played a major role in the origins, development, and self-image of the Legionary Movement. The chapter follows the evolution of the movement’s use of university politics through the lens of increasing female participation. The second chapter is entirely devoted to the exploration of family relations in the Legionary Movement’s ideology and experience. In the third chapter, I analyze the open support or sympathy for the Legionary Movement held among the intellectual elites of Bucharest, the aristocracy, and, finally, among some feminist circles. Gender and class dynamics are inseparable in the analysis of the political beliefs and activity of the women protagonists of this chapter, whose support of or sympathy for the Legion complicates the notion of membership and opens different perspectives on the intersection of gender and class within the movement. Finally, the fourth chapter explores the adoption and adaptation by some legionary women and, especially, by the more formal feminine section, of violence as a form of political action. What emerges from this study is the experimental nature of women’s participation, the constant redefinition of its forms and limits. Moving in an ideological framework designed for them by men, women found their space(s) of agency at the interplay of discourse and practice, through the opportunities for political action offered by the complexity of lived experience.
The starting point of the thesis is the hunch that judges in private Competition Law litigation cannot directly appraise (complex) empirical or theoretical economic evidence. Thus, the first question the thesis asks is whether this is true and if so, why this is the case. The answer, found with the help of behavioural psychology literature, is that economic evidence is indeed problematic for judges and, as a result, is systematically undervalued. The reason for this is that judges distrust evidence of a probabilistic, statistical or circumstantial nature and avoid making inferences from it, as such evidence is open-textured and allows the judge to imagine multiple subjectively plausible scenarios. Furthermore, the thesis shows that judges need to employ coping strategies in the form of decision making heuristics when having to appraise complex empirical or theoretical economic evidence. These heuristics form the basis for the content and explain the adoption and success of the economic theories employed in Competition Law litigation, such as the Chicago School in the US. In other words, those economic theories which make it easier for judges to navigate complex economic evidence are likely to be more successful. It is thus theories which are easier to apply, rather than those which are most precise, that tend to find favour with judges. Based on these findings I make the argument that the institutional characteristics of the legal system translate into a preference for a certain type of economics, which is based on simple, clearly-defined and axiomatic rules for categorising conduct. While I initially illustrate this claim by analysing the Chicago School in the US, I ultimately aim to show that axiomatic economics is present also in European national courts in private litigation. Lastly, the thesis analyses the implications of these findings for the relationship between public and private enforcement.
With the approval of Directive (EU) 2016/681 on the use of Passenger Name Records (PNR), the personal information provided to carriers by air passengers crossing European Union (EU) borders is available for mining by national law enforcement, third countries, and Europol. This is in line with other pre-emptive security policies, but it goes further in generalizing suspicion over large numbers of EU and non-EU travelers. After years of pressure from the United States under the banner of the global war on terror, air companies are no longer between a rock and a hard place. They are now able to lawfully disclose big data gathered as part of the normal course of business. Following booking and reservation, up to 19 items of individual data must be provided to Passenger Information Units for criminal investigations and other appropriate actions. The intra-EU PNR system has managed to fly under the radar of scholars and public opinion. Most specialized literature is limited to superficial discussions on security and privacy. There is insufficient research looking at it comprehensively and in detail. This thesis explores this novel security policy in depth and questions its validity. It argues that the PNR scheme should be invalidated by the Court of Justice of the EU for two reasons. In the first place, the Union was not competent to approve a secondary law so intrusive to the national security agendas and policies of the member states. Secondly, the Directive disproportionately encroaches upon the fundamental rights of passengers. There is, as yet, no doctoral project which analyzes the EU PNR so thoroughly. This work fills a gap in scholarly writing regarding fundamental rights and creeping competences in EU law. Its novelty lies in questioning issues that have been overlooked, or insufficiently addressed, in the journey of the PNR Directive.
It is well-established that the traditional working-class culture played a decisive role in shaping workers’ attitudes towards the communist parties and their rule in Central Europe in the aftermath of the World War II. However, the diverseness of workers’ culture arising from the pre-war developments is rarely taken into account. Moreover, in the Polish case, the post-war communist party is frequently treated as a homogeneous entity alien to the workers and their culture and not as a continuation of a pre-war organization of the Polish working class. This dissertation – a microhistorical study of shopfloor and local politics in Żyrardów, a company town in Central Poland – crosses the cesura of the war to illuminate the multitude of ideas and practices of the working class. The communist party is treated here as a heterogeneous organization divided along ideological and institutional lines in which working-class members possessed a degree of agency and influence. Many communists, often driven by post-Luxemburgist ideas, were responsible for organizing works councils in the years 1944-1945. They were countered by other party members in the state economic apparatus, and pre-war officials allied with them, striving to limit the scope of workers’ participation, and who by mid-1945 had succeeded. However, the skilled, male, working-class communists – who had dominated the party since the interwar period – were able to use the party structures to alter state and managerial policies until the late 1940s. Female unskilled workers, in turn, who before 1939 remained outside the labour movement had to, and frequently did, strike to communicate their demands. Simultaneously they were also the most eager to participate in the productivist policies. Unlike the skilled and unionized workers, they did not oppose the Taylorization of the shopfloor during the interwar period but embraced the ethos of individualized labour and this attitude persisted after the war.
In a context of growing anxiety about globalisation and social inequality, debates on the allocation of benefits and burdens of European integration are commonplace. Despite the key role that the Court of Justice of the European Union played in the process, little attention has been given to the way in which its doctrines and decisions benefit some groups at the expense of others. This thesis maps the ways in which the phenomenon of Integration through Law affects the distribution of wealth and income. Using four different field studies (the Common Agricultural Policy, Cohesion Policy, Direct Taxation, and Student Mobility), it analyses the conflicts of interests present in each policy, how they translate into (unequal) litigation strategies, and how the Court resolves such conflicts. In doing so, this research illustrates how the case law of the Court is both the result and the cause of distributive conflicts. It also unveils the Court’s own assumptions about how benefits and burdens should be allocated across the subjects of EU law. The thesis concludes that distributive conflicts are not an exceptional or recent phenomenon, but endogenous to Integration through Law. Judicial decisions bear a distributive impact in ways that are particular to each policy field, but usually to the detriment of the have-nots and those already disadvantaged by the policy-making process. In this context European Union law, and judge-made law, should be included in discussions on social inequality and liberated from the assumption that they are neutral and a vector of social unity.
Custom remains a widely discussed source of international law even if its unwritten nature has raised more questions than it has provided answers. At the same time, rarely do discussions regarding customary international law (CIL) transcend the more traditional boundaries of public international law into its newer branches, such as international human rights law (IHRL). When discussions do transcend such boundaries, IHRL is often discarded as unsuited to be informed through custom. The aim of the present work is to address this divide by exploring more closely the possible intersection of CIL and IHRL. In this context the thesis identifies and zooms onto what it calls custom’s “vitality paradox” — its persistence in the practice of international law despite the multiple challenges raised in the scholarship. To see whether this paradox also manifests itself in the field of IHRL, the thesis addresses the case law of judicial bodies that apply international human rights law. It demonstrates that the sceptical discourse on CIL in general, as well as in respect of IHRL in particular, has not played out in practice. To better locate and understand this vitality paradox and explore its implications for the theory and the practice of CIL identification, the thesis traces the specificities of custom and its identification by drawing analogies with custom’s operation in Roman law, civil law before its codification, and common law. As a result, a necessary link between custom and dispute settlement and the multiple-participant process of identification centred around the latter is uncovered. This view of custom identification offers intrinsic safeguards against the feared degeneration of custom into (judicial) wishful thinking and is equally applicable to the field of human rights law. Building on these findings, the thesis concludes with exploring the specificities of IHRL to determine how it should be informed by means of custom without unduly stretching its scope.
The preliminary ruling procedure (PRP) of the European court of justice ensures the uniformity of EU law through the cooperation with national courts. However, the mechanism is simultaneously ‘the infringement procedure of the EU citizen’: it opens the gates of the court for individuals to bring their claims to the court, and it does so successfully. Yet, there is something more to a procedure so strongly linked to the need to ensure the uniformity of a legal system always afraid of fragmenting and crumbling. Individuals are there, but the procedure is not fully about them. One feels a tension in a procedure that aims towards the concrete and the abstract at the same time. This thesis argues that the procedure is best understood if we consider that two different disputes coexist within it. This entails a new way of approaching the PRP: rather than looking at the dialogue between courts, the key here is the transformation of the dispute, from the main dispute to the Europeanized one, that takes place in the proceedings. Moreover, the thesis proposes a novel framework of analysis with which to explore the procedure. It unpacks the procedure to unveil its different procedural factors and analyze how they contribute to the transformation of the dispute. The thesis provides a sober picture of the individuals in the proceedings. It first demonstrates empirically that the court maintains both narratives, rights protection and uniformity, for most rulings. This sometimes comes at the cost of transforming the individual in the proceedings. Far from irrelevant, this confirms that the procedure is a tool for the protection of individual rights; but it places such findings in a more nuanced context, which considers what exactly this implies and what consequences it has for the individual in the proceedings and for the uniformity goal of the PRP.
From the introduction: Une superbe carte postale, éditée au début du XXe siècle, retrouvée au fil de cette recherche témoigne d’une frontière aujourd’hui disparue : la frontière qui sépara la France et l’Allemagne entre 1871 et 1914. Sur le cliché, elle traverse les champs et les bois, et coupe transversalement la route Paris-Metz qui relie les villages lorrains de Mars-la-Tour, en territoire français, et de Vionville, en territoire allemand. La frontière est matérialisée par une borne en pierre et par deux poteaux en fonte : le premier indique tout simplement « frontière » ; le second arbore une aigle impériale, sur fond blanc cerclé de rouge, au-dessus de laquelle est inscrit « Deutsches Reich ». À pied ou à bicyclette, elle paraît aisément franchissable, même si la présence visible de gendarmes français et allemands suggère qu’en ce lieu particulier se rencontrent – s’affrontent ? – deux souverainetés. Il faut en effet se plier aux contrôles effectués par les forces de l’ordre, chez qui une certaine fébrilité semble palpable, tout débordement pouvant en effet donner lieu à un incident aux conséquences diplomatiques imprévisibles.
This dissertation looks at how gender constitutes and is constituted by the migration process. It analyzes what it means for migrant women to return home and reintegrate into their societies after long-term labor migration. As such, it contributes to our understanding of gender transformations in situations of precarious mobility and provides multiple scenarios for dealing with it. Studies of migration have paid scant attention to the history of return and reintegration. Migrants' return, the dissertation argues, is challenging both individually and socially because it entails renegotiation of social orders, gender roles, and the political status of returnees. Returnees become symbols of social and individual change. The study refines the critical migration concepts - "labor migrant," "returnee," and "reintegration" - by analyzing how they apply within a particular emigration-dependent context while constructed within the receiving states' political agendas. It shows that these categories are strategically used to marginalize in the context of return as much as in migration contexts. The study is based on in-depth multilanguage interviews with sixty-five female migrants and over two hundred family and community members in Tajikistan. I argue that gender asymmetry is a product of social order in institutional and socio-political processes while also being a producer of social order at the same time. I have researched the case of return migration to 'post-socialist' Tajikistan. I demonstrate that systematic changes in attitudes toward self, family, and community are part of the reproduction of a double discourse that constitutes the gendered order. Migrant categories are the reflections of the structural inequalities that exist in the context of Tajikistan and Russia. Structural inequalities marginalize many people considered as part of a migrant group.
This dissertation assesses the harms of actual misinformation and compares it with the potential harms and benefits of the media’s attention to as well as interventions against misinformation. The attention and interventions, what I together refer to as the coverage of misinformation, I argue not to be in pro portion to the magnitude of the problem of misinformation itself. To test this argument, my dissertation disentangles which type of exposure - actual misinformation, the coverage of misinformation, partisan news, or a media literacy intervention - fosters misperceptions, lowers trust and increases skepticism about verified facts the most. The dissertation is structured in four chapters.
Despite increasing research into populist parties in power, their impact from within subnational institutions has been neglected. Taking a novel local perspective, this thesis enquires into the consequences of populist radical right parties in leadership of local government. I compare four Western European cases, in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, and ask three main questions. First, to what extent do they generate policy impact in line with party ideology? Second, to what extent do they undergo a mainstreaming of discourse with the transition from opposition into local government responsibility? And third, by which processes is their impact in policy and mainstreaming in discourse made, and how do these processes vary cross-nationally? The thesis argues that the degree of radicalism of these parties in local government leadership is shaped according to two principal factors. First, the degree to which power sharing is imposed by the institutional setting. A mayor in a consensual system, like the Swiss case, is constrained to be more moderate compared to a mayor in a majoritarian system, like the Italian case. Second, the involvement of the central party, and the strategic motivation behind their involvement. In particular, the use of local government as part of a mainstreaming strategy is crucial to understand the relative moderation of the French case. I show how these factors lead to populist radical right parties in the four cases operating through different multi-level governance configurations. Overall, the findings contribute to an understanding of the outcomes of populist radical right party-led local government across Western Europe, and the processes by which their impact is made, and open up a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives for future research.
This thesis seeks to elucidate the ways in which clothing was used by the members of Rome’s different socio-economic classes as a token to accentuate – or disguise – their social standing. In the early modern period, social identity was regarded as much more important than the individual. The social hierarchy was reflected in the hierarchies of appearance, in which clothes constructed the social body with the purpose of defining status and social rank. Clothes also functioned as an alternative currency. Garments were repaired and remade, circulated as perquisites, wages, gifts or bequests, or were pawned or sold on the second-hand market if the necessity arose. Investment in textiles and clothing therefore served as a type of savings; clothing as a means of payment could sometimes even be more valuable than money. Yet, this constant circulation of clothes could at times also create confusion within the hierarchies of appearance. By acquiring clothes otherwise out of reach of one’s socio-economic range, the wearers were enabled to ‘appear what they would like to be’ rather than as they were. Early modern Rome was a city with a dualistic nature, which seems to have permeated many aspects of Roman society around 1600 – the stern Counter-Reformation church on the one hand, and the lavish courts on the other; the sacred versus the profane; the importance of romanitas – an ancient Roman lineage – in contrast to a transnational character. Above all, it was a city where the controlled was constantly challenged by the chaotic. Such a fragmented context creates a number of interesting aspects when studying early-modern clothing as social markers. Thus, because of the Roman society’s very nature, this thesis argues that Rome presented an exceptional case in comparison to other societies in the Italian peninsula.
The aim of this thesis is to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of one of the most popular and prolific strands in European legal scholarship, i.e., constitutional pluralism. Specifically, the thesis seeks to challenge the central claim advanced by pluralist scholars with regard to the legal structure of the European Union: namely that the relationship between the EU and national legal orders is best conceptualized and understood as a heterarchical rather than hierarchical one. To that purpose, the thesis examines the work of leading scholars of pluralism– –Neil MacCormick, Kaarlo Tuori, Mattias Kumm, and Miguel Poiares Maduro–– all of whom advanced such heterarchical rather than hierarchical understandings of the aforesaid relationship. In so doing, the thesis attempts to address two main questions: first, does pluralism succeed in offering a descriptively and analytically sound account of the common European legal ordering; and second, how do the traditional, positivist, and hierarchical accounts of law fare in comparison with their pluralist contenders? The thesis concludes that while pluralist scholars should be given credit for bringing to light certain distinctive features of the European legal ordering, upon closer examination, their analyses appear to confirm (rather than deny) some crucial insights of said positivist theories, along with their allegedly outdated and distorting, hierarchical understanding of law and legality. Furthermore, it is argued that the pluralist attempts to set aside the positivist questions about the ultimate grounds of law, final authority and constitutional supremacy in the European Union prove unsuccessful in view of the growing constitutional disagreement therein. Finally, the thesis suggests that the nature of the current European legal or constitutional setting is better captured by the notion of national constitutional supremacy, rather than the core pluralist idea of heterarchy.
How do norms related to politics change? I draw upon norms related to two major stigmas in advanced industrial democracies: radical-right ideology and behavior associated with previous authoritarian regimes. Using original measures and sources of data, I illustrate ways in which these norms can change and make individuals become more willing to engage in previously stigmatized behavior. Chapter 1 uses a novel measure of how stigmatized it is to report support for the radical right, based on the proportion of the official vote for a party that is reported in post-electoral surveys. Using three different empirical approaches (regression discontinuity design, comparison of different modes of interview, and difference in differences), I show that once radical-right parties enter parliament their voters become significantly more comfortable in expressing their support. Chapter 2 looks into whether a similar finding can be replicated at the elite level. Using a newly collected dataset of speeches in German state parliaments, the analyses show that after radical-right politicians enter these parliaments the remaining politicians make their discourse more distant to that of the radical right. A mix of quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that this is driven by their desire to portray themselves as the enforcers of the norms breached by radical-right politicians. Chapter 3 uses a novel dataset of flags displayed in the façade of buildings to show that the process of Catalan independence normalized public expressions of Spanish nationalism—which were previously stigmatized due to their association with authoritarianism. Chapter 4 proposes ways in which political scientists can measure normative influences with recourse to observational data, based on the approaches used throughout the thesis.
Deliberating Development in India’s Forests is a thesis that examines how India’s forest laws and the right to free, prior, and informed consent or consent provision of forest-dwelling communities has shaped the relationship between the state and forest-dwelling communities in extractive frontiers. The relationship between the state and forest-dwelling communities is tenuous as land in forest areas is acquired based on the Doctrine of Eminent Domain for extractive industries. Through extensive fieldwork in three mining sites in the eastern state of Odisha, this thesis offers an analysis of how the consent provision is implemented and how the relationship between the state and the forest-dwelling citizen is mediated by the pro-business bureaucracy as one of competing sovereignties. The forest-dwelling communities describe that the state operates in multiple modalities in India’s forests to enable extraction and realize its pro-business ambitions. Drawing from interviews with forest-dwelling communities and their aspirational legal interpretation of the consent provision the thesis makes an argument for the state to operate in a deliberative mode in India’s forests supported by a shared sovereignty framework and theories of deliberative and nodal governance. The thesis charts out an institutional pathway to overcome the structural imbalance experienced by forest-dwelling communities in their negotiations and dialogue with the state. This pathway can pave the way to repair the ruptured relationship between forest-dwelling communities and the Indian state and entrench the state in its deliberative modality.
In 1499 the city of Venice unveiled their Torre dell’Orologio to the world stage that was Piazza San Marco. Perhaps due to its intricacy the Torre dell’Orologio has only ever been studied in isolation. Primarily this thesis seeks to place the clock tower back into its historical, social, spatial, and visual context, focusing on its ‘public facing’ aspects, rather than mechanical developments. This is achieved by considering the actors involved in the clock towers construction and maintenance, its possible design influences, the impact the tower had on its immediate built environment, and the way it was depicted and described. Importantly this thesis notes that Venice’s spectacular structure was not the first of its kind. In fact, the majority of cities in the Venetian Terraferma already boasted their own examples of monumental clocks before Venice’s was built. Problematically however, these examples are popularly characterised as ‘lesser copies’ of Venice’s monumental astronomical clock. Because each of these clocks have similarly only been discussed in monographic isolation, the patterns of similarities within this group of clock towers, which by the end of the sixteenth century represented a clear visual coherence, has not before been identified.  By reconsidering Venice’s monumental clock tower within the context of a selection of similar case-studies in Padua, Brescia, Vicenza, Udine, Sacile, and other clocks in Venice itself, which were developed throughout the long fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this thesis also asks why and how this visual coherence was born. In doing so the thesis likewise challenges the centre-periphery model that so often characterises the perception of Venice’s relationship to the Terraferma. Instead, it argues that in relation to public clock towers this apparent relationship was established after the fact, and as a result of Venice’s visibility, and later innovations after the war of the League of Cambrai.
This thesis analyses the history of international law and humanitarianism in the British Empire, concentrating on South Africa and Ireland from 1899 – 1921. Drawing from archival research gathered in South Africa, the UK, Ireland, and the United States, it contributes to global histories of international law. This project is framed as a socio-legal history, exploring how international legal categories and classifications shifted conflict experiences for ordinary people, including soldiers, prisoners, doctors, and nurses. It starts by analysing the emergence of international legal codification in the late-19th century, focusing on the 1899 Hague Conference. It first explores debates over the application of these laws devised at the Hague to the Second South African War (1899 – 1902), to understand the alleged limits of international law and its exclusion from internal, imperial conflicts. It then analyses the use of the Red Cross symbol and language of the Geneva Convention by guerrilla fighters in South Africa as constructing international law’s applicability through practice. Turning to Ireland, it uncovers a similar deployment of the medical relief under the aegis of the Red Cross during the Easter 1916 rebellion and subsequent guerrilla conflict. It shows that Irish activists used the rhetoric and methods of international humanitarian organisations during the struggle for independence (1916 – 1921). Finally, it explores the legal challenges made against the British Empire by Irish prisoners to be treated as prisoners of war rather than political prisoners as an effort to reclassify the conflict as an independent war.
“Call of duty” – why does the Catholic Church support European integration? I investigate the “puzzlement” caused by the situation in which an international religious institution, the Catholic Church, which is urged by its believers and political institutions to engage in criticism of the EU and the integration process, and itself sees the changes in EU policies as well, still advocates in favour of the Union in each instance where a choice must be made concerning a country’s membership. The dissertation features also two case studies. The first one concerns Poland in 2004 and the referendum on joining the European Union, and the second – 2016 UK with its “Brexit” referendum on leaving the EU. In both countries, despite considerable difference in the position of the Catholic Church and its political influence, as an institution, it strongly supported European integration – joining the EU in the former case, and remaining in it in the latter. The case studies analysis is preceded by an overview of the development of Catholic Social Doctrine as a vital background for understanding the logic of the actions undertaken by the Church.
This thesis explores the phenomenon of socialist's Poland entanglement with the West in the 1970s. Between 1970 and 1980, the period of Edward Gierek's leadership, Poland multiplied its economic and political contacts with capitalist countries, especially Western Europe. Against the backdrop of European détente, it became a frontrunner of East-West exchanges among the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and Warsaw Pact members. However, this experience of globalisation and Europeanisation weakened the socialist regime and offered the West leverage over its situation, proving critical for the country's crisis in the 1980s, and its political and economic future in the 1990s. As this thesis shows, the entanglement with the West was the outcome of conscious choices made by Polish socialist elites, who believed that Poland could open up towards the West without endangering socialism. Against the usual assumptions about the vulnerability of the socialist elites, this thesis presents them as confident and pro-active actors of the critical processes of the 1970s, including détente in the Cold War relations and globalisation. First, it does so by zooming on making, debating, and readjusting the national strategy, and second, by exploring its practices. Specifically, the thesis brings in the cases of cooperation with Western European states (Italy, France and the Federal Republic of Germany) and companies (Fiat, Berliet, Grundig, Thomson) in the production of cars, buses and audio equipment in Poland based on foreign licenses. By bridging the socialist regime's domestic history with phenomena such as Western European integration, oil crises, Helsinki process, or the sovereign debt crisis, this thesis offers an international reading of the Polish 1970s history. The 1970s were a transformative decade that reorganised global political and economic order. Poland was a case in this process.
This thesis examines the impact of the EU resolution framework on the way in which the twin goals of banking competition and financial stability are pursued. It reveals that the tension between these two goals, which was present during the European Financial Crisis, is being attenuated under the current framework. In Part I, the thesis shows that during the European Financial Crisis (2008-2014), EU policymakers were caught between a rock and a hard place. They could achieve either a competitive or a financially stable EU banking sector, but they could not choose both. This policy dilemma was rooted in the long-standing economic debate about the relationship between banking competition and financial stability. Part II shows that after 2014, EU policymakers revisited the stabilityoriented strategy that was in force during the European Financial Crisis. The creation of the Banking Union in 2014, which included the implementation of the EU resolution framework, challenged the competition-stability trade-off. The resolution regime reveals the intersection between these two policy objectives, and contributes to achieving coordination between them. Overall, the thesis investigates whether, from an empirical perspective, the EU resolution framework successfully reconciles the policy objectives of minimising the use of public funds, thereby creating a level playing field among banks, and protecting financial stability. Through a sample of quantitative and qualitative data, the thesis critically assesses whether the EU resolution framework has fulfilled this twofold purpose, and whether it has attenuated the policy dilemma between banking competition and financial stability. The findings demonstrate that the EU resolution framework has mitigated the tensions between these two policy goals in the EU banking sector.
The effects of anticompetitive conduct within global value chains (GVCs) may be felt far from the place where the anticompetitive conduct originates. This creates a vacuum in competition enforcement. The jurisdiction where the anticompetitive conduct takes place is not interested in investigating it, because its market is not affected. In contrast, the affected country can face legal challenges with asserting its jurisdiction over the case as well as run into other legal and technical challenges throughout the enforcement process. Although previous legal studies have analysed the extraterritorial application of competition laws and competition chapters enshrined into trade agreements, they did not address the specific problem of anticompetitive conduct that occurs within GVCs. This thesis fills this gap by answering the following question: How can competition and trade tools be used to tackle the anticompetitive conduct within GVCs? To answer this question, this thesis examines the limits of public and private competition enforcement in the selected jurisdictions: the EU, US and Japan. It also analyses the WTO framework and the scope of competition chapters enshrined in trade agreements. This thesis argues that the effects doctrine may justify extraterritorial application of competition law if the effects of the anticompetitive conduct are felt further down the supply chain. However, numerous uncertainties remain as to how jurisdictions apply this doctrine. Public enforcement can address the challenges better than private enforcement. As to trade instruments, the WTO does not offer viable solutions. Competition chapters need to be developed further and should be drafted taking into account the risks of anticompetitive conduct within GVCs.
The transnational history of the Soviet Union often goes against everything we know as citizens of the post-Soviet world. We are used to imagining the Iron Curtain as an impermeable obstacle and any meaningful connection between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world as clandestine, unofficial, and potentially subversive. But it was not always the case. I wish to open my thesis with a short dramatic exposition from the memoir of one of the protagonists of my thesis, the Soviet architect Felix Novikov: Soon [after the speech against the extravagances in architecture in 1953] the architectural bosses went abroad in search for examples worthy of emulation. The head of the Union of architects of the USSR, Pavel Abrosimov, left for Italy, Aleksandr Vlasov went to the US, Iosif Loveĭko who, in his absence became the chief architect of Moscow, left for France. After, each of them gave a talk about his impressions to the colleagues in the overcrowded lecture hall of the Central House of Architects. A year after the “historical” (without irony) speech the Party and government decree “On the elimination of extravagances in housing design and construction” appeared […] in the text of this document were such lines: “Obligate (the list of responsible organizations followed )… to be more daring in assimilation of the best achievements… of foreign construction.” The true “reconstruction” resulted in architecture that I call Soviet modernism started from this moment.”
Following the second revolution of republican Ukraine, Crimea was annexed by the Russian Federation in February 2014. The annexation, which took place via a rapid and smooth military operation, was confirmed by a controversial referendum held on 16 March. A few days later, when browsing the Internet for updates about the Crimean ‘crisis’, I came across a blog post where recent political events were commented upon by a group of people in Kerch, who signed themselves as ‘Crimean Italians’ (in Russian Krymskie ital’iantsy, in Italian Italiani di Crimea). The post’s authors looked on Crimea’s new government with hope in terms of the potential official recognition of the Crimean Italians as an oppressed people of the Soviet regime, a request the Ukrainian authorities had neglected. Eventually their hopes were fulfilled. With decree no. 458, on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples (2015), the Italians were immediately, and without any historical discussion, recognised officially as both a national minority of Crimea and victims of the Soviet regime, alongside the Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Tatar and German peoples.1 It was not the political implications that captured my attention, but rather the authors: who were these Crimean Italians? Diving into the very scarce initial information available on their history, I conceived of the research topic that developed into the present dissertation.
This dissertation is a collection of three empirical chapters contributing to the understanding of the relationship between family of origin socio-economic background and birth outcomes. For this investigation, I draw from high quality cohort studies from the United Kingdom and vital statistics from Spain. Overall, I find that there is a strong and persistent relationship between family of origin socio-economic background and birth outcomes. The first study shows that disadvantaged mothers delivered children with poorer birth outcomes respect to their advantaged counterparts for the large share of the last fifty years in the United Kingdom. And maternal unhealthy behaviors such as prenatal smoking play an important role in accounting for socio-economic disparities. In the second study, I report substantial geographical variation in the association between family socio-economic background and birth outcomes in Spain, suggesting that spatial patterns of intergenerational mobility found by previous research may be visible as early as at birth. In the third empirical chapter, I study a natural experiment and show that exposure to exogenous prenatal maternal stress is more detrimental for disadvantaged mothers, and that maternal behaviors or the complex biology behind stress may account for this result. All in all, these results bring novel evidence on the early transmission of status across generations, integrating classic stratification research with insights from epidemiological, economic and health research. Finally, I outline how further research may improve our understanding of the role of birth outcomes in the stratification process.
Venture capital is considered an important source of capital for enterprises with high-growth and innovation potential. Contrasted with the United States, the European venture capital sector has historically been considered weak and it has been argued that this weakness has translated to Europe’s poorer innovation performance. In this dissertation, I trace the origins of European venture capital markets from 1960 until 1985 in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany. I argue that the rise of venture capital in Europe was strongly tied to the rise of innovative entrepreneurship and that during this period, the foundations of European venture capital were created. I assess the reasons behind the creation and promotion of venture capital, discussing my findings in relation to the United States and the general economic trends of the time. Venture capital developed first through the importing of venture capital practices in the 1960s, before in the 1970s European governments started to support the development of the market both through direct and indirect measures. In addition, I discuss the performance of venture capital companies over this period. Although their economic performance has often been described as a failure, I argue that the earliest venture capital companies had a significant impact on the practices, which were adopted, and the rise of innovative entrepreneurship By contributing to transfer of social and process innovations, venture capital companies supported the transfer of innovation, participated in the hidden integration of Europe and helped keep entrepreneurship and innovative SMEs on the policy agenda, while contributing to their development. The discussion is wrapped up by addressing the changing environment in the 1980s and the transnationalization of venture capital.
Responding to the idea of Northern Ireland as ‘a place apart’ or ‘sui generis’, this thesis analyses various aspects of state repression in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, with one eye on how they unfolded and the other on contemporaneous and subsequent understandings of them. In doing so, the aim is to ‘de-provincialise’ Northern Ireland by challenging characterisations of it as singular or unique, and reading it into broader histories of both British domestic and foreign policy and European politics and diplomacy of that period. The extent to which repressive measures were justified by claims of exceptionality, and their relevance to European politics of the time, is assessed thematically: the use of emergency law, with a case study of the emergency laws passed to curb popular resistance to emergency measures; policing in Northern Ireland; the use of torture and its legal ramifications; and the prisons system.
Gender equality is a complex and debated concept; feminist scholarship and legal philosophy still struggle to define this notion. The EU context is no exception, as within the European project and literature, conceptions of gender equality have fluctuated. Existing literature has only given limited accounts of the different meanings of gender equality and has failed to identify the variables and reasons for this fluctuation in EU policy and case-law. In order to fill this gap, the present thesis takes onboard the challenge to uncover how the meaning of gender equality has shifted in the EU, across time, policy field and institutions. It starts by developing a theoretical frame which distinguishes between the possible aims of gender equality policy and the legal strategies employed by gender equality policy. It then applies this frame to four decades of EU policy regarding work and care, from 1980 to 2020, and questions to which extent these different gender equality conceptions and strategies have served the aim of women’s emancipation, assessing their effect on the gendered division of care and on the provision of social protection. The thesis shows that the main variable of fluctuation of gender equality conceptions has been the policy issue at stake: while the EU has employed formal equality in certain areas of law, it has been more prone to allow for substantive strategies for equality in others, depending on political priorities and opportunities. The conclusion explains these findings and reflects on the political conveniences of gender equality conceptions. It makes a theoretical, political and normative contribution to existing literature and debates concerning gender equality in the EU and gives directions for future gender equality policy.
The intergenerational transmission of inequality is a research field that has sub-strands in several disciplines with findings that have consequences for the way we see and evaluate our society. Therefore, it is crucial to continuously update how we address questions in such an important research area. In this thesis, I study the importance of the family of origin for different areas of social inequality using a sibling design. I estimate the influence of the family on labor market success, partnership union formation, and occupational gender stratification in Germany using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The results show that the family plays a crucial role in the generations of social inequality over the life course. It affects the labor market attainment for different social origin groups and over and above a person's education, and it influences the timing of marriage, cohabitation, and living-apart-together unions. In addition, the gender composition of the sibling group creates inequality regarding occupational attainment within families. Thus, this thesis provides a comprehensive view of how the family of origin is relevant to several areas of social and economic life in Germany. It discusses the implications of using a comprehensive approach to the family for further research and policy.
The thesis investigates an emergence of a business world in Yugoslavia in the midst of communists’ endeavour to develop a socialist society and a workers’ state. Its central focus narrows down on the general directors in charge of the large industrial enterprises who in the period of liberalising reforms between the 1960s and 1970s became both independent and powerful enough to attract the interest of the Party leaders. The thesis provides the answer to the question of how Yugoslavia shaped its business environment and, more importantly, how the changes of the socio-economic setting allowed general managers to become relevant actors and even considered a homogenous group in both the public and political discourse.  By delving into economic, ideological, socio-political, and legal domains of Yugoslavia’s life, the thesis identifies the first half of the 1960s as the critical moment for the emancipation of the managerial elite. It explores how the widespread modernisation campaign, at the same time, accelerated the expansion of the Yugoslav economic potentials and reproduced systemic contradictions that in turn created the demand for new forms of company leaders. Since large industrial companies also appeared in this same period, the thesis explores their beginnings in relation to the appearance of the new generation of managers. In its final part the thesis establishes the definition of large production companies in the 1960s and 1970s Yugoslavia and builds a collective profile of their general directors. In this sense, the typology of directors and the statistical analysis of their profiles, as well as their short professional histories, are at the heart of the thesis, giving a fresh understanding of their role in the Yugoslav political and business world.
Business economists and financial historians distinguish between a first and a second wave of international and multinational banking. The Great Depression and the two World Wars interrupted the first wave which began in the mid 19th century. The second wave began in the 1960s and was triggered by the advent of the Euromarkets under the international monetary regime of Bretton Woods (1944-1971).   The thesis investigates the determinants of the internationalization of European commercial banks under Bretton Woods by focusing on the experience of Italian banks. I argue that Italian banks re-entered international and multinational banking from the late 1940s onwards in order to contribute to establish Italy as a commercial power. Competition between the banks in the international arena led them to integrate Eurodollar deposits into their international and domestic banking strategies in the 1950s and the 1960s thus contributing to the globalization of finance.  The big European continental commercial banks internationalized in parallel to Italian banks and for the same reasons. Nevertheless, in contrast to latter, the former became major actors in the Euromarkets as a result of the American challenge after 1965. The thesis argues that the growth of the Euromarkets in the second half of the 1960s was sponsored by the Federal Reserve of the United States. The Federal Reserve encouraged the growth of the Euromarkets, and the role of American banks in the market, in order to defend the US official gold stock and the US balance of payments. Sources are drawn from bank and central bank archives in Italy, France and the United States.
This doctoral thesis analyses the process of state construction in the early modern period from a joint perspective that amalgamates the agencies of state officials, lending communities, and local elites in the Hispanic Monarchy during the four initial years of Philip II’s reign. The project examines the convergence of private agendas inside and outside the royal administration, which were channelled by the Genoese lending community to overcome the consolidation of royal short-term debt in 1557 and its consequences. The application of an institutional approach, based on the works of Avner Greif, to the analysis of the social organisations that prevented a failure of coordination in the Hispanic Monarchy offers a fresh perspective on a topic normally assessed under predatory models. The specific study of two Genoese lenders who contributed to the establishment of a more viable and efficient financial system in the monarchy, Costantin Gentil and Nicolao de Grimaldo, provides details about how interregional transactions and local economies contributed to the consolidation of the early modern state.
This thesis consists of three articles in applied economics. In the first essay, I consider the extent to which informational frictions between workers and jobs can be alleviated with short-term contracts in the early career. I leverage a program at a Finnish university which gave out randomly selected students an internship subsidy for a three-month paid internship. I match these students to administrative data to track their transition to labor markets in the years around the program and find evidence that the program significantly improved early labor market success. In the second essay, I study the effect of social sorting on family formation and inequality across households. I leverage the institutional features of Finnish high-school assignments to evaluate how exposure to high- skilled, high-socioeconomic -status peers affect the quality of social ties individuals form. I find that while high schools are an important meeting place for future spouses, but that exposure to higher quality peers will not affect the eventual partner characteristics. This suggests that policies aiming to mix individuals from various backgrounds may not always work anticipated. In the third essay, I study with two co-authors the causes and consequences of broadly defined inequality and democratization using Finland as a natural experiment. We find evidence that the 19th famine affected inequality and labour coercion and thus the balance of political power. On the other hand, we find that these developments were critical in explaining both the increasing threat of revolution and participation in the Finnish civil war in the early 20th century and a subsequent shift to democratization. Areas that initially experienced higher growth in inequality, also experienced the most significant shift to redistribution in the aftermath of the war.
When analysing the moral relationship between the state and its subjects, the majority of scholars subscribe to the “principle of correlativity”. This is the belief that the state’s political legitimacy and a citizen’s moral duty to obey the law are correlative: if one is established, the other is as well. The aim of this thesis is to challenge the assumption of correlativity. I do this by showing that the legitimacy of the state is not dependent on the existence of a general moral duty to obey the law on part of the state’s subjects. Three distinct interpretations of the “correlativity principle” may be identified in the literature: one logical interpretation and two substantive interpretations. Against the first, I argue that state authority should not be understood as a claim-right to rule, but as a moral power possessed by the state. Against the substantive interpretations, I argue that political obligation is neither sufficient nor necessary to justify state authority. Firstly, the moral duty to obey the law may be thought to arise even in states which actions and conduct clearly are not morally justified. Secondly, the state’s right to issue and enforce law may be explained without reference to a general moral duty to obey the law on part of the subject. Having rejected the “correlativity principle” in both its logical and substantive interpretations, I sketch a theory of legitimate state authority, one that does not rely on the moral duty to obey the law for its justification. I argue that legitimate state authority both represents a minimum threshold to be reached, defined by the state’s protection of basic rights for all, and an ideal to which actual states should strive through the balancing and furthering of individual claims to freedom.
The European response to the 2015-16 inflow of asylum seekers raises some important questions: how are we to understand the references and appeals to solidarity among EU member states? Do EU member states have a particular moral duty to share the costs connected to providing asylum that is different from what we understand to be the general duties of cooperation among states globally? What if the policy choices of some member states in relation to asylum negatively affect other members? In this thesis I address these questions by defining normatively acceptable and practically feasible regulatory principles for the EU asylum system. By adopting a normative institutionalist and EU-focused approach to the ethics of refugee protection, I argue that EU member states are called to equitably share the responsibility for refugee protection pursuant to the duty to act in solidarity. The analysis is prompted both by the failure of EU member states to respond adequately to the ongoing refugee emergency, and by the lack of normative guidelines to establish the duties among members of a regional association that features the partial pooling of the traditional powers of sovereignty. While the thesis is primarily a work in normative political theory, it thus aims to inform current policy debates by suggesting what EU member states owe each other when it comes to protecting asylum seekers and refugees. The first part of the thesis develops a normative argument about the obligations generated by EU membership with respect to interstate asylum practices. The second part examines how member states justify their non-compliance with the normative theory proposed above and how adequate these arguments are. In the concluding part, I elaborate on the remedial duties that EU member states have vis-à-vis widespread noncompliance with the duty to act in solidarity.
In the first postwar years, the CPY followed Lenin’s thesis on the merging of the nations, which they emphasized in their speeches. However, the merging would occur only after the nations would reach the same level of development. After the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, the Yugoslav soft nation-building project was accelerated. During the 1950s, the soft nation-building process was latently stimulated through language, culture, censuses, and changes in the constitutional and socialist system. The idea of national or ethnic Yugoslavism reached a climax during the VII. Congress of League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1958 and with some intellectuals that defined the Yugoslav ethnic community. In 1964 the Party abandoned the idea of a melting pot. This turning point was visible in the ideological shift of the Party’s chief ideologue Edvard Kardelj. A redefinition of the socialist Yugoslavism followed in the mid-1960s, without ethnic or national connotations. Two Yugoslavisms were created: a socialist one propagated by the Party and a national one that lived among the population in small proportions. The latter constantly pressured the Party via the Yugoslav media and by sending letters advocating for their rights. Since the early-1960s the Party also extensively financed the newly established research field of interethnic relations. The main role in the field was played by the Institute of Ethnic studies in Ljubljana and the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade. Both institutions were used as a political tool: the first one as a bulwark of Slovenian national rights and the second as the advocate of the merging of nations. Due to the reforms of the Yugoslav system in the 1960s Yugoslavs were never recognized as a nation. Consequently, the abandonment led to several national revivals in Yugoslavia. The census of 1971 presented a confrontation between national Yugoslavs and the Party, regarding the Yugoslav category.
This dissertation is a local history of crowd formation and crowd action in the city of Kristiania (today Oslo) in the 1890s. This was a decade of turbulent labour relations and one in which we can locate the beginnings of a lasting organised labour movement. As the title indicates, the main analytical goal is to overcome a dichotomous view of crowd behaviour at the end of the nineteenth century—a view that categorises crowds as expressions of ‘order’ or ‘disorder’. The dissertation disaggregates the idea of ‘the crowd’ that was imposed on these actions in the 1890s by observers and participants from both the political right and left, observers who sought both to make sense of and to use crowd actions for their own purposes. This dissertation teases out common traits of crowd actions, the causes of these actions, and how they were framed through post hoc categorisation. All the while, the dissertation draws on local context for sensible answers.
In 16th century Venice, new consumption patterns and the emergence of a luxury economy were part of the economic changes observed at that time. During the same period, mercers become a key figure in commercial exchanges of all kinds, as suppliers to the princely courts, as shopkeepers or itinerant merchants. All of them, regardless of their individual importance, are united within a single corporation, the haberdashery, whose existence dates back to the 13th century. Among this heterogeneous group, we find principally mercers that are new to the trade. They come from the “middle” strata of society and most of them were not born in Venice, but in Terra-Ferma. These "new men" often come from Bergamo and Lombardy and manage to acquire the privilege of citizenship. Some of them are involved in international trade, while others, on a more modest scale, make a living from petty trade and handicrafts. During this same period, haberdashery became a corporate structure exercising institutional control over several distinct trades. In fact, several craft activities were directly placed within the authority of the haberdashery. In short, it is a mixed agglomerate dominated, monitored and administered by the haberdashers, at the service of their interests. The aim of this work is to highlight the investment of the non-noble merchants in commercial affairs, questioning the role and place of haberdashery in the Venetian economy and society. The careful study of individual trajectories and collective actions aims at understanding how the actors of haberdashery, individually and collectively, establish themselves in the city, whether or not they succeed in increasing or not, whether or not they convert their economic capital into social capital. We shall also investigate how their economic and social role is reflected in the urban space.
This thesis analyses the role of evidence in the international law on tobacco control. Starting from the 1990s, the 'tobacco wars' have invaded the international arena, giving rise to what I call an 'international lawfare'. International law has been used as a double-edged tool: to spur action at the domestic level, and at the same time to deter domestic regulation. The battle has consisted of two main courses of action. First, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, the tobacco control network pushed for the negotiation of a treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Second, as a counter-offensive, a wave of disputes has been lodged by the tobacco industry or by some States acting in their interest before international courts and tribunals (particularly the World Trade Organization dispute settlement system,  ad-hoc international investment tribunals, and the Court of Justice of the European Union). Against this background, my thesis explores how both sides of the battle (the tobacco control network and the tobacco industry) strategically used and challenged the evidence on the effectiveness of tobacco control measures. To this end, Chapter I describes how the treaty entrepreneurs built the FCTC as an evidence-based treaty to counteract the attacks on evidence by the tobacco industry. Chapter II reviews how, after its entry into force, the FCTC institutional arrangements and scientific cooperation provisions have created a continuous evidence-based regime. Chapter III explains how the tobacco industry used the international lawsuits to challenge the effectiveness of tobacco control measures. The conclusions, finally, discuss some of the main issues raised by this thesis, including the role of business actors in international regulation and the fragmentation of international law.
This thesis explores what makes people believe (and share) news about politics. Two independent variables play a particular role throughout the four papers: The congruence of information with people's attitudes or ideology, and the credibility of sources. In Chapter 1, a first study with a German sample tests how congruence with pre-existing attitudes and the type of source (real versus fake) affect believing news reports. Contrary to predictions, credible sources cannot mitigate the tendency for assimilation bias, i.e. the tendency to give more credit to congruent information. A second study confirms this finding for sharing intentions. Chapter 2 presents a study from Germany that explores drivers of source credibility.  As predicted, subjects are more likely to believe a source that has previously-i.e. through experimental manipulation-provided congruent information. Machine learning methods reveal that people with low media trust and voters of the populist right are most susceptible to this effect. The last two chapters shift the focus to the US, and to asymmetries in information processing between liberals and conservatives. Chapter 3 examines three previous peer-reviewed studies that test which side is more prone to assimilation bias and is more able to tell true from false. Various robustness checks show that results of these studies do not survive variations in the selection of informational stimuli.  This points to the need to ensure externally valid representation of a clearly defined target population of information. Chapter 4 tries to meet this requirement by, firstly, collecting a large set of real-world news items (both true and false), and by secondly randomly sampling stimuli from this collection. In a subsequent survey, liberals turn out to be more truth discerning, but also more biased than conservatives. These asymmetries can be partly attributed to the real-world news supply, partly to psychological differences per se.
In this thesis, I employ techniques from time series econometrics to study the detection of asset price bubbles and the measurement of vaccine uptake. In Chapter 1, I analyse some commonly used bubble detection tests that have been derived from simplified present value relationships. I apply the tests to a flexible, estimated present value model and study their size and power properties. I find that, under the null hypothesis of price being equal to fundamental value, no time series based test allows for correct inference under conventional critical values. Comparing tests under the alternative hypothesis, tests for periodically explosive growth minimize maximum regret. The next two chapters analyse human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccinations in Denmark. In Chapter 2, coauthored with Peter R. Hansen, we develop a dynamic model of vaccine compliance, based on the score-driven paradigm. The model estimates a time-varying compliance parameter, controlling for age effects and changing seasonality, and can diagnose events that impacted vaccine compliance. We apply the model to the weekly HPV vaccination data and find that compliance fell sharply following the broadcast of a controversial TV documentary. We also find that vaccine-critical media stories predict drops in compliance. Chapter 3, coauthored with Peter R. Hansen and Noel T. Brewer, analyses more recent HPV vaccination data that have been sampled monthly. The lower frequency enables us to employ a simple method to control for seasonal and age effects. The longer sample period allows for the evaluation of a national information campaign that advertised the HPV vaccine's safety and effectiveness. We find that, after the information campaign began, HPV uptake recovered to its baseline level. Still, we estimate that 26,000 fewer girls received their first HPV vaccination as a result of the period of low compliance studied in Chapter 2, compared to a scenario in which uptake had not declined.
[No abstract available]
This thesis examines substantive and procedural EU State Aid Law from the angle of accuracy in assessment of State measures by the Commission under the notification procedure and, to a lesser extent, by national authorities under the General Block Exemption Regulation. It adopts an economic analysis approach, within the framework of which it identifies the components of the expected cost of error (the probability of error multiplied by its cost) and makes suggestions on how to bring that expected cost down without significantly increasing enforcement costs.  In order to lower, ex ante, the expected cost of error in Commission’s assessment, it seems essential to separate the criteria of compatibility assessment applied under the preliminary examination on the one hand, and the formal investigation procedure on the other hand. It is necessary in order to overcome the informational asymmetries, exacerbated by the procedural design of the preliminary examination. This proposition becomes particularly salient because the least costly type of error, on the side of which it could be preferable to err, may not be reliably identified in State aid law.   In order to lower, ex post, the expected cost of error, a well-functioning error correction mechanism is necessary. In that respect, the action for annulment, especially the one that allows to attack decisions not to open a formal investigation procedure, presents an interesting potential. While softer rules for locus standi in State aid are still needed, the recent developments in the Court’s case-law look promising for competitors. Finally, the extension of the GBER allows to free Commission’s resources to more accurately assess the remaining measures, but it must be guaranteed that national authorities correctly qualify measures under the exemptions. The significant efforts to simplify the GBER and to educate national enforcers are assessed positively.
The thesis examines the emergence of Debt/Credit Alternative Investment Funds in the EU, the risks that they can pose to financial stability, and the regulatory and supervisory tools available to mitigate these risks. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 revealed many of the flaws in the regulation of the Banking Industry and led to massive regulatory interventions. The new rules forced Banks to maintain higher quality and quantity of capital, leading to the reduced lending capacities of Banks. This created a gap in the financing of small and medium enterprises, which is covered by alternative lenders and more specifically by Debt/Credit Alternative Investment Funds. The thesis first examines the reasons behind the emergence of these new innovative products, the risks that they can cause to the financial system, and the risk of a general market failure that can be caused by the failure of these funds. The risks of lending for both Banks and Debt/Credit Alternative Investment are then analyzed and compared. After reaching the conclusion that the risks of lending for both industries are similar, the thesis analyzes and compares the regulatory tools available in the International and European Banking legislation and in the European legislation on Alternative Investment Funds. The research has shown that although Banks and Credit/Debt Alternative Investment Funds are conducting the same lending activities, there are many differences in the regulatory requirements that they must follow, especially in relation to mitigating macroprudential and systemic risks. The thesis subsequently explores the necessity for developing a new framework tailored to Credit/Debt Alternative Investment Funds and ends with specific proposals on new macroprudential, supervision, and resolution tools to be applied to Credti/Debt Alternative Investment Funds.
This is a study on causal reasoning in legal argumentation. It starts by identifying the core problems of determination and evaluation of cause-in-fact in legal cases, including the challenges of responsibility attribution in multi-party cases, and issues arising from hidden assumptions. The thesis introduces the Framework for Causal Argument (FCA) that uses artificial intelligence methods to identify, model, and evaluate causal arguments. The FCA aims to represent the arguments by expert witnesses and judges in a structured manner by modelling each of the reasoning steps in a logic-based language. The argument models are then evaluated using the argument scheme from-effect-to-cause and an updated list of critical questions. Moreover, with the developments in the science of causality, some new insights are directly integrated into the evaluation criteria. This thesis provides a general framework for causal argument analysis and presents its use through case studies of vaccine injury and asbestos exposure related lung cancer cases with complex evidential settings. It concludes with a discussion of the role of causality and evidence in the burden of proof debates, and also proposes a new approach to the application of the standard of proof exceptions in specific areas of torts.
The thesis is devoted to the history of radio communication in Russia, investigating how, where, and for what purposes radio enthusiasts constructed self-made devices for transmitting and receiving radio signals. It examines the processes beyond the radio waves taming in Russia with a particular focus on civic amateur radio experiments and communication practices during the 1920s and the early 1930s. It considers amateur radio practices in the context of technology and knowledge proliferation as an alternative scientific and development practice in the early Soviet context. The dissertation uncovers a story of relationships between elusive radio waves and enthusiasts in certain historical and national settings, which helps to understand how closely the activities of individuals and the interests of the state were intertwined.
Why are women the younger partner in the majority of couples? This thesis investigates the social and gendered patterns of age-difference between heterosexual partners in Europe and beyond, and the causes behind such patterns. Chapter 2 begins by constructing a theoretical framework to identify the mechanisms of mating selection that apply to age-differences, whether these may vary by gender, and why. In the following two chapters, the thesis investigates how age differences among married couples varies across space and time. In chapter 3, it analyses age differences between spouses in 96 countries, and how they vary according to the level of socio-economic development, women’s empowerment and the demographic characteristics of the country. In chapter 4, it focuses on one case study, showing how age differences between spouses have changed in Italy over the past 145 years. Thereafter, the thesis moves on to cohabiting and married unions and tests two specific hypotheses affecting women’s and men’s preferences for age hypergamy. In chapter 5, it tests the “empowerment” hypothesis, according to which women with more opportunities are less likely to choose older men because such women can “afford” the risk of less financially stable men and less traditional gender roles. In chapter 6, the “evolutionary” hypothesis is tested, that is that men seek younger women as a reproductive strategy. The thesis shows the persistence of hypergamy and its prevalence among marriages worldwide, but cross-country differences linked to different levels of women’s empowerment. Importantly, the patterns of age differences among European cohabiting and married couples reflect gender differences in opportunities in the society and, only to a lesser extent, biological differences in reproduction capacity.
The recent developments in the modernisation of the prohibition of abuse of dominance (e.g., Intel) have created the impression that Articles 101 and 102 TFEU and merger control are finally aligned with each other. Against this backdrop, this thesis focuses on appreciability and explores to what extent this statement holds true. To this end, the thesis completes two tasks. It first examines the consistency of EU competition law by taking appreciability as a benchmark and vertical restraints as case study. Once the existence of inconsistencies is confirmed, the thesis tackles the following research question: how to rethink appreciability to repair the consistency of competition law? More concretely, the doctoral dissertation identifies the presence of a category of restrictions of competition that are neither de minimis nor appreciable; as well as the adoption of two different approaches to appreciability by the European Commission and EU courts: an analysisbased and an assumption-based approach. It contends that the coexistence of both approaches undermines the consistency of competition law: under the former there is room for considering some restrictions non-appreciable due to their small impact on competition, whereas under the latter the degree of harm is always assumed to be high. Moreover, the thesis finds that appreciability is not playing a part in the modernisation of EU competition law, which exacerbates the inconsistency of this legal system. To repair the consistency of EU competition law, the thesis proposes a superior policy for appreciability. In doing so, it explores the role of appreciability in competition law, its structure as a rule and a standard, and its position vis-à-vis other standards in the enforcement of competition rules. The thesis suggests combining the analysis-based with a presumption-based approach, which can be adopted on a case-by-case basis depending on the legal provision and type of restriction at issue.
Focusing on the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, this thesis examines divergent approaches taken to regulating large banks after the 2008 financial crisis. The UK unilaterally imposed a contentious break between commercial and investment banking, defying its banks; the Netherlands pursued a cultural agenda championed by its banks; and Germany imposed a milder compromise between the two. These outcomes challenge prevailing theories of financial reform which cite constraints imposed by economic systems and the power of business interests. This thesis develops a novel explanatory framework for these outcomes based on three modes of party: incumbent and associated opponent and unassociated opponent. Parties have clear incentives to frame the crisis in different ways based on their historical association with it, and this defines both the way policy solutions are produced within parties and patterns of competition and bargaining over policy between them. The ensuing competitive or consensual dynamic determines the extent to which the ‘default setting’ of bank control over the policy agenda can pervade even when a manifest policy failure becomes a highly salient issue. In the UK, a competitive blame game took control of the policy agenda away from the banks and was locked in by parties creating a reformist expert commission. In the Netherlands, competition was absent as all three parties sought to deflect ownership, allowing banks to set the agenda. In Germany, competition only occurred at a later stage, leading to a mild compromise. This is ‘politics by association’, a basic framework that can have wider applications in policy studies and political economy.
The European Union (EU) has long been accused of suffering from a democratic deficit. One of the latest reforms introduced with a view to tackling this deficit is the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), an instrument which allows citizens to present legislative proposals provided that they have collected one million signatures from several Member States. The establishment of the ECI has been accompanied by buoyant democratic rhetoric by EU leaders for enabling, for the first time, EU citizens to participate directly in shaping EU policy. But, does the ECI really help enhance democracy in the EU? Although this question has attracted considerable scholarly attention, our knowledge about the democratic value of the ECI remains limited. This is due, first, to the fragmented character of the criteria against which the democratic value of the ECI is discussed and, second, to the absence of systematic empirical research. This thesis addresses both these shortcomings. Drawing on political equality and autonomy as core normative democratic principles, I derive three criteria which aim to provide a comprehensive set of evaluative standards: equal and inclusive participation, openness and inclusive group access to the agenda, and impact on the legislative agenda. Second, I study how well the ECI meets each of these criteria over three empirical chapters. I draw on different fields of literature for each level of analysis and use a multi-method approach, which combines quantitative analysis, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and case-studies, and different sources of data.  Synthesizing the findings, this study informs the debate about the democratic value of the ECI and its capacity to enhance the democratic fabric of the EU. But beyond case specifics, the thesis generates insights for understanding the possibilities and limits of democratizing the EU by offering citizens opportunities to participate beyond, and in addition to, representative channels.
This thesis explains differences in changes to family formation and stability in France, Norway, the FRG and the GDR based changes to family- and housing policy. Focus is on developments from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Previous research has focused on more recent developments from the 1980s onwards. A new conceptualization of family policy is introduced that enables a distinction between policy that alleviate the care giving role of mothers (de-familialization) and policies that intervene more directly in the caring responsibility within the family, aiming for a more equal share of childcare between women and men (de-genderization).  
Findings show that higher educated women are more likely of entry into marriage, when family policy provides more de-familalization (France, GDR) or de-genderization (Norway). But higher educated women are less likely of entry into marriage in the FRG where family policy remained conservative, forcing these women to choose between family and career. In the FRG where family policy remained conservative, with low support for female employment, married women with low levels of education became more likely of entry into divorce. A difference between women with different educational levels is not observed where family policy has included more de-familialziaiton and de-genderization. Findings for changes to housing policy are less convincing. Soft deregulation of rent control and tenure security has a positive effect on entry into consensual union in all countries, making a two person income household better equipped to cover the cost of rent increases that this change introduced. But results for the influence of support for home-ownership show little effect on entry into a marriage and divorce in all four countries. This may be because the full effect has not manifested itself yet. Extending the time period of analysis may provide more insights on the influence of these changes.
I examine the role of personal values in the reproduction of social structures in the Netherlands. Previous research failed to distinguish values from culture, neglected self-transcendence and self-enhancement values and the life-course. I use the life-course perspective to investigate how gender and social class interact with personal values to produce behavior and inequalities. Chapter 2 provides the psychological theory on values and their role in behavior. Chapter 3 describes the association between personal values and age, cohorts, occupations, and households using the European Social Survey. In Chapter 4, I construct a value measure using the Longitudinal Internet study for Social Sciences and the theory of basic human values. In Chapters 5 to 7, I use these value measures and the dual process theory of cognition, status characteristics theory and doing gender to frame the analysis. I show that theoretically informed value measures substantively improve our understanding of value’s relationship to social structures and behaviors. Using longitudinal data, gender is found to effect self-transcendence and self-enhancement values and their in application in choices of fields of study, occupational socialization, the probability of marriage and the production of inequalities in household division of labor.
The ‘measure’ in WTO law is best conceived as a stabilizing concept grafted onto the substance of specific GATT/WTO legal obligations in terms of aim and effects throughout the judicial proceedings, in line with its essence as enshrined in the DSU and the fundamental WTO principle of security and predictability, beyond the predominant open approach to the ‘measure’ in WTO law based on its form.  More specifically, we conceive the ‘measure’ in WTO law as deriving from the substantive judicialization of the WTO dispute settlement system understood primarily from the perspective of the coherence and consistency of the judicial reasoning, as centrally informed by the substantive politico-economic perspective of GATT/WTO law integrating the very nature of the disciplined measures. To fully attain the stabilizing concept of ‘measure’, we integrate it as from the panel request against the background of the procedural doctrinal perspective of GATT/WTO law.   In this perspective, we critically assess the substantive conceptualization of the ‘measure’ based on its aim and effects with respect to three fundamental GATT pillars relating to tariffs, quantitative restrictions and domestic measures. We identify a lower degree of substantive conceptualization and judicialization regarding more complex cases involving general legal clauses and de facto cases, which may be explained by a limited economic approach and a lack of integration of the very nature of the measure. We further show that the substantive conceptualization of the ‘measure’ in WTO law extends to questions relating a priori to its form or nature.  On the procedural side, we identify a low required degree of specificity regarding ‘the specific measures at issue’ in a panel request. To enhance the procedural judicialization, we propose to link this specificity requirement to the substantive conceptualization of the ‘measure’ in WTO law as founded on the substantive politico-economic perspective of GATT/WTO law.
Environmental protection during and after armed conflict has gained significant momentum, as evinced by the proposed inclusion of a provision related to the topic in the draft Global Pact for the Environment and by the relevant work of the United Nations International Law Commission, which culminated in the recent adoption on first reading of draft principles on the protection of the environment in relation to armed conflicts. On the other hand, it is a truism that during and post-armed conflict, humanitarian considerations rank higher on the agenda of priorities of the international community. Against this background, I argue that the pluralistic stewardship approach, which accounts for the interaction of multiple value systems, informs and enriches our understanding of the interests and dynamics that underpin the normative landscape of environmental protection during and after armed conflict. By adopting this approach, the thesis sheds light on the protection of the environment against the impacts of armed conflict.
Organisation Todt (OT) was a product of the Third Reich and had a central role as assistant of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Starting out as a domestic and civilian initiative in the 1930s, this engineering and construction organisation would take on an increasingly military character with the outbreak of the war. Establishing itself all over Europe, OT impacted the societies and economies within which it operated, besides having a profound importance for the German armed forces, supporting them in their attempts at conquest and domination. OT established itself in Finland in the autumn of 1941, as a consequence of the Wehrmacht’s failure to capture Murmansk. This led to a situation where the troops were stuck in the inhospitable territories of Lapland and the northern areas of the Soviet Union, areas with extreme climate and insufficient infrastructure. For three years, OT would operate in Finland though the subunit Einsatz Finnland (EF). Despite being a relatively small unit of OT, EF performed a wide range of construction projects assigned to it by the Wehrmacht, and its presence became vital for the German army in Lapland. Together, the German agencies were struggling to survive in the Arctic environment, which tested man and technology equally. Access to  resources of both sufficient quality and amount was paramount for the operations of EF and although the unit received most of its resources from Germany, EF was also active on the Finnish domestic market, engaging in legal as well as illegal trade.
In the last decades mass domestic opposition has progressively challenged the institutions of international cooperation. In Europe, skepticism towards European integration has increased in all countries and recently led to the first withdrawal of a member state. While we know a great deal about the sources of Eurosceptic attitudes, researchers have devoted less attention to their consequences. The goal of this thesis is to better understand under what conditions these preferences matter, to what extent they affect political behavior, how they are activated, and how they spread. The core argument is that, as a consequence of the increasing politicization of European integration, people’s EU attitudes have come to affect the dynamics of democratic representation in Europe. I analyze three crucial consequences of citizens’ integration attitudes: their impact on voting behavior; their impact on the political discourse of mainstream parties; and their impact on the opinions of other citizens abroad. Thus, the papers of this dissertation investigate three different conditions under which mass Euroscepticism has political consequences: (1) during election campaigns, when challenger parties’ discourse provides information to voters that increases the impact of EU attitudes on vote choices; (2) between elections, when competition from rival parties pushes mainstream parties to adapt their political discourse to the ups and (mainly) downs of public support for the EU; (3) in occasion of momentous EU referendums, when public preferences, in the form of election results, provide a signal to citizens in other countries and set in motion a process of contagion. The findings of this thesis suggest that the politicization of conflicts over national sovereignty may be at the same time a threat to the survival of the European project and a necessary step to reinvigorate the channels of political representation in our dissatisfied democracies.
This thesis makes the case for reading G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from 1820 as a pertinent contribution to the public debate on the constitutional question in post-Napoleonic Germany. Its title is inspired by a term used by contemporaries to express their demand for constitutionalisation and some form of popular participation in government. While attempts at precise definition were undertaken, these constituted no more than bids for the prerogative of interpretation, and the exploration of that struggle lies at the heart of this work. Hegel undoubtedly embraced the single greatest political demand of the age and, in idiosyncratic fashion, accommodated it in the Philosophy of Right, thus making a characteristic contribution to the discourse on the representative constitution. By placing Hegel’s political thought in the context of contemporary discussions, this history of thinking about the state in the early nineteenth century humanises a thinker with a notorious reputation for obscurity and unearths the ideas of many lesser-known contemporaries. Sharpening our sense of possibility through a confrontation with the past and alternative ways of thinking, it encourages critical reflection on the nature of representation, the virtues required to perform it successfully, and the constitutional arrangements best suited to facilitate it.
This thesis analyses constitutional disintegration and disruption in the European Union. These phenomena take the form of Member State withdrawal and opt-outs. The supranational constitutional order of the European Union is legitimated by individuals as Member State nationals and citizens of the European Union. Its construction and reconstruction are exercises of constituent power by the representatives of the Member States. Withdrawal through Article 50 TEU functions as a guarantee to nationals of the Member States that constituent power can be repatriated. The process of disintegration is subject to an orderly process in the interests of all EU citizens under the withdrawal clause. Opt-outs are reservations of constituent power by individual Member States made possible by the executive dominated process of treaty amendment. Opt-outs take effect through ad hoc Protocols addended to the Treaties that disapply EU law in certain sectors. The origins and development of withdrawal and opt-outs are analysed through the Brexit case study of disintegration, and the narrative of disrupted integration concerning the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Ireland. Disintegration through withdrawal has more dramatic consequences for individuals. The constituent status of EU citizenship is terminated for former Member State nationals and the territory of application for EU law contracts. Opt-outs disrupt supranational constitutionalism and the symmetry between individuals as democratic subjects and juridical objects qua Member State nationals and EU citizens. The thesis concludes with reform proposals for a dedicated constitutional clause that would subject the creation and maintenance of opt-outs to supranational constraints. Amendments to the text of Article 50 TEU are proposed to realise its telos to provide a sovereign right of withdrawal for Member State nationals whilst ensuring an orderly process for all EU citizens.
Ever since humans have been on Earth, there has been migration. And with migration, come transnational attachments, sometimes creating phenomena which have been called ‘diasporas’ since the Septuagint. Although traditionally applied only to some paradigmatic cases, particularly the Jewish, Armenian or Greek diasporas, in recent times the term has come to be used more broadly to cover new situations arising from the current globalized world. This thesis addresses legal instruments used by European states to engage with populations abroad that they consider diasporas. Traditionally ignored by legal scholarship, diasporas had been often addressed from the point of view of the so-called ‘host country’. This thesis takes the perspective of the ‘motherland’, and how ‘diaspora laws’ respond to the diasporic phenomenon. After defining key concepts, such as ‘diaspora’ itself, the thesis identifies five categories of diaspora laws. Building on this typology, the thesis takes a double approach. The first is a comparative legal take on the diaspora laws of four EU Member countries: Hungary, Ireland, Italy, and Spain, selected because of the different characteristics of their diasporas. By analyzing the laws of these countries, the thesis finds that diaspora legislation does not necessarily respond to diaspora characteristics, but rather too often to partisan interests in the state of origin. The second part of the thesis looks at several aspects of diaspora laws which may clash with established principles of international law. In particular, the thesis considers jurisdiction, nationality, and other principles like pacta sunt servanda, nondiscrimination, and non-intervention and friendly relations. The thesis finds that while most diaspora laws do not clash with these principles, several issues could arise, in particular with regards to friendly relations. The main conclusion of the thesis is thus that more international cooperation is desirable in relation to diasporas.
Most commentators of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice law are strongly influenced by the predominant ‘liberal constitutional’ narration of the Union polity, which envisions the creation of a European federation that supersedes Member State sovereignties and protects European Union citizen’s individual rights. Against this background, it is not surprising that most commentators usually identify and praise stories underlying the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice that promote the creation of such a ‘liberal constitutional’ entity or identify and criticize stories that run counter this integrative dream. This dissertation will display that there are many other ways to narrate the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice beyond this entrenched ‘liberal constitutional’ imaginary. In particular, this dissertation will show that the case law of the Court of Justice cannot only be narrated as giving expression to a picture of the Union polity as one concerned with the transfer of powers and individual rights, but also as one concerned with solidaristic markets (Laval case), forgiving conduct in European citizens (Google Spain case), duties of reciprocal respect and tolerance (Sayn-Wittgenstein case), and the dutiful and devoted male caretaker (Roca Álvarez case). By disentangling these uncharted stories underlying the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice, this dissertation aims to open new windows into life in the Union polity, which the ‘liberal constitutional’ imaginary is not capable of disclosing. It aspires to provide alternative pathways to narrate the Union polity and enrich Union citizen’s imagination as a crucial requisite for the development of a vibrant discourse on the future(s) of European integration.
Defections within the ruling elite often endanger the authoritarian rule, emboldening opposition groupings and paving the way for a regime breakdown. For example, defections to the opposition were crucial in the fall of prominent dictatorships in Mexico, Kenya, or Malaysia. However, the consequences are better understood than the causes. While allying with the regime offers significant advantages to elites (e.g., privileged access to the state resources), the opposition’s ability to deliver regime benefits is severely limited. Why would elites risk their standing by joining the opposition when the ruling coalition can offer much more?  This dissertation examines the “push” and “pull” factors that influence the decision of elites to “stay” or “go” with a novel dataset on the political careers of 15,019 deputies and ministers in 12 electoral autocracies. The findings show that the ruling coalition is held together by spoil-sharing among the elite. Electoral autocracies see more defections when the government has few economic resources. Against this backdrop, the risk that ruling elites will be deprived of access to regime benefits increases, leaving them discontent and prone to defect. Besides grievances, opportunities also matter: while parties, legislatures, and elections are designed to help authoritarian incumbents survive, they can also become the means by which a ruling coalition unravel. Specifically, regime elites tend to defect when the end of a legislative term is closer, and they do not expect media harassment. Finally, elites also weigh opportunities to defect based on their political resources—such as their standing in the regime hierarchy, knowledge, and connections with relevant actors. In sum, the thesis offers direct tests on competing theories linking defections with authoritarian regime breakdown.
Over the course of a decade, disability laws in Europe changed dramatically.  Due to (1) the entry into force of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, (2) the transposition of EU Directive 2000/78 into national law, and (3) a new line of judgments handed down from the European Court of Human Rights, individuals with disabilities gained new rights—and new opportunities to enforce those rights in court. This European Disability Rights Revolution constitutes a double upheaval—one part conceptual, one part legal/hierarchical.  This dissertation is an attempt to grapple with the complex confluence of events and ideas that created the European disability rights revolution and what drives it forward today. Does disability rights law develop mainly through European Union law, regional human rights law, international law, or domestic law? Who are the individuals and/or organizations that sustain the European disability rights revolution? Who breathes life into the statute books—and how do they do it?
The thesis analyses the international human rights law framework on the exercise of the freedom of peaceful assembly and the freedom of association at a universal and regional European level, to assess whether the current international law regime covers the exercise of these two rights in the online context and with the use of new technologies.  While applying the current framework to the online exercise of these rights, the thesis identifies those areas where international human rights law would require adaptation in order to ensure the respect, protection and fulfillment of these important political rights.  The thesis provides examples of how people organize and collectively express themselves online, that is  assemble and associate, with a particular focus on political parties. The areas identified and analysed in the thesis can generally be summarized as; the need to re-assess the core, and thus, the definition of these two rights in their online manifestation; the nature of the Internet and social media as a new space on which these fundamental rights are exercised; the private enforcement of fundamental rights by Internet intermediaries and the responsibility of the State in this regard; the limitations already placed over the exercise of assembly and association online, such as the use of algorithms, take-down and regulation of content; State restrictions already placed over the exercise of these rights online such as filtering and shut-down of the Internet; and the potential evolution of a new ‘right to the Internet’. The thesis proposes that the human rights framework contains the resilience and flexibility to face this changing environment for the exercise of rights and with the requisite adjustments, can serve to protect the exercise these fundamental political rights online.
This thesis examines the approaches of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court to the interpretation and application of the definitions of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in light of human rights law. This is done through the clarification of the concept of international human rights crimes. It is argued that the positive law definition of a criminal act must have an overt renvoi to human rights law in order to be regarded an international human rights crime. Such a renvoi can be explicit, implicit, terminological, open-ended or interest-based. It ascertains the amount of discretion for judicial reference to human rights law: from the largest in the case of an explicit renvoi, to the smallest in the case of an interest-based renvoi where the structural differences between international criminal law and human rights law are the most tangible. War crimes do not constitute international human rights crimes. Genocide might be regarded an international human rights crime only in the most abstract form. All crimes against humanity have at least an interest-based renvoi. In this thesis, meticulous attention is paid to their contextual elements and the selected actus rei: imprisonment, other inhumane acts, persecution, torture, rape, enslavement and sexual slavery. The interpretive framework for judicial reference to human rights law consists of the rules of interpretation under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties as qualified by the principle of legality, which is argued to be lex specialis. In addition, Article 21(3) of the Rome Statute obliges the International Criminal Court to interpret and apply the law consistently with internationally recognised human rights and without discrimination. Finally, this thesis concludes with a normative critique of the international criminalisation of human rights violations.
The thesis provides a transnational account of Roma rights activism over the last thirty years with a focus on five Central and Eastern European countries, where the majority of the European Union’s Roma live. It contributes to scholarly debate by (i) mapping ethnic/racial justice related legal opportunities; (ii) taking stock of legally focused non-governmental organisations; (iii) charting legal mobilisation in courts and enforcement agencies; (iv) presenting an alternative account of the transplantation of public interest litigation, and (v) ‘mapping the middle’ between dominant and critical narratives about the Open Society Foundations and white Europeans in the Roma rights field. Finding that international advocacy and litigation alone have been insufficient to generate social change, the thesis highlights the salience of indigenous practices. It points to the shortcomings of the elitist conception of legal mobilisation characterised by top-down, planned legal action and a focus of international NGOs. The thesis proposes to shift the limelight to the financial resources of strategic litigation, to a broad conception of collective legal action, and the necessity of investigating the  role private individuals, NGOs, as well as public agencies play in promoting racial equality in general and Roma rights in particular in a transnational field. By scrutinising the ethno-political critique of Roma rights activism and pointing to its conflation with the critique of litigation - that resonates on both sides of the Atlantic - the thesis navigates between liberal internationalism and ethno-nationalism by acknowledging and celebrating organic cross-border cooperation, in other words “good transnationalism.”
This thesis investigates the interplay between financial regulation and economic integration in the context of financial market infrastructure.  This inquiry is driven by the prominence of both regulatory frameworks and economic integration platforms in determining the degree of liberalization for financial services sectors.  In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, clearinghouses have emerged as essential financial institutions for the financial system as the result of regulatory overhaul.  This thesis examines their role within three major economic integration settings, namely, the WTO, Economic Integration Agreements and EU Competition law, and explores whether a more harmonious relationship between financial regulation and economic integration is feasible and, if so, how it can be achieved.  Given the existing body of literature falls short of providing a critical eye on the relationship between the regulation of clearinghouses and the abovementioned economic integration models, this thesis aims to fill this lacuna.  The overarching question put forward by this study seeks to identify the parameters pertinent to promoting or discouraging the liberalization of financial market infrastructure within the different economic integration settings covered by the analytical framework of the thesis.  Against this backdrop, the thesis underscores the existence of both structural barriers to trade (e.g. in the form of inadequate regulatory transparency) and trade-facilitating tools (e.g. the use of competition law and policy in the EU) that can impede and foster the further integration of financial market infrastructure, respectively.  Ultimately, the thesis extrapolates policy recommendations in respect of utilizing a number of tools that can contribute to further liberalization of the financial market infrastructure without jeopardizing the financial system’s soundness and integrity should States decide to pursue this objective.
In today’s multilingual EU, with 24 official languages, as many versions of every piece of legislation of general application are produced, all of which are equally authentic. In order to comply with this legal requirement, embodied in the Treaties and in secondary law, legal translation and legal-linguistic revision become fully integrated in the law-making process. But most importantly, the multilingual nature of EU law has consequences for how the meaning of the law may be found through interpretation.  The Court of Justice of the European Union has declared that the language versions of EU legal acts should be compared in order to access the meaning of the legislation. That presumption of identity of meaning, however, conflicts with the inherent limits of language. As a result, occasional divergences in the linguistic meaning of the different language versions of EU legislation are unavoidable. These divergences in the linguistic meaning of the language versions of legislation may be bridged through interpretation. These problems of interpretation are ultimately settled by the CJEU, the only authoritative interpreter of EU law. The Court has developed certain techniques for that purpose, not without controversy. In order to solve the puzzle of how to access the meaning of multilingual EU legislation, this thesis first reviews the multilingualism of the EU legislative machinery, subsequently moving from the production of the law to its interpretation. The ultimate goal is to produce a critical assessment of the Court’s methods, in order to understand how they fit into the framework designed by the previous Chapters. That is to say, to see how uniformity of meaning, which is constructed first in the legislative procedure in one language, then deconstructed through translation into all official languages, is finally reconstructed by the Court of Justice.
Legal mobilization is a peculiar type of mobilization: it does not bring people to the streets and does not use banners and slogans. Instead, it quietly uses the law and courts to press for social change. While most of the studies on legal mobilization focus on the United States or on the European Court of Human Rights, this thesis brings attention on the underexplored but yet important question of legal mobilization before the Court of Justice of the European Union. In particular, this research asks whether the preliminary reference mechanism (267 TFEU) can be used as a tool for enhancing migrants’ participation and protection. To do so, the thesis departs from the classic court-centric approach and conducts a law and society analysis of three case studies (Italy, the UK and the Netherlands). By interviewing the individuals involved in the preliminary reference proceedings on migrants’ rights, and by analysing press documents and political statements, I collected fine-grained qualitative data that allowed me to uncover the legal mobilization stories behind the litigations. Finally, analysing together the three case studies, the last chapter identifies the conditions under which a legal mobilization emerges and reaches the Court of Justice. These conditions lay bare the fact that supranational legal mobilization is not a ‘cheap’ strategy: it is generally a rather long process, that requires material and non-material resources, and the outcome of which is difficult to predict. The findings of this thesis offer an innovative understanding of the preliminary reference mechanism and of its potential to create social change. Although in some instances the Court of Justice has not been responsive to the civil society’s calls, in other cases litigation has led to the redefinition and expansion of migrants’ rights, and arguably it represents an important tool to scrutinize the executive’s activity and give voice to minorities’ interests.
The monograph explores the new crisis prevention and risk management regime for EU cross-border bank groups established after the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). The absence of a such a framework over the course of GFC resulted in renationalisation and fragmentation in the internal banking market. Though the new EU resolution law now regulates cross-border bank groups specifically, it does not explicitly lay down their organisational law. The thesis reconstructs the principles of cross-border bank group governance drawing on common legal traditions of EU Member States, corporate group theory and European Commission’s state aid control of bailouts to cross-border bank groups during the crisis. The scope of the EU cross-border bank group is shown to be determined through the transnational interplay between prudential regulation, crisis prevention measures and internal risk management procedures provided for in EU resolution law. The bespoke cross-border governance regime for EU bank groups is analysed through the building blocks of inter-institutional cooperation, group departitioning, corporate governance innovations and specific regulatory objectives. Group governance entails a mechanism for balancing the enabling and the protective elements, i.e. legal strategies which either enable a group-wide perspective or protect local markets and entities. The monograph concludes with considerations of the possible implications of such a bespoke law of EU cross-border bank groups and their function of providing critical functions across borders.
The internet and digital technologies have irreversibly changed the way we find and consume news. Legacy news organisations, publishers of newspapers, have moved to the internet. In the online news environment, however, they are no longer the exclusive suppliers of news. New digital intermediaries have emerged, search engines and news aggregators in particular. They select and display links and fragments of press publishers’ content as a part of their services, without seeking the news organisations’ prior consent. To shield themselves from exploitation by digital intermediaries, press publishers have begun to seek legal protection, and called for the introduction of a new right under the umbrella of copyright and related rights. Following these calls, the press publishers’ right was introduced into the EU copyright framework by the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in 2019.
The rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), held by each Member State (MS) for six months in turn, is seen both as an opportunity and a burden for the MS. While the functions and the achievements of the Council presidencies have been widely studied on the EU level, this thesis adopts the inverse, and under-researched perspective of looking at what holding the presidency means for the MS and whether it fulfills its alleged function of bringing Europe closer to the MS. Combining new institutionalist theoretical approaches under the concept of Europeanisation and employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, this thesis addresses the question of whether the Council presidency leads to Europeanisation of national polities and politics. It examines the impact of the presidency on three levels: national administrations; national ministers; and the citizens of the MS.
This thesis examines the manifestations of the clash between two competing regimes: EU law, on the one hand, and international (in particular, investor-State) arbitration on the other. This examination (approached through the lens of the respective contradicting claims of autonomy) reveals the interrelation between this clash and the current initiatives to reform ISDS. The first part of this thesis is devoted to the EU interference with international arbitration at the intra-EU level. It maps out the intraEU BITs controversy focusing, first, on the general issue of compatibility of intra-EU ISDS with EU law in the aftermath of the Achmea judgment and, second, on the specific issue of the intra-EU face of the ECT. The future of enforcement of investment arbitral awards in the EU emerges as the lynchpin of the controversy. In the second part, the focus shifts to the developments at the extra-EU level. The thesis reflects on the EU competence on FDI and underscores the decisive way in which the EU has shaped its policy towards ISDS. With the contours of the competence in mind, and after reflecting on the main critiques against investor-State arbitration (as they are mirrored in the EU-led initiatives), the proposal for the establishment of an investment court system (bilateral or multilateral) is discussed in detail. The thesis explores the internal questions of compatibility with EU law (Opinion 1/17) and also discusses the (de-)merits of a court solution as ‘the’ corporate governance of investorstate disputes in the future.
In this dissertation, I analyze how two Italian states, the Republic of Genoa and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, tried to enter trans-oceanic trade in the seventeenth century. Their efforts did not just lead to the drafting of plans and projects, but also to the establishment of joint-stock companies of trade, a trading expedition to Guyana, and to many years of careful diplomatic negotiations, which involved a very broad range of actors. The aim of my work is to study how, in these cases, state structures interacted with the private merchants involved. As I show, overseas expansion was often the result of relatively small coalitions of interests, and their success depended on how easily they could be aligned. In monarchical Tuscany, plans for commercial expansion were mainly promoted by the Medici administration, and their details and goals were relatively little flexible. Either merchants managed to win the support of the Grand Duke, or they could not expect any kind of help from state structures. In republican Genoa, on the other hand, it was easier for small groups of people connected to the ruling aristocracy to influence, up to certain extent, the action of the state. Even foreign merchants, such as the Dutchmen of Genoa, could access the structures of the Republic. Nevertheless, in the end, plans for a state-led commercial development foundered in both countries. Some Tuscans and Genoese kept on participating in overseas trade, but through small and flexible private networks, rather than as part of a structure sponsored by their home states.
This dissertation tests various messaging strategies to improve debt repayment among overindebted individuals. In order to do so, I carry out four field experiments in cooperation with a credit management company in Riga, Latvia. I examine the effects of personalizing a message, social norm, reputational concerns, public goods, framing, sequencing, salience, as well as the effect of communication on payment rates. The field experiments explore how debtors respond to these messages at different stages of the debt-recovery process (those who have already defaulted; those on a debt-repayment plan), on various types of debts (consumer debts; hospital debts) and through various communication channels (email; mobile text messages; regular mail).
This dissertation is about the approach of EU private law towards the regulation of fair trading practices along the global value chain and about the parallel development of SMEs as a new legal status. The thesis starts from the assumption that the transformation of the global economy into global supply chains has undermined traditional private laws as historically embodying the diverse cultural traditions and socioeconomic realities of the member states. These traditions portray the socioeconomic role of small businesses in various ways. However, the conventional schemas of national private laws struggle, both in their substance and enforcement dimensions, with the destabilizing effect brought about by the global chain. At the same time, the supply chain has provided leeway for innovative forms of private regulation by means of contract. The EU uses this leeway to manage persistent national differences in B2b trading practices. By means of coregulation, the EU transforms national fair trading laws through three parallel mechanisms: the re-definition of SMEs as actors in the internal market; the establishment of new mechanisms for enforcement; the promotion of new substantive standards for trading practices.
How do cultural resources such as values and beliefs, and their functions in ideology-making, change? In the democratization literature, the value-based approach to culture seeks cultural change based on values. However, the combination of this approach with value-surveys fails to consider several ways in which change may unfold between cultural periods. Instead, this study will delve into a history of conversational texts, which are endogenously grounded within culture, capable of demonstrating culture in action and reflecting what is collective about culture as it operates through dialectical encounters. I focus on change in three landscapes of culture in Turkey, which have witnessed some of the most persistent stories of the unequal relationship between the self and the other.
This thesis advances a relative justice approach to the judicial and non-judicial review of EU legal acts. It specifically compares the kind of justice, predominantly procedural in nature, delivered by the action for annulment before the EU Courts; appeal before the Board of Appeal of the European Chemical Agency and complaint to the European Ombudsman. By exploring the practical functioning of these mechanisms, the thesis seeks to determine whether non judicial review mechanisms can fill gaps in the EU system of justice caused by inherent shortcomings of EU judicial review. These shortcomings – the uncertain thoroughness and limited accessibility of judicial review – stem from a constant need to avoid overloading the EU Courts with complex cases and shifting on them too much responsibility for the substance of EU law, rule and decision-making.
This thesis is concerned with the protection of conscientious objection in the workplace under the freedom of thought, conscience and religion, particularly as protected in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Specifically, the aim of this thesis is to try to identify particular norms under the freedom of thought, conscience and religion as apply to instances of conscientious objection in the workplace, defined as instances of irreconcilable conflict between an individual’s fundamental moral precepts and an otherwise applicable work duty. In order to identify such norms, this thesis considers three case studies: first, the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights concerning Article 9 rights in the workplace context, second, approaches to conscientious objection in the healthcare profession, and third, approaches to selective conscientious objection in the professional military. Having identified some tentative norms under the freedom of thought, conscience and religion as apply to conscientious objection in the workplace, this thesis concludes by considering whether the norms identified are ‘rules’ or ‘principles’ according to the distinction articulated by Robert Alexy in A Theory of Constitutional Rights. This thesis argues that correctly identifying the applicable norms as either rules or principles enables a more coherent legal framework for approaching instances of conscientious objection in the workplace to be constructed. Moreover, it is suggested that identifying particular norms as either rules or principles allows for a reconceptualization of the freedom of thought, conscience and religion based on an inalienable core of ‘rules’ surrounded by a more general principle. It is argued that such a conceptualization addresses at least some of the criticisms which have been voiced regarding the traditional forum internum/externum (or belief/practice) construct of the freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
This thesis reconstructs an intellectual history of the ‘New Haven School’. It employs archival material previously unused by researchers, in some cases completely unseen since recording or storage, to explore what for Lasswell and McDougal were the origins of the ideas that would become identified in the field of international law as this school. A widespread contemporary understanding of the New Haven School considers it a post-war response to international relations realism, a positivist-empiricist theory of international law in an epoch of American empire. The history recovered in this thesis emphasises the significance of three of strands of ideas not centrally addressed by this narrative. First, it places Lasswell and McDougal’s ideas in the cultural context of 1920s and 1930s modernism. Second, the political commitments of policy-oriented jurisprudence are traced to New Deal redistributionism and European socialism. Third, two bodies of thought are identified that for Lasswell and McDougal represented the intellectual origins of New Haven School theory – psychoanalysis and philosophical pragmatism. The thesis explores this history and these ideas in the following way. In Chapter 1, the 1968 moment when the New Haven School was named by former students of Lasswell and McDougal is reconstructed. The thesis then begins to seek the origins of the ideas that prompted this naming by working backwards through time – in Chapter 2, to Lasswell and McDougal’s initial 1943 statement of their legal theory, and in Chapters 3 and 4 to the earlier lives of Lasswell and McDougal respectively. In Chapter 5, the thesis concludes by returning to the post-war period in which the New Haven School was named, exploring the seminars through which Lasswell and McDougal inspired a group of students to identify as the New Haven School.
This dissertation examines the Sovietization of Jews in the interwar Ukrainian province. It is concerned with the transformation of Jewish life during the early Soviet nationality policy officially known as korenizatsiia (Rus. nativization, indigenization, lit. “putting down roots”). I discuss the process of making a secular, loyal, Soviet citizen out of a shtetl Jew through Yiddish schools, local councils, the anti-religious campaign, and secular culture. Focusing on three main domains of Jewish life around which the nationality policy was organized on the territories of the former Pale of Settlement—education, religion, and culture—I explore the extent to which Soviet institutions in the 1920s-1930s changed daily practices of the provincial Jewish population in private and public spaces. I argue that contrary to what Bolsheviks hoped for, Sovietization of Jews in the province in the interwar period was far from successful. The local population sometimes openly resisted the novelties, although more often it opted for reconciliation, combining them with their traditional lifestyle. In general, the Jews distrusted the agents of the new power, seeing in them the descendants of the imperial oppressive regime. Sovietization of Jews was inhibited by numerous factors, including distance from Moscow, poor financing, double loyalty of intermediary agents, and opportunism of Jewish elites who used the nationality policy to foster their national revival. More broadly, I argue that the nationality policy was a continuity of imperial discrimination of the Jewish population.
Capital in banking is a central pillar of financial regulation. In the wake of the last financial crisis, the low levels of capital have become a widely discussed topic. Historically, most of the decline of capital/assets ratios occurred already before the end of the First World War. The capital/assets ratio fell rapidly again during the Second World War, followed by a much slower decrease during the second half of the 20th century. Focusing on the United Kingdom and Switzerland, the thesis critically assesses the evolution of capital ratios and the validity of the numbers used by the existing literature for the period from 1830 to 1990. It shows that undisclosed (hidden) reserves, shareholders’ liability, and hybrid forms of capital (e.g. subordinated debt) must be considered when assessing capital adequacy. All three factors substantially alter published capital/assets ratios. Based on archival material from regulators, supervisors, and banks, the thesis sheds light on three vital drivers of capital/assets ratios in the long run: ideas, wars, and regulation. I argue that the capital policies of banks in the 19th century were guided by informal conventions: The managers of the first joint-stock banks already had well-established ideas about the role of capital and its relationship with risk. These ideas on capital adequacy and how to manage banks and their risks became more nuanced over time. The two World Wars, however, fundamentally changed the perception of capital ratios in banking. Rapidly increasing government debt, of which banks held a substantial part, coupled with inflation and the absence of capital issuances during the wars, led to a sharp decline in capital/assets ratios. Finally, I assess how bank capital was regulated over time, showing that banks were highly involved in the evolution of capital regulation, both in the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and therefore shaped their regulatory environments.
This thesis considers the phenomenon of smuggling in late eighteenth-century Sweden, a hitherto understudied topic in Swedish historiography. It explores smuggling over a stretch of forty years, from 1766 to 1806, a time period when both Sweden and Europe underwent significant changes, not least as a result of the increasing global flows of wares. The thesis approaches smuggling from five angles. It studies perceptions of smuggling in the national economic debates, it examines its implications for state territoriality, it explores the social attitudes towards the contraband retailers, it investigates contraband and its effects, and it probes international perceptions of smuggling in Sweden. The combination of these perspectives extends our understanding of the multifaceted and changing role of smuggling in early modern Sweden. In doing so, the thesis shows how smuggling was deeply connected with three key historical processes that shaped the late eighteenth-century: globalisation, state formation, and consumption. The intensification of globalisation in the eighteenth-century prompted increased rates of protectionism in Sweden, as the state attempted to enforce economic control over its territory and unify it under homogenised economic legislation. This was a crucial step towards consolidating state power and standardising Swedish territory and legislation. However, a demand for foreign goods persisted which meant that smuggling flourished despite the bans, and this illicit trade and consumption of smuggled wares came to shape Swedish society and culture. This multi-layered history of smuggling in Sweden in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries thus establishes that smuggling, rather than being a fringe phenomenon at the edge of society, permeated Swedish politics, culture, economics and society.
In the first chapter, I study whether the introduction of primary elections induces more or less political polarization. Before 1976, only representatives from Indiana had to pass through the primaries, whereas the reform introduced primaries for Indiana’s US senators too. Using a difference-in-differences, I show that primaries deliver less-polarized politicians and account for one-fifth of the pre-reform average ideological gap between parties. I interpret the results in the light of a conceptual framework in which primaries lower the cost of participating in candidate selection procedures, giving incentives to participate to moderate voters as well. The second chapter is coauthored with D. Iorio and A. Mattozzi. We use a newly collected dataset from 63 democracies, and we construct the tenure accumulated by the ruling party while in office. We merge these data with fiscal policy indicators. We find an expenditure elasticity of 0.061 and a deficit elasticity of 0.055 over the period 1972-2014. Our findings point into the direction of a honeymoon effect: the older is the coalition of parties, the more divisive tend to be the available policy choices, which require costly transfers in the form of public expenditure to keep coalition members together later on. In the third chapter, I exploit newly collected data on ties between local politicians in Italy from 1985 onwards, to study the relation between cross-party connections and future career prospects. Exploiting a difference-in-discontinuities design, I find that ruling coalition members connected with the runner-up are twice as likely to be promoted to the council in which the runner-up leads the opposition. The effect of connections with the leader of the rivals disappears when I consider appointments to boards of state-owned enterprises. These findings suggest that connected politicians act as political brokers and smooth the relationship between government and opposition.
This thesis examines the impact of European Union trade and investment agreements on public services of its member states. Typically, the relationship between EU law and public services is thought of as an internal question that concerns the single market and its impingement of such services. However, this neglects the potential effect of the Union’s external agreements. Their possible role has received widespread public attention but comparably little from academic circles, although a growing body of legal scholarship continues to develop. Against this backdrop, the overarching question of the thesis is whether public services are protected and treated as they should be in EU trade and investment agreements. This raises a number of sub-questions: how can international trade and investment rules impact public services; what obligation does the EU have to public services; does this extend to its international agreements; and, if so, do its external agreements meet its public service obligation. Over the course of six main chapters, each of these is addressed. Adopting doctrinal legal methodology, a broad argument is constructed that argues public services are a shared value of the Union that should shape its trade and investment policy. It is claimed the EU’s external treatment of public services should cohere with its internal treatment of public services. As it expands its collection of trade and investment agreements, the EU has made use of the existing toolkit of international trade and investment law. It has, however, done so in a tailored fashion thats carves out policy space for public services. Combined with its preclusion of direct effect, it is argued the EU’s agreements take important steps in satisfaction of their obligation to public services. That said, the approach adopted by the EU leaves significant room for future improvement.
The aim of this thesis is to examine the impact of the judge on the content of the laws and criminal policies regarding irregular immigration. More specifically, this work is based on the jurisprudence regarding the administrative and criminal sanctions applicable to the irregular migrant for the sole motive of his/her irregular administrative status. By studying a set of selected cases from the Italian Constitutional Court (and to a lesser extent of the Justice of the Peace), the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights on these issues, the objective is twofold. Primarily, it seeks to measure whether the judges, at all levels, impinge on the shaping of the law and affect the legal treatment of the irregular migrant. And secondly, the study assesses the effect of their interventions on the protection of the fundamental rights of irregular migrants. The findings of this research surprisingly show two things. First, the judges have indeed found themselves at the crossroads of diverging interests. This position was used by the national Constitutional judges of Italy as a leverage to strongly lean on the legislator and curb the tendency towards an ever-increasing criminalization of irregular immigrants. Whereas the supra-national judges have shown more restraint. Concerning the Court of Justice, the protection afforded to irregular migrants has often been the collateral and paradoxical result of a legal regime essentially geared towards their expulsion. While the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence forms a complex regime of protective elements and surprising exceptions justified by the States’ sovereignty regarding the control of their territory. Second, the judges’ interventions have generally lead to more protection of the irregular migrants’ fundamental rights than what national or supranational norms originally granted them.
This thesis examines the development and transformation of mid-nineteenth-century colonialism on Dutch Java and the British colonies of Ceylon and the Straits Settlements through a carefully contextualized, critical analysis of the corpus of popular colonial travel writing published on these areas in Dutch and English in the period. The analysis is undertaken on two levels: on the one hand, through a close reading of a body of about twenty travel books and the representation of colonial societies therein; and on the other, through a consideration of the concrete changes that were taking place on the ground and the corresponding debates within communities and on the pages of the colonial press. What emerges from the exercise is a significant double movement in nineteenthcentury imperialism, whereby an influx of European newcomers – settlers, officials, soldiers etc. that moved into the region in order to take advantage of the opportunities offered by rapid administrative and territorial expansion – disrupted the pre-existing norms and habits of established colonial elites; and, while doing so, employed the genre of popular travel writing as a tool to firmly establish and legitimise the new conception of empire they represented on a cultural level. The genre, seemingly frivolous but in fact intensely political, deliberately employed the characteristics of the tourist culture then fashionable in Europe in order to transpose metropolitan cultural and social norms on colonial life, doing away with the tropes of imperial adventure and tropical exoticism prevalent in the travel writing of the preceding decades. The analysis focuses specifically on how this new mode of colonial leisure related to and modified understandings of three themes: the so-called social and cultural anxieties of empire; the emerging and increasingly professionalised colonial sciences; and the contemporary notions of race and racial boundaries.
This Ph.D. thesis introduces the concept of responsibility into the field of Union citizenship law. More concretely, it centres around the responsibility of the Member States for the Union citizen. ‘Responsibility’ is used not as a positive legal concept, but rather as a narrative tool to reexamine the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It is argued that Union citizenship creates new responsibilities for both the home and the host Member States. Union citizenship, analysed through the lens of responsibility of the state, describes persons who are recognised, protected, and linked to a state (or multiple states), rather than persons who are emancipated and independent from the state. At the core of the thesis lies a test of the following hypothesis: Union citizenship has created a continuum of responsibility between the home and the host Member State for the citizen. In theory, this creates a system in which the responsibility seamlessly shifts from the home to the host state once the citizens moves, and shifts back from the host to the home, if the Union citizen falls outside of the realm of Union citizenship rules. The thesis examines the ways in which this hypothesis is true, but also draws out its limits. It highlights the increasing importance of the role of the home Member State for the Union citizen. The analysis demonstrates that the Court of Justice has reinforced the link of nationality between home Member State and Union citizen, and simultaneously decreased the responsibilities of the host Member State for the Union citizen. This shift of responsibility away from the host and towards the home Member State can be interpreted as an attempt of the Court of Justice to safeguard the status of Union citizenship at a time when its legitimacy is increasingly questioned.
This dissertation presents three independent chapters that study labor markets in low-income countries and charitable giving. In the first chapter, I investigate whether present bias correlates with savings and job search behavior in a population of low-skill workers in Ethiopia. I elicit a measure of present bias in a tightly-controlled experiment and match results to high-frequency survey data that I collect over a period of three months. Present bias is a significant predictor of job search effort, controlling for liquidity and a broad range of covariates. Present-biased workers spend 57 percent less time on job search per week. As a result of reduced search, present-biased workers generate fewer offers. I find no significant correlation between present bias and savings behavior. In the second chapter, co-authored with Egon Tripodi, we study incentivized voluntary contributions to charitable activities. We consider a setting where different incentives coexist and agents can choose to donate without receiving monetary compensation. In a laboratory experiment we show that a collection system where compensation can be turned down can improve the efficiency of collection. Image effects and incentive effects do not crowd each other out. A significant share of donors turn down compensation. In the third chapter, also co-authored with Egon Tripodi, we use a field experiment to study how social image concerns affect pledges to engage in a charitable activity. We work with blood banks and a municipality in Germany to offer sign-ups for human whole blood donations. Motivated by a simple signaling framework, we randomly vary the type of organization to donate to and the visibility of the pledge to donate. We find evidence for strong social image concerns when subjects are asked in public whether they would like to pledge a donation with a well-known charity.
This study examines the cultural and political work of the first professional art historian in Croatia, Izidor Kršnjavi (1845-1927). Special emphasis is given to intellectual and political currents of mid-nineteenth century Vienna and Kršnjavi’s education there. Education in the imperial center shaped his liberal worldview and influenced his socio-political ideas and actions. One of those ideas was reconciliation between the empire and the nation. Contrary to the widely-held belief that the empire and nations were permanently clashing, I present how the empire often unintentionally fostered nationalism. My aim is to present how the empire and the nation tried to find answers and resolve their imperial and national problems in the new socio-political context of growth in industrialization, population, literacy and nationalization of most spheres of life. More particularly, I want to present on Kršnjavi’s case how imperial and national elites cooperated thanks to the Habsburg’s policies of protecting and fostering diversity of its population, unlike the forceful assimilation of other European empires. Kršnjavi's initiatives had the main aim in achieving political goals through the nationalization of culture. These initiatives included areas such as arts and crafts, architecture, scholarly work, academic and public lectures, and opened debates with main questions like the dominant character of the Croatian nation, the Croatian legal system and its national territories. Kršnjavi’s liberal idea that he could persuade everyone to accept his view through open debate and arguments left him unable to adapt to the new socio-political reality at the turn of the twentieth century. Ironically, Kršnjavi’s initiatives often had the opposite effects of what he intended - instead of bridging the national differences, his initiatives deepened them further.
This thesis comprises three essays that analyze how uncertainty affects the macroeconomy. Each essay investigates a particular feature of uncertainty propagation. The first essay studies the effects of uncertainty shocks on economic activity, focusing on inflation. I consider standard New Keynesian models with Rotemberg-type and Calvo-type price rigidities. Despite the belief that the two schemes are equivalent, I show that they generate different dynamics in response to uncertainty shocks. In the Rotemberg model, uncertainty shocks decrease output and inflation, in line with the empirical results. By contrast, in the Calvo model, uncertainty shocks decrease output but raise inflation because of firms’ precautionary pricing motive. The second essay, written with Dario Bonciani, shows that uncertainty shocks negatively affect economic activity not only in the short, but also in the long run. We build a New Keynesian model with endogenous growth and Epstein-Zin preferences. A decline in R&D by higher uncertainty determines a fall in productivity, which causes a long-term decrease in the macroeconomic aggregates. This long-term risk affects households’ consumption process, which exacerbates the overall negative effects of uncertainty shocks. The third essay, prepared with Anna Rogantini Picco, illustrates how economic agents’ heterogeneity is crucial for the propagation of uncertainty shocks. We build a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions and Calvo pricing. Unemployment risk for imperfectly insured households amplifies their precautionary savings through increased uncertainty, thus further depressing consumption. Therefore, uncertainty shocks have considerably adverse effects and lead to a decrease in inflation.
Urbanization, immigration, and industrialization transformed the British and American economies between 1890 and 1939, making poverty more prevalent among the working class. In America, the depressions of 1893 and in the 1930s further aggravated the situation. People lived in great destitution in tenement houses: a 1908 census of 250 East Side families found that about 50% slept three or four to a room and 25% slept five or more to a room. Children often had to work to supplement the family income. In Britain, the impact of the First World War and of the depression of the 1930s, which was leading to an unemployment crisis, affected many families. In consequence, child and family poverty remained endemic in many working class families.
Article 6.8 of the Antidumping Agreement (AD) allows domestic investigating authorities to make determinations on the basis of the best information available (BIA) when any interested party does not cooperate during an antidumping investigation under the discipline of Annex II of the AD. Since its introduction, this provision has been the source of extensive and neverending litigation in front of both domestic investigating authorities and the Dispute Settlement Body. In this thesis, we research to what extent the findings of the Panels and the Appellate Body regarding Article 6.8 AD are consistent with the mandate set out in Articles 3.2, 11 DSU and 17.6 AD and to what extent they are reasonable from an economic perspective. To answer the first question, we first discuss Articles 3.2, 11 DSU and 17.6 AD to establish what is the mandate of the Panels and the Appellate Body under the Dispute Settlement Body. We then examine the findings of the Panels and the Appellate Body in the interpretation of the seven terms of Article 6.8 AD under the previously established mandate. To answer the second question, we summarize the latest developments in the economic theory of adjudication and litigation. We then discuss the findings of the Panels and the Appellate Body using this economic standard. In the conclusion, we compare the results of our analysis with current negotiations on Article 6.8 AD in the Doha Round framework and further discuss the opportunity to create a single united international investigating authority.
The thesis analyzes Zionism as a nation building project in East-Central Europe during the years of war, revolution, the collapse of Empires and the creation of nation states, 1914 to ca. 1920. It focuses on the day-to-day forms of activism in the Habsburg Empire and the regions of Russia occupied by the German army during the First World War. Zionist activists found themselves in a situation where they both had to respond to hitherto unknown pressures and where they could seize opportunities to engage with the masses of East-Central European Jewry and win them to the national project. The thesis argues that it was the everyday encounters between Zionist activists and Jewish communities that allowed the movement to establish itself as an important force in Jewish social and political life. These included the building of a social and educational infrastructure, the provision of relief and aid as well as attempts to provide security and representation during a period that was characterized by impoverishment and anti-Jewish violence. Local conditions and the relations between activists and the authorities determined whether such efforts were successful and whether Zionists could convince larger segments of the population and acquire meaningful positions within Jewish society. The Zionist activists’ struggle to gain agency for the Jewish nation in a radically changing environment is at the core of the thesis. The major narratives of the period, namely those of collapse of empires, the rise of nationalism, and the simultaneous promises made by the Balfour Declaration and the Russian Revolution could have different impacts and meanings on a local level and for individual activists. Whereas many of these developments forced people to rethink their ideological preconceptions as well as their place in society, I argue that Zionists’ on-the-ground activism shaped the way people responded to these major events.
Does European integration contribute to the rise of the radical right? This dissertation offers three empirical contributions that aid understanding the interplay between political integration within the European Union (EU) and the surge of the populist radical right across Europe. The first account studies the impact that the European Parliament (EP) elections have for the national fortune of the populist right. The findings of a country fixed-effects model leveraging variation in the European electoral cycle demonstrate that EP elections foster the domestic prospects of the radical right when national and EP elections are close in time. The second study demonstrates that the populist radical right cannot use the EP elections as a platform to socialise the most impressionable voters. The results of a regression discontinuity analysis highlight that the EP contest does not instil partisan ties to the political antagonists of the European idea. The third study shows that anti-European integration sentiments that existed prior to accession to the EU cast a long shadow in the present by contributing to the success of contemporary populist right actors. Relying on an original dataset entailing data on all EU accession referenda on the level of municipalities and exploiting variation within regions, the study demonstrates that those localities that were most hostile to the European project before even becoming part of the Union, today, vote in the largest numbers for the radical right. In synthesis, the dissertation approaches the relationship between two major current transformations of social reality: European integration and the surge of the radical right. The results highlight that contention around the issue of European integration provides a fertile ground for the populist radical right, helping to activate nationalistic and EU-hostile sentiments among parts of the European public.
This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays on the economics of social interactions. The first chapter is coauthored with Lorenzo Verstraeten. Knowing that Individuals interact with their peers, we study how a social planner can intervene, changing these interactions, in order to achieve a particular objective. When the objective is welfare maximization, we describe the interventions for games of strategic complements and strategic substitutes. We show that, for strategic complements, the planner uses resources to target central players; while she divides individuals into separated communities in the case of strategic substitutes. We study which connections she targets in order to achieve these goals. The second chapter is coauthored with Lorenzo Verstraeten and analyzes a model of contagion on social network. We ask how a social planner should intervene to prevent contagion. We characterize the optimal intervention and the cost associated. We discuss the intuition behind the choice of the planner and we provide comparative static on the cost of intervention for different type of network. In the third chapter I develop a theoretical study about groups relationship and ask whether intragroup cooperation crowd-out intergroup cooperation. I consider a gift-giving game where cooperation endogenously arises, within and across groups. Cooperation is sustained through peer punishment with the help of a group specific monitoring technology. I specify under which conditions cooperation crowding-out occur. I identify two classes of equilibrium: a Sorting equilibrium where guilty players prefer to be matched outside their group due to a less efficient Out-Group monitoring technology, and a Non Sorting equilibrium where the higher level of In-Group cooperation makes it more attractive for everybody. I then compare their welfare properties and draw conclusions on optimal punishment levels.
This dissertation examines gender differences in political interest. It draws from scholarship in political science, sociology and communication, amongst other disciplines, to explore the drivers of such pervading differences. The key argument of this thesis is that gender differences (or gender gaps), both regarding political orientations and political participation, are the product of gendered social norms and differences in men and women’s socio-economic status. Despite advances in gender equality in Western societies in the last decades, women remain the primary care-providers while men focus on the provision of resources.  The thesis consists of three empirical chapters, each addressing a distinct puzzle regarding the object of difference, their development over the lifespan and the context in which they develop. In the first paper (chapter 2), I argue that men and women relate differently to politics, and this is reflected in their interest not as a matter of level (how interested they are) but of the object of interest (women are interested in other issues). In the second paper (chapter 3) I argue that socialization is at the heart of the existence of a substantial gender gap in political interest from an early age. These gender differences in the political realm are further amplified during the transition to adulthood. The third paper (chapter 4) turns to contextual factors, precisely that the absence of women in media as agents of the news contributes to hindering women’s interest in politics as they lack figures to identify with. Despite the limited attention of the scholarship to media, it is a relevant contextual factor that vehiculates many citizens’ interactions with the political realm (but also with financial affairs or other social events), so the events reported and how they are framed are crucial for the political formation of citizens.
This dissertation examines the evolution of temporal perceptions amid crises in Western Europe, in the period between 1500 an 1660s. Time captured the imagination of intellectuals, noblemen and commoners alike, constantly faced by instability and changeability. Importantly, times was perceived to be at once the dimension of one’s social existence and an agent of history of its own accord. Being such, time then also mattered politically. How did the temporal perceptions alter amid crises? What sort of reflection did temporal perceptions find in the political thought generated between 1500 and 1660s? This thesis represents a novel re-examination of Western political thought from the perspective of temporal discourses. Concentrating on the study of temporal discourses during crises, the work engages with a number of scholarly debates in early modern intellectual history and provides a new reading of the emergence of the theory of early modern sovereign state, as well as of the paradigm of state of exception. It is argued that the early modern theory of sovereignty was born as a result of the gradual radicalization of political thought precisely as the human intellect sought to respond to the exceptionality generated by time. With a focus on kairotic temporality and the moment of crisis at which decisive action is called for, this work suggests that the classical idea of dictatorship reemerged powerfully in the context of a kairotic perception of time. In so doing, it contributes to discussion about the appearance of a new ethics of statehood, and a new sort of constitutionalism, by tracking the evolution of a way of thinking about politics and time that translated into the endorsement of some form of absolutism.
The 1970s, a UNESCO report claimed, would be the “communication decade”. UNESCO had started research on new means of mass communication for development purposes in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the issue evolved into a debate on the so-called “New World Information and Communication Order” (NWICO) and the democratisation of global media. It led UNESCO itself into a major crisis in the 1980s. My project traces a dual trajectory that shaped this global debate on transnational media. The first follows communications from being seen as a tool and goal of national development in the 1960s, to communications seen as catalyst for recalibrated international political, cultural and economic relations. The second relates to the recurrent attempts, and eventual failure, of various actors to engage UNESCO as a platform to promote a new global order. I take UNESCO as an observation post to study national ambitions intersecting with internationalist claims to universality, changing understandings of the role of media in development and international affairs, and competing visions of world order. Looking at the modes of this debate, the project also sheds light on the evolving practices of internationalism. Located in the field of a new international history, this study relates to the recent rediscovery of the “new order”-discourses of the 1970s as well as to the increasingly diversified literature on internationalism. With its focus on international communications and attempts at regulating them, it also contributes to an international media history in the late twentieth century. The emphasis on the role of international organisations as well as on voices from the Global South will make contributions to our understanding of the historic macro-processes of decolonisation, globalisation and the Cold War.
Understanding the propagation of shocks throughout the economy is crucial for the design of policies and for their evaluation. Shock propagation hinges on a number of factors, among which market structure and the level of competition play a relevant role. In this dissertation I investigate the role of competition on firms’ pricing behavior and on banks’ funding stability when hit by a shock. Moreover, I also assess the implications of greater capital requirements on banks’ liquidity provision. The first chapter assesses how firms set their markups following a positive demand shock. I use the 2012 Emilia-Romagna earthquake as a natural experiment and I exploit within-firm variation of construction firms to identify the causal effect of interest. I find that markups decreased on average by 4 percentage points following the demand shock and that this drop is driven by higher competition due to firm-entry in the face of increasing marginal costs of labor. The second chapter, joint with Tommaso Oliviero, studies the effect of an increase in deposit insurance limit to e100,000 per bank account, set by the EU in early 2009, on the market for deposits. To evaluate the impact of the new directive we use Italian banks as a control group as they were not affected by the change. We find that the increase of deposit insurance limit reduces banks’ cost of financing through deposits between 0.3 and 0.7 percentage points. The third chapter studies the effect of a change in capital requirements on the market for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). In a framework where securitization lowers banks’ monitoring effort over loans’ quality, I provide evidence of optimal risk-adjusted capital requirements that trade off the benefits of higher liquidity with the costs of lower monitoring incentives.
Over the last forty years, legal theory and policy advice have come to draw heavily from an ‘evolutionary’ jurisprudence that explains legal transformation by drawing inspiration from the theoretical successes of Darwinian natural selection. This project seeks to enrich and critique this tradition using an analytical perspective that emphasizes the material consequences of concepts and ideas. Existing theories of legal evolution depend on a positivist epistemology that strictly distinguishes the objects of social life—interests, institutions, systems—from knowledge about those objects. My dissertation explores how knowledge, and especially non-legal expertise, acts as an independent site and locus of transformation, mediating the interaction between law and social phenomena and acting as a catalyst of legal innovation. Prior work by Simon Deakin has integrated insights from systems theory to show how the interaction between law and economic institutions can only be properly understood by attending to the epistemic frame law uses to interpret economic practice. Using a case study on the impact of ‘law and finance’ literature on World Bank policy advice and, consequentially, on legal reforms adopted by many developing countries between 2000 and the present, I show that such attention to legal knowledge is inadequate. The case points, first, to the contingency of the intellectual tools used to understand legal institutions. Rather than deploying a determinate rationality, private and public actors address legal, economic, and ethical problems using a variety of paradigms: viewpoints are not determined by realities. More fundamentally, the cases suggest that successful paradigms, rather than economic or political realities alone, shape the dynamics of socio-legal change. My conclusions address some normative questions that arise when researchers in a social scientific mode are implicated in the processes they seek to document.
The Great Recession constituted a breaking point in several aspects of the cultural, economic and political life of southern European countries (i.e. Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain). This dissertation aims to shed light on the political consequences of the economic crisis in this region —with a specific focus on Spain as a paradigmatic case— by analysing different aspects of the political transformations that took place during the period of crisis. The underlying argument is that, albeit some relevant differences, the four countries experienced a common pattern: the incapacity of national politics to offer differentiated recipes to the deteriorating economic situation triggered a widespread crisis of representation that introduced new issues in the political agenda and drove the political transformations in these countries. The combination of a political and economic crisis at the national and European levels opened new political spaces that new parties capitalised by appealing to the need for democratic renewal and opposition to austerity politics. Furthermore, as illustrated by the Spanish case, and in particular the Catalan experience, the political crisis had far-reaching consequences beyond economic grievances, leading to the activation of different types of conflicts. Overall, the findings suggest that the transformations in the structure of political conflict in southern Europe in the aftermath of the Great Recession are not the by-product of a growing cultural divide —as is the case in several other continental and north-European countries—, but instead respond to the loss of credibility in the political system. Methodologically, the dissertation relies on an original dataset of media content as well as on several sources of survey data to test the empirical validity of the claims.
Recurring variations in cohort size (also known as ‘baby booms’ and ‘baby busts’) are known to be a factor affecting the fortunes of people born to different cohorts. However, existing evidence in this regard comes overwhelmingly from Western countries, while little is known about the impact of similar processes in Russia despite the fact it is the country in which the Second World War has left, perhaps, the most sizeable and far-reaching demographic trace. Apart from immense casualties and devastating effects on the health of the surviving population, it had a major impact on the fertility of several generations that sent ripples through Russia’s population age structure for years to come – the phenomenon that Russian demographers metaphorically refer to as the ‘demographic echo of war’. In this study, I explore the effects of this peculiar demographic context on individual social mobility both during the Soviet and the post-Soviet period, using rich data from the Max Planck Education and Employment Survey and Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. In general, I find that the demographic echo of war affected the individual mobility patterns of Russians in several intricate ways, although the magnitude of its impact does not warrant the conclusion that it had a decisive effect on people’s fortunes. The study also makes several theoretical contributions to existing scholarship on the relationship between changes in population age structure and the process of social stratification.
This PhD thesis explores pro bono practice among large, international law firms in Europe. The central question addressed by the thesis is: does “Big Law Pro Bono” contribute to access to justice in Europe? The thesis commences with a review of the literature which both contextualizes and situates the thesis. This review also identifies gaps in the existing literature particularly related to the globalization and localization of law firm pro bono and its practice beyond the United States (i.e. its practice in other parts of the world such as Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America). After identifying issues with the current definition of access to justice, used throughout much of the existing literature, the thesis proposes a new definition which is then used throughout the thesis to evaluate pro bono practice in Europe. Towards this end, the thesis first provides historical context to law firm pro bono practice by exploring the history of pro bono, legal aid and other models of progressive lawyering across Europe. Following this, the thesis closely explores the process by which large firm pro bono practice arrived in Europe (i.e. globalization), the contemporary practice and the process by which it adapted to the European legal, social and political ecosystem (i.e. localization). Ultimately, it is suggested that large firm pro bono does not contribute to access to justice in Europe insofar as access to justice is defined narrowly - in the way that it has been conceived of in much of the existing literature. However, by embracing a broader definition of access to justice, it is possible to perceive the actual (and possible) social and political impact of large firm pro bono practice in Europe.
This thesis aims to bring back financial history into two of the main topics in Italian historiography, namely the Risorgimento and the Southern Question, by comparing the financial evolution of the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Two Sicilies and reassessing the financial impact of national unification in the South. It shows in particular how politics – in terms of foreign and domestic policy and power relations between regional economic elites – shaped financial markets and how different financial institutions, in turn, supported more or less effectively government policies. It also makes clear that, prior to unification, there was properly speaking neither a financial ‘North’ nor a financial ‘South’ due to extreme market fragmentation. Despite its larger resources, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies proved conspicuously unable to leverage them to promote widespread credit development, thus breaking free of a ‘Neapolitano-centric’ perspective. By constrast, Piedmont’s wager on nationalism and economic development soon proved successful. Initially forced by an impending sovereign debt crisis after the First War of Independence to rely heavily on foreign and domestic banking, the Piedmontese government under Cavour turned financial policies into a powerful tool to support an ambitious foreign policy and promote political and financial rapprochement between the Turinese and Genoese business elites. The annexation of the South in 1860 resulted in a surge of public debt, while it took decades to re-establish an orderly monetary system. From the point of view of credit conditions, however, national unification was a remarkable success in the South, despite – or better because of – the fierce competition between regional banks of issue. Yet the entanglement between finance and politics ultimately delayed the establishment of a sound monetary and banking system nationwide and impinged on regional credit development.
This first chapter is co-authored with Nicolás Aragón and examines how participant and market confidence affect the outcomes in an experimental asset market where the fundamental value is known by all participants. Such a market should, in theory, clear at the expected value in each period. However, the literature has shown that bubbles often occur in these markets. We measure the confidence of each participant by asking them to forecast the one-period-ahead price as a discrete probability mass distribution. We find that confidence not only affects price-formation in markets, but is important in explaining the dynamics of bubbles. Moreover, as traders’ confidence grows, they become increasingly more optimistic, thus increasing the likelihood of price bubbles. The second chapter also deals with expectations and uncertainty, but from a different angle. It asks how increased uncertainty affects economic demand in a particular sector, using a discrete-choice demand framework. To investigate this issue I examine empirically to what extent varying uncertainty affects the consumer demand for flight traffic using us micro demand data. I find that the elasticity of uncertainty on demand is economically and statistically significant. The third chapter presents a more practical side to the issue examined in the first chapter. It describes how to elicit participants’ expectations in an economic experiment. The methodology is based on Harrison et al. (2017). The tool makes it easier for participants in economic experiments to forecast the movements of a key variable as discrete values using a discrete probability mass distribution that can be “drawn” on a virtual canvas using the mouse. The module I wrote is general enough that it can be included in other economic experiments.
The thesis contributes to the debate on the EU’s approach to the business practice of resale price maintenance (RPM), which is widely criticized as too strict and in conflict with what is considered to be the consensus in the economic literature. The thesis critically dissects the economic consensus, on which the critique against the EU’s approach is based, by analyzing the empirical evidence that is cited to support the claim that RPM can frequently be explained by the service-based RPM models and shows that there is no convincing evidence that would support the significance of these positive RPM models that predict positive effects on welfare. To support this finding the thesis collects new evidence by surveying the marketing literature and shows that not only is there no convincing evidence that the positive RPM models frequently apply, but to the contrary there is evidence that these models are inconsistent with the real world phenomenon of RPM. Having refuted the service-based models the thesis takes up the scientific challenge that “it takes a theory to beat a theory” and proposes to fill the gap with three price-based models. The thesis offers an analysis of the three price-based RPM models, first from the perspective of welfare effects and then from a broader economic perspective in an attempt to ultimately show that the EU approach to RPM can be justified based on these economic models. All three models explain the situation in which RPM is used by a branded good manufacturer to create the perception of high quality, which is used either as a credible quality signal, becomes a component of the product or is used to bias the consumer decision; they thus enter the difficult terrain of consumer preference formation and of markets for the intangible components of a product.
Involuntary sterilisation and castration, narrowly problematised at the Nuremberg trials, were long topics incoherently regulated by international law. A supranational conceptual and remedial framework, mainly pertaining to human rights, is only recently emerging regarding the practices. Against this background, the thesis takes a closer look at Sweden, Norway and Finland, three Nordic countries that established similar sterilisation and castration laws and/or administrative regulations during the last century. The regulations have built on state control and allowed for interventions against the will of the targeted individuals. The targeted groups have been heterogeneous but can generally be divided into three subgroups: poor and marginalised women (1930s–1970s), sexual offenders and ‘deviants’ (1930s–1970s) and trans people (1970s–today). While the majority of the practices have been abolished, the three otherwise similar states have legally conceptualised said practices very differently, particularly in terms of state responsibility and remedies for victims. The thesis looks deeper into these differences and draws on legal mobilisation and social movement theory, particularly grievance formation with reference to rights. The thesis engages in doctrinal, legal-historical, socio-legal and comparative modes of analysis. Doing so, it investigates five legal and extra-legal factors to understand the differences between the countries of comparison: i) rights culture; ii) remedial and public liability culture; iii) victim mobilisation; iv) perception of victims and mass media attention; and v) public image and political party alliances. These factors have affected the unfolding of the establishment, abolition and remedy of involuntary sterilisation and castration in Sweden, Norway and Finland – practices sometimes referred to as the ‘skeleton in the closet’ of the Nordic welfare states.
This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays in microeconomics. The first chapter studies a principal-agent model where a biased agent can costly collect information useful for the principal. I study what is the optimal contract the principal should commit to, when she cannot do contingent transfers to the agent. When the agent's value of information is higher than its cost, the optimal mechanism is a threshold delegation rule. The principal allows the agent to choose among all the available actions up to some threshold. This threshold is increasing in the parameter measuring the cost of information. Otherwise, the principal will commit to extreme biased behavior to induce information acquisition. The utility of the principal is non-monotonic in the cost of information. While inducing information acquisition becomes more difficult with higher cost, certain deviations in the acquisition stage become more expensive and thus less profitable for the agent. The second chapter is coauthored with Julie Pinole. Knowing that Individuals interact with their peers, we study how a social planner can intervene, changing these interactions, in order to achieve a particular objective. When the objective is welfare maximization, we describe the interventions for games of strategic complements and strategic substitutes. We show that, for strategic complements, the planner uses resources to target central players; while she divides individuals into separated communities in the case of strategic substitutes. We study which connections she targets in order to achieve these goals. The third chapter is coauthored with Julie Pinole and analyzes a model of contagion on social network. We ask how a social planner should intervene to prevent contagion. We characterize the optimal intervention and the cost associated. We discuss the intuition behind the choice of the planner and we provide comparative static on the cost of intervention for different type of network.
The thesis offers a doctrinal and philosophical analysis of the regime of gender identity in three European jurisdictions: France, Italy, and England and Wales. Firstly, the dissertation clarifies the role of gender categories in the law and explains why the gender binary is entrenched in the selected jurisdictions. To this purpose, the thesis analyses the legal regime to which intersex and trans identities are subjected. It begins by unfolding the demands for recognition and protection made by intersex and trans persons. It then explores the legislative and jurisprudential reactions to such demands. In so doing, the dissertation explores the doctrinal justifications, in terms of public interests and fundamental rights, offered to regulate gender identities. Moreover, through the lenses of queer theory, it conceptualises the instrumental value of gender categorisation, and identity normalisation. This analysis falsifies any rhetoric of naturalness and makes explicit the political dimension of binary categories and identities. Secondly, the thesis explains how gender categories are enforced in the law. The analysis of the legal discipline imposed on intersex and trans people indeed reveals a system of disciplinary normalisation. Through the cogs of this mechanism, identities and bodies are re-shaped to fit with the purposes which gender categories serve. The selected jurisdictions, read in conjunction, offer a great variety of legal acts, decisions, and literature. Such an abundance consents a deep analysis of the phenomenon. These jurisdictions shed light on a largely unexplored, even taken for granted, area of the law where discourses on sexuality, identity, and pathology intertwine, far too often with adverse consequences on the rights of intersex and trans people.
This thesis examines black music circulation in the urban spaces of London and Paris. It shows the complexity of the evolutionary processes of black musical genres, which occurred during the late imperial period (1920s-1950s) within the urban music scenes of two imperial metropolises, and how they played an important role on the entertainment circuit. Both cities functioned as sites of crossfertilisation for genres of music that were co-produced in a circulation between empires and Europe. Musicians of various origins met in the urban spaces of the two cities. The convergence and intermingling of musical cultures that musicians had brought with them produced new sounds. This process was influenced by a minority group (blacks), but had a significant and lasting influence on the musical world. By creating an historical account of the encounters and exchanges between people of different origins within the music scenes, this thesis examines music development and the complexity of processes of racialisation according to their historical locality and meaning. Using a variety of sources including police reports, government documents, interviews, guidebooks and newspapers, this work contributes to widen the perspective of historical studies on music developments, emphasising their social and spatial dimensions, which are fundamental for the exploration of music scenes, in general, and for the spread of black genres of music in particular. Black music styles spread internationally, but were produced in several specific locations where music industry infrastructure was developing. In the urban spaces of the music scenes of London and Paris social networks were formed by various actors - both blacks and whites - and were crucial for music production and reception; different perceptions of blackness, processes of competition, and debates on authenticity emerged; and processes of regulation and negotiation underpinned the intervention of public authorities.
Despite the large body of literature on labour market institutions and their effects on employment and unemployment, large gaps remain. This thesis sheds a new light to the old problem of labour market institutional design and labour market performance. It examines how labour market institutions in different European models of capitalism affect labour market transitions. It does so by employing an advanced econometric method: an event history analysis, estimating a piecewise constant exponential model. Longitudinal data are employed from three different national datasets (the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the Italian Survey “Famiglia e soggetti sociali”) for the period 1990–2009. The effects of labour market institutions are estimated both at a country-level and at a comparative, pooled-country-level to increase the degrees of freedom and the variability in the independent variables. The empirical evidence suggests that institutions indeed have a significant effect on labour market transitions and this effect differs largely among different models of capitalisms, corroborating the Varieties of Capitalism approach. In accordance with the latter, the importance of non-pecuniary institutions such as trade union power, trade union fragmentation and wage bargaining is re-affirmed and substantial labour market institutional complementarities are found. This thesis advocates for an optimal, strictly positive and intermediate level of EPL in all countries; an unemployment insurance contingent on strict conditionality and high activation; while the optimal level and system of wage bargaining are found to depend crucially on the trade union power as well as trade union coordination and fragmentation. Trade union fragmentation is found to reduce all labour market transitions and have a negative effect on labour market performance.
The elderly are an ever-growing group of the population of western countries. Increasing their low employment rates is one of the greatest challenges we face in labour market policy today and is the subject of the ﬁrst chapter of this thesis. I evaluate the labour market eﬀects of partial retirement - that is a scheme that subsidises part-time work for older workers. It was introduced as an attempt to extend working lives by incentivising part-time employment after a certain age. I ﬁnd that this policy had overwhelmingly negative eﬀects on old-age labour supply as most workers substituted full-time work with part-time work in partial retirement without actually extending their active lives. Chapter 2 of this thesis is a reﬂection on the labour market situation of young workers with parental backgrounds that make it diﬃcult for them to achieve their potential. When and where they are held back and whether an open labour market can compensate for this disadvantage is the subject of this chapter. I ﬁnd that after entering the labour force, workers from disadvantaged backgrounds ”catch-up” in terms of wages with respect to their privileged peers with the same educational achievement. I explain this phenomenon in a setup of education signalling with noise and subsequent employer learning. In the third chapter my co-authors and I focus on the consequences of national wage setting mechanisms in countries with large geographic diﬀerences in labour productivity. We confront Germany with relatively ﬂexible wage bargaining mechanisms and Italy with very rigid ones. We ﬁnd that given the large productivity diﬀerences in both countries, Italy’s highly centralised bargaining system generates signiﬁcant ineﬃciencies and high costs in terms of aggregate earnings and employment particularly in the South.
Main aim of this thesis is to shed a new light on the 4th of August of regime, the authoritarian state that was established in August 1936 by Metaxas, and the anti-parliamentarian ideology that it developed during the years of its existence. Despite increasing production of literature on this topic in the last few years the bibliographical lacunae are still many and there is still a high degree of puzzlement in regard to the understanding of the nature of the regime. This thesis attempts to form a new understanding of its political nature and the discourses that it has developed as a regime on its own physiognomy. The anti-parliamentarian discourse is chosen to be analyzed from the ideological motives that the regime adopted since it is considered crucial for the understanding of the mentality of Greek fascist experiment. The overcoming of the parliamentarian rule was one of the key reasons for its establishment considered as destructive for the existence of the national totality. I adopt the concept of 'anti-parliamentarianism' as a more suitable term than that of 'anti-democratic' because it leaves room for alternative definitions of democracy.
Historicizing Postmodernism through the prism of cultural transfers: The case of Greece (1974-2010), examines the various transformations of the concept of postmodernism in the Greek intellectual framework, between 1970 and 2010, and situates them in a wider transnational context. It is focused mainly on the academic fields of history, literary criticism/Philology, and social theory and it is deployed around three interrelated questions; two preliminary questions concerning the postmodern debates in the Greek context, and the central research question, which seeks to bring the debates into a transnational context: Firstly, a) what were the Greek perceptions of postmodernism? More particularly, what did the concept of postmodernism mean for the intellectuals who entered the debates around its definition and features, depending on their field of expertise, and on the particular moments they attempted to define it in the period under examination? Secondly, b) how has the debate on postmodernism affected the aforementioned subject areas, in such a way that it radically changed the terms of discussion on their regulatory epistemological foundations; and how have the changes in the social, economic and political context of the past 40 years shaped and reshaped the various different arguments regarding postmodernism in the level of ideas. Finally, c) How did the debate around postmodernism in the Greek intellectual circles relate with intellectuals of other national frameworks?
This is a study of the development of war writing in the nineteenth century, showing how the authorial impulses of veterans from the Napoleonic Wars interacted with a booming publishing industry across Europe to forge a new relationship between ex-soldiers, the book market, and the cultural representation of war. Focussing on the hundreds of military memoirs written by British, French, and Spanish veterans of the Peninsular War (1808-1814), I propose a new methodology for the study of these sources, departing from the current state of literature with a deliberate emphasis on their public, political, and commercial aspects. Beginning with the political aims of the old soldiers who wrote these books, I examine their attempts to re-write history, reform the army, and defend themselves from controversy. Using evidence from the archives of publishing houses, I reveal the immense and frenzied editing, printing, and marketing activity which was concealed behind the facade of a simple soldier’s tale, challenging us to start thinking about soldiers as professional authors, aiming to influence the broader writing of the story of war. I then explore the afterlives of these war memoirs, following the books once they outlived their authors. In the hands of later editors, family members, and commercially-minded publishers, many memoirs changed dramatically, selling an updated idea of the experience of war. I also consider the widespread phenomenon of reprinting and translation, which carried soldiers’ tales far beyond their home countries and into new languages, appropriating them into the memory-making processes of other nations. Throughout, the comparison with Spain acts as a counterweight to the more heavily-studied France and Britain, allowing me to challenge prevailing ideas about the origins and format of military autobiography in Europe, as well as to explore the development of still-persistent divisions between the different ‘national’ narratives of the same war.
Over the last years, academics, practitioners and policy makers have focused their attention on an emerging technology: three-dimensional printing (“3DP”). 3DP is often portrayed as a game changer, showing the potential to disrupt established socioeconomic paradigms and exert profound implications in disparate areas of law. 3DP not only is well integrated in the manufacturing industry, but also increasingly adopted at consumer level. Recent developments have made it possible for ordinary people to take an active role in the production, customization and distribution of goods, and likewise paved the way for the proliferation of new market entrants, such as 3DP online platforms. Against this background, this thesis aims to shed some light on the implications that 3DP may have for Intellectual Property Law. In particular, this work attempts to predict and grasp the consequences that the digitization of real world things may carry in the area of IP law, both from the side of protection and infringement. This contribution is intended to create general awareness about the current state of the art and likewise delineate possible future scenarios in the 3DP ecosystem. The research question at the core of the analysis is whether the current legal framework of different IPRs already offers suitable means for regulating the thin dividing line between the digital and the analogue world, or rather needs to be amended, in order to cope with such a fascinating reality. To this end, the analysis contributes insights to the best legal treatment that CAD files shall receive, in case such files embed products protected by copyright, designs, patents and trademarks. Hence, it addresses right owners’ concern that the online transmission of CAD files, combined with the ease of converting such files into the final printout, will facilitate mass-scale and worldwide infringement of all IPRs.
How do we legislate for the unknown? This work tackles the question from the perspective of copyright, analysing the judicial practice emerging from case law on new uses of intellectual property resulting from technological change. Starting off by comparing results of actual innovation-related cases decided in jurisdictions with and without the fair use defence available, it delves deeper into the pathways of judicial reasoning and doctrinal debate arising in the two copyright realities, describing the dark sides of legal flexibility, the attempts to ‘bring order into chaos’ on one side and, on the other, the effort of judges actively looking for ways not to close the door on valuable innovation where inflexible legislation was about to become an impassable choke point. The analysis then moves away from the high-budget, large-scale innovation projects financed by the giants of the Internet era. Instead, building upon the findings of Yochai Benkler on the subject of networked creativity, it brings forth a type of innovation that brings together networked individuals, sharing and building upon each other’s results instead of competing, while often working for non-economic motivations. It is seemingly the same type of innovation, deeply rooted in the so-called ‘nerd culture’, that powered the early years of the 20th century digital revolution. As this culture was put on trial when Oracle famously sued Google for reuse of Java in the Android mobile operating system, the commentary emerging from the surrounding debate allowed to draw more general conclusions about what powers the digital evolution in a networked environment. Lastly, analysing the current trends in European cases, the analysis concludes by offering a rationale as to why a transformative use exception would allow courts to openly engage in the types of reasoning that seem to have become a necessity in cases on the fringes of copyright.
As of the 2014-2020 financial period the EU has made increasing use of its budgetary resources to advance its policy objectives at the Member States' level thorough the use of EU spending conditionality. EU spending conditionality is a requirement linked to EU funds expenditure that aims primarily to induce recipients to adopt a conduct desired by the EU and secure its financial interests. This thesis examines the novel spending conditionality tool, through the lens of four distinct theoretical frameworks, metaphorically called worlds: the conceptual world (Part I), the legal world (Part II), the constitutional world (Part III) and the institutional world (Part IV). Each theoretical framework reveals important findings regarding the conceptual roots, the legal reach, the constitutional significance and institutional realities of spending conditionality in the EU. Based on empirical EU-wide data and detailed case studies, this thesis concludes that despite its sophisticated conceptual form, thick legal setting, potentially far-reaching constitutional implications and the monumental institutional effort to render the tool effective, in practice, the policy output of EU spending conditionality has so far been limited and uncertain. In response, this thesis puts forward several recommendations that may usefully inform the effective future operation of spending conditionality within the EU legal and constitutional system.
The aim of this dissertation is to shed new light on the electoral support for radical rightwing parties (RRP). Whereas most existing investigations assume a form of causal homogeneity, the starting point of this research project is based on what I call electoral equifinality : the coexistence of multiple causal paths leading towards different forms of support for the same political party. In order to discern and understand different forms of RRP support, the study takes both the supply and the demand side into account. Regarding the supply side, I link cleavage theory and conflict sociology to the Laclauian notion of equivalence , arguing that the electoral appeal of RRP relies on their capacity to coherently unify a multiplicity of heterogeneous demands along the same main antagonism: national versus foreign. Following Weber’s and Parkin’s thoughts on social closure, I theorize that this nativist core conflict is invoked according to a specific tripartite structure, which, to my knowledge, has remained quite unnoticed in the existing literature. In accordance with this theory, a new dataset is developed (n = 1,378), based on the tweets of Le Pen and Wilders, to compare the political supply of their parties in terms of forms of closure, reference groups and issue categories. Pertaining to the demand side, a sequential mixed methods design is followed, focusing quantitatively on the structural heterogeneity within RRP constituencies along three dimensions within a Bourdieusian framework of social space: social characteristics (who); political preferences (why) and political interest (how). Subsequently, the second qualitative research step is based on life history interviews with 125 RRP voters in France and the Netherlands, leading to a typology of radical right support. Taken together, these findings contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of RRP support in Western Europe and open up theoretical and empirical perspectives for future research.
In this dissertation I seek to contribute to our understanding of the recasting of religion in the global order. I approach this by conducting a case study of a prominent practitioner of religious diplomacy: the Italian Catholic Community of Sant’Egidio. I suggest that faith-based mediation is an important arena in which the meaning and role of religion in international politics and diplomacy is (re)negotiated, and seek to develop our understanding of two lacunae in the academic research on faith-based mediation: the operational dynamics of faithbased mediation and its links and contact points with international politics. With a view to developing a comprehensive and contextualized study of the Sant’Egidio community, I draw upon practice theory and mediation theory and propose a three-layered research design focusing on: the internal religious practices of the community; its conflict mediation practices; and, finally, its role and impact as a global entrepreneur of religion and politics. I show that faith-based mediation - when performed by a transnational, professionalized religious network such as Sant’Egidio - is likely to take on some distinctive characteristics that do not necessarily resonate with the findings established in the academic literature on faith-based mediation and religious peacemaking. I further argue that the Sant’Egidio community - through its status and role as a leading practitioner of religious diplomacy -is entrenched in a broader transformative process affecting both dominant ways of “thinking” religion in the current global order as well as traditional modes of conducting international diplomacy and politics.
This dissertation investigates the ties between Florentine merchants in Antwerp and their hometown in the sixteenth century. It demonstrates that such ties were of great importance to them and are crucial to understand their actions and strategical decisions. Despite being an outdated institution, the Florentine nation in Antwerp remained an important point of reference for the merchant community, and depending on its concrete strategical value it was treated with either indifference or great attention by its home government in Florence. The members of the nation in Antwerp predominantly had a background in the Florentine Office Holding Class, which indicates that social dynamics in Florence resonated in the composition of the community in Antwerp. Apart from the nation, merchants also were guided by their Florentine background in forming their business ties. In their partnerships, they relied strongly on investments from other Florentines, and in Antwerp they largely selected collaborators with a Florentine background. This also goes up on a long-distance level, where a large number of their international contacts were with Florentines in other centers of commerce in Europe. Their ties with their hometown were stronger than has been assessed thus far. Apart from commercial ties with their hometown, Florentine merchants in Antwerp also sought to develop patronage ties with their home ruler, Duke Cosimo I through the provision of various services. As demonstrated by the case of Gaspare Ducci, also merchants that developed strong ties in the Low Countries and settled there, sought to maintain ties with their region of origin. By pointing to the importance of merchants’ hometown, this thesis contributes to debates about the relation between politics and commerce, the relation between informal networks and formal institutions, as well as the explanatory value of diaspora and cross-cultural trade.
This thesis consists of three essays in applied microeconomics. In Chapter 1, I estimate the effect that wealth and power have on criminal justice outcomes by exploiting the random matching of drivers to pedestrians in vehicle-pedestrian crashes. If justice is impartial, we should observe the same share of rich offenders both for poor and rich victims, conditional on location and time. Rich victims act as a control group to estimate the proportion of missing rich offenders whose victims are less powerful. Using data from Russia, I find that its justice system is not impartial and the disparity in outcomes is even more obvious for graver crashes. Chapter 2 studies how race and gender affect the probability of receiving help in the United States. Refining the approach of Chapter 1, we estimate whether drivers who hit a pedestrian decide to stay or flee depending on the race or gender of their victim. We match crashes that happened under similar circumstances and in proximity to each other in the U.S. We find that drivers generally do not discriminate pedestrians by gender, but do by race. Drivers stay less often for blacks than for whites, especially in the white-majority neighborhoods. Chapter 3 studies how the power imbalance between victims and defendants affects negotiations in Victim-Defendant settlements in criminal justice. We develop a perfect-information game where the victim and the defendant must exert costly effort for the case to reach prosecution, but they can settle before the contest. Improving the defendant’s bargaining position reduces the settlement amount, yet even affordable settlements can fail to happen. Using the data on criminal traffic offenses in Russia, we structurally estimate the model and recover individual preferences and fighting abilities. We find that the relation between the defendant’s wealth and the expected settlement offer is inversely U-shaped.
This thesis consists of three independent chapters, related by a common theme: the role of education in the macroeconomy. The first chapter considers the role of higher education policies in intergenerational mobility. Student loans and grants increase the possibilities for low-income students to attend college and earn high incomes later in life. For that reason, they are commonly assumed to increase intergenerational mobility. Instead, the chapter shows that education policies have another effect, working in the opposite direction: they reduce the relative importance of other components of earnings such as luck, while those components are a greater source of mobility. Which of the two effects dominates is an empirical question. To that end, the chapter develops and parameterizes a model of the markets for higher education and labor. The results show a trade-off between welfare and intergenerational mobility. The second chapter connects two disparate strands of literature on earnings inequality. On the one hand, skill-biased technological change describes how general equilibrium effects between different types of workers shape the income distribution. On the other, the literature on taxation suggests that incentives to accumulate human capital drive the earnings distribution. The chapter combines both approaches, underpinned by an empirical analysis of occupational skill data. It finds that incentive changes in taxation like those that occurred in the second half of the 20th century can lead to polarization of the labor market. The third chapter really concerns education in economics, rather than education in the economy. It analyses the completion times of students in top European PhD programs. These are comparable to their counterparts in the United States, with a median that is approaching six years and a higher average. The publication of the present thesis helps counter the trend.
Sovereignty endures as a language tenaciously entrenched in the legal and political self-understanding of the Member State. So it is that the boundaries demarcating the Member State polity retain importance as signifiers of sovereignty in terms of both constituted and constituting power. This thesis critically re-evaluates disagreement about these boundaries of territory and citizenship through the exploration of four cases: overseas territories, the withdrawal of nationality, the loss of effective control and state succession. The analysis begins by acknowledging a fundamental split in how sovereignty is understood: it is comprehended both as claims made within the given institutional grid of a state, and as deeper framing ideas about how the legal world is explained and justified. These two meanings of sovereignty have become separated in a time of endemic overlap between legal orders, such as is particularly apparent in the European Union. As a consequence, it is argued that an account of the boundaries of the Member State polity needs to go beyond simply aggregating the four cases in terms of how they are conceived and resolved as practical problems. It also needs to engage with that deeper sense of sovereignty as discourses about how to define and justify the overlap of authority between the Union and the Member States. That deeper sense of sovereignty is given expression in sets of questions the thesis identifies as the “foundational”, “jurisdictional” and “structural” frames corresponding with the “what”, “who” and “how” of late sovereignty. Through a reading of the chief debates in the four cases selected in the thesis, it is argued that disagreement about Member State boundaries concerns not only the stark question of who or where is “in” or “out” of the polity but also involves a clash of ideas about the scope and purposes of the European project.
This thesis explores the history of cross-cultural political advice in India. Specifically, it deals with the encounter between Indo-Persian and Jesuit ideas of kingship at the court of the Mughal emperor at the turn of the seventeenth century.  The main question underlying this work concerns how political ideals were communicated in a globalising world. It takes as its starting point the entangled world of a Spanish Jesuit who was sent to convert the Mughal Emperor of India in 1595 and produced a political manual written in Persian, commissioned by his royal Muslim host. The thesis uses a contextual reading of that manuscript, left untranslated and unexamined for centuries in European libraries, to argue that more than religious rivalry, shared political language shaped the way empires interacted in the early modern period. Underlying this research is also a critical intervention into questions about scales of historical analysis: how do micro-histories from early-modern empires help fabricate, or turn upside down, our ideas of long-term or wide-scale phenomena such as the gestation of political ideas and ideologies?
My Ph.D. dissertation shows the centrality of landless labourers in the shaping of Italian and Spanish history of the 1950s and 1960s. In both Italy and Spain before the beginning of the reform period of the 1950s, high rates of unemployment and low incomes for the majority of small peasants and rural labourers coexisted alongside large areas of uncultivated land in the hands of a few owners.  I argue that aiming to solve these problems both governments implemented a southern model of rural change. This model entailed diminishing the workforce of the countryside together with the industrialization of the rural system, to create a model of efficient and productive agriculture. In this context, the rural labourers become protagonists of change. They claimed the right to work, demanding the full use of the uncultivated land in order to increase occupation, and labour rights in line with those of industrial workers. For them it was not a question of land ownership but of labour rights. While the labourers pushed for a regulation of their working conditions, plans implemented by both governments led to a general decrease of the rural population but, at the same time, a steady percentage increase of rural labourers in the southern regions. Indeed, rural labourers replaced peasants, and a new model of rural economy was set up, that of farming business based on labourers.
This thesis asks who is the woman in human rights law and explores how transnational human rights law forums are contributing to women’s silencing by reinforcing harmful stereotypes. It constructs a special analytical frame – a reproductive rights-based approach – to show the emerging narratives about women, their bodies and sexuality when jurisprudence concerning abortion, birth, reproductive violence and assisted reproduction is connected and read together. By using feminist approaches to law and understanding human rights through power relationships to analyse a total of 35 cases (between 2003-2017) from the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the United Nations CEDAW Committee and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the thesis shows how despite good examples of anti-stereotyping done by courts or committees, by an large, women are still given fixed roles that are all primarily connected to the idea of women as mothers and women’s bodies as reproductive bodies. Thus, the human rights law forums are still not putting women’s lived experiences at the centre of their analysis and are not doing an effective listening work. Instead, there is still a resistance – especially in the European Court of Human Rights – against taking women’s lived realities, life plans and what they say about violence, suffering, disadvantages seriously.
This thesis is about the crisis of Goa, a protracted dispute between Portugal and India over the sovereign rights of the Estado Português da Índia – a group of territories in the Indian subcontinent which had been under Portuguese colonial rule since the sixteenth century – which developed between 1947 and 1961. Although its origins dated back to (at least) the 1920s, and its repercussions were still being felt as late as 1974, the dispute came to a height in August 1947, when India finally became a sovereign state after approximately two centuries under British rule. The new leaders of India believed that the territories of Goa, Daman, and Diu were (and had always been) an integral part of the nation, and, therefore, that they should be liberated from foreign rule and (re)incorporated into India. Geographical proximity, but also the historical and cultural affinities between ‘Indo-Portuguese’ and Indians, were the chief arguments employed to validate such demands. Conversely, Portugal believed that while the Estado Português da Índia was indeed geographically part of India, it was socially, religiously, and culturally part of Europe, a product of more than four centuries of Portuguese presence and influence on the Indian subcontinent. Índia Portuguesa, moreover, was intrinsically part of the Portuguese nation and of its history, and thus altogether inalienable. Such contrasting views regarding sovereign rights culminated in the late 1940s, in a conflict that involved multiple dimensions (i.e. political, diplomatic, economic, religious, and military), several stages (i.e. a bilateral approach, followed by satyagraha, followed by an international approach), and various actors (i.e. diplomats, politicians, and freedom fighters). Eventually, this dispute came to an end following a military intervention by India in December 1961, which finally dislodged the Portuguese from the subcontinent.
This thesis seeks to trace an intellectual history of the concept of customary international law (CIL) within the natural law and ius gentium tradition. Across a timespan of two centuries, in the present work I will make the claim that a strong, foundational relationship exists between the normative content of natural law and the emergence of customary law of nations as a distinctive concept of the international legal discourse.  The work is divided in two parts. The first deals with the emergence of the concept of customary law of nations in the early modern 16th century legal tradition, by juxtaposing and contrasting two different natural law doctrines, the theological one of the School of Salamanca (through the eyes of Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez) and the rhetorical theory of ius gentium by Alberico Gentili. The second part takes into account the modern legal tradition from Hugo Grotius, via Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Wolff, to Emer de Vattel, by showing the relationship between custom and the systematization of natural law into a body of rational law which constitutes a leitmotif of the 17th-18th century. The aim of this work is to assess the argumentative strategies that led to the formation of the concept of customary international law. In other words, the overarching thesis of this project is that the natural law and ius gentium tradition have provided normative content to CIL in ways that are still recognizable today. An intellectual-historical analysis is useful to qualify such content, to show the conceptual development of CIL over time, and ultimately, to answer the question of why CIL is so important to the Western legal tradition of international law.
The pay-as-bid auction, also called the discriminatory price auction, is among the most common auction formats to price and allocate assets and commodities. Trillions of dollars each year are traded in pay-as-bid auctions. The format is the natural multiunit extension of the ﬁrst-price auction of a single item. Bidders specify a price for each unit they want to buy. The market clears at the price where supply intersects aggregate demand and winning bidders pay their bids for each unit won. In the ﬁrst chapter of my thesis, I explain strategic diﬀerences and similarities between the single-item and multi-unit case. In practice, it is rare that multi-unit auctions take place in isolation. The second chapter introduces a model of interconnected pay-as-bid auctions. The auctions run in parallel and oﬀer perfectly divisible substitute goods to the same set of symmetrically informed bidders with multi-unit demand. This connects the demand side of both auctions. The supply side is linked because the total amounts for sale may be correlated. I show that there exists a unique symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium when the marginal distributions of supply have weakly decreasing hazard rates. I then develop practical policy recommendations on how to exploit the interconnection across auctions to increase revenues. These theoretic insights are the basis for the ﬁnal chapter of my thesis. In collaboration with Jason Allen (Bank of Canada) and Jakub Kastl (Princeton University) I use data from auctions of Canadian debt to quantify the extent to which demands for securities with diﬀerent maturities are interdependent. Generalizing methods for estimating demand schedules from bidding data to allow for interdependencies, our results suggest that 3, 6 and 12-month bills are often complementary in the primary market for Treasury bills. We present a model that captures the interplay between the primary and secondary markets to provide a rationale for our ﬁndings.
This thesis is primarily an enquiry into the production of historical scholarship on the Italian peninsula in the first three decades of the 18th Century, with a specific emphasis on Naples and the Italian South. As a point of entry this study draws upon the passive correspondence of the Neapolitan lawyer and scholar Matteo Egizio. Its method is strategic rather than exhaustive: it argues that during the early 18th Century networks of Italian scholars sought to systematically reform how history was written, how the past was understood and related to the present, and how scholarship worked and related to other realms of life. Working collaboratively, groups of Neapolitan and Italian scholars aimed to enforce a specific method, epistemology and sensibility upon the writing of history and the production of scholarship. Building upon the humanist tradition, this entailed a critical approach to history, valuing empiricism and certainty in factual knowledge, challenging speculation and prejudice, and opposing the excesses of universalism, rationalism, dogmatism as well as Pyrrhonic scepticism in historical thought.  This amounted to a coordinated attempt to discipline the production of historical scholarship. On the one hand it aimed to insulate historical scholarship from the encroachment of ideological bias, demarcating the writing of history, in a limited sense, as a distinct realm of learning. At the same time, the disciplining of scholarship made history a powerful source of authority, able to construct and deconstruct political-jurisdictional and theological-ecclesiastical arguments. Between these two tendencies, the generalization of historical criticism in the early 18th Century animated tensions between the intrinsic and the instrumental value of historical argument, as well as between the particular and the general meaning of historical truth. An exposition of these conflicts is the subject proper of this thesis.
Trade in raw materials was a crucial part of what is now often referred to as the “first global economy”. As populations increased and the west industrialized, demand for raw material surged. Helped by falling barriers to trade, improved transport and communication technology made it possible for localities further and further afield to efficiently supply the industrial centres. Technology also created demand for completely new resources, or made the price of resources previously considered worthless soar. The Thomas-process turned phosphorescent iron ore from inconsequential rocks into a strategic commodity. Modern paper production turned useless timber into the raw material of the ever-increasing mass media. And electricity turned picturesque waterfalls into unlimited suppliers of “white coal”.
This study examines how visions of Rome manifest themselves in artworks produced by 265 international artists during or after their stay at the city’s foreign academies, 1989–2014. I treat the extensive body of aesthetic material as a laboratory for exploring the wealth of responsive, sometimes agitated, sometimes conflicting ideas which are not passively transmitted by Rome, but framed, activated and given form by the artists. The account is wide-ranging in so far as it combines a large number of artworks; and it is selective in the sense that it frames these artworks within specific thematically oriented chapters. The result is a dynamic visual history of how artists reconfigure Rome today – from critical evaluations of the institutional frameworks and legacies of the foreign academies to explorations of how artists negotiate the spectacle of Roman sites; from portraits of the people who inhabit the city to studies of how the notions of history and Roman artistic traditions are appropriated and reconfigured in the present. These international artists create work that is experimental, open and ambiguous – work that situates Rome in the entanglement of past and present as well as in local and global contexts. It is through the tensions and possibilities that this entanglement brings to the fore that the artworks challenge more traditional historical reflections on the city. When artists successfully reconfigure Rome, they provide us with visions that, being anchored in a present, undermine the connotations of permanence and immovability that cling to the ‘Eternal City’ epithet. Looking at this work, we are invited critically to engage with the question: what is Rome today? – or perhaps better: what can Rome be?
Whether formal education can equalize life chances of people with different backgrounds, or further exacerbate inequalities that inevitably exist in any society, depends largely on how equally the chances to attain education are distributed among different socio-economic groups. Large-scale political, socio-economic, institutional and structural transformations that newly independent republics underwent in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union 25 years ago was bound to substantially change the distribution of those chances. Bridging the post-communist area studies with the social science scholarship on educational inequalities, with this thesis I study how inequalities in educational attainment changed in post-Soviet Russia and Georgia and what were broader implications of any such change. Using Gender and Generations Survey data from Russia and Georgia I have examined how chances of attaining various levels of education changed for people born to parents with different social status. I have used a merged dataset of repeated cross-sectional national survey from Russia to examine if returns to educational attainment changed during 1990s and 2000s. I find that while educational inequality has increased in both countries, particularly in attaining secondary education, returns to educational attainment, understandably small in the Soviet Union, did not increase much. This leads me to conclude that increasing educational inequalities did not contribute to the well-documented surge of income inequality. Finally, I used quasi-experimental approach to estimate the effect of the introduction of standardized university admissions examinations on the chances of access to highly selective universities. I find moderate support for the hypothesis that the standardized exams have equalized chances of students from various backgrounds to be admitted to selective universities.
In the Habsburg Empire the implementation of compulsory education in 1774 marked a new era. The development and monitoring of educational measures in the following decades was in the past frequently described as a linear narrative of progress until the present day. However, it was not the desire for educational advancement but social anxieties and economic considerations which were usually the driving force for educational policies as numerous examples in this thesis document. The instilment of morality was seen as an important purpose of education. This focus on morality and a general climate of fear during the period of the Napoleonic Wars provided the basis for educational structures that were effective until the Primary School Law of 1869 and beyond. Policies enacted during this time forced for example factory owners to concern themselves with the education of their child labourers and at the same time opened spaces for men and particularly women to engage in the business of private schooling. Through the critical investigation of a broad variety of sources this thesis shows how different school types developed, from factory schools to finishing schools, and how men and women claimed spaces as experts, from moralizing pamphleteers to women educational activists. By investigating the role of educational entrepreneurs, and tracing the possibilities, limitations and practical consequences of the politics of schooling this thesis provides new insights and adds complexity to our understanding of nineteenth century Habsburg society.
The three chapters of this thesis provide a theoretical and quantitative analysis of three elements of the tax-transfer system which recently received increased attention in both the academic and the public policy debate in the United States and Europe. In the first chapter, I show theoretically that optimal taxes on business owners are not entirely characterized by the usual, well established, equity-eficiency trade-off but that additional \trickle down" effects reduce optimal tax rates. As taxes on business income reduce investment, the demand for labor declines, which results in lower wages. I show quantitatively, on the basis of a dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated to US data, that these effects substantially reduce the optimal progressivity of the income tax code. In the second chapter, joint with Fabian Kindermann and Dominik Sachs, we argue that the taxation of bequests can have a positive impact on the labor supply of heirs through wealth effects. On the basis of a life-cycle model calibrated to the German economy we show that for each Euro of bequest tax revenue that the government mechanically generates, it can expect another 7.6 Cent through higher labor income taxes of heirs. We show theoretically and quantitatively that a proper modeling of - empirically hard to identify - anticipation effects is crucial to obtain this result. Finally, in the third chapter, joint with Arpad Abraham, Joao Brogueira de Sousa and Ramon Marimon, we assess the beneffts of a potential European Unemployment Insurance System using a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with search frictions. In spite of substantial heterogeneity of labor market institutions across Europe, we find that a harmonized benefft system with a low replacement rate but an unlimited duration of eligibility is welfare improving in all countries as long as country specific contribution payments eliminate persistent transfers.
Cette thèse propose une analyse du rap algérien à travers une approche pluridisciplinaire mêlant ethnologie et anthropologie culturelle de l'espace social particulier que représentent aujourd'hui les mondes du Hip-Hop en Algérie. Depuis quelques années les études sur la Méditerranée comme entité géographique, sociale et politique, prennent plus d'ampleur, reflétant l’intérêt grandissant pour cette zone dont les peuples ne cessent de proclamer leurs droits et leur place dans le monde. L’Algérie y occupe une place particulière depuis sa guerre de libération nationale, ne cessant de s'affirmer comme une place forte à la frontière de l'Europe et de l'Afrique mais secouée depuis 1962 par des expériences politiques douloureuses et un statut international empreint de sa relation post-coloniale avec la France. C'est cette Méditerranée s'exprimant à plein dans le destin de l’Algérie que cette thèse se propose d'analyser en présentant certains des mondes sociaux les plus actifs au sein de la jeunesse algérienne : les mondes du Hip-Hop. En présentant les spécificités de cette culture urbaine mondiale, relocalisée et réinterprétée dans le contexte algérien, nous proposons une analyse des constructions identitaires et des expressions politiques propres à cette jeunesse. Nous montrons comment ces pratiques culturelles effectives sont le miroir d'une volonté d'agir dans un contexte matériel défavorable, propre au sud de la Méditerranée, tout autant que de ces passé et présent liés au fait colonial qui continuent de s’entremêler. Le Hip-Hop devient alors le parangon d'une mondialisation reprise en main, piratée, réappropriée pour mieux affirmer et construire des zones d'autonomie rejetant à la fois une globalisation injuste et un pouvoir autoritaire liberticide. L'autonomie se joue entre appropriation et détournement : là où la langue reflète avant tout des réalités matérielles de survie.
This thesis comprises essays in macroeconomics across two main themes. The first studies the role of confidence shocks as a source of business cycle fluctuations using an instrumental variable approach. Exogenous drops in consumer confidence are identified by using school and mass shootings in the U.S. as natural experiments. Such autonomous drops in confidence are, in turn, found to sizably and persistently depress consumption and economic activity, raise prices, and reduce nominal interest rates. These empirical findings are shown to be consistent with a model in which negative confidence shocks reduce expectations of future technology, prompting consumers to save for wealth and precautionary motives, firms to reduce employment and investment while raising prices, and monetary authorities to reduce short-term nominal interest rates. These findings provide empirical evidence of a causal role of confidence in producing macroeconomic fluctuations. The second theme studies household fertility decisions in relation to business cycles and underlying labor market institutions. Fertility in the U.S. is shown to be procyclical with respect to current economic conditions (negative unemployment shocks) and rise in response to consumer expectation and stock price news shocks - representing expected wealth effects anticipated by households. However, fertility is shown to be countercyclical with respect to highly transitory TFP shocks – such that couples choose to have children during recessions when the opportunity cost (forgone wages) is lower, i.e. the income effect outweighs the substitution effect. Moreover, labor market institutions not directly targeting fertility are found to affect average fertility rates through their impact on business cycles. Fertility rates are negatively associated with wage rigidities (which raise employment volatility) and positively associated with employment rigidities (which instead raise wage volatility).
This is a theses on political preference formation, which refers to the ways in which actors learn to prefer one political option over another. In political science, these actors are usually private citizens, in their role as voters, and it is easy to see that voting behavior will continue to dominate the research on political preferences. After the referendum that saw a majority of Britons in favor of leaving the EU and the American election of 2016, which brought Donald J. Trump to the White House, people now call for political scientists to spend the next few years trying to figure out how this could have possibly happened.1 It is a safe bet that political science journals will be filled to the brim with articles on the topic and that many, many hours in university classrooms will be devoted to discussions of Trumpism, authoritarianism, anti-immigrant sentiments, white backlash, et cetera. As important as this is, the road that this study travels takes a different turn. It heads away from elections and referendums – “electoral spectacles”, as Hacker and Pierson (2011, p. 86) call them – and instead takes aim at preference formation among large firms, the type of actor that, according to the same authors, truly shapes politics in the long run.
The first chapter of this thesis (which represents joint work with Benedikt Kolb) quantifies the potentially different effects of monetary policy communication on macroeconomic variables, relative to monetary policy actions, using U.S. data. We employ a decomposition of high-frequency jumps in financial futures around meeting days of the FOMC, in the vein of Gürkaynak et al. (2005), but with an additional weighted averaging procedure to reduce noise and to allow the series to be entered into a simple hybrid VAR of the Romer and Romer (2004) type. We find that only the communication shocks deliver responses of Industrial Production consistent with theory. The second chapter of the thesis re-examines the argument of Asker et al. (2014), who suggest that recently developed measures of resource misallocation largely document the dynamic adjustment of firms in the presence of capital adjustment costs and idiosyncratic shocks to demand. The study extends the analysis of Asker et al. (2014) to the case of labour adjustment costs, and finds that such arguments are well able to deliver the levels of labour misallocation recorded using Italian firm-level data. The model struggles with the correlation between misallocation measures and firm-size. The model is then used to investigate a regulatory threshold, representing the first structural investigation of factor adjustment costs that explicitly incorporates features of the regulatory environment into estimation. The effects of regulatory reform for TFP are shown to be potentially quite large. The third chapter of the thesis evaluates whether the financial crisis of 2008 precipitated positive or negative changes in levels of misallocation, as would follow either from the “cleansing” or the “sullying” views of recessions respectively. The paper uses European data from 13 economies. Regression analysis is able to detect some evidence for cleansing redistributions of value-added and employment, for the manufacturing sample.
In this thesis, I study from various angles how uncertainty affects macroeconomic activity. Chapter 1 investigates the effects of uncertainty shocks on economic activity in the euro area by means of a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model with heterogenous agents and a stylized banking sector. We show that frictions in credit supply amplify the effects of uncertainty shocks on economic activity. This amplification channel stems mainly from the stickiness in bank loan rates. This stickiness reduces the effectiveness in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. In chapter 2, I provide empirical evidence that uncertainty shocks have strong asymmetric effects on economic activity depending on the phase of the business cycle. In particular, the impulse responses estimated with the local projection method on a smooth-transition model show that in recessions uncertainty shocks strongly dampen economic activity. In an expansion, the effects are reversed, and uncertainty shocks have positive macroeconomic effects. One possible explanation is that during expansions uncertainty fosters investments and economic activity through the "growth options" channel, while in recessions it reduces investments via the "wait-and-see" channel. In chapter 3, I show that shocks to macroeconomic uncertainty negatively affect economic activity both in the short- and in the long-run. In a New Keynesian model with endogenous-growth through investment in R&D, volatility shocks have negative affects in the short-term because of precautionary savings, lower propensity to undertake risky investments and rising markups, and in the long-run because of the fall in R&D investment. The presence of long-run fluctuations in consumption makes agents more risk-averse, which strongly amplifies the affects of uncertainty shocks.
Written during the centenary of the Armenian genocide, A Nation of Orphans focuses on the personal narratives of individuals who were touched, in one painful way or another, by the Armenian genocide of 1915 – individuals of different genders, social backgrounds, classes and ages. They range from orphans to school directors and presidents, from fathers to daughters and grandchildren, from genocide victims to perpetrators and bystanders. Engaging different modes of historical analysis, my thesis aspires to avoid two recent trends in Genocide Studies: a one-sided focus on either the perpetrators or the victims, and obsessive revolving around the notion of denial. Over the course of four chapters, A Nation of Orphans looks at how Turkey remembered the First World War and the Armenian genocide – what was spoken about but not said, and what was said but not spoken about. My central argument is that silence swept Turkey’s memorial landscape after the Great War. The Turkish silence about the Armenian genocide is both unique and characteristic of the silence that followed the Great War. An ideological break with the past, which was solicited by the republican political regime in the years following the war, and the legacy of the genocide have shaped modern Turkey. I make an effort to understand how silence would indeed become the language of the newly founded republic and how individuals dealt with this predicament of silence: how they came to identify themselves in this liminal situation between speech and silence, between remembering and forgetting, and how they nevertheless found ways of telling their personal stories.
This study constitutes a socio-legal inquiry into the practice of international human rights law. Specifically, the study unpacks the ways in which the concept and category of indigenous peoples is made active and given effect among the Bedouin in the Negev desert in Israel, since before the turn of the new millennium. Drawing contextualized insights from Bedouin localities, the case studies demonstrate the various layers of intermediaries and actors involved and the processes by which the Bedouin have appropriated the international concept and category to make it into a Bedouin vernacular. Grounded in law and society and legal anthropology, this research deploys socio-legal and historical analyses and is supported by rich empirical fieldwork, including extensive interviews and ethnographic observation. In the process of reconstructing how the international concept and category of indigenous peoples came to be invoked in this particular context, this research sheds critical light on how local and global discourses and understandings of internationally-defined status and rights interact and produce tensions, hybridities, and new subjectivities as well as legal and political dynamics at the domestic and international level.
The purpose of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, it attempts to achieve a proper contextualisation of the works of the Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1712), drawing on but going beyond the studies of pure intellectual historians and focusing on Fletcher’s political stances. In this sense, his pamphlets are considered in chronological order and singularly in their most immediate context, that is the concrete issues they addressed, following the trajectory of their reception and the way they managed to modify the ongoing debates in relation to their practical aims. What emerges is the figure of a political activist rather than a systematic thinker, whose brilliant intuitions also belonged to the realm of concrete proposals rather than to utopian speculation only. On the other, the following dissertation bridges a gap in current historiography, constituting a first comprehensive and modern monograph on Fletcher. The introductory chapter indulges on his life, including some new sources and a specific section on his personal library. Chapter two focuses on the militia debate, exploring the distinctive radicality of Fletcher’s interventions, meant for an English and a Scottish audience. The third chapter deals with the economic reforms Fletcher designed for Scotland, reading them as an expression of English political arithmetic and a viable programme. The following chapter revolves around the intertwined ideas of reason of State and commerce, which Fletcher addressed in his Italian pamphlet on the Spanish succession crisis. The following section reconstructs the usage of the natural law theories in the debate about the Darien colony and Fletcher’s attack on the rise of factions in the English parliament. The closing chapter explores Fletcher’s role in the Union debates, looking at the reception of his parliamentary proposals and at the practical aims his last attributed publication tried to attain.
This thesis studies the authority of legislation within the European Union. I believe that the EU legislature is an institution that does not always receive the attention it deserves, that the value of legislative decision-making remains misunderstood, and that our understanding of what it means for the acts of legislation to be recognised as authoritative still is underdeveloped. Drawing upon political and legal theory, I argue that the EU legislature must have a certain primacy over other sources of authority within the EU in the process of ordinary decision-making. That is, I suggest, primarily because the EU has reasonable legitimacy when subject to the control of the EU legislative process and also because legislation contributes to stability in EU decision-making and gives guidance to those subject to EU law. In addition to explaining the benefits of EU legislative decision-making, this thesis will provide the benchmarks that allow for a determination of whether other institutions recognise legislative acts as authoritative. I establish the connection between authority, legislative rules, and legislative text and argue that the authority of legislation is recognised if the constraints laid down by the rules of legislation and the text that articulates these rules are accepted. The authority of legislation is studied in the context of decision-making in the field of EU citizenship.
This study examines popular imperial culture in The Netherlands around the turn of the twentieth century. In various and sometimes unexpected places in civil society the empire played a prominent role, and was key in mobilizing people for causes that were directly and indirectly related to the Dutch overseas colonies. At the same time, however, the empire was ostensibly absent from people’s minds. Except for some jingoist outbursts during the Aceh War and the Boer War, indifference seems to be the main attitude with which imperial affairs were greeted. How could the empire simultaneously be present and absent in metropolitan life? Drawing upon the works of scholars from fields ranging from postcolonial studies to Habsburg imperialism, I argue here that indifference to empire was not an anomaly of the idea of an all-permeating imperial culture, but the consequence of imperial ideas that rendered metropole and colony as firmly separated entities. The different groups and individuals that advocated imperial or anti-imperial causes – such as missionaries, former colonials, Indonesian students, and boy scouts – hardly ever related to each other explicitly and had their own distinctive modes of expression, but were nonetheless part of what I call a fragmented empire, and shared the common thread of Dutch imperial ideology. This suggests we should not take this culture’s invisiblity for a lack of strength.
This thesis is about the anti-Islamic turn and expansion of the far right in Europe and beyond between 2001 and 2017. The anti-Islamic far right has undergone four waves of expansion in this period, driven by terror attacks and other moral shocks. Their leaders and ideologues have varied backgrounds ranging from far-left to far-right before joining the anti-Islamic cause. The anti-Islamic expansion of the far right builds on an ideological duality. Whereas their hostility toward Muslims and defense of traditions continues the legacy the older far right, the simultaneous inclusion of modern gender norms and other liberal positions are historically at odds with the far right. Their online, organizational networks mirror the strategic ambiguity present in their ideology. They connect with Christian conservative and pro-Israeli groups as well as LGBT, women’s rights and animal right groups. Many of their members express views in line with this duality. Based on these findings, this thesis indicates that anti-Islamic initiatives in Europe and beyond comprise a transnational movement and subculture characterized by a semi-liberal equilibrium. The anti-Islamic turn and expansion is thus also a liberal turn and expansion. Rather than being interchangeable and inconsequential, the anti-Islamic expansion of the far right demonstrates who the enemy is matters.
The semi-liberal equilibrium is challenged by three factors: (1) the expansion of their network into Eastern Europe with the inclusion of traditional extreme right groups; (2) the presence of extreme activists harboring anti-democratic, racist and anti-Semitic views; and (3) the belief that Western civilization is facing impending doom at the hands of Islam and those who practice it. The equilibrium is therefore fragile.
This thesis focuses precisely on the anti-ACTA mobilization and the way it fits within the broader wave of contention. While the anti-ACTA campaign did not include occupation of squares (but only the more traditional protest marches), it shared many important features with other protests in the wave of contention, including the adoption of the Anonymous mask and the national flag as crucial symbols (Gerbaudo, 2017), the demand for more democratic decision-making, and most importantly – the belief in the Internet as a tool for empowerment that could contribute to a more horizontal democratic society (Beyer, 2014; Jarvis, 2014; Juris, 2012; McCarthy, 2015). The big difference is that for anti-ACTA protesters, the Internet was more than a tool - it became a cause in itself. People protested to defend Internet freedom, interpreted in a wide variety of ways by different actors, but most often as the freedom of sharing culture (and files) online, the freedom of not being 2 under surveillance, and the freedom of expressing oneself as a key prerequisite for the functioning of any democratic community.
Policy-makers are increasingly looking for ways to reduce inequality in higher education. But what is the size of this problem? How does public policy affect inequality, if it at all? And what actually works to reduce inequality? In this thesis, which combines four empirical papers around this topic, I define inequality as the parental background effect on access to and completion of higher education. The broad goal, then, is to better understand how public policy affects intergenerational inequality. I use a variety of data sources and research methods to provide an answer. Cross-sectional population surveys are analyzed to provide a descriptive picture of inequality in Europe. I also use research findings as data, by doing a systematic literature review on the current state of the evidence. I analyse government register data to better understand the effect of policy changes in England. To analyse the dynamics of completion, I use administrative data as well as the administrative archives from the European University Institute. I find that there is substantial variation between European countries in both the absolute level and the trend in inequality. No country has come close to eliminating inequality completely. Public policy may be a factor that explains this cross-country variation. In terms of what works, I find that some outreach policies, particularly those that include counselling and academic tutoring can work to increase access for disadvantaged groups. Needs-based financial aid also seems to work, while performance-based aid looks promising. The relationship between tuition fees and inequality should still be clarified. While there is extensive evidence that costs can be a barrier, recent increases in tuition fees do not seem to have affected inequality in enrolment. Finally, I find that a reinforced program structure as well as more extensive financial aid may help doctoral students from finishing their dissertations more quickly.
For the citizens of Europe, the late nineteenth century was marked by the beginning of mass mobilization. In many states, including the Habsburg Empire, people were transformed from subjects into citizens and the representatives of certain political preferences and national identities. I research the beginning of this mass mobilization process with specific attention to the role of the Catholic Church in Austrian Galicia, as the Church was a leading social institution and set an example of action for its laity. With this thesis, I aim to contribute to the history of mass mobilization and social history by emphasizing the changes and challenges that the mass mobilization process brought to the Catholic Church (divided in Galicia into the Greek Catholic and the Roman Catholic churches) and its laity during the fin de siècle. The Greek and Roman Catholic churches, which I understand as consisting of high hierarchs, clergy, and laypeople, were important players in the mass mobilization process and managed to influence it dramatically. The beginning of mass mobilization challenged the strong position of the hierarchy and clergy and stimulated them to produce new strategies and values in order to remain influential and important, especially for their laity. By laity, I mean those who were part of these institutions, more precisely the peasants.
Looking at the social and political transformation of China during the entire Republican era, my thesis explores the twofold adoption of the Red Cross in the country. My examination reveals that the model served reform-oriented philanthropists of the Chinese Red Cross Society to establish relief structures to improve the country’s welfare system through the implementation of Western approaches. In addition, the Red Cross was of use for supporters of China’s religiously-based philanthropy who reformed the faith-based mission of the Red Swastika Society to gain legitimization and to advance emergency measures. Adding to current research on the development of humanitarianism a so far marginally explored local case study, my thesis suggests that the Red Cross in China not only served reform-oriented philanthropists, but also served supporters of China’s traditional philanthropy.
This thesis focuses on recent monetary and macroprudential policies addressing the Financial Crisis. Chapter 1 stresses the role of central-bank communication. In particular, shocks derived from movements in federal funds futures prices during monetary policy announcement days have become popular for analysing U.S. monetary policy. While the literature often considers only surprise changes in the policy rate (“action shocks”), we distinguish between action and “communication shocks” (surprise announcements about future rates), using a novel decomposition of futures price movements. Our results indicate that communication shocks are the main driver of U.S. monetary policy shocks and that they explain a substantial share of variation in production. Chapter 2 turns to a macroprudential topic: How will a tightening in aggregate bank capital requirements affect the real economy? In this paper, we investigate this using a narrative index of regulatory US bank capital requirement changes for the period 1980M1 to 2016M8. Our results robustly suggest that a tightening in capital requirements leads to a temporary drop in lending and economic activity. The aggregate capital ratio and the level of bank capital increase permanently. Our results suggest that permanently higher capital requirements have no lasting negative effect on the real economy. Finally, Chapter 3 looks at asset purchases by the ECB. Their declared goal is to revive inflation, but purchases of which asset will be best suited for this? I address this question in a DSGE model with a role for three different asset classes: Government bonds, securitised financial assets and corporate sector bonds, which affect the economy via different channels. I investigate the impact of asset purchases in an environment of low inflation and a policy rate at the zero lower bound. Purchases of government bonds appear most effective in countering disinflationary episodes, while those of securitised assets have less impact.
This dissertation examines the phenomenon of book digitization and the legal challenges for the creation of digital libraries. It explores whether the current copyright framework supports libraries in the digital era as they strive to remain the institutional guardians of our literary treasures. The thesis hypothesis is that the current framework is unsuccessful or inadequate in supporting libraries. To test this hypothesis and identify the legal inefficacies the dissertation examines context, i.e. the history and rationale for applying copyright rules to books and libraries, the copyright rules as applied to libraries before and after digitization was possible, various digitization projects and the practical challenges that digitization brought about, and, the relevant litigation which has started on both sides of the Atlantic covering over a decade now. Furthermore, the thesis explores normative directions of copyright rules, including their exceptions, applicable to libraries in the digital era. It ultimately proposes that among various players claiming this role, libraries, given their institutional functions and capabilities, should be attributed rights to digitization and a favorable legal framework for providing access to digital material.
This thesis puts in a new light the old problem of institutional design for ethnically divided societies. The lens through which I examine this question is mass education, a key mechanism of cultural reproduction and ethno-national homogenization. In doing so I integrate the insights of various intellectual traditions, including the most recent developments in the field of comparative ethnicity and nationalism, as well as neoinstitutional analysis. The logic and method of the thesis is comparative, based on case studies from Europe’s Eastern periphery. It draws its evidence from a variety of sources, including interview material and the related historiography. I begin by delineating the general research problem, reviewing the existing theoretical and empirical literature, and outlining the place of my study in it. A historical and contemporary examination of the basic demographic and policy frameworks in East-Central Europe follows, with the aim of familiarizing the reader with the overall factual context within which the thesis is framed. This leads to the discussion of the comparative logic adopted and the overall methodological approach. The next three analytical chapters interrogate a different sub-question each, based on the contrasting assessment of a pair of carefully selected cases. Despite their differences in substance, approach, and design, these analyses jointly advance the understanding of the drivers of institutional choice and change in ethnically divided societies. But they also go beyond that in their explorations of the ways culture, identity and politics interlink more generally.
Indian cotton textiles have been said to have both created a craze amongst consumers and paved the way for the industrial revolution in England in the eighteenth century. This thesis examines the volume of the Danish import trade of Indian cotton textiles in the period 1660-1806 as well as how the import trade changed character over time to comprise increasing amounts of white, untreated cotton textiles. The Danish trade in volume was far smaller than that of other European nations, but for certain years, each Dane had a larger quantity of Indian cottons available to them than any other. On the basis of the import trade, the work explores the levels of re-export as well as the Danish textile trade in the barter trade in West Africa. The network of merchants in Copenhagen who purchased large quantities of Indian cottons and their histories as well as involvement with cotton printing manufacturing has also been assessed, as these were essential in ensuring the continued Danish participation in global trade. The significance of the import of Indian cotton textiles to Denmark and its impact on Danish consumption and material culture has also been assessed to analyse how cotton textiles seeped into Danish society. To uncover the material heritage of cotton textiles in Danish history a number of cotton textiles with a believed provenience to the eighteenth century has also been included to exemplify Indian cotton imports as well as European production of cotton textiles. Thus the thesis bridges key concepts of global trade, merchant histories, consumption and material culture, analysis of historic cotton textile samples and production of cotton textiles in Danish history.
This dissertation deals with the issue of institutional reform in transition economies. In particular, it studies banking reform in 17 transition economies during their accession to the European Union (EU). It does so by building on the veto player theory often used in the literature on the political economy of reform. However, the veto player theory as traditionally applied seldom take into account the role of special interests. The dissertation aims to fill this gap in the literature by developing a theoretical account of how veto players and special interests interact. The empirical part of the dissertation, on whoch the theoretical account is based, consists of two parts. First, a quantitative part that studies the effect of the interaction between veto players and special interest on banking reform during seventeen transition economies accession to the EU. Banking reform is meaured through a new dataset based on the Commission Progress Reports. A measure of market concentration has also been developed for the purpose of the thesis, the measure uses data from BankScope (2016), which consists of yearly data for more than 43 000 banks world-wide. Second, the qualitative part of the dissertation consists of two case-studies of Estonia and Lithuania. The main finding of the dissertation is that neither veto players nor special interests can be studied in isolation, but rather that they should be studied in tandem. How veto players affect the reform capacity of a country will depend on how special interest is structured in the country. At high level of market concentration, additional veto players will make the movement towrds full reform more likely. Conversly, at low levels of market concentration additional veto players decreases the likelyhood of reform.
The Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) was founded after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943 with the mission of training a new generation of flag bearers of Communist ideals and Soviet State interests on the international scene, the so-called meždunarodniki. Often cited as the alma mater of most of the leading figures involved in the conduct of the Soviet diplomacy during Cold War, the MGIMO has received paradoxically little attention from scholars. Most researchers who have mentioned it present the Institute either as a crucible of social reproduction in the 1970s Soviet Union or as a subversive place, whose ‘net thinking’ paved the way to Gorbachev’s perestroika. For their part, numerous meždunarodniki describe the MGIMO as a Soviet Tsarskoye Selo or a Communist Lyceum: they surprisingly refer to their experience at the Institute in terms redolent of Russian imperial history, stressing the fact that they were much more than experts in foreign affairs and that they occupied a distinct place within the Soviet elite. Ranging from the end of World War II to the collapse of the USSR, this research aims at analyzing the making of a hybrid social category, what I describe as Party nobility in the Soviet Union, the identity of which shaped and was shaped by the Cold War. How did an institution and its alumni form a distinct social group that sat at the very core of the Cold War enterprise? How did MGIMO become the place where a specific praxis of foreign affairs was inculcated, based on the hybridisation of aristocratic manners and communist ethics during the Khrushchev and the Brezhnev era? Why was the loyalty of both the institution and the social group put into question during perestroika as early as 1985? These are some of the main questions this research will answer.
‘Social Europe’ is an elusive concept. Although largely forgotten today, it was a vibrant idea and project in the 1970s. Promulgated mostly by West European socialdemocratic forces, it was basically a European governance reform project. Its fundamental objective was to transform the nature of European cooperation and integration, by using the European Community as a vehicle to realise democratic socialism in Europe. ‘Social Europe’ took shape around the ideas of wealth redistribution, social and economic planning, economic democratisation, improved working and living conditions, regulation and control of economic forces, guarantee of the right to work, upward harmonisation of European social regimes, and access to social protection for all. It also included environmental concerns, democratisation of the European Community’s institutions, and claims to rebalance the international system to favour the development of the rising ‘South’. It made ambitious proposals to empower the Community in the social field and to increase social and economic coordination between its member states. It was, in short, a proposal for a radically different future than the one we actually inhabit today. This work investigates the rise and demise of ‘social Europe’ in the ‘long 1970s’. It highlights the socialist efforts to build a common European project, explores the concrete proposals it contained, traces its evolution and assesses the strategies and alliances envisaged between the different forces of the Left for its realisation. It sheds light on the reasons for the defeat of ‘Social Europe’, which had long-lasting, and arguably dramatic repercussions for the nature of European integration and European societies, for the relations of Western Europe with the rest of the world, for the history of capitalism and its shift to the ‘neoliberal’ paradigm, and for the ‘European Left’ itself.
This thesis presents a phenomenology of deference in proportionality. There is a relatively broad consensus that proportionality balancing as a method for resolving conflicts of fundamental rights in cases of judicial review needs to be coupled with some kind of doctrine of deference. Although there is a significant literature on many aspects of this question, thus far one of the more basic ones, namely what deference looks like in cases of proportionality, has received less attention. In order to analyze this question, this thesis analyses the case law of four courts – the German Federal Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court of Canada, the Constitutional Court of South Africa and the European Court of Human Rights – with regard to three sets of rights – freedom of expression, the right to privacy and freedom of religion. From this analysis a number of points emerge: In the first place it shows that deference in balancing takes place through adapting the normative and empirical arguments required by that exercise to the institutional limitations attendant to courts. Further, we find a variety of similarities and differences in how deference operates between different rights and different courts. Here we can observe that proportionality is often constructed in a similar fashion among the same right between the different courts. This means that, the way in which courts balance is, often, very similar in Canada, South Africa, Germany and the ECtHR. We can further observe, that there are differences in the practice of balancing between the different rights. The normative and empirical questions that occupy courts with regard to different rights pose different institutional challenges and require courts to balance differently.. Behind these two general observations there are more subtle and nuanced differences and similarities about each of the courts and rights that all contribute to a richer understanding of what deference looks like in proportionality cases.
In broad terms, this research is inspired by the founding questions of social movement studies: what triggers the process of recruitment, mobilisation and spread that leads to the demise or success of collective action? In particular, I was puzzled by the mobilisation and emergence of Egyptian contentious actors: how and why collective action evolved in the country from seemingly random and disconnected events and agents? Using Egypt as a case-study and the first decade of the twenty-first century as time frame, I set to solve this puzzle and find an answer to the leading research question: Does the emergence of Collective Action Networks in Egypt explain the increasing levels of contention and, ultimately, the 25 January uprising? This question focuses on the topic that gives title to the thesis, which is the relation between the hypothetical emergence of CANs and 1) a phase of heightened contention from 2000 to 2011 and 2) the revolutionary situation of 25 January, 2011. It also provides the basis to assess the manifestation of the two other relational patterns that appear in the subtitle of the thesis, namely dynamic protest waves and mobilisation spirals. In addressing the research question, I mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, combining protest event data collection and analysis, social network analysis with interviews. This allowed me to test if, how and why Collective Action Networks emerged and whether the revolutionary situation of 25 January 2011 was an unexpected spontaneous uprising or the natural outcome of a decade of sustained mobilisation. The main finding of this thesis is that, indeed, the intensification of contentious action in Egypt, between 2000 and 2011, was the product an emergent and increasingly complex Collective Action Network that stirred up protest waves and mobilisation spirals thus determining the Egyptian 25 January revolution.
By introducing the terms “citizens of the Union”, the drafters of the Maastricht Treaty inscribed a new concept in European Union law. The denomination of the new concept coincides with that of national legal concepts and of a concept widely discussed in political theory. More than twenty years later, the legal concept of citizenship of the Union has been widely constructed by the case law of the European Court of Justice. This case law then offers a particularly rich field of study for the development of a new perspective on judicial activity. My thesis proposes an investigation on the judge and the work of legal concepts; that is, an investigation on the practice of the judge – the work on concepts – and on the role of concepts in legal reasoning – the concepts at work. This inquiry should be distinguished from classical studies on the judge, mainly dealing with interpretation, as well as from works focusing on power relations between legal actors. In this thesis, I argue that EU law must be understood in its own terms, through an inquiry on the conceptual practices of the judge and I propose a non-formalist account of legal forms.
This thesis examines the relations between the United States and Romania through the prism of the interaction of détente in the ‘long seventies’ with the US policy of differentiation towards Eastern Europe. It deals with the dynamics that shaped the evolution of their bilateral relations after Bucharest’s opening towards the West and the subsequent embrace of this initiative by Washington as an instrument to undermine the unity of the Soviet bloc. The focus of this dissertation is on the progress of the relationship between the two countries from 1969 to 1980 during the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Based on multi-archival research from both US and Romanian sources, it aims to provide an analytical account of the exceptionally close relationship between Washington and Bucharest through a chronological narrative. In this way, the variations and the fluctuations in attitudes, atmosphere and expectations from both sides are highlighted to facilitate an evaluation of the connection between the initial goals and the actual results that this partnership produced. I argue that the examination of US policy in Eastern Europe through the prism of the interrelation between détente and differentiation allows us to shed new light on the substance and the scope of US objectives towards the communist bloc in the seventies.
This thesis compares the industrial policy strategy implemented by the Italian and Spanish governments to favour the internationalisation of domestic firms in the high value-added sectors of banking, electricity and telecommunications. The trajectory of six firms that successfully completed the transition from inward-looking monopolist to European champion (the banks Unicredit, Intesa-Sanpaolo, BBVA and Santander, the Italian electricity utility ENEL and the Spanish telecommunications firm Telefonica) is compared with that of two firms that failed to become European champions and are currently controlled by foreign competitors (the Spanish electricity utility Endesa and the Italian telecommunications incumbent Telecom Italia). The comparison of successes and failures makes clear the factors that led some Italian and Spanish firms to become European champions and others to be taken over.
My thesis is centred on the question of how information asymmetries affect elections. In particular, I am interested in how electoral concerns shape policy choices and in the consequences of institutional arrangements aimed to providing voters with information on politicians. In the first chapter I model a primary election, i.e. an election to choose a candidate. I show that if party members do not know the quality of candidates, high quality candidates distinguish themselves by proposing more extreme policies. As a result, introducing primary elections increases the quality of candidates but it might lead to policy polarization. The second chapter, which is my job market paper, develops a model in which a politician takes a repeated action over an issue and is evaluated by a voter through an election. I show that politicians who flip-flop, i.e. change their decision on the issue, are penalized by voters, because flip-flopping signals incompetence. As a result, politicians have an incentive to protect their reputation by inefficiently sticking to their initial policy choice. This decreases the quality of both policy and electoral choices. The paper also discusses how changes in transparency and term limits can discipline the behaviour of politicians. My third and final chapter describes a media market in which a set of news outlets compete to break a news concerning a politician in office; after receiving a signal of whether the politician is corrupt, media outlets can either fact-check and learn the truth, or publish the news immediately. We show that increasing the number of outlets competing in the market results in less fact-checking and more fake corruption scandals being published. By making the re-election of honest incumbents more difficult, the increase in competition might therefore be detrimental to social welfare.
The Geneva Conventions of 1949 are generally considered the most important codified rules ever formulated for times of war. Conventional wisdom considers them as a liberal humanitarian response to the Second World War. Tracing the international, imperial, and intellectual foundations of these treaties, this dissertation breaks with many traditional explanations by uncovering humanitarian law’s mixed and contested origins. It does so by reconstructing the interwar and postwar drafting debates regarding four principal questions, namely: the protection of civilians, irregulars, the regulation of civil and colonial wars, and of air (and atomic) warfare. It shows in detail how the birth of the Conventions was intimately connected to competing political visions of different key actors. Rising Cold War tensions, the memories of occupation and genocide, the outbreak of civil and colonial wars, and the changing character of the international order, all shaped the way in which they reemerged from the 1940s. The dissertation, which is based upon multinational and newly uncovered archival materials, prompts a fundamental shift with respect to the history of humanitarian law. It uses a comparative approach, focusing on the internal and public debates among and within the four major state and non-state drafting parties of this revision process – France, the ICRC, United Kingdom, and the United States. While adhering to recent approaches to international legal history, it seeks to critically examine the origins of, and the connections between, configurations of humanity and human rights at the start of the Cold War and at the end of empire.
This thesis demonstrates that to understand Immanuel Kant’s account of reason, we must interpret reason’s legislation as embedded in the intricate collection of juridical metaphors that are repeated in the entire body of the Critique of Pure Reason. These metaphors teach us that Kant understands reason as operating analogously to a legal system. Kant repeatedly describes both reason and its critique using legal vocabulary; he likens the critique to a tribunal, the transcendental deduction to a legal deduction and the situation among metaphysicians of his day to a state of nature. Of these juridical metaphors, only the quid juris metaphor, which introduces the transcendental deduction, has been discussed extensively in Kant scholarship, starting with Dieter Henrich’s study of the similarities between the transcendental deduction and legal deductions. The remaining metaphors have either been neglected or studied jointly with the political metaphors. This thesis shows that the juridical metaphors are central to understanding Kant’s account of reason’s legislation and its ability to make valid judgments. Through an analysis of the juridical metaphors in their entirety, it is demonstrated that Kant conceives of reason as having the structure of a legal system in a natural right framework. Against this background, the method of critical philosophy becomes the nomothetics of pure reason. The parallel is substantiated by investigating the metaphorical presentation of five aspects of Kant’s account of reason: reason’s legislation, the notion of a deduction, the critical tribunal, reason’s authority (Befugnis) and its systematicity. It is argued that Kant’s aim in the first Critique is to make cognizers become similar to authorized judges within such a system by proving the legitimacy of the laws and the conditions under which valid judgments can be pronounced. These elements consolidate the conclusion that reason’s systematicity is legal systematicity.
In the first chapter of my thesis I study the effect of firing costs and labor reallocation. Exogenous variation of expected firing costs is offered by the random allocation of judges to trials involving firms in a large Italian court. Judges may be slow or fast and therefore firms experience randomly assigned shorter or longer trial lengths in an institutional context in which longer trials imply higher employment protection. I find that a 1% increase in expected firing costs induced by the past experience of a longer trial reduces the hazard of hiring or firing by 0.4% after the end of the trial. In the second chapter of my thesis I use administrative data from one large Italian court I quantify the extent to which lawyers can be held accountable for the slowness of Italian courts. Borrowing the methodology used in the analysis of employers-employees linked data, I estimate the contribution of unobservable time-invariant plaintiff and defendant lawyers' characteristics in explaining the variability of trials' length. I find that 27% of the variance in trials length is explained by unobservable time-invariant lawyers' characteristics. In the third chapter I study how tournaments may motivate workers to provide effort, yet differences in relative abilities may undermine the incentives of workers to exert effort. I use a novel data set from professional football competitions and find that differences in relative abilities are associated with lower effort exerted by players. In this empirical setting, effort and relative abilities are measured as, respectively, the distance covered on the pitch by football players and relative winning probabilities, the latter derived from betting odds of professional bookmakers. I find that larger differences in betting odds of opposing teams lead to less distance covered on the pitch.
The objective of this dissertation is to shed further light on the nature of European integration by examining the relationship between religion and politics throughout the whole process. The thesis aims at answering the following research question: which forms of secularism have underpinned the process of European integration. Secularism is understood in the thesis as a public settlement between politics and religion (i.e. we can speak of secularism, if religious and political sphere are conceptually distinct). A historical perspective allows the author to identify and examine the following junctures with respect to the relationship between religion and politics in the process: the Christian-democratic foundation of European Communities, the question of Turkish accession, the search for the “Soul of Europe” during Jacques Delors’ presidency at the European Commission, the debate on the Treaty establishing Constitution for Europe, and last but not least: the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty with its art. 17 obliging European institutions to maintain dialogue with religious organisations. Dissertation’s findings indicate that three forms of secularism, rooted in the European intellectual and political history, might be identified in the discourse and practice of European integration: 1) Christian-democratic secularism – Christianity transformed by personalist thought is regarded as a cultural and symbolic basis of European integration; 2) Laicist secularism - religion seen as a challenge to the democratic political order; 3) Agnostic secularism – understood as an attempt to depoliticize religion, to delegate it to other bodies, e.g. Member States or international organizations. The author argues that the last concept, liberal in its nature, has been most successful throughout the whole process.
Despite the centrality in the Rome Statute of both the principle of complementarity and gender justice norms, little research exists connecting these two core ideas. Using Harold Koh’s transnational legal process theory, this thesis seeks to fill that gap by analysing normative interactions between the Rome Statute and national accountability processes for sexual violence crimes in Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It examines how, why and in what way the Rome Statute’s gender justice accountability norms and standards have been domesticated in these two countries, and what this reveals about (positive) complementarity as a tool in the fight against impunity for sexual violence. This analysis starts from a doctrinal analysis of gender justice pressure points in the ICC’s admissibility framework, but also seeks to investigate the practical application of (positive) complementarity in both Colombia and the DRC. This analysis ultimately demonstrates that, while the existence of the ICC (as an institution) is important, most developments around accountability for sexual violence, while often grounded in the idea of complementarity and linked to the Rome Statute, happen through the actions of other actors. The ICC’s constitutive documents and the norms and standards around accountability for sexual violence enshrined therein, on the other hand, have provided an important normative impetus for these developments, particularly where catalysed by civil society organisations and domestic political actors acting as norm entrepreneurs. This thesis thus aims to contribute to illuminating both the prospects and the limitations of (positive) complementarity as applied to the fight against impunity for sexual violence crimes.
This aims at better understanding the drivers behind the volume-outcome rela- tionship found in many studies in the medical and health-economics literature. In the first chapter I investigate the relationship between workload and choice of treatment. Using detailed microdata on childbirth, I exploit a quasi-random assignment of patients attempting to have a natural delivery to different ratios of patients-to-midwives and compare their likelihood of changing delivery method. I find that women who face a ratio higher than 1.33 are 34% more likely to give birth by cesarean section (C-sections). This effect is larger for patients who were already admitted with a higher risk of C-section, since provision of proper and timely care matters more for these patients. Because C-sections are faster than vaginal deliveries, the medical team may find it appealing to do more C-sections when time constrained. Using civil status as a proxy for bargaining power -assuming single women are on average more likely to be alone-, I find that only single patients are subjected to unnecessary surgery. The second chapter documents the existence of `learning-by-doing' effects in physicians' performance. More specifically, I test whether cesarean-section surgeons who have performed more procedures in the recent-past observe an improvement in performance. By using data from the Italian health care system, where patients are not allowed to choose a physician, I eliminate concerns regarding possible bias from selective referral -a problem in previous studies. Using four years of birth certificates data from one large hospital I find that, for emergent cases, performing one additional procedure reduces the likelihood of neonatal intensive care unit admission by nearly 1.2 percentage points (5.5%) and of being born with a low Apgar Score by about 1.1 percentage points (10%), all else equal.
This thesis consists of three microeconomic essays that depart from the perfectly informed and self-interested agent to analyze important socioeconomic problems which do not find a fully satisfactory explanation under more standard characterizations of individual behavior. The first chapter explores the role of economic information on housing tenure choice during periods of generalized optimism, such as housing bubbles. A microeconomic theoretical model including biased beliefs about future house prices is developed, and its main predictions tested in the context of the last Spanish housing bubble. The main finding is that better-informed households were less likely than worseinformed ones to purchase their main dwelling in the years leading up to the burst, when houses were highly overvalued. The second chapter focuses on how the relationship between diversity and performance in hierarchical organizations is mediated by group size. It tests theoretical predictions for individual performance in contexts where knowledge spillovers are important for production, by analyzing the case of Pakistani tax collectors. A legal rule which dictates that 10% of positions must be reserved for members of the army renders this case particularly convenient for observing the effects of diversity. The third and last chapter proposes a new explanation for the relationship between within-country cultural diversity and support for regionalism —both in the form of demands for more autonomy and outright secessionism. This suggests that otherregarding preferences of individuals might play an important role. We test this relationship using data on electoral support for regionalist parties across tenWestern European countries, finding that a region being relatively richer than the country to which it belongs is associated with higher electoral support for regionalist parties only to the extent that it is culturally differentiated.
This thesis explores how the szlachta and residents of the geographically, socially, and politically distinctive regions of Volhynia and Podole reflected on and made representations of the Enlightenment in the 1790s – 1860s. By focusing primarily on the memoirs of the local actors in Volhynia and Podole, this dissertation addresses the ways they experienced and responded to changes in social practices and intellectual communication within their local context and environment. The chapters of this dissertation tackle issues such as education, reading habits, the practice of translation, scientific exploration, emancipation, toleration, and the role of religion in society. By building on these topics, this thesis argues for the importance of peripheral areas in order to uncover the geographical diversity of the Enlightenment. It also contributes to the discussions on cultural superiority/inferiority that were prevalent during the age of Enlightenment, and elucidates the new vocabulary that the residents adopted in their works between the 1790s and 1860s. By focusing on the narratives offered by the landed nobility and residents, this study makes a case for the transfer of ideas and their cultural (dis)placement. The ambition of this work is to trace the full spectrum of changes that occurred within this provincial community, in order to provide a fresh perspective on blending and transformation of ideas in a specific context. Simultaneously, the local actors’ works are also examined as indicators of identity formation in the face of foreign imperial domination.
The question of procedural fairness in EU’s competition procedure has been discussed widely in the academic literature based on the traditional positivistic legal method; so far without a success in producing a consensus on where the practical limitations of the concept of procedural fairness ought to lie. This thesis sets out to approach the problem more fundamentally by propping beyond the concept of procedural fairness in the legal positivistic sense, and venture into the territory of moral and political philosophy for establishing a practical understanding of the more general concept of fairness in human relations. Once the concept of fairness has been properly revealed in practical terms, the thesis attempts to quantitatively translate this concept of fairness into the laws to facilitate the composition of a fair legal rule. To achieve this, a novel methodological model is constructed based on microeconomic tools. This model, the model of fair rules, is then used to assess two dilemmas of procedural fairness in the context of EU’s competition procedure that have been solved by the CJEU based on the traditional juridical method. The results of the assessment suggest that methodological improvements can be made in the design of competition procedures with regards to facilitating procedural fairness. Such improvements would also have implications for the legal interpretive methodologies used by the EU courts.
One of the widely shared features of modern autocracies is the presence of democratically-designed institutions. Elections, referendums, legislatures, and parties are the essential institutions 'bydefault'. Political regimes that have introduced nation wide elections have become the predominant type of political regimes in the contemporary world.
This study examines the effects of climate change on the early-nineteenth century socio-political transformation of the Ottoman Empire by analyzing the institutionalization of an imperial political-ecology, and the transformation of socio-ecologies of the imperial subjects as a reaction to both the climate change and the development of the imperial political ecology. It is argued that the first official weather forecasts, the first Ottoman natural history museum (1836-1848) and model farms of the 1840s were institutional outputs of a significant change in the perception of nature of Ottoman administrators. On the other hand, that perception, which tended to understand nature more and more as a commodity and a scientific object was reacted and challenged by Ottoman subjects in a variety of ways ranging from resistance, to adaptation, and invention of new tactics to cope with its effects. Abstaining from felling trees for the Tersane-i Amire, incendiarism, altering established labor-relations and migration against the will of the state were among the most common practices. It is argued that the resulting dialectic between an ideology based on expert knowledge and identity, and one based on local knowledge became a decisive factor in the empire-building practices and the direction of reforms during the second half of the century. The same dialectic made visible the reasons of the 'failure' of Ottoman state in natural disaster relief after the 1830s, especially during the famine of 1845-50. Dependence of Ottoman administration on centrally appointed expert-bureaucrats and their ideology in comparison to pre-1840 famines, limited the ability of the state to take immediate action and its capacity to negotiate with local elites, merchants, producers and consumers. Famine-time charity and philanthropy have become practices through which a new imperial identity was negotiated between the central authorities, local elites and common subjects of the empire.
The argument that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is important in the development of European Union law has been present in legal and political science research for years. At the same time, some under-researched questions remain. Among those is the CJEU’s impact on the lawmaking process at the EU level and the way the development of EU law steers the case law in response. Further, the theoretical implications of any such 'horizontal' interaction remain under-explored, especially since the major theories in this area tend to see the Court’s relationship with the lawmakers (both the member states in their role as Treaty-makers and the EU legislature) in conflictual rather than complementary terms. This thesis analyses the role of the CJEU in constructing EU level social policy and proposes to conceptualise the relationship between the CJEU and lawmakers in a novel way. First, this thesis explores the interaction between the Court and the Union lawmakers, how this interaction operates in practice and whether there is an overlap between what the Court and Union lawmakers are occupied with. By using both large scale process tracing and a detailed case study method, I show that there is a remarkable (but not omnipresent) degree of interaction between the CJEU and the lawmakers at various levels. Second, I consider what my results mean for the constitutional understanding of the CJEU’s role and its relationship with the lawmakers. I argue in favour of adopting a modified version of the theory of constitutional dialogue in order to better accommodate the actual nature of the CJEU’s relationship with the lawmakers and in order to facilitate the interaction from the specific standpoint of the CJEU. In the last part of my thesis, I explore how this interaction could be turned into a conscious, coordinated process – the coordinated construction of EU social policy law.
The Tunisian Revolution and constitutional process constitute the first successful indigenous democratization process in the Arab World. In this article based thesis the historic event is analysed and discussed in relation to the established theories of democratization. The thesis contains four different articles. The first focuses on why the Tunisian Islamists accepted the country’s new constitution despite the fact that it contained principles that were in opposition to some of their previous Islamist beliefs. The second centres on the role of the Tunisian General Labor Union. It seeks to explain why the union could play such a crucial role in the revolution and constitutional process despite the fact that its leadership had close connections to the previous regime. The third article looks into how the Tunisian religious sphere changed as a result of the revolution. The fourth article tries to answer why the revolution came to be understood as a conflict between 'Islamists' and 'secularists' through an analysis of the conflict between the Islamists and the Tunisian General Labor Union. Finally, in the last chapter the state of comparative politics is discussed in relation to the conclusions of the different articles.
This thesis examines the origins and evolution of Yugoslav policy towards Western European integration from the early 1950s until the signing of the first Yugoslav–EEC Trade Agreement in 1970. It examines the emerging role of Western Europe in the Yugoslav foreign and internal politics within the larger context of the Cold War and development of European integration. Increased trade relations with the EEC and the domestic introduction of the 1965 Economic Reform proved vital in persuading Belgrade to become the first socialist country to establish diplomatic and trade relations with the Community in 1968. The thesis argues that these relations became of increasing relevance to the economic and, ultimately, political stability of Yugoslavia. Besides the basic foreign (trade) policy concepts towards the EEC, this study focuses on the perceptions of the Western European integration process among the political elite by addressing the following research questions: How did Yugoslav policymakers react to the Western European integration process? What impact did the success of the EEC have on Yugoslav foreign policy and internal differences among the political elite? In what way did the League of Communists of Yugoslavia rationalize their cooperation with the EEC? What did it mean for the internal coherence of the LCY and for Yugoslavia’s pronounced cooperation with the developing countries? The overarching question is how and why already in the 1960s the EEC became such an important external factor, crucial for the economic development and stability of Yugoslavia. By analysing the complex interaction between the external factors and internal dynamics of Yugoslavia and their impact on Belgrade´s policy towards the EEC, this study provides an explanation of the underlying long-term structural problems of the economy that determined the Yugoslav diplomatic and economic responses to the creation and evolution of the EEC until the breakup of the country.
Around the end of the Second World War two processes dramatically changed the socioeconomic landscape of East Central Europe: the expulsion of up to twelve million Germans and the establishment of a new social order inspired by the Soviet model. This project is an inquiry into the interconnectedness between these apparently distinct histories. My aim is to understand how the redistribution of property formerly owned by Germans shaped the postwar reconstruction of the social order in two countries whose territories were comprised of up to one third of the post-German lands: Poland and Czechoslovakia. The specific focus of this study lies in the illegal takeover of property left behind by Germans, attempts to control it and the associated discourse. Studying the destructive and productive effects of plunder offers me the opportunity to reveal how public security, economic stability and redistributive justice were negotiated at various intersecting levels. I show that the illegal property transfers were both an obstacle to the post-war reconstruction as well as an opportunity used by individuals and institutions to accelerate it. In more general terms, this reading highlights the critical role of the legally-opaque property arrangements to be found in any modern socio-economic order.
This Ph.D. thesis is concerned with the way litigants of the Usambara Mountains in Tanganyika spoke and wrote about their disputes and grievances under British rule. Language and narratives are at the core of my analysis. While I will give an overview of litigation patterns of the so-called 'native courts' in the Usambara Mountains from the late 1930s to 1960, and will examine clusters of recurring cases, my main concern is not to write a social history of these courts, but a cultural one. I am interested in recurring narratives and their intellectual roots. What kind of language did the Shambaa and other African litigants use in lawsuits and the many petitions and letters that accompanied their suits? What might have influenced them in their strategic choice of language? What intellectual sources did they draw from? While I am also interested in the outcomes of cases and the success of narratives, my objective is to treat these emerging narratives as windows into specific local perspectives. Why did Shambaa litigants depart so markedly from legal language? Was the legalistic language unsuitable for a specific Shambaa understanding of the law, or were the courts themselves not perceived as places for the dispensation of justice?
Since deeper 'open-door' domestic reform in 1992, China has consistently maintained its position as the largest foreign direct investment (FDI) recipient among developing countries. In recent years China is going global as well. Accompanied with a large amount of outbound FDI, the level of debt is also increasing. Thus it is necessary for China to adopt a sustainable development policy and behave based on rules. China needs to work with the world to promote a rules-based investment climate. At a multilateral level, China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 and promised general and specific obligations on market entry and non-discrimination principles. Bilaterally, only after 2001, China has started negotiating preferential trade agreements (PTAs). The first part of the thesis analyses China’s legal obligations in investment agreements in pre- and post-WTO entry phases. Chapter 1 introduces China’s investment policy before 2001. Chapter 2 clarifies China’s commitments on non-discrimination principles under the WTO agreements, especially China’s Protocol of Accession. Chapter 3 compares Chinese BITs and PTAs with regard to investment principles. The second part of the thesis concerns interpretation on substantive and procedural provisions. Chapter 4 tries to answer the question of whether and how do tribunals consider jurisprudential concepts developed in the case law of the trade regime when resolving investment cases. Chapter 5 examines different remedies in trade and investment agreements. It is important for China to keep compliance with its commitments in international agreements, otherwise, it would face countermeasures which are highly costly. Also, China can implement competition rules in its domestic market for improving firms’ efficiency. Meanwhile, a balancing approach which emphasizes corporate social responsibility is equally important for China’s companies going global.
The aim of this thesis is to illustrate, on the basis of a socio-legal study presented in three qualitative case studies, the role of hybrid collective remedies in enforcing European socially oriented regulation, in particular environmental law, anti-discrimination law and consumer law, for the creation of a European social legal order, which is able to gradually counter its perceived internal market bias. The hybrid collective remedies at stake in the three case studies – each case study constituted by a preliminary reference to the CJEU – are symptomatic of the three legal-political fields at stake. With the EU taking a leading role in the three fields for the purpose of complementing the creation of an internal market, the EU has decoupled the fields from their national social welfare origin and re-established a policy which is not so much based on ensuring social justice, but more based on procedural mechanisms to ensure access justice. Likewise, the EU left the creation of collective remedies fostering a genuine protective purpose to the Member States. The national and European models of justice underlying the three legal-political fields and their remedies are of a complementary, i.e., of a hybrid nature, and are moving towards the creation of an integrated European social order. The creation of the European social order via national actors using the preliminary reference procedure to implement the three policies at stake goes hand in hand with the creation of a European society.
Prior to the euro, the topics of constitutional law and monetary policy rarely overlapped. Money was regulated, on the national level, through the ordinary legislative procedures. For European monetary union, the use of constitutional law was nevertheless attractive because it meant that the MS would be in control of the negotiation process, because it enabled a very independent central bank and because it kept the MS in control over the future of the euro. The lack of trust among MS to share a currency was overcome by an abundant trust in law. As the euro was negotiated as a constitutional currency, this created specific opportunities and obstacles for the different parts of the EMU. Once the euro finally came into existence, the constitutional framework of the euro proved remarkably stable for the first decade and a half. After the excitement of Maastricht, monetary policy very quickly became boring again, in no small part due to constitutional law. Unfortunately, EMU primary law was quite successful. During the euro-crisis, EMU primary law shaped the responses to the crisis by placing fewer obstacles on some routes to change than on others. As the crisis developed, some conflicts became the topic of much legal debate and even judicial decisions, whilst other parts of euro-crisis law met with few objections, despite some legally problematic aspects. The possibilities for further reform of the Eurozone without treaty change are then largely the result of the process of reform until now.
For all its powers, we know little about how the European Central Bank (ECB) makes its decisions and why. In light of its ever-increasing importance in European governance and the criticism this has attracted, this is particularly regrettable. Often a welcome scapegoat, the ECB has been accused of doing first too little, then too late. Compared to other major central banks, the ECB has indeed long been a laggard – regarding both conventional interest rate policies and unconventional balance sheet operations. Why? I argue that central bankers’ policy experiments after the financial crisis are a prime example of policymaking under conditions of Knightian uncertainty. Faced with an unprecedented situation, central bankers were unable to draw on historical experience and had to resort to their beliefs about how the economy works instead. Based on a survey among 422 central bank economists, I quantify these different ways of thinking. My survey data shows a) that certain beliefs matter for policy preferences and b) that both are unevenly distributed among central banks. In particular, the ECB leans more towards orthodox beliefs and hawkish inflation preferences than the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. It is considerably more conservative. Within the Eurosystem, different national central banks are clustered regarding both beliefs and preferences, revealing a dividing line in economic philosophy between core and periphery. This suggests that the frequently surfacing conflicts inside the ECB’s Governing Council reflect a battle of ideas rather than a conflict of interests between creditor and debtor states. Proponents of activist monetary policy at the ECB had to overcome enormous resistance from within before they could follow the examples set by others. I argue that this is why the ECB first did too little to support the economy, and only changed its orthodox stance very late.
This thesis explores the evolution of tort law through the prism of three paradigms of modernity, namely, the society of individuals, organizations and networks. These models build on Karl-Heinz Ladeur’s pioneering work. Tort law developed in a society of individuals which is considered a radical break with prior methods of social organization. While the core of private law was contract law modelled on the abstract will, tort law set outer boundaries on the will but its shape was individualistic focusing on individualized conduct. In the twentieth century, with the rise of the society of organizations, tort law was reshaped towards providing remedies fit for a society of organizations. This is evident both in terms of how tort law was adapted to the private firm and the state as service-provider. We find that the concept of vertical vicarious liability fits the way in which tort law abstracted from the reasonable man per se, to embrace the organizational setting in which agents conducted their activities. Our third paradigm, that of the society of networks, is emergent. It blurs lines between private and public and, additionally, the existing normative models of liability – whether individualized or organizational – are not aligned. With the breaking of the territorial frame of the nation-state coinciding with the emergence of a society of networks we investigate whether actors, which might previously be considered 'peripheral' to a tort and, therefore, outside the organizational model of liability are, from the perspective of the horizontal sociological network, once again potential normative addressees of liability. We argue that European law de lege lata is beginning to bring such actors within its scope of application. Making sense of these developments in an overall framework of an emerging society of networks and, additionally, arguing what the stakes are, and how they may be fitted into legal, normative argument, is the task of our final chapters.
This dissertation focuses on the relations of Genoa and Florence with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, with a specific emphasis on key moments in their diplomatic contacts. Triggered by political and economic factors, both states attempted to restore their relations with the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the sixteenth century. Building largely on Italian archival material and complementing it with Ottoman and European sources, this study reconstructs each diplomatic negotiation process that took place and highlights the complex environment in which they occurred. Although the Genoese and the Florentine diplomatic enterprises took place at different times (the Genoese during the late 1550s and the Florentines in the 1570s and 1590s) and under different circumstances, they followed similar patterns, shared common experiences and were confronted with the same obstacles. Thus one of the main contributions of this study is to examine Genoese and Florentine diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire together, and to present a comprehensive picture of the intricacies of cross-cultural diplomacy in the early modern period, placing specific emphasis on actors, stratagems and exchanges. In so doing, it also sheds light on the dynamics of political configurations and alliances as well as inter-state rivalries, which were shaped by commercial and political interests in the early modern Mediterranean.
Rediscovering Zaporozhians examines the cultural imagination of intellectual, administrative, and military elites of the largely Ukrainian-speaking Cossack colonial settler community on the North Caucasus, the Kuban host, who in the final decades of the nineteenth century came to celebrate themselves as the heirs and successors of the Zaporozhian Sich. Drawing together findings from nine archives, materials from contemporary periodicals, administrative and personal correspondence, and ego-documents, the dissertation traces the emergence and development of the idea of Kuban as a living relic of Zaporozhia during the late imperial period. Inventing the ancient past for themselves, the Cossack elites pursued different goals at once. They sought to secure the Cossack privileged estate status in the changing world of fin-de-siècle, to negotiate more autonomy in local affairs, to lend the Cossack community organic coherence and enhance its morale, to reaffirm the Cossacks’ loyalty to the ruling dynasty. Finally yet importantly, the notion of the Cossacks’ Zaporozhian origin shaped and maintained the symbolic boundaries of their cultural peculiarities. The dissertation looks at a wide array of examples of using the past—commemorations, monuments, regalia, rhetoric and other culturally charged entities—to show how the Zaporozhian myth came into being and what political implications it entailed. Following these processes against the background of political developments in the Russian Empire, this work weaves them into the general fabric of the imperial ideology of the epoch. In doing so, it probes the limits of allowable in the dealing of the central authorities with cultural differences on the imperial periphery.
As the saying goes: there are some things that money cannot buy. Yet, scholars have tended to analyze the upper class as a homogeneous group, able to overcome any difficulty that life puts in their way to educational success. Nonetheless, the children of the upper class are subject to the disadvantages of a historically discriminated ethnicity, negatively stereotyped gender, and the boundaries of the institutional framework, among other things. By neglecting the heterogeneity of the upper class, the literature on the Inequalities of Educational Opportunities (IEO) has forgotten to test the limits of class privilege in education. The most crucial point for fully comprehending the research that is being pursued here, is that this dissertation does not tackle whether the rich are simply doing better than the poor in school, or whether the gap between social classes is widening or shrinking. Instead, it focuses on the dynamics and limits of privilege. It analyzes how, in some contexts, the advantaged can be disadvantaged too. In other words, it aims to shed light on what happens when privilege meets disadvantage, and how the perks of being upper class vary among different social groups, such as blacks and whites in the US, or boys and girls in Germany. There are three main lessons to be learned from the three empirical chapters of this dissertation. First, privilege is multidimensional (chapter 3). Second, privilege is dynamic (chapter 4). Finally, privilege is contextual (chapter 5). Lastly, one may wonder why the focus should be on upper-class children since they are, generally, the top performers in any country in the world. The reason is simple; because the dynamics of privilege are part of the IEO puzzle. Only by testing the limits of privilege will we be able to unravel the riddle that IEO poses.
The spread of the internet and migration are key dimensions associated with globalization and range among the most salient challenges of our times. Looking at the intersection of these two phenomena, this dissertation explores how the internet enables citizens of non-democracies living abroad to partake in the political discourse and online campaigns in their home countries. How does the fact of living in non-authoritarian countries affect the migrant’s position inside their online community? Using concepts from the contentious politics literature, I examine why migrant netizens adopt different roles in online campaigns in the years leading to and during the Arab uprisings at the examples of Tunisia and Morocco. I draw upon multiple empirical strategies including an analysis of web crawls of the Tunisian and Moroccan blogospheres, in-depth interviews with a number of key actors and frame analysis. I find that migrants were among the pioneers of political blogging, are well-integrated in their respective blogosphere and often occupy central positions. Political opportunity structures matter, thus the relative absence of repression allows migrants to act as radical mobilizers in highly repressive regimes like Tunisia. In contrast to that, migrant netizens in slightly more liberal settings like Morocco are less of a driving force than an equal partner in online discussions and campaigns, even if they might provide additional resources and establish contacts with international actors. Finally, the frame analysis reveals that radical migrant bloggers are likely to suffer from a lack of credibility due to their relative immunity to repression, unless they adapt their frames to the concerns of the wider blogger community, thereby enabling the creation of a broad coalition.
'Collaboration is a Very Delicate Concept : Alliance-formation and the Wars of Independence in Indonesia and Malaysia, 1945-1957' is a case study in the interface between late colonial empires and colonized societies. Unlike traditional studies that continue to focus on British or Dutch (military-political) efforts to open specific avenues towards independence, the thesis analyses how local elites, their constituencies or individuals determined and navigated their own course— through violent insurgencies—towards independence. The thesis dispenses with (colonial) notions of ‘loyalty’ and ‘colonizedcolonizer’. Instead, it takes the much more fluid concept of local allianceformation and combines it with theories on territorial control to elucidate why certain individuals or groups co-operated with colonial authorities one moment only to switch to the freedom fighters’ side the next. In showing the complexities and ambiguities of association, the thesis advocates and executes an agenda that transcends the narrow politicaldiplomatic scope of decolonization to restore the agency and motivations of local political parties, communities and individuals. The red thread throughout the thesis, then, is that Indonesians, Chinese and Malays pursued their own, narrow—often violent—interests to survive and secure a (political) future beyond decolonization. Ultimately, the limits of alliance-formation are probed. The search for territorial control by colonial and anti-colonial forces necessitated zero-sum outcomes to pre-empt alliance breakdowns. As such, coercion remained the major motivational force during decolonization: coercion local communities participated in more than has been hitherto acknowledged in relation to the decolonization of Southeast Asia.
According to the cumulative (dis)advantage hypothesis, social disparities in health increase over the life course. Evidence on this hypothesis is largely limited to the U.S. context. The present dissertation draws on recent theoretical and methodological advances to test the cumulative (dis)advantage hypothesis in two other contexts – Sweden and West Germany. Three empirical studies examine the core association between socioeconomic position and health (a) from a life-course perspective considering individual change, (b) from a cohort perspective considering socio-historical change, and (c) from a comparative perspective considering cross-national differences. The analyses are based on large-scale longitudinal data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey, the German Socio-economic Panel Study, the Health and Retirement Study, and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. The key analytical constructs are education as a measure of socioeconomic position and self-rated health, mobility limitations, and chronic conditions as measures of health. The results show large differences within countries and between countries in the age patterns and cohort patterns of change in health inequality. In the U.S., educational gaps in health widen strongly over the life course, and this divergence intensifies across cohorts. In Sweden, health gaps are much smaller, widen only moderately with age, and remain stable across cohorts. In Germany, health gaps widen with age and across cohorts, but these patterns pertain only to men. Taken together, these findings show that health inequality across lives and cohorts is mitigated in Western European welfare states, which target social inequality in health-related resources. In the U.S. context, which is characterized by a lack of social security, unequal access to health care, and large social disparities in quality of living, health inequality increases across lives and cohorts.
Upon his death in 1704, the Minim friar, botanist to Louis XIV, and intrepid traveler Charles Plumier (1646-1704) left in his Parisian convent a mass of drawings on the flora and fauna of the West Indies. The industrious Plumier was a naturalist with inky fingers: his firsthand observations on the Caribbean islands translated into thousands of paper materials extremely heterogeneous in form and content. They encompass exquisite inkand- watercolor pictures and rapidly executed sketches, rough notes and elaborate written descriptions, detailed measurements and interminable lists. For all their diversity, Plumier’s papers bear the common desire to depict, describe, and inventory flowery and non-flowery plants, seeds and leaves, fishes and shells, reptiles and birds—in one word, to capture a faraway nature on paper. “Nature in Draft” mines this exciting and virtually untapped 8,000-page archive, and traces its history from the field, through the often tortuous paths that brought part of it into print, down to its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century afterlives. By paying particular attention to the materiality of Plumier’s corpus and the practices by which it was crafted and subsequently put to use, my aim is to relocate the much-debated notion of “scientific image” within a broader perspective on the working methods and intellectual technologies that underpinned the production and transmission of natural knowledge in France around 1700. Each of the six chapters foregrounds a different aspect of Plumier’s papers. The first two chapters consider the intellectual and political dimensions of the corpus; the third and fourth move towards an in-depth analysis of the archive as a tool for the recording, storing, and management of natural historical information; the last part of the dissertation deals with the transmission and reception of the collection, both in print and through the appropriations and relocations of which it was the object long after the death of the author.
This thesis addresses two phenomena, which are commonly observed in the financial markets but so far have received relatively little attention in the literature. By putting these issues into a theoretical framework I provide a deeper understanding of their mechanisms as well as their possible impact on the market as a whole. The aim of the first part of the thesis is to provide a rationale why informed traders in the financial markets voluntarily share information with others. The success of online chatting platforms within the financial service industry shows that traders very much like to communicate with each other. Standard theory however suggests that by sharing information, traders reduce their informational advantage and thus decrease their profits. The aim of this work is to reconciliate theory with the facts by providing an explanation on why sharing information could be profitable for traders as well as to investigate the effects of information sharing on the market as a whole. The second part of the thesis analyses the role of credit insurance on debt renegotiation. During the renegotiation of private debt in Greece it has become apparent that the existence of credit insurance significantly changes investor behavior when it comes to their willingness to accept a deal. This article explores the impact of credit insurance on the bargaining process as well as how it changes lending conditions for the issuer of debt.
This develops a defence of the principle of the moral equality of combatants against recent revisionist critiques. It does this by developing an interpretive and hermeneutical approach to the study of war and the just war tradition. This approach allows the meanings of war and of actions within war to be explored and it is on the basis of this understanding of meaning that the moral equality of combatants is defended. It shows that these meanings and distinctions cannot be recognized by the revisionists and that this is a moral and interpretive loss. The thesis develops the argument of Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice and applies it to war; it demonstrates that war has a distinct meaning and that the principles for distributing identities, rights, and responsibilities in war are relative to this meaning.
The thesis begins by exploring the history of the just war tradition and the evolution of the concept of combatancy and the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in order to demonstrate how the just war tradition constitutes war as an institution. It then explores the contemporary debate and argues that whilst the traditional defences of the principle of the moral equality of combatants have been found wanting, the conclusions of the revisionists need not be accepted. To demonstrate this, the following chapters study a number of examples that highlight important and meaningful contrasts associated with both the jus in bello and the jus ad bellum. The final chapter introduces the concept of the normative structure of war and argues that the right to participate and to kill in war depends upon a public relationship of duty between soldiers and the state. The reciprocal relationships of duty are the source of the moral equality of combatants.
Dare una definizione o trovare una collocazione precisa al cosiddetto ‘femminismo sindacale’ è tutto fuorché un’impresa semplice. Come le due citazioni mostrano efficacemente, il suo stesso nome costituisce di per sé un elemento problematico. Il femminismo sindacale, infatti, si sviluppò tra gli anni Settanta ed Ottanta come esito - complesso e nient’affatto ‘risolto’ - all’incrocio tra la critica neofemminista al patriarcato e le lotte operaie che a partire dal decennio precedente avevano tentato di imprimere una svolta in senso progressista ed egualitario ai rapport di produzione tra capitale e lavoro. Le donne che negli anni Settanta si muovevano nello spazio sindacale, come delegate e militanti o semplicemente come lavoratrici, furono profondamente attraversate e coinvolte dalle riflessioni che il neofemminismo internazionale andava allora
producendo e scelsero di utilizzarle per risignificare l’esperienza del lavoro dal punto di vista femminile. Il femminismo sindacale costituisce un oggetto di studio affascinante, collocato appunto all’incrocio tra due fenomeni internazionali di indiscussa rilevanza come il movimento delle donne ed il movimento dei lavoratori.
This thesis undertakes a double task by on the one hand analysing 18th century medicine within the context of Immanuel Kant’s work and on the other hand analysing Kant’s work within the context of 18th century medicine. Drawing on a series of Kant’s writings on medicine, often discarded as marginal, his work is re-located within the context of 18th century medical reforms and scientific revolutions. Focusing on the initial conflation between 18th century medicine and philosophy the thesis traces the growing disciplinary distinctions between the two in their rivalling views on the science of man. By focusing on the changing attitudes towards his own long lasting engagement with medicine, it is demonstrated how Kant becomes increasingly self-critical. It is argued that Kant’s philosophy is developed as a critical reflection of a growing medicalization of human life, which fails to perceive man as a free agent.
The research project is centred on Spanish economic policies from 1937 to 1959, which guided the creation and development of the Instituto Nacional de Industria (the Spanish State-owned company, I.N.I. hereafter). Particular attention will be paid to the similarities, or differences, between these policies and those of Fascist Italy during the 1930s until the 1950s, especially as referred to the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (the Italian State-owned company, I.R.I. hereafter). I aim to capture the analogies between the two public entities, I.N.I. and I.R.I., through the analysis of their financial ratios, statutes, sector investment and production. If it is true that, in Italy, different economic policies were applied all along from the thirties to the fifties, some of them were autarkic. I.R.I can be seen as a reflection of the regime’s will, mirroring, mirroring the evolution of Italian economic policies. Since the different roles of the I.R.I. and its adaptation to the decisionmaking process of the Italian regime have not been considered by the literature that dealt with the I.N.I., especially with respect to the classification of the autarkic models that the I.R.I. was called to apply, my research attempts to identify which of the I.R.I. roles were copied by the I.N.I., and in particular whether it was the ‘war autarkic’ model, adopted by the I.R.I. between 1939 and 1943. Particular attention will also be dedicated to explaining why the creation of the I.N.I. was inspired by the Italian model of the I.R.I. The ultimate purpose of my project will be to provide a new insight on the economic policies of the First Francoism by discussing whether postwar policy in Spain was a continuity of the ‘war autarkic’ policy of the Civil War, and not just a ‘normal autarkic’ policy.
Extraite des Souvenirs de Victor Ogier sur un industriel lyonnais, Camille Dognin -ici le « malheureux », cette citation résume en quelques lignes plusieurs problématiques liées à la domesticité : rencontre entre classes sociales antagonistes, mise en exergue de la dimension économique de l'unité familiale, potentielles reconfigurations des relations affectives... Sur l'ensemble des XIXe et du XXe siècles, la domesticité, pour les femmes et pour les hommes, constitue un statut professionnel omniprésent, aussi bien en ville qu'en milieu rural. Elle met en contact direct les classes populaires, le haut des classes moyennes, et les classes dominantes dans des relations de travail. A l'heure actuelle, la recherche, surtout en sociologie, s'intéresse particulièrement au caractère direct de ces relations de travail, entre employeur.e.s « amateurs » et employé.e.s professionnel.le.s, à la formation de cet « autre monde populaire », aux tensions liées aux rapports sociaux de genre et de race. Le travail domestique rémunéré demeure une thématique féministe : pourquoi est-il exercé massivement par des femmes ? Quelle est sa valeur ? Quelle est sa place dans le fonctionnement des migrations contemporaines ? Quel rôle a-t-il dans la définition des identités et des rapports sociaux ?
When, in 1796, the British invasion fleet approached the Demerara River, its commanders were in for an unpleasant surprise. The expedition, arriving from Barbados with some 1,300 men, aimed to take possession of the Dutch colonies of Essequibo and Demerara on the Guiana coast of South America. Theoretically the British came to offer “protection” to the colonies in the name of the Dutch Stadtholder, in practice they were also keen on taking these lucrative colonies for themselves. The Dutch colonies of Essequibo and especially Demerara already had a high percentage of British planters, and their fertile soils carried the promise of great riches. The coffee, sugar and cotton planters could fuel the unfolding Industrial Revolution in Britain with the raw material for its machines and the consumer goods for its workforce.
This thesis deals with the Spanish cycle of protest in the shadow of the Great Recession. It has a twofold aspiration. On the one hand, from a process-based approach, it seeks to unravel the timing of the cycle of contention that evolved in light of the recession scenario between 2007 and 2015. I argue that the peak of protest persisted for a long time (from mid-2011 until 2013) because institutionalisation was postponed and radicalisation contained. Specifically, I focus on three aspects, key to understanding the trajectory of collective actions: 1) issue specialisation of protest after the first triggering points, 2) alliance building between unions and new actors, and 3) the transition process towards more routinised repertoires of action that came about as protests declined. On the other hand, the thesis aims at shedding light on the role that grievances play for mobilisation dynamics in a context of material deprivation. Covering multiple levels of analysis, the main argument developed here is that the effects of objective-material aspects and socioeconomic grievances are mediated by political attitudes, especially political dissatisfaction. To empirically test my arguments, I use qualitative data from semi-structured interviews, which are combined with information from a self-collated protest event analysis and different statistical analyses based on time series, panel data and other survey materials.
The picture presented and often referred to in EU internal market law and legal scholarship is clear. Within the internal market private actors are the recipients of rights and public authorities are constrained in their (regulatory) powers. The notion of this new individualism is bound up with capacities, powers, and resources that empower private actors to engage in the internal market and cross-border situations;ultimately serving the objectives the internal market seeks to attain. Yet, within thinew individualism a conceptually different class of private actors has emerged that is
constrained in economic freedoms, i.e. through obligations, rather than being
empowered in the context of the internal market. This thesis will enquire the reasons
that led to the development of this counter-culture. Why did it emerge? To what extent
does this phenomenon affect the roles of private actors in the internal market?
I will demonstrate that under the counter-culture private actors are responsibilized
and transformed into ‘competent authorities’, i.e. alternative forms of regulatory
authority, in the internal market. Private actors are placed into systems of shared
responsibilities the relationships of which are coordinated by EU internal market law.
In this regard, the concept of responsibility will serve as a tool to bridge the gap
between the new positions EU internal market law allocates to private actors and the
emerging legal consequences, i.e. allocation of obligations or tasks. The legal contexts of EU free movement law, EU discrimination law, EU food safety law and EU data protection law will serve as case studies against which the construed conceptual framework will be tested. Under the counter-culture the new individualism is no longer only about the exercise of self-interests. Rather, this form of the new
individualism comes with a requirement to give account to the interests of other actors within the internal market.
This thesis consists of two chapters regarding the transmission of information in the
sovereign debt market. The first one looks into the signaling role of the choice of debt by the sovereign and the second one focuses on a class of intermediaries in the market of sovereign debt, the credit rating agencies, and examine the information consequences of their solicited and unsolicited ratings. In the first chapter I build a model where creditworthy countries may use fiscal austerity to communicate their ability to repay sovereign debt and show that the signaling channel is active only for high levels of asymmetric information. The model generates a negative association between the amount of public information, provided by the rating agencies, and fiscal tightness. Informed by the model predictions, I perform an empirical investigation based on a panel of 58 OECD and emerging market economies since 1980 and  find evidence of this signaling channel.
The second chapter aims at contributing to the debate on whether unsolicited ratings
are strategically motivated. I present evidence from the sovereign debt market that strategic motivation is not necessarily behind the patterns that we see in the data and propose a model of credit ratings and ancillary services that abstracts from strategic considerations. In my model, borrowers with different unobservable characteristics select themselves into different solicitation groups. In equilibrium, the model can generate either a negative or a positive selection on unsolicited ratings, depending on the share of unsolicited ratings in a given market. The economic mechanism analyzed in this chapter implies a "natural" degree of market selection which is not associated to strategic motivation.
The Ties that Bind: Marriage, Family, and Fortune offers a fresh perspective on the European family through a parallel study on a group of English and Venetian families during the latter part of the seventeenth century. The families in this study were all connected to the legal profession, and shared a similar socio-professional status. However, their worlds were remarkably distinct, England and Venice were governed by different norms and laws, they represented different sides of the confessional divide, as well as the North-western European divide. These differences had an impact on their experiences of family life. This study will focus on three major themes, marriage strategies, inheritance and family affiliation, and family relationships and hierarchies. Through these three issues, this study will examine in parallel how the different geographical, cultural and legal settings of England and Venice impacted experiences of marriage and family life. Building on a wide range of sources including, testaments, court cases, citizenship reports, family archives, and correspondence, this thesis will examine the English and Venetian families through a series of case studies. In so doing it will provide a broader range of experiences within the family between two rather distinct groups.
This thesis examines the politics of alcohol in Eastern bloc states in the 1970s and 1980s. In this period, socialist governments ceased describing alcohol problems as a symptom of exploitation or as the result of a lack of socialist consciousness. Instead, they developed short-term methods to tackle the consequences of drinking, such as hospital treatment for alcoholics and counseling services for their family members. The thesis revolves around the question of why socialist states embarked on this pragmatic approach to social problems. The politics of alcohol serves as a lens through which I study how socialist states rearranged their ideas about state responsibility and good social order in the 1970s and 1980s. In five chapters, I reconstruct the new categories of social organization that arose in that period. Analyzing consumption politics, treatment programs for alcoholics, debates about family problems, and new safety precautions in Romania and Czechoslovakia, I show how in each of these fields, central governmental institutions delegated the responsibility for coping with alcohol problems to smaller social units: to scientific experts, to the institution of the family, and to the individual. I argue that by reassigning state responsibility, socialist governments did not retreat from authority. On the contrary, they strove to rearrange governing rationalities and thereby adapt socialist states to post-industrial realities.
This dissertation examines the social and material surroundings of French ambassadors stationed in the Venetian Republic between 1550 and 1610. Centred around the activities and experiences of Ambassador François de Noailles (1557-1561), three important facets of the diplomatic reality abroad are scrutinised. Part I sets out the characteristics of the ambassador's court through an investigation of the architectural, social and domestic features of the diplomatic house. In so doing, it will shed light on some of the realities behind the political world of diplomacy and reveal social complexities. Part II opens an illuminating window to the ambassador's possessions and discloses the great importance of material culture for the performance of diplomacy. By exposing the furnishings and clothing purchased and displayed by the ambassador, the use of objects to assert diplomatic identity will be unravelled. Part III again takes material culture as the point of departure, as it studies the movement of goods through the brokerage and patronage networks constructed by ambassadors while on mission. Whereas diplomatic service had benefits, it also had disadvantages, most importantly, the physical absence from the centre of power. Both the delivering of procured goods and the offering of unsolicited gifts were used to sustain ties with influential people at the French court in order to pursue private and family interests. Throughout the entire study, all these diplomatic activities are strongly contextualised and linked with the specificity of Venice as a trading metropolis, situated between West and East and ruled by a republican government. By looking behind the curtains of diplomacy, this dissertation contributes to the field of the new diplomatic history especially by its extensive focus on material culture. Objects had an important communicative power as they conveyed political messages and, this way, were essential for the functioning of early modern diplomacy.
This dissertation explores the modes of representation used by the ecclesiastical elites of early modern Catholicism to negotiate their roles as religious leaders, political ministers, cultural patrons and members of the aristocracy in the European courts. It examines the religious and artistic patronage of Cardinal Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas (Aranda de Duero, 1546 – Toledo, 1618) during the reign of Philip III of Spain. Archbishop of Toledo, Inquisitor General and uncle of the king’s favourite minister, the Duke of Lerma, Sandoval was the leading ecclesiastic of the Spanish Monarchy and one of the richest and most powerful patrons of his time. Located at the crossroads between historical and art historical studies, this dissertation bridges this historiographical disjuncture by proposing an integrated approach that combines methodologies from the fields of art history, court studies and cultural history. The patronage of material and visual culture is here analysed as the result of the constant negotiation between Sandoval’s individual self and the wider contexts to which he belonged. Six chapters scrutinize a rich array of visual and material sources, together with manuscript and printed documents collected from over thirty archives, reconstructing the socio-political and religious contexts in which Cardinal Sandoval operated. In examining the family conflicts and political tensions encountered by post-Tridentine prelates, I demonstrate how the patronage of sacred art, holy relics, monastic institutions and religious texts operated beyond their fundamentally devotional objectives. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of early modern political culture by showing how religious and artistic patronage was a fundamental practice for shaping the rhetoric of piety with which ecclesiastical patrons negotiated their reputation.
The thesis uses as case studies the Stabilisation and Association Process and the European Neighbourhood Policy in order to exemplify the increasing role played by the Unionﾒs administrative power in external relations. While seemingly harmless, the administrative power bears important legal consequences regarding the position of individuals, of third countries, and of the Union as a whole. In a system based on the rule of law (and committed to its respect in external relations), it is crucial to question whether implementing arrangements are in place or ought to be put in place with the aim of subjecting the external administrative power to administrative rules and principles. The analytical framework suggested by the thesis uses as a starting point the features and the impact of the administrative power externally. Based on this analysis, it identifies which administrative law principles (as developed within the framework of the internal market) have the potential of giving effect to the administrative rule of law externally once applied and operationalized in the external domain. Despite the increasing role granted to administrative power externally, administrative law in external relations is underdeveloped. Therefore, the analytical framework suggested by this thesis is relevant as it helps to ensure that the action of the Union in the international scene is carried out in compliance with its constitutional spiration, i.e. upholding the rule of law in its relations with the outer world, and as it structures the relation between the Union and individuals, and between the Union and third countries. The 'long-overdue encounter' between EU external relations and EU administrative law ought to be encouraged. The thesis aims to offer a methodology for structuring such an encounter and for planning venues for future meetings.
Transparency of trade regulations by all WTO Members is essential for open, fair and predictable trade relations. Because of the negative integration process followed by the WTO Agreements, a myriad of different regulations apply in all WTO Members and have the potential of affecting international trade. With the progressive lowering of tariffs since 1947, these differing regulations remain the most significant barriers to trade, and the most difficult to reduce. The Agreements on Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures and on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) provide the most comprehensive frameworks to address the costs arising from such regulatory diversity, through extensive obligations on regulatory transparency and cooperation and introducing elements of positive integration. Does transparency, within the SPS and TBT Agreements prevent disputes from rising, or ensure all Members access necessary information to raise more and better disputes? Through a presentation of the legal obligations and institutional framework of the two agreements (Part I), an in-depth analysis of the issues encountered by WTO Members in the implementation of the two Agreements and raised as trade concerns in the SPS and TBT Committees (Part II), and a study of the factors leading to disputes and transparency's role in addressing them (Part III), this thesis will demonstrate that transparency as it exists under the two agreements has the potential to both complement dispute settlement, by giving equal access to information for Members to raise disputes, and substitute dispute settlement, by fostering dialogue between Members before their frictions escalate to formal disputes. In this sense, the strength of the WTO legal and institutional system goes well beyond its dispute settlement system, with enforcement of WTO obligations fostered by better information sharing and dialogue among Members themselves, through non-judicial means.
Coherence in EU external relations is a long-standing concern. While seemingly surpassed in the last years by the idea of the 'comprehensive approach', the latter is nothing but the latest attempt to advance coherence in this field. The issue of the role of law in the quest for coherence is characterised by the existence of important gaps in the literature, at both theoretical and practical levels. This thesis aims at complementing legal literature on coherence with a study that specifically focuses on how coherence is sought between specific policies and activities coexisting in external action. It also intends to complement the empirical political science literature on coherence by focusing on the legal aspect of the query. The thesis elaborates on the notion of coherence in EU foreign policy, addressing questions like: What does coherence in external action mean? Why is it an obsession? What purposes does it serve? It also proposes a categorisation of the legal provisions and principles that are relevant to the struggle for coherence based on four mechanisms set out in EU primary law. It then focuses on the CFSP-development nexus in Union action in Somalia between 2008 and 2014 as a striking case to analyse these mechanisms in the development and implementation of policy action. The thesis reflects on the interaction between law and policy in the external dimension of the EU project, and provides arguments to think about how the law of external relations could more effectively promote coherence in this field.
Based on archival material from various central banks, international organisations, commercial banks, and on several interviews, this thesis examines the history of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, from its creation in 1974 to the Basel Agreement on Capital Adequacy of 1988. Departing from the existing literature which has either adopted a state power approach or produced an almost official history of the Committee, it analyses the various dimensions of the Committee's history, from the role of individual countries' financial and political systems to the networks of actors involved. It contends that the Basel Committee's actions cannot be explained simply in terms of the balance of power between member countries, but that other elements have to be taken into consideration in order to improve our understanding of its inner workings. Among these elements are its social and cultural dimensions, which underline the process of “making” regulation. The thesis concludes that the Basel Committee evolved from what was basically a forum for international policy exchange into a full-blown institution. This can be ascribed to the international context, most notably European integration, American pressure resulting from the Debt Crisis, and the on-going internationalisation of banking activities, and to the Committee’s own activities and its increasing visibility over the period considered. It participated in the broader evolution of financial governance characterised by the simultaneous embrace of more liberal regulation and closer supervision. The Basel Agreement on Capital Adequacy was not only the result of "Anglo-Saxon" pressure, but also emerged from the desire of most countries to reinforce their banks' capitalisation, the convergence exercise conducted at the European level, and the increasing focus of regulators on capital as a regulatory tool. The Basel Committee participated in the construction of a more global financial market.
This thesis is composed of three essays that propose macroeconomic theories to answer empirical questions and guide policy design. The focus is on expectations formation, learning and optimal taxation. In the first chapter I address the empirical finding that sovereign default history is a predictor of risk spreads even after controlling for pricing fundamentals. I show that this fact can be reconciled with a model of creditors’ learning about the default probability of a sovereign. Furthermore, I show that if creditors learn about a group of countries, then clusters of default emerge as a side effect of the beliefs formation process. The second chapter documents that investment recovers sluggishly after recessions and that consumption tends to lead the recoveries. I propose a model to show that during recessions investors might be excessively pessimistic about consumer demand and delay the implementation of projects. Taking this setting to the design of countercyclical policy, I argue that corporate income taxation can be a desirable instrument to use, as it is linked to the expected gains of firms, while interest rate policy or investment subsidies affect the cost of investment. In the third chapter, coauthored with Pawel Doligalski, we study how to design the tax system in an economy featuring an informal labor market, by extending the Mirrlees theory on optimal income taxation. We estimate the key elements of this model on Colombian data and compute the optimal tax schedule.
This dissertation is on liberal neutrality and toleration. The first part asks what kinds of comprehensive doctrines or worldviews should be tolerated by a liberal state. Specifically, it considers to what extent, if any, doctrines that (partially) reject citizens’ freedom and equality in the public and/or private sphere merit toleration. The second part asks whether liberal states should be neutral towards tolerable doctrines. Besides considering whether their policies should be neutrally justified towards such doctrines, it considers whether states should (sometimes) equalise policy consequences amongst them. In doing so, this dissertation focuses on consolidated liberal democracies and the doctrines of citizens.
This thesis sheds light on three questions in international macroeconomics. The first chapter investigates why business cycle correlations are state-dependent and higher in recessions than in expansions. I suggest a mechanism to explain why this is the case. Therefore, I build an international real business cycle model with occasionally binding constraints on capacity utilization which can account for state-dependent cross-country correlations in GDP growth rates. Empirically, I successfully test for the presence of capacity constraints using data from the G7 advanced economies in a Bayesian threshold autoregressive (T-VAR) model. This finding supports capacity constraints as a prominent transmission channel of cross-country GDP asymmetries in recession compared to expansions. The second chapter is joint work with Mathias Hoffmann and Sven Blank of the Deutsche Bundesbank. It analyzes how foreign direct investment (FDI) influences optimal country portfolio diversification. In a DSGE model that features the endogenous choice of firms to become internationally active through either exports or foreign direct investment (FDI), we find that the optimal equity holdings of agents are more biased towards domestic firms than in a model without FDI. The third chapter explores under which circumstances member countries of a monetary union will not find it optimal to bail each other out. To investigate these circumstances, I build a model of cross-country holdings of sovereign debt with the possibility of default, as well as the possibility to negotiate a bailout for a struggling country. I show that if there is a representative household in each individual member country, a bailout solution always exists. In a second version of the model that involves heterogeneity in household wealth within the bailout providing country, the utilitarian government of this country optimally refuses a bailout in some states of the world.
International cooperation against tax evasion has had a long history of failure. Tax havens protecting the income and identities of their foreign clients through financial secrecy have persistently resisted requests from major developed economies for administrative assistance. Since 2014, however, more than 100 countries, including all major offshore centers, have agreed to automatically exchange information (AEI) on capital income earned by non-residents. Why did tax havens adopt AEI after decades of firm resistance against greater financial transparency? Conventional theories of tax cooperation do not provide an answer. Contractualist approaches expect international agreements to produce joint gains. Yet, countries substituting financial secrecy for the routine reporting of account information lose relative to the status quo ante, as hidden capital flows out, and wage levels and employment decline. Constructivist approaches expect shared regulative norms of sovereignty and nonintervention to prevent major economies from using coercion against noncooperative tax havens. In contrast, I trace tax haven cooperation in multilateral AEI back to a credible threat of economic sanctions from the United States (US). The US  the only great power in tax matters for the time being  linked access to its financial market to tax haven participation in bilateral AEI. This, in turn, provided the rest of the world with an opportunity to request cooperation in multilateral AEI from them. By comparing three anti-tax haven initiatives of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), I show, moreover, that the US only issues such a sanctions threat when it can shift the costs of regulation to foreign actors, and domestic constraints prevent regressive tax reform. Finally, a nested differences-in-differences analysis reveals that a credible sanctions threat reduces the value of foreign asset holdings in tax havens relative to non-havens.
This dissertation studies the gunners, a socio-professional group who played a key role in the political and military expansion of early modern states. During the sixteenth century, new designs of fortresses and warships resulted in the proliferation of heavy guns. This transformation has been well described by the historiography of the "Military Revolution", but its impact in terms of skills and knowledge has been largely neglected. Cannons were quite complex technical objects which could only be handled by specialists called "gunners". Before the end of the seventeenth century, all main military powers needed to resort to hundreds or even thousands of them. The dissertation shows the quantitative and qualitative aspects of this change by focusing on the Catholic Monarchy and its vast network of strongholds and war fleets spread between the western Mediterranean (mainly in Spain and Italy), Flanders and America. Thus, it aims to make a valuable contribution to military history as well as to the history of the Spanish empire. Furthermore, this study also tackles many issues at the core of the historiography of science and technology. As a result of this massive increase in the need for artillery specialists, new systems of technical learning emerged. In contrast with the traditional system of apprenticeship involving a small-scale transfer of skills from master to disciple, schools of gunners were created under the patronage of the Monarchy where one master taught to a large audience of apprentices. This new system of technical learning articulated theory and practice, training gunners in the use of cannons on a practice ground but also providing them with theoretical lessons validated by an oral examination. At the dawn of seventeenth century scientific transformations, these schools stimulated the publication of mathematical treatises, thus establishing the scientific and technological grounds of early modern seaborne empires.
To the great joy of some, and even greater chagrin of others, the margin of appreciation has become a cornerstone of international rights adjudication. Within less than 40 years, the doctrine has made it from Strasbourg into courtrooms across the world. This thesis studies the use of the margin of appreciation by the Court of Justice of the European Union. By the same token, it studies the Court and the EU as such, and the remarkable evolution both have undergone during the past decades. The research focuses on the Court’s jurisprudence on free movement rights and Member State restrictions thereof. After conceptually defining the margin of appreciation, the thesis investigates the law and practice of the doctrine. The analysis is based on an empirical survey of free movement case-law, which covers around 250 judgments from 1974 until 2013. The data expose some fundamental changes in the review behaviour of the Luxembourg Court since the 1970s. Its jurisprudence is evermore marked by self-restraint and decentralisation, a development which manifests itself in two ways. For one thing, the Court increasingly grants national legislatures the freedom to make particular policy decisions. For another, it passes more and more review duties onto national courts. The thesis discusses the implications of these phenomena for review tools such as proportionality analysis. Likewise, it provides a normative assessment of the Court’s practice. It is shown that the changes that have occurred in free movement law have to do with some broader changes in the European project. Over the past two decades, the EU has embraced a series of constitutional goals which take it far beyond its original mission statement. These goals suggest that it is, at times, desirable that the European judges renounce control over Member State acts and, thus, practise passive virtues.
The first chapter of this thesis, joint with Angela Abbate analyses the importance of the risk-taking channel for monetary policy. To answer this question, we develop and estimate a quantitative monetary DSGE model where banks choose excessively risky investments, due to an agency problem which distorts banks’ incentives. As the real interest rate declines, these distortions become more important and excessive risk taking increases, lowering the efficiency of investment. We show that this novel transmission channel generates a new and quantitatively significant monetary policy trade-off between inflation and real interest rate stabilization: it is optimal for the central bank to tolerate greater inflation volatility in exchange for lower risk taking. The second chapter develops a quantitative model of sovereign default with endogenous default costs to propose a novel answer to the question why governments repay their debt. In the model domestic banks are exposed to sovereign debt. Hence sovereign default causes large losses for the banks, which translate into a financial crisis. The government trades these costs off against the advantage of not repaying international investors. Besides replicating business cycle moments, the model is able to generate not only output costs of a realistic magnitude, but also endogenously predicts that default is followed by a period during which no new foreign lending takes place. The duration of this period matches empirical estimates. The third chapter outlines a method to reduce the computationally necessary state space for solving dynamic models with global methods. The idea is to replace several state variables by a summary state variable. This is made possible by anticipating future choices that depend on one of the replaced variables. I explain how this method can be applied to a simple portfolio choice problem.
The objective of this thesis is to examine the role and utility of competition law within the EU’s legislative and regulatory dialogue, using its response to crisis conditions as a test of its aims and abilities. As such, the main conclusion of this thesis is that competition policy acts as a forum for debate as to the direction of the European integration project, while competition law can serve as a tool for aiding in the implementation of broader policy objectives. The analysis in this thesis follows certain themes as they arose in the individual chapters, namely: (i) the role of the general economic context in the application of competition law, (ii) the existence of identifiable baselines applicable in crisis conditions, (iii) the ability and role of National Competition Authorities (NCAs) in applying competition law, and (iv) the ways in which the Commission’s overarching policy goals can influence the application of competition law. The decision to take an empirical approach to this research project stems from a conviction that an investigation into the real world situations faced by firms and consumers should underpin the evaluation of the applicable legal rules. Over the past number of years the European Commission has exerted more and more influence over the development of the regional and global airline industry, and Chapters 4 and 5 reflect the emergence of an apparent overarching aim on the part of the Commission to create a market with a handful of ultra-competitive airlines with international reach serviced by an array of smaller feeder airlines on a regional basis. The study of the Irish beef processing sector in Chapter 6 is interesting because of the high level of government involvement in providing the strategic thinking behind a crisis cartel scheme, and because the economic context appears to have exerted considerably more pressure on the government and the national court than on the competition authorities involved.
This dissertation is a collection of three stand-alone papers each making distinct contributions and addressing different, but closely related, empirical puzzles that contribute to the literature on Internet privacy. The first article starts by exploring some of the tangible consequences of the Snowden revelations and challenges the common-wisdom culturalist theories of Europe’s privacy regime. Then, the second article offers a new explanation of the origins of America’s privacy framework that also defies conventional culturalist explanations. Finally, the third article closes by offering a novel implementation and policy design analysis of the American and European privacy regimes. Each article employs slightly different research methods and uses different yet compatible and complementary theoretical frameworks. In general, this dissertation adopts an institutionalist perspective studying how and why certain institutions change, and “why some flourish in some context and/or why some die out in others” (Steinmo, 2003a). The first article focuses on institutional reform, and resistance to institutional reform by corporate actors, following Culpepper’s quiet politics framework (2011). The second article, borrowing from Steinmo (2003b) and Blyth (2002, 2011), discusses the interaction between ideas and institutions, following perhaps the clearest institutionalist narrative of all the pieces of this dissertation. The third article, building on Rothstein’s general theory on implementation (Rothstein, 1998) discusses the implementation and policy design of the European and American institutions for the protection of privacy.
This dissertation is composed of three self-contained chapters on the same topic: the impact of financial markets on inequality. The first paper investigates the connection between the increase of equity wealth, the rise stock-market returns, the slowdown of corporate investment and the decline of the labor share in the U.S. economy. I use a version of the standard heterogeneous-agent model to explain the connection of these phenomena and I identify three driving forces. In particular, I show that the fall of the average marginal tax on capital income, the reduction of stock-market costs and a higher inclination towards corporate short-termism explain the decrease of investment and the rise of equity prices. This way, the model predicts an endogenous upsurge of equity Tobin’s Q and, importantly, the rise of equity returns. The decline of the labor share occurs in response to investment sluggishness when capital and labor are complements, which requires an elasticity of substitution consistent with the values found in the literature. Given the predictions of the model, the paper solves what Joseph Stiglitz has recently called the Piketty puzzle: why has the wealth-output ratio and capital returns increased, while wages have not. The second paper, which is joint work with Pedro Trivin, extends the previous analysis to a panel of countries. We use a reduced-form framework with wealth in the utility function to obtain an estimable equation and, by using recent panel time-series techniques, we find that the increase in Tobin’s Q explain almost 60 per cent of the total decline in the labor share. The third paper makes a theoretical contribution to recent debate on secular stagnation. I use a growth model with imperfect competition to show that the rise of monopoly rents is consistent with several investment and inequality dynamics that have characterized the post-1980 stagnant era.
Aurangzīb has generally been described as a Mughal villain, who, through his intolerant religious policy and temple destructions, ushered in the empire’s later downfall. This negative image also stains Mustaʿidd Ḫān (died 1724) and his chronicle, the Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī (written between 1707-1710), which covers the whole reign of the once mighty emperor. However, many important aspects have been overlooked in this classic narrative. First, Mustaʿidd Ḫān, as a munšī, was a long-term member of the cosmopolitan Indo-Persian intelligentsia. In order to write this important chronicle, he had to collaborate with the text’s patron ʿInāyat Allāh Ḫān (died 1726), a blind admirer of Aurangzīb’s most controversial decisions. As will be shown, these two opposing characters are an important reason for the dichotomies in the text. Equally, as Mustaʿidd Ḫān wrote the chronicle, the empire was thrown into one of its worst crises in decades: it thus was obvious that Aurangzīb had made mistakes during his reign. Aurangzīb’s successor Šāh ʿAlam Bahādur (gov. 1707-1212), the text’s main recipient, distinguished himself from his father in many points, and he now had to pay for Aurangzīb’s errors. Our author had to react to all of these issues. It will be shown that the Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī is a very complex narrative and much more multifarious than previously thought. It is not only a chronicle about the past and a glorification of an emperor who destroyed temples; rather, I argue, it is also a future-oriented text that called for new forms of government. It should therefore be described as an agenda 1710 for the new Šāh. Through a detailed narratological analysis of the Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī, we come to understand how the author wrote history in a time of crisis and how he understood the notion of a just Muslim government in the years following Aurangzīb’s death.
This thesis examines the monumental landscapes and historical culture in 20th century Estonia. It considers a network of three major socio-political upheavals and mnemonic 'ruptures' in the society's path for an exploration of how memory places and the memories they represent survived, responded to, or drew upon the political changes. The study follows Estonian monuments to the War of Independence (1918-1920), and proposes discourse units such as freedom and nation as a basis for interrogating the processes of their construction, destruction, altering, and eventual reconstruction. It examines the mechanisms of a mnemonic rupture, and searches for breaks alongside continuities in its aftermath. More generally, the thesis proposes a triple-change argument for the investigation of an Eastern European memory landscape, and poses a question of cross-rupture permanences in such borderland memory sites.
This is a thesis about the polka, a dance of women and feminity, love, passion, young and old, peasants, bourgeoisie and aristocrats. And, as I will explain and study in the following pages, it is about one of the spectres haunting Europe in the nineteenth century. A few years ago a short story called "Polkamania" by Joachim H. Stocqueler fell into my hands. This little farce, written in 1844, tells the story of Miss Woolgar, a young lady, who is dying to learn the polka. Then opportunely, a medical student arrives. He tricks the father into thinking that the polka is a new type of medicine that can cure the young lady of ennui. The historian’s curiosity encouraged me to rummage among some dance books and internet websites to find out what was so special about this dance, which Poles usually dance at wedding parties and which  contemporary  American  immigrants  consider  a  part  of  their  cultural  and  national heritage,  to make it a  theme  of  this  short story. My curiosity derived not  only  from  the  fact that I am Polish but also because, as a musician, I always considered the polka a rather boring, traditional, peasant dance. My short investigation convinced me that it was time to change my mind about this dance form.
Sovereign Wealth Funds have been the new 'rising star' of the global economy for a few years. Host States have reacted to their rise cautiously and have quite frequently cited 'national security' as a justification for maintaining an absolute degree of freedom in regulating their entry into their markets. This thesis is arguing that a substantial proportion of regulatory concerns that surround the operation of SWFs are actually not of a national security nature—at least as perceived by the relevant instruments regulating investment in International Economic Law. As a consequence, the current regulatory framework screening SWFs investments a priori is both legally and normatively problematic and, in fact, it constitutes a form of protectionism. As an alternative, this thesis suggests that SWFs ought to be primarily regulated after their entry into Host States' markets. In that context, a proper conceptualisation of the principle of non-discrimination that takes into account the 'regulatory unlikeness' between SWFs and other market suppliers/investors will allow the Host States to properly regulate them after their entry into their markets. Such a conceptualisation – contrary to usual analyses – draws heavily from International Investment law in order to interpret the relevant provisions of the GATS.
In the first chapter I calculate unemployment multipliers of fiscal policies. As an innovation, I include family firms in a New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions; they behave differently in the labor market and are differently managed. Based on European data I find that both at peak and cumulatively, unemployment reacts least when consolidation is done by increasing the value-added tax. However, this policy results in the steepest decline in consumption. Also, ignoring sectoral heterogeneity might lead to incorrect conclusions. Next, with Magnus Saxegaard we investigate the macroeconomic impacts of deregulating the labor and product markets. The novelty of the model, which was jointly developed with Rahul Anand and Purva Khera, is the inclusion of an underground sector in an open- economy model. It is a major determinant of the sign and the magnitude of reactions. We show that in South Africa both reforms increase long-run output, although labor market reforms are more successful in decreasing unemployment. Nevertheless, there are short-term costs; which can be mitigated reform packages. Finally, we find that it is usually better to start with a labor market reform. The last chapter focuses on southern Europe where high levels of government debt are coupled with rapid population aging. With Daniel Baksa we examine the macroeconomic effects of public old-age pension reforms and other policies under conditions of aging. As a novelty, we incorporate a shadow economy into an overlapping generations model. We find that a retirement age increase implies the lowest reduction in long-run GDP, although there are doubts about its feasibility. Impacts, in general, depend on the type of pension plan. Furthermore, when moving away from the PAYG towards a fully funded regime the pension-wage replacement rate temporarily sharply drops. The presence of informality and unemployment are important, in particular for responses of labor income tax hikes.
We develop a conceptual model of contracts as regulatory instruments in over-the-counter (OTC) financial markets. The model is informed by the functional understanding of financial regulation as addressing problems of counterparty risk, liquidity, information and systemic risk and structural understanding of regulation as a process of standard-setting, monitoring and enforcement. The justification of conceptualization contracts as regulatory instruments is found in the nature of the political economy considerations that inform the definition of certain contracts used in OTC financial markets. While many scholars rely on conceptualization of the said contracts as boilerplate, we argue that there exist important qualitative differences between boilerplate and regulatory contracts, which we link to a broader spectrum of interests taken into account in their definition in the process of standard-setting. The model and its application to loan and derivatives markets help to highlight the impact of governance features of the organization developing the contract and the regulatory competition to which the organization is exposed on the scope of the regulatory function. We also use a number of indicators and attributions to examine the effectiveness of regulatory contracts. While the contractual model displays some weaknesses in terms of both standard-setting (conflicts of interest) and enforcement (reliance on delegation) compared to its better established counterpart – the organizational model associated with exchanges – the contractual model helps to account for important self-regulatory features of OTC financial markets and offers suggestions as to how the structure of OTC financial markets can be improved.
This thesis offers an innovative study in the construction of the Hispanic Monarchy during the first half of the sixteenth century. Focusing on a king's man: Juan Rena (Venice, ca. 1480-Toledo 1539); I explore subjects such as the Spanish expansionism in Europe and beyond, the configuration of the empire's frontiers, the shaping of the new imperial administration, and the functioning of Charles V's military machinery in the Mediterranean. In analysing Juan Rena's activity as a crown servant, this work reveals how the Hispanic Monarchy was constructed from below, out of multiple interactions between a wide array of socio-political actors. Furthermore, and this is one of the main contributions of this research, it will allow us to rethink the role of that the myriad of king's men, like Rena, played in the configuration of early modern empires. Hence, this thesis seeks to do more than simply reconstructing the activities of a royal servant, it aims to provide an in-depth study, which will contribute to our historical understanding of the construction of early modern empires.
Mobilising Memory traces the political legacies of the participation of the citizens and subjects of colonial Algeria in the First World War. Focused on the analysis of rhetoric, this thesis points to the existence of a common political language anchored in the Great War that transcended the boundaries which defined politics and daily life in French-occupied Algeria. It demonstrates the utility of applying concepts from First World War Studies to postwar societies beyond Europe, arguing for an integrated approach combining methodologies from the fields of colonial history and the history of the Great War. Over the course of six chapters, it analyses the place of the Great War in the political language of actors as diverse as activists from the extreme right, the Left, the movements of indigenous reform, the veterans' movement and the nationalist movement, as well as individual war victims, Algerians migrants in Paris, and their interlocutors in the colonial regime. All sought to renegotiate the postwar colonial order by evoking the Great War. However, a shared language did not necessarily result in mutual intelligibility. Rather, political actors would pit different narratives of the colony's wartime contribution against each other as they competed to impose their own visions of a reconfigured imperial polity. The evocation of the Great War would prove a particularly unwieldy strategy, with actors struggling to reconcile rhetoric with the reality of politics in a colonial society. The many unintended consequences of articulating political programmes in the language of the Great War, explored in depth in this thesis, expose the key tensions underlying political action in a colonial context. By highlighting the potential potency and pitfalls of evoking the Great War, this thesis elucidates the rival, and often contradictory, visions of alternative imperial futures promoted by political actors of all ethnic, religious and ideological backgrounds in interwar Algeria.
Due to the interplay of factors such as population ageing, women's entry into paid employment and the decline of the welfare state, EU Member State face increasing needs for domestic work services – primarily care but also cleaning and other housekeeping services. The majority of domestic workers in Europe today are migrants, both EU and third-country nationals. They tend to work under precarious conditions that make them vulnerable to day-to-day exploitation. Migrant domestic workers face low wages, long and unregulated working hours, workplace harassment, lack of protection if they become pregnant, and unlawful dismissals. Such vulnerabilities are to some extent attributed to intersections of race, class and gender-based prejudices. Yet law, in particular migration and labour law, has an important role in constructing and sustaining vulnerabilities. My aim in this thesis is twofold: to examine the role of law in structuring vulnerability and to identify legal sources that can challenge and reduce certain aspects of this vulnerability. In the first part of the thesis I identify the key dimensions of migration law that make domestic workers vulnerable to then build a typology of the different migration law regimes of EU Member States. To examine the role of labour law, I compare the labour law regulation of domestic work in four Member States: Spain, Sweden, Cyprus and the UK. The analysis sheds light to labour law's very different ways in structuring and, in certain instances, reducing vulnerability. In the second part of the thesis I examine the treatment of migrant domestic workers under EU law. I first give an overview of EU migration law sources to locate and evaluate norms relevant to domestic workers. Then I revisit a debate on the personal scope of EU employment law and challenge the flawed assumption that it does not apply to domestic work. I finally argue that EU employment law is a useful but largely misunderstood resource for domestic workers.
This thesis argues that the emergence and expansion of the European-origin international society (EIS) has taken place through two dominant organizational processes. The first is the social organization and expansion of the international society. It is primarily associated with the stabilization and change of the hegemonic definitions of who are and can become legitimate holders of sovereignty in the international society. The second process is a material one associated with the negotiation, stabilization and change of specific, hegemonic techno-scientific mechanisms for the appropriation of sovereign authority over new terrains by the already members of the international society. The thesis sets out to describe the co-production of the two sets of fundamental and constitutional international institutions that I claim have been associated with this progress of the material as well as social expansion of the EIS. I conceptualize the international institutional framework these institutions makeup as 'the double-constitutional structure of the EIS'. The empirical focus in the study of the composition and change of the different elements of this structure is on how sovereign power has been constituted and mobilized for, what, in hindsight, can be regarded as failed attempts to appropriate specific Arctic regions through human settlement during the previous half a millennium. I conceptualize the case studies of these processes as cases of, in hindsight, failed attempts to geographically and materially expand the international society. Their analysis is organized according to what can be regarded as four international-system-wide revolutions in the epistemic authority structure of the EIS. Through the comparative analysis of the cases and these time periods I empirically illustrate what I theoretically conceptualize as the social role of science and technology in the northward expansion of the international society.
In this thesis I develop two models that bring together macroeconomics and political institutions; these models allow me to draw conclusions about the impact of institutions on economic outcomes, and about the effect of economics on political results. In the first essay, I provide a formal theory that explains the effect of government coalitions on the probability of sovereign default, and the seemingly excessive prevalence of surplus coalitions across the democratic world. In the second essay, I construct a model of an endowment economy in which a leader distributes income, and I show how investments in de facto power enable the leader to significantly increase his tenure in office, while collecting a large share of rents for his private benefit. Throughout the thesis it is assumed that leaders are selfish, and institutions (incentives) are the main determinant of their behavior in power.
This thesis examines national days in Hungary and Czechoslovakia from their establishment as independent nation-states in 1918 to the collapse of Communism in 1989. The focus is on the capital cities of Budapest and Prague, as the locations of the official commemorations. In these eighty years both countries underwent major political, social and cultural changes that were reflected in national day commemorations. In the interwar period these countries were free to establish their own commemorative calendars and construct their own national historical narratives. Whilst in Hungary this was a rather straightforward process, in Czechoslovakia establishing the calendar was fought along a number of different battle lines. During the Second World War Czechoslovakia was occupied by Nazi Germany and dismantled, whilst Hungary became Hitler's reluctant satellite. National day calendars, rather than simply being completely cancelled, continued in some form from the previous period, as this allowed the Nazis to maintain a semblance of normality. The most significant overhaul of the national day calendar came with the Communist takeovers. The Communist parties imposed a new socialist culture that included a new set of Sovietthemed national days. However, they could not completely break away from the national days of the independent interwar states. Eventually, especially from the late 1960s, the Communists in both countries found that it was expedient to restore some of the interwar national days, some of which still continue today, thus questioning how radical a break 1989 was. Studying national days over the longue durée enables historians to uncover how the dynamics of political power operated in Central and Eastern Europe over the 20th century. This thesis concludes that national days are an example of both the invention of tradition as well as the resilience of tradition, demonstrating how political regimes are always bound by the broader cultural context.
This PhD proposes a method for making private law doctrine. The introduction defines private law, argues that the way in which private laws are dealing with new cases is causing them a crisis and introduces the method that jurists should follow to make private laws exit their crisis. The chapters of the dissertation illustrate an application of the method. The first step of the method is to identify a new case. Mine is the case of revoked (firm) promises. The second step is to criticize laws and decisions. Private laws imply collateral contracts, apply the reliance theory and enact special provisions to sanction the revocation of promises. These solutions may serve to tackle the injustice arising from unduly revoked promises but compromise the integrity of, respectively, contract law, the division freedom\obligations and private law in general. The third step of the method is to think of the case's best possible private law form. I ask: If promise were to be a private law concept, what should that concept be? The form for promise is that of contract, tort and unjust enrichment. The fourth step is to construe a legal proposal. Here I construe promise as another cause of obligation. The "unilateral promise", as the new concept is called, enables judges to find an exchange of rights in certain promises and conclude their irrevocability. The last step is to evaluate the construction. I neutralize the arguments against construing promise as a (voluntary) cause of obligation and suggest that my proposal is better than the possible alternatives, which are revocability and regulating revocation as a tort. In the conclusion I show that my proposal does the work of the current laws of promises but without compromising the conceptual integrity of private law. I finish suggesting other applications of the method.
This thesis takes a dynamic approach to the treatment of energy in international trade law. It traces the development of energy rules from the inception of the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations today. The thesis is divided in two main parts: (I) Regulation and (II) Challenges.  The first part of the thesis discusses the controversies surrounding the coverage of energy in the GATT/WTO forum. It continues by providing an overview of WTO Agreements relevant for the treatment of energy. Finally, this part of the thesis looks at the crystallization of new rules in energy trade: what developments do we observe in WTO accession commitments and, beyond the WTO, in preferential trade agreements?  In the second part, the thesis focuses on three major challenges in WTO law with respect to energy. It starts off with a comparative study of the WTO and the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), scrutinizing their overlap and potential conflict. Then, using law and economics methodology, the thesis takes a closer look at restrictive practices in energy trade, such as those maintained by Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Third, this part discusses the 'subsidies paradox' in WTO law through which fossil fuel subsidies arguably escape the disciplines of the WTO. Subsidies for clean energy and renewables, on the other hand, are an easy target for WTO dispute settlement proceedings.  By way of conclusion, the thesis considers policy options for enhanced energy governance. It, amongst others, discusses possible future scenarios and the role of the WTO and Energy Charter Treaty therein.
This thesis seeks to explain the relative absence of inter-state war in South America and Southeast Asia. I maintain that the two regions are security communities in a minimalist sense. The sustenance of these minimalist, no-war communities lacks a conclusive explanation, as the factors commonly emphasised by security community scholars have been either weak or wholly absent in the two cases. The emergence of no-war communities in South America and Southeast Asia is all the more puzzling given the fact that in both regions there have been numerous territorial disputes, which have been shown to be the best predictor of interstate conflict. Building on qualitative case studies of territorial disputes, I advance three propositions. First, I argue that a lack of domestic state capacity induced an overriding and lasting concern with internal stability in the two regions. The need for internal security created incentives to manage international conflict, leading states to avoid war with their neighbours. Second, I maintain that in order to understand the conjunction between accommodation and the sporadic escalation of conflict, state capacity needs to be disaggregated into its theoretically relevant dimensions. In this study, three dimensions correlated strongly with how states behaved in territorial dispute: military capacity, institutional capacity, and socio-political cohesion. My third proposition is that in both regions, states came to develop stable expectations that major war between them was highly unlikely. The causal arrow that explains the emergence of community in South America and Southeast Asia is domestic incapacity; however, how the no-war pattern regularized and institutionalized, took different forms in the two regions.
The Thesis analyses the impact of the regulation of radio spectrum and energy resources in the liberalisation of wireless communications and electricity in the European Union (EU). The answer to this inquiry presupposes a discussion of three sub-questions: (i) what is the competence of the EU to regulate the radio spectrum and energy resources ("the power gap"); (ii) is there a gap in the regulation of natural resources ("the regulatory gap"); and (iii) how has the Commission used other instruments, particularly competition law, to bridge the two gaps? The Introduction presents the institutional economics approach that guides the reader throughout the Thesis. It builds upon Williamson's four levels of institutional analysis and argues that the way in which access to natural resources is structured ("level 2" of institutional analysis), deeply impacts the regulatory design of the network industries and the way in which the Commission shapes the application of competition law. Its purpose is not to present an ideal system of resource management but rather to highlight that all institutional decisions bear costs, and that, in the absence of level 2 interventions, the Commission has used imperfect alternative solutions, such as competition law, to bridge the regulatory and power gaps.
September 25, 1972, marked the end of the most bitterly fought political struggle of Norwegian postwar history. With a slight majority, those opposed to membership in the European Community (EC) prevailed in a popular referendum. With the Norwegian 'no', the date also marked the first non-enlargement of the EC. This thesis investigates how a group of diplomats – who worked throughout the 1960s and early 1970s to negotiate a Norwegian EC membership – became Europeans. Being a European meant developing an emotional and professional conviction that membership in the EC was a good thing in itself. But it also entailed a certain displacement: who the Europeans were and how they worked with the EC-case was determined by their in-betweenness. The study of who the Europeans were, and how they worked with the EC-case, is structured around a three-level analysis: 1)The anthropo-institutional investigation 2)The discursive framework, and 3)The study of the Europeans' diplomatic practice regarding the EC-case. The Europeans profoundly shaped Norwegian European policy between 1960 and 1972, helping to redirect the Norwegian postwar foreign policy in quite a fundamental way, and also changed the Community itself. The Europeans were forged into a community and received their political potency/weakness from their in-betweenness: both professionally and personally invested in the membership issue, their actions lay between traditional diplomacy and politics, their ideas, practices and spaces were constituted between 'Europe' and 'Norway' in multiple ways, and their ultimate task remained to bridge the division between the two entities. In brevity, the thesis tells the story of a handful of Norwegian diplomats that became passionately pro-European in the 1960s, and who worked to get Norway on the inside of the EC – a failed elite, shaped in the middle, which nonetheless made a lasting, yet untold, mark on Norway, Europe and the diplomatic trade.
This thesis deals with the thought of Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) from the perspective of intellectual history; its aim, to think about the enlightenment anew. The historical problem, to which the thesis offers an answer, is twofold. What was the nature of Holberg's thought in relation to the enlightenment and how can it be said to have constituted an early Northern enlightenment more specifically? To the extent that we can talk historically of a specific early Northern enlightenment, it cannot, of course, be reduced to the case of Holberg. Yet, this thesis argues that any proper understanding of the question whether there was a particular early Northern enlightenment, as one amongst a multitude of enlightenments, must necessarily begin from an understanding of the thought of Holberg, the most prominent writer in the early eighteenth century. Describing Holberg as an eclectic thinker, the main argument of the thesis is that the early Northern enlightenment is best understood in light of Holberg's engagement with a wide range of intellectual traditions, both secular and religious. Thus, the thesis aims to reconstruct the trajectories of Holberg's thought and to situate his thinking about monarchism, religion, and moral philosophy in relation to a broader range of European enlightenments. It aims to show that the key to understanding the early Northern enlightenment is to be found in the connection between the thought of Ludvig Holberg and the multiple enlightenments with which he was engaged. In addressing such issues, the thesis sets an essentially revisionist agenda: the enlightenment of Holberg is best understood as an eclectic blend of Lutheranism, Arminianism, and modern natural law.
The dissertation focuses on a group of women married into the Nehru family who, from the very first years of the 1900s, engaged in public social and political work for the cause of their sex, becoming important figures within the North Indian female movement. History has not granted much room to the feminist work they undertook in these decades, preferring to concentrate on their engagement in Gandhian nationalist mobilisations, from the late 1920s. This research instead concentrates on the previous years. It investigates, on the one hand, the means Nehru women utilised to enter the public sphere (writing, publishing a Hindi women's journal, starting local female organisations, joining all-India ones), and the networks within which they situated themselves, on the national and international level. On the other hand, this work analyses the complex relations between the feminist and nationalist movements at whose intersection the Nehru women found themselves. The vicissitudes of the Nehru family and of its female members in particular work as a lens through which a different light is shed on the political and social realms of early-twentieth century India. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that its protagonists were all but the passive recipients of others' choices and priorities: their stances resulting from time to time in resistance, negotiation, acquiescence, or critique were actually dictated by strategic considerations of political or social expediency, and bespoke an emerging feminist agency.
From serious violations of human rights, international law derives a set of consequences that fall to the responsible states. These consequences take the form of secondary obligations arising from primary rules and standards, which guide governments in the process of coming to terms with a violent past. This thesis argues that some of these legal constraints, because of the manner in which they have been developed in practice, may affect the way wrongdoing states choose to deal with their past. As a result, they influence the processes of memory-making within societies. Through the legal analysis of international norms and their application to, and implementation in, situations of gross and systematic human rights abuses, this research develops the concept of a duty of memory under international law. In so doing, it offers a critical assessment of the ways international law may affect official representations of the past in the present, playing the role of vector of memory.
This thesis explores the legal and institutional settings that contribute to the creation of general preconditions for the freedom of expression and, primarily, genuine pluralism to prosper throughout the European audiovisual media space. Taking into account the intense legislative and judicial activity on audiovisual media matters in the European Union (EU) and bearing in mind the developments brought about by new digital communications and technological convergence, the analysis focuses on the institutional forms and modes of governance for the media that are apt to foster an effective and consistent supranational approach to the fundamental objective of media pluralism and the values it involves, considering notably the role and functioning of Independent Administrative Authorities (IAAs) for the media. To this end, the three Parts into which the Thesis is divided deal with, respectively: the notion of media pluralism and its employment in EU law, highlighting the limits of classical hard-law based approaches (Part I); an examination of the institutional features as well as the operation of three national IAAs for the media – namely, the French Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel (CSA), the UK Office of Communications (Ofcom) and the Italian Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (AGCom) – selected as case studies to illustrate the role of these bodies in securing media pluralism (Part II); the investigation of EU action in setting the necessary institutional preconditions and some specific related requirements to guarantee attainment of this objective, also looking in some detail at the legislative developments that have occurred in comparable sectors, such as data protection legislation, equality law and electronic communication regulation, before considering the arrangements in place at the supranational level, as well as the incipient ones in the governance of audiovisual media (Part III).
This thesis contributes to the existing literature on the agricultural reforms that took place in Central and Eastern European countries during the transformational period (1990-2004) and on the agricultural development in Europe in general in the long-term (1960-2004). The study explores the history of the agricultural transformations in Poland and Belarus through a detailed analysis of the agricultural production and productivity dynamics, aiming to answer (i) whether the reforms succeeded or failed in terms of agricultural production and agricultural productivity; and (ii) what were the determinants of the agricultural reforms' success or failure. The research is centered on a comparative analysis of Polish and Belarusian agricultural performance, but it also incorporates the other CEE countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Russia and Ukraine), as well as the advanced Western European economies.
Thanks to the success of recent attempts to study fascism within an international or transnational framework, scholarship on the subject has broken free from its traditional national orientation. By now, the European or even global interconnectedness of the revolutionary right has clearly come to light. This is not necessarily true for the links between fascism and internationalist and Europeanist intellectual currents in interwar and post-war Europe. My thesis explores the political thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce, two French intellectuals, journalists and political writers who are representative of this Europeanist avant-garde. I argue that their Europeanist ideas and international contacts played a major role in their 'drift' towards fascism during the 1930s, while they were seduced by a fascist vision of a united Europe during the Second World War. Paradoxically, these ideas also enabled them to gradually reintegrate with the political mainstream during the early post-war years. Jouvenel's post-war career as a leading neoliberal intellectual and founding member of the Mont Pèlerin society should, just like Fabre-Luce's continued involvement with the French extreme right, be seen within the light of continuity in their ideas about Europe, fascism and democracy, stretching from the turning of the 1930s well into the 1950s.
Reginald Pole's 1532 return to Italy, where he had spent five years between 1521 and 1526 to complete his studies, marked the beginning of his rapid rise in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Not only did the Plantagenet cousin of Henry VIII come close to being elected pope, but he also became the focus of the widespread expectations of Church reform. For his part, however, Pole did never outline a concrete programme for reform, not even in his De reformatione Ecclesiae, on which he worked from the eve of the council of Trent until the last years of his life. The numerous versions of this unpublished treatise have been the starting point of my study, which examines the apparent contradiction between Pole's silence on the practical measures to restore Peter's ship to its pristine state and the high hopes he aroused as a reformer, to the extent that he was often hailed as the long-awaited Angelic Pope. The analysis of De reformatione shows a peculiar conception of reform, grounded in Pole's "radical eclecticism" (both at philosophical and at doctrinal level) as well as in his belief in the coexistence of the exoteric ecclesiastical institution and the esoteric spiritual Church. The development of this unconventional ecclesiology was significantly inspired by a usually neglected source, that is to say the Joachimist tradition within which the prophetic myth of the Angelic Pope developed before reaching Pole, at the time of his first sojourn in Italy. These convictions led him, along with the circle of the spirituali of Viterbo, to put into practice a reform outside of the Tridentine council, by means of the same non-institutional channels through which they attempted to spread the religious message that lay at the heart of their undeclared programme.
The period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was a time of significant economic and social progress in the history of Europe. The development of industry and urban growth, the increasing role of trade and the expansion of geographical knowledge led to an époque of colonial expansion for Italy. Its maritime republics, Genoa and Venice, became cradles of commercial development and represent an early modern system of international long-distance trade in the late medieval period. These city-states came to the forefront of world history not only because of their commercial importance and the commercial mechanisms of exchange they introduced and adopted, but also because of their naval importance and the establishment of their overseas settlements.
In representative democracies citizens are supposed to be well-informed about what parties do and say. Such information helps voters to choose parties and candidates which are likely to promote their interests in political decision-making. However, it is well established that many people often fail to become adequately informed about politics due to a lack of political interest and cognitive abilities. It is, furthermore, broadly acknowledged that our impression formation is to a considerable degree guided by affect and particularly by our party identity, which can severely bias our perceptions of parties’ policy standpoints and their responsibilities. This dissertation investigates how our impression of what political parties stand for in the left-right spectrum as well as in the conflict over European integration is determined by voters' level of cognitive resources and by their party attitudes. In addition, what people might know inevitably depends on the information environment, which is largely shaped by political parties’ behavior; our knowledge about politics depends on the quantity and quality of policy-relevant information disseminated by political parties. I discern between three policy-based strategies of party competition: 1) position-taking; 2) the manipulation of salience; and, 3) a politics of ambiguity. By employing these policy-based strategies parties create information that is crucial for representation. Thus, public knowledge about political parties is the outcome of a communicative process between voters and political parties. It depends on voters' cognitive and affective components as well as on the policy-based strategies of competition employed by political parties. Moreover, I explore how cognition and party affect are associated with party knowledge conditional upon the information environment as shaped by political parties.
The dissertation aims at studying the historical institutional evolution of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the judicial arm of the supranational European community. The Court has been largely analysed, in the multidisciplinary field of European studies, particularly because of its central role in the process of continental integration, for the role played for the evolution of the European Union legal order. The perspective I would like to suggest and to develop in this work tries to differentiate itself by taking a somehow reverse standpoint. First, I will focus on the evolution of the Court itself, more than on the impressive evolution of the EU legal order and its judge-made nature. Naturally, this last aspect will be the background of my analysis. In this respect, I will not be much concerned with the evolution of case law, jurisprudence or the interpretative activity of the European Court but more on the structure and the organization of the Court itself, taken as an institution. Finally, I will try to develop this approach by making use of the precious insights provided by the comparative analysis of law. I will select some specific yet central aspects of the structural, organizational, institutional development of the Court in the decades since its foundation and will do this with a purpose. My aim is to show, through a comparative analysis, how the development and institutional evolution of the Court of Justice of the European Union can be considered mimetic - able to engage and somehow internalize the solicitations which came from EU Member States influences of different legal traditions (with increasing strain as the EU grew dimensionally) and responding to global challenges in relation to the increasing role of the international forms of judicial review and of the international judicial review bodies. This proved decisive, I argue, for strengthening the authority of the Court of Justice in its federal judicial architecture.
This dissertation addresses the cross-border political networks between members of the Polish-Lithuanian, Ottoman and Moldavian political elites in the seventeenth century (1595-1711).Throughout this period, the Porte and the Commonwealth remained locked in an intermittent rivalry for dominance in the principality of Moldavia, with the Moldavian rulers trying to navigate between the two larger powers. In historiography, these developments are usually interpreted as a policy driven by states' geopolitical interests, seeing states as homogenous, undifferentiated actors. However, in an interesting twist, each of respective polities experienced the rise of factions and,correspondingly, a devolution of power from the political center towards patronage-based elite networks. By tying these two phenomena, the present study focuses on instances of cross-border patronage that emerged during this period of the long seventeenth century. The main object of this dissertation argues that rather than 'state interest,' factional interests and the individual agendas of members of Polish-Lithuanian, Ottoman and Moldavian elite shaped the course of the entangled history. Despite religious, social and political differences, the actors involved were embedded in a complex system of political networks that straddled across territorial and religious boundaries. In doing so, this dissertation focuses on the interlocking peripheries of eastern European empires,directing attention to the relationship between the processes of state formation, political infighting and agency of the imperial periphery in shaping political hierarchies and practices in the three polities throughout the seventeenth century, which cannot be accommodated by state-oriented models.
Legitimacy has become an increasingly important topic within international law. The reasons behind this recent surge in the interest of the justification of authority are intimately related to the transformations that the international legal order is undergoing. From a consensual normative order, centred on interstate relations, international law has evolved into a complex and dense normative framework encompassing subject areas that until recently seemed alien to international law. The increasing influence of international law has sparked an intense discussion about the suitability of the conventional basis of its legitimacy. In particular, due to the direct impact on individuals of international legal norms in areas previously covered by national law, a legitimacy gap has opened up, making the legitimation of international law a pressing concern. This dissertation offers a critical account of legitimacy and its use in international law. On the conceptual side, the dissertation illustrates the broadness of the concept and analyses some of the reasons for why legitimacy is highly contested and why these disagreements are unlikely to disappear. On the descriptive side, the thesis questions the often-presumed link between legitimacy and the stability of a social arrangement - the international legal order in this case - by examining alternative explanations and by contesting the idea of legitimacy as a matter of individual beliefs. As a way forward, the dissertation offers an alternative reading of legitimacy, which proposes a shift of focus from legitimacy to legitimation, moving from a static to a dynamic perspective. In contrast to existing explanations, this account is not centred on ascertaining whether a certain social arrangement is legitimate or not, but rather on describing and analysing the means through which actors attempt to expand or restrict the permissible boundaries of action.
This thesis is a collection of four empirical studies which analyze the effects of family and sibling characteristics on educational outcomes. The analysis in all empirical studies is guided by the compensatory effect of social origin hypothesis according to which higher social origin families can reduce the negative impact of disadvantageous characteristics and life events on their children's educational outcomes. In detail, I study the effects of month of birth, parental separation, birth order, birth spacing, and maternal age. I use data on England, Germany, and Sweden. On a methodological level, I employ natural experiments, fixed effects methods, and instrumental variable (IV) estimation in order to control for the influence of unobserved confounding variables. Overall, I find support for the initial hypothesis with respect to the effects of month of birth, parental separation, and close birth spacing. Contrary to that, I find no systematic social origin differences in the effects of birth order and maternal age on educational outcomes. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of the intergenerational transmission of education, the differences in life chances of children from socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged families, and the allocation of resources within families. I discuss how further research could possibly test in how far differences in parental involvement between social origin groups are underlying these relationships.
This dissertation investigates EU cooperation in the field of migrant integration. Closely tied to the notion of national identity and a core competence of the Nation State, migrant integration policy is a field where the Member States should have displayed an insurmountable degree of reluctance to act collectively at the EU level. In the early 2000s, the Member States nonetheless chose to place this highly sensitive issue on the European agenda and to take some common initiatives in this area. In light of these considerations, the dissertation aims to explain the introduction of cooperation in the field of integration and its nature—the soft mode of governance and the type of integration policy informing the cooperation. Inspired by the Strategic-Choice Approach and Liberal Intergovernmentalism, I analyze these different aspects through a two-stage explanatory framework that focuses both on the national and EU level. The first stage considers the preferences formation process in the Member States—that is, their preferences for the cooperation and its specific features; I focus in particular on the cases of Sweden and the Netherlands. The second stage is concerned with the negotiation process between the Member States with respect to the substance and instruments of cooperation in this field. Specifically, I analyze the negotiations of two Council Conclusions, which took place in 2004 and 2011 respectively. I demonstrate how policy divergence between national integration policies have acted as a driver for Member States to engage in cooperation at the EU level. I further document how national politics not only influence the preferences of the Member States for the nature of the EU cooperation, but also explain the outcome of successive negotiations.
This dissertation examines the symbolic urban landscape in the four cities of Prussia and Austria-Hungary in the period 1867-1914. Following a theoretical discussion of the symbolic politics and construction of collective memories three chapters deal with the key elements of city-text: street names, monuments and architecture of public buildings. The following chapter focuses on public responses to reshaping of the four cities in that period. Finally, in the conclusions all the different threads are pulled together and further lines of enquiry are presented. Using a variety of primary sources (administrative files, newspapers, address books, maps, iconography) street names, monuments and architecture of public buildings are examined in terms of who was involved in creating these symbolic items, where in the given city space they were located and what symbolic messages they conveyed. The examination of the processes which resulted in erecting of symbolic markers in the four cities allow us not only to better understand how definitions of German and Polish national communities changed in the second half of the long nineteenth century, but also how different social, economical and political circumstances influenced the understanding of each national category. Furthermore, the examination of the symbolic sphere gives an insight into power relations on municipal as well as state level. As this dissertation shows, the symbolic urban landscape was an important arena on which emerging power of the cities confronted the existing power structures of the state and the army. Moreover, powerful individuals used the symbolic resources to strengthen their position within the given community, but also to legitimise their social class. For this reason this dissertation not only contributes to the field of nationalism, memory studies and symbolic politics, but also to the political history of Prussia and Austria-Hungary.
Constitutions establish communities. This essay explores how a European political community can be advanced through EU constitutional law. It is shown that legitimacy of the Union derives from three conceptions of Peace manifest in EU free movement law, external agreements of the Union and migration law under the AFSJ. The constitutional role of the Union is to ensure Peace by addressing two types of conflict. The first are static conflicts of interests between the national polities in the EU. These are avoided by ensuring reciprocal non-interference between Member States in the Union through deregulation in Union law. The second are dynamic conflicts of ideas about positive liberty held by the peoples of Europe that can be resolved through regulation in a European political space. Here, Union law enables a continuous process of re-negotiating a shared European idea of positive liberty that can be accepted as own by each national polity in the EU. Both solutions are premised on liberty from domination of each national polity, from which legitimacy of the Union and the European political space ensue. Substantive law and constitutional theory, analysis of the legislative process and CJEU case law, insights from psychology and philosophy are combined throughout this work to unveil how a stronger Union can be advanced through constitutional law.
General principles of EU law have been used by the Court of Justice of the European Union since its inception. They have been attributed several functions, and their application reaches across all fields of EU law. Much has been written about individual principles, but the analysis of their application in combination with other legal sources has been neglected. This thesis aims at presenting a framework to study the relationships of different norms in the EU, having general principles as a reference norm. It is an enquiry on how certain general principles are applied in combination with provisions in Treaties, regulations and directives. The Court has, in great part, been responsible for the construction of these interactions; and the modes of operation used show another facet of a peculiar legal system. Many times studied from the perspective of a rigid hierarchical legal system, EU law is indeed much more complex, with its different sources assuming different possible combinations, which lead to different results. By deconstructing the existing pre-conceptions with regard to the categories and functions attributed to general principles of EU law, this thesis aims at showing that a broader theory relating to the interaction of these and other legal sources, and the impact and effects achieved therewith, is missing. As such, a new taxonomy, based on the modes of operation deployed in the use of these tools, is here proposed, in an attempt to bring clarity to the principle-based reasoning of the CJEU.
This project is about the fundamental loss of effective legal understanding in conversations between competent jurists from different national legal systems. It consists of three parts. The first argues for a complex, full and effective legal understanding that is embedded within a socially constituted practice of legal language. This means that those who engage in such a practice of language should be able to communicate with each other in more or less agreement, and this includes the possibility of meaningful disagreement, misunderstanding, or mistake. This account is in line with the view of language and meaning, advanced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. The second part demonstrates that in certain conversations about law the participants do not share a socially constituted practice of legal language and as a result cannot communicate effectively. At most they can communicate in terms that collapse into an infinite number of interpretations because there is no shared understanding of them. Ultimately this leads to a paradoxical understanding of the conversation that is not full and effective at all. Hence the quality of communication is fundamentally undermined. Three conversations are analyzed to demonstrate this problem: a non-legal conversation about coffee and two legal conversations about contractual interpretation and the interpretation of a European Court decision. The third part concludes that when the quality of communication is fundamentally undermined the participants must work together to create a new, shared practice of legal language. This kind of collective undertaking resembles what James Boyd White has described as a process of integration in his Justice as Translation. Through this process, which is based on the participants’ different understandings of law, a new kind of understanding can be created, one that is both respectful of the original and shared.
This thesis focuses on the production of political cartoons in Turkey in the context of authoritarianism and repression that was brought about by the coup d’état of September 12 1980, and by the military rule that followed. It builds on theories of political satire as an active element of political culture. Political cartoons serve as the lens through which the evolution of the political space under the regime is explored. The analysis revolves around Girgir (Tease), the satirical magazine that in the decade prior to the coup had already contributed to the emergence of a socially and politically critical field with its politically engaged columns and illustrations and that, during the regime, became the best-selling weekly at a national level. Two main issues are investigated. On the one hand, how Girgir’s satire survived under a regime that, in its attempt to turn citizens into a homogeneous, uniform, and apolitical society, came to repress any possibility of criticism. On the other hand, how an alternative political response was elaborated through the cartoons by civil society and intellectuals in reaction to authoritarianism. Overall, the thesis contributes to the study of the military regime of the early 1980s, of satire in Turkey, of censorship, and of the strategies of dissent in authoritarian regimes.
This thesis first of all conducts a conceptual analysis of the illegality of a thirdcountry national’s stay by examining the boundaries of the overarching concept of illegality at the EU level. Having found that the holistic conceptualisation of illegality, constructed through a combination of sources (both EU and national law) falls short of adequacy, the thesis moves on to consider situations that fall outside the traditional binary of legal and illegal under EU law. The cases of unlawfully-staying EU citizens and of non-removable illegally-staying third-country nationals are examples of groups of migrants who are categorised as atypical. By looking at these two examples the thesis reveals not only the fragmentation of legal statuses in EU migration law but also the more general ill-fitting and unsatisfactory categorisation of migrants. Having examined the conceptualisation and regulation of the phenomenon of illegality, the thesis then examines the consequences that arise from the EU’s current framing of illegality. The conflation of illegality with criminality as a result of the way EU databases regulate the legal regime of illegality of a migrant’s stay is the first trend identified by the thesis. Subsequently, the thesis considers the functions of accessing legality (both instrumental and corrective). In doing so it draws out another trend evident in the EU illegality regime: a two-tier rationale which discriminates on the basis of wealth and the instrumentalisation of access to legality by Member States for their own purposes. Finally, the thesis proposes corrective regulation of illegality through access to legality and provides a number of normative suggestions as a way of remedying the current deficiencies that arise out of the present supranational framing of illegality.
This thesis consists of two chapters exploring how even benevolent governments may struggle to convince their citizens that they will stick to the policies that ensure the best outcomes in equilibrium. If people believe that the government will optimally choose a different policy in the event of a crisis, their reaction to that belief may in fact bring about just such a crisis. This thesis investigates the circumstances in which these kinds of commitment problems can be overcome. The first chapter is on bank resolution, where the choice between resolving insolvent banks and bailing them out creates a time inconsistency problem. To deter banks from taking excessive risks, governments want to convince them that they will choose resolution. However, when facing the costs of liquidating banks, governments may be tempted to bail them out instead. By strengthening their bank resolution regimes, governments reduce these costs, thus credibly committing themselves to choosing resolution over bailouts. Governments with greater resources face a more severe commitment problem. When banks interact strategically, improving the resolution regime can eliminate equilibria in which they coordinate on risky investment strategies. In the second chapter, Antoine Camous and I present a theory linking the cyclicality of fiscal policy to inherited public debt. When debt is low, fiscal policy is countercyclical, in the sense that the government responds to reductions in output by cutting the tax rate. Above a threshold level of debt, however, optimal fiscal policy becomes procyclical. This creates the possibility of self-fulfilling crises, in which output is low because workers expect high taxes, and the government sets high taxes because output is low. Our model suggests why highly indebted governments might implement procyclical fiscal policy during recessions, even without facing high sovereign risk premia.
In light of the doctrinal innovations of the latest thematic treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the present thesis revisits the concept of positive obligations in human rights law. Having as a main point of reference the vision of the human being upon which human rights law is based, the thesis suggests a new approach towards conceptualising and analysing positive obligations, namely in terms of human interactions. Under this revised schema, positive obligations ought to be defined as calls for assistance to enable the individual to reach a minimum threshold of both material welfare and sociability. In addition, upon assuming its protective duty the State ought to ensure that in delivering its services it also forges a relationship with the recipient that reflects its caring role. The thesis grounds this revised understanding of positive obligations in the evolution of the notion of autonomy within human rights law. It argues that human rights law has gradually shifted away from the vision of the isolated and independent individual that characterised early human rights instruments and towards a more truthful conception of the human person as a needful and sociable person, a process that the CRPD epitomises. While this change has primarily taken place through thematic treaties, the present thesis argues that the most basic characteristics of this revised notion of selfhood — dependence and relatedness — affect us all and ought to be integrated within our mainstream human rights framework. The thesis explores the analytical and practical implications of this argument by drawing from the human rights jurisprudence on positive obligations, which it will revisit on the basis of its own model.
This thesis investigates the dissemination of the plays of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen to Denmark, Germany and Britain. The investigation covers the time from when Ibsen’s dramas were first attempted to be introduced to the time when they broke through in each of the three countries spanning the period 1852-1893. In this way, the thesis offers both a synchronic and diachronic view of the process. The thesis’ approach builds on theories of cultural transfer and investigates the agents that carried out the transfer, the cultural markets through which the plays were disseminated and finally how they were integrated into local culture. Through the three case studies, the thesis offers a transnational scope on the transfer of Ibsen’s drama as well as incorporating a plurality of perspectives to show how the transfer was contested and negotiated locally. The cultural markets, such as local and transnational book and theatrical markets, are investigated to show how structural conditions influenced the transfer, and contemporary notions of nation and national literature are explored to place the transfer in an ideational context. Thus, the investigation of the transfer of Ibsen’s plays offers a prism for the study of cultural markets, agency in the field of culture and the circulation of Scandinavian cultural products in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Using e-books as a case study, this thesis considers whether the principle of equal treatment could play a role in driving more consistent and rational regulation of markets where content is available in both tangible and intangible formats. At present, although the content is the same, these formats are often subject to different rules. This difference in treatment has opened up discussions about whether current legal frameworks should be amended and in these discussions actors with very different standpoints have consistently invoked the language of equality to justify their varied stances. However, in these discussions there is no clear elaboration of what equality means or how it can be used, leading to abstract debates and eventually to arbitrary decisions. The thesis attempts to fill this gap by building a framework based on outcome equality to decide if intangible book formats should be treated ‘like’ tangible ones. It uses the objective underlying the existing rule as the standard for establishing likeness or difference and advocates that functional equality, rather than formal equality, is desirable because this takes account of the differences in the functionalities between content formats: Intangibility impacts on the functioning of the rule in question (e.g. quantitatively increased ease of circulation and copying) and it is only if these impacts can be neutralized that functional equality can be achieved. The framework is applied to the case studies of copyright exhaustion, reduced rates of VAT and fixed book pricing. These have been chosen in recognition of the range of decision-making powers between the national and EU levels in this cultural sector. Overall, the analysis shows that rationality can be inserted by using equal treatment as a guide, but that consistency is more difficult to achieve given the interaction between national and EU influences in the book market.
This thesis examines the contractual dimension of the EU Regulatory Framework for Electronic Communications. In particular, it provides a comprehensive legal analysis of the transformations occurring in private law as a result of the impact of EU telecommunications regulation on private law relationships. While the main focus in the Europeanization of private law has been on the sale of goods, this thesis engages the (concealed) private law dimension accompanying the, almost, all-encompassing sector-related framework that concerns the provision of a Service of General Economic Interest. This thesis scrutinizes the private law implications of the regulation of telecommunications services from cradle to grave; i.e. from its making to its enforcement. Hence, it does not only consider substance but also focuses on the institutional and procedural transformations taking place within the sector. Tested against empirical research, the thesis further assesses the self-sufficiency of sector-specific legislation as a separate regime of private law serving regulatory functions that operate independently of general contract rules. The thesis concludes by validating that self-sufficiency is actually occuring in view of the results yielded from the foregoing legal and empirical analysis and by providing a normative assessment of the transformation of private law which is taking place as a result of the shift in the focus of European private law from the failed European of civil code project to the regulation of areas beyond the core of private law.
The central question posed in this project is: In what way did the colonial labor regime in German East Africa correspond with the formation of a global color line and the growing debates over the relationship between race and labor at the end of the nineteenth century? The division between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ subalterns made by colonial rulers is the topic around which this project is structured. By examining three case studies, this project highlights the emergence of a colonial labor order in early colonial Tanzania. In doing so, it shows the discursive entanglements that bound local processes to global, transregional, inter-imperial, and metropolitan phenomena. The first chapter focuses on the recruitment and employment of Asian indentured laborers on plantations owned by the German-­East African Plantation Company, and so raises questions regarding global migration as well as free and unfree labor during High Imperialism. The second chapter contextualizes the “education of the Negro to work” as a result of a transatlantic knowledge exchange and ties this process to the question of school policy in colonial Tanzania. The chapter then goes on to analyze the recruitment policy of state-run schools in which Muslims, first and foremost, were to be trained as subaltern civil servants. The third chapter in turn focuses on unwanted subalterns and contextualizes the deportation of poor whites who were seen as a danger to both the colonial (labor) regime, as well as to the “white prestige” of colonial rulers. The project will demonstrate that this was a broader problem and that the legislative solution ultimately reached in German East Africa has to be analyzed within the context of imperial border regimes.
What makes governments decide to engage in cooperation with their neighbours to deliver regional public goods? Under which conditions do they decide to keep this cooperation informal, and when do they instead prefer to formalise it through an international treaty? Why do government seem to be more capable to produce regional public goods in some policy-areas than in others? The present research addresses these questions by analysing the contemporary South American-wide regionalism from 2000 to 2014, the period in which the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) was created and later formalised into the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). First, the analysis of the intergovernmental negotiations shows that an informal institution such as IIRSA better accommodated the preferences of governments that were searching for and experimenting with a collective response to an external challenge, whereas a formal institution such as UNASUR better accommodated the preferences of governments that wanted to avoid the emergence of competitive regional projects and the defection of some states. Second, the thesis examines the interactions between governments and transnational actors and shows that regional public goods are more likely to be produced in policy-areas in which governments were able to broker non-state transnational actors to implement basic intergovernmental consensus. In answering these questions, the thesis offers an empirically informed assessment of contemporary South American regionalism without following either the over-optimistic or over-pessimistic viewpoints that dominate the current academic debate.
One of the most significant roles of the EU in the world is that of being a norms exporter. The EU has concluded numerous agreements with countries in its neighbourhood with the aim of encouraging third countries to adopt EU acquis in exchange for access to the internal market. The most ambitious of these agreements are the three multilateral agreements establishing the European Economic Area, the Energy Community and the European Common Aviation Area, respectively. The common feature of these agreements is the aim of extending to third countries either the entire internal market or a sector thereof. Achieving this objective is, however, challenged by the difficulty of circumscribing precisely the scope of the internal market and delimiting it from other EU policies, the sui generis nature of the EU legal order and the proclaimed need to protect its autonomy. An analysis of the concept of the internal market, the EU’s foundational principles and the institutions and procedures in place in the EU and in the three agreements for achieving and maintaining homogeneity within the expanded internal market reveals that it is, indeed, possible to extend the internal market to third countries. However, the level of homogeneity in the expanded market depends heavily on the goodwill of third country decision-­-makers, national administrators and, especially, courts to adopt and give the same effect to rules of EU origin outside the EU as within the Union. The objective of full homogeneity within an expanded internal market inevitably requires a certain transfer of supranational characteristics also to the agreements exporting the acquis.
20 ans après l’arrêt Bosman de la Cour de Justice de l’UE, cette thèse analyse l’interaction entre le droit de l’UE et la lex sportiva, le droit transnational privé qui régit l’activité sportive internationale. Elle entend tout particulièrement éclairer la fonction de contre-pouvoir démocratique transnational que remplit le droit de l’UE dans ce contexte. La première partie de la thèse retrace les modalités de l’intervention du droit de l’UE dans le domaine sportif et démontre que tant les libertés fondamentales que le droit de la concurrence de l’UE peuvent être efficacement invoqués afin de contrecarrer les normativités privées transnationales. Ce contre-pouvoir n’est cependant pas aveugle : le contrôle de proportionnalité couplé avec la notion émergente de spécificité sportive permettent de tenir compte des objectifs particuliers poursuivis par la lex sportiva. Dès lors, une forme de dialogue juridique transnational se met en place. La seconde partie s’attache aux changements institutionnels et normatifs que cette intervention du droit de l’UE a pu engendrer tant au niveau des organes que du contenu de la lex sportiva. En effet, l’UE ne dispose d’aucune compétence (ni de capacité) législative pour se substituer à la lex sportiva. L’intervention du droit européen doit donc, pour être efficace, se traduire par un effet réflexif sur celle-ci. En pratique, cette intervention du droit de l’UE a donné lieu, d’une part, à de nouveaux modes de production de la lex sportiva, notamment en co-production avec la Commission européenne afin de se conformer au droit de la concurrence ou dans le cadre récent du dialogue social européen, et de l’autre, elle a contribué à faire naître les nouvelles fabriques de la lex sportiva que sont le Tribunal Arbitral du Sport et l’Agence Mondiale Anti-dopage.
Cultural factors shape the symbolic environment in which contentious politics take place. Among these factors, collective memories are particularly relevant: they can help collective action by providing symbolic material from the past, but at the same time they can constrain people's ability to mobilise by imposing proscriptions and prescriptions. In my research I analyse the relationship between social movements and collective memories: how do social movement participate in the building of public memory? And how does public memory, and in particular the media representation of a contentious past, influence the social construction of identity in the contemporary movements? To answer these questions I focus on the student movements in Italy and Spain, analysing the content and format of media sources in order to draw a map of the different narrative representations of a contentious past, while I use qualitative interviews to investigate their influence on contemporary mobilisations. In particular, I focus on the evolution of the representation of specific events in the Italian and Spanish student movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the different public fields, identifying the role of terrorism and political transitions in shaping in the present the publicly discussed image of the past. The thesis draws on a qualitative content analysis of media material, tracing the phases of the commemoration, putting it in historical context, and attempting to reconstruct the different mechanisms of contentious remembrance. Furthermore, I refer to interviews conducted with contemporary student activists in order to assess the relationship between the public memory of a contentious past and the strategic choices of contemporary movements.
Through an ethnographic study of sohbet meetings and patterns of civic and political engagement of the Nur community in Turkey, this thesis examines the processes through which Islamic socio-political imaginaries are constructed and subsequently turned into practice. The phrase ‘socio-political imaginary’ is used in the meaning given to it by Charles Taylor. According to the author, a social imaginary is the transformation of social theory into the profound normative notions and imagines that enable common people’s practice of society. Applying this analytical tool to the study of an Islamic community allows the researcher to fill in a gap of time and space existing in the literature about Islamic movements. In terms of time, it allows the researcher to focus the investigation on a little theorized step in the process of mobilization by religious actors that is, the cognitive elaboration of a socio-political project before mobilization around that project is organized. In terms of space, it grasps the intermediate level of cognition existing between the theological elaboration on politics and society promoted by religious scholars and the masses’ practical knowledge of the social realm constituted by a set of instinctive beliefs and judgments. Finally, the concept of social imaginary allows the researcher to analyse discourse and practice as mutually sustaining elements that together define a social actor’s function and position in society. Unravelling this dynamic interaction means going back and forth, both temporally and cognitively, between imagination and acts and recognizing that the discourse in itself can be influenced by the social space for which it provides a map.
Abstract	The first chapter analyzes the effects of commercial television in Norway. Matching data on cable television networks with individual-level administrative register data, we find that the expansion of commercial television reduced ability test scores as well as high school graduation rates. We find stronger effects on sons of low-income parents and particularly large effect for children in elementary school. Aggregate data show a substantial drop in time spent reading by young people in the same period, suggesting that television watching may have crowded out more cognitively stimulating activities such as reading. This chapter is joint work with Simen Markussen and Knut Røed. The second chapter investigates how sickness absence behaviour in Norwegian municipalities was affected by the terrorist attack in Norway on July 22, 2011. Using register data covering the complete Norwegian population, I find that sickness absence rates declined substantially in municipalities affected more intensely by the attack. In municipalities from which a resident was killed in the attack, sickness absence rates declined by 4% compared to municipalities without victims. The effect is precisely estimated, stable across several challenging specifications, and persists for as long as there is available data. The effect for people in their 20's is more than twice that for the population at large – for this group, local exposure to the attack decreased absence rates by around 10%. The third chapter exploits a natural experiment in the Norwegian political system. I find that obtaining the right to vote at a lower age is associated with substantially higher turnout among first-time voters, and that this is driven by parental influence. Counter to conventional wisdom about the habitual nature of voting, this difference in political participation does not persist for subsequent elections.
This thesis is a historical-sociological study of the Irish independence struggle, which culminated in the partition of Ireland in 1920, and the secession of most of the island from the United Kingdom in 1922. It asks how the Irish separatist project was able to go from political marginality up to 1916, to the attainment, with widespread popular support, of an essentially independent state covering most of Ireland just a few years later - a violent and unexpected process. Focusing on the years 1916-1921, the thesis explains what happened as a path dependent reactive sequence - that is, a chain of events initiated by a highly contingent happening, setting in motion a series of reactions and counter-reactions. That highly contingent happening was the Easter Rising of 1916 - a surprise attack on British rule in Dublin - and it was the product of the agency of a small band of rebels. The sequence it set in motion brought deep structural tensions to the boil - but this might never have happened were it not for the agency of the rebels. The thesis examines this classic paradox of the structure-agency relationship via a focus on the strategic interaction of the Irish rebels and the British state, and attempts to identify the key causal mechanisms involved. These mechanisms were shaped by key British policy choices as much as by rebel action - from the British government's initial decision to back-pedal on meaningful Irish autonomy, to the subsequent policy drift towards brutal and indiscriminate repression in Ireland. The thesis suggests that were it not for the crucial transformative event that started this fateful sequence in 1916, Ireland might well have stayed within the United Kingdom.
This thesis investigates three questions on fiscal policy that have gained importance in the recent turbulent times of general economic decline, labelled as the Great Recession. The first chapter examines how government spending multipliers can vary depending on the location of the debt holder. Empirically, we find that fiscal multipliers are larger when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to non-resident foreign investors, than to resident home investors. Using a theoretical model we then show how the location of the government debt holder produces these di?erential responses through the extent that investment is crowded out in each case. Increasing international capital mobility of the resident private sector can attenuate the di?erence between the two types of financing. The second chapter contributes to the current debate on fiscal sustainability and fiscal coordination in currency unions. It does so using a large-scale New-Keynesian DSGE model calibrated to the EA South and EA North, and fed with a particular fiscal policy scenario identified using the guidelines of the Stability and Growth Pact. The results suggest that when monetary policy is constrained by the zero-lower bound an expansion in the EA North o?sets a consolidation in the EA South leading to a union-wide increase in output. The third chapter studies the effects of fiscal policy in a setting where crisis shocks propagate through the real exchange rate to generate distortions in labour and financial markets. The joint presence of labour market and financial frictions, modelled as downward nominal rigid wages and a collateral constraint on private borrowing, endogenously generate unemployment and persistently high debt levels. Fiscal policies aiming to stimulate or consolidate the economy affect the movement of the real exchange rate in such a way so as to generate it toothless in the face of a 'debt-unemployment' trade-off.
The thesis analyzes the interaction between authoritarian rule, and societal mobilization by focusing on the two uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt /.../ When the Arab spring started in the marginalized interior areas of Tunisia and spread to the densely populated capital of Egypt, removing two of the longest-standing dictators in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), it left observers and scholars with many puzzles to solve. After all, this was a region studied for its sturdy resistance to pressures for democratization. Scholars who had predominantly been occupied with understanding the unusual stability of Middle Eastern autocracies suddenly found themselves in need to explain the opposite – their unexpected vulnerability in the face of popular resistance. Their theories it seemed, were ill equipped for the task. Emerging out of the democratization-focused transitions literature, authoritarianism studies had in recent years departed from asking how institutions could push along democratization, to focus instead on how even seemingly democratic institutions could provide authoritarian regimes with stability and longevity. Their analysis thus heavily leaned on understanding elite coalitions and the institutions – formal or informal – that ensured regime maintenance. When scholars tried to understand the role of political opposition forces under authoritarian rule, it was mostly in the framework of either their lack of role or their (unwilling) support of authoritarian rule. The masses over which these regimes ruled, however, only rarely put in an appearance. It does therefore not come as a surprise that authoritarianism studies should have missed the widespread grievances brewing within Middle Eastern societies.
This thesis studies how fiscal and environmental policies affect firms' behavior and economic performance. In chapter 1, co-authored with Stefan Lamp, we focus on the effect of tax adjustment on firms' investment decisions. Using a detailed narrative of tax changes in Germany covering 40 years of fiscal adjustments, we define and exploit the exogenous variation of tax bills to quantify the effect of tax changes on future investment plans of firms as well as on realized investment. In chapter 2, co-authored with Hélia Costa, we study how uncertainty over environmental policy affects firms' investment in low-carbon technologies. We model policy uncertainty in the context of an emission trading scheme and we develop a three period sequential model. The set-up of the model combines the industry and electricity sectors and encompasses both irreversible and reversible investment possibilities for firms. Finally, in chapter 3, I investigate whether international and domestic firms' productivity growth may be heterogeneously affected by environmental policy. Using a novel measure of environmental policy stringency and a panel of 11 OECD countries and 22 manufacturing sectors over the period 2000-2009, I estimate the difference in multi-factor productivity growth between multinational and domestic firms associated with a tightening of domestic environmental policy.
This dissertation purports to connect the preliminary reference procedure with direct taxation. The aim of my dissertation is to lay down how this essential mechanism for the development of EU law – the preliminary reference procedure – deals with the cases in the field of direct taxation. By analyzing the preliminary rulings in the particular field, this thesis will shed light on the meaning of judicial cooperation between the Court of Justice of the European Union (“Court”) and the national courts. The almost absence of harmonized direct taxation reached at the European level enables the Court throughout the preliminary reference procedure to become the only available actor to safeguard the rights conferred to the individuals by EU law. In the area of direct taxation, it encompasses the rights of the individuals to exercise the fundamental Treaty freedoms of circulation. Therefore, the entrenchment of the rights of the individuals requires national courts requesting questions for preliminary rulings whereby national tax law in breach of EU law is challenged. Accordingly, this narrative of “protection of EU rights” which is embedded within article 267 TFEU enables the Court to adopt the role of a constitutional court assessing the compatibility of national law with EU law. The current asymmetries and conceptual mismatches of the substantive case law in the field of direct taxation are firmly anchored in a preliminary reference procedure in which the Court, as a constitutional court, is endowed with discretionary powers to drive it.
According to Jessup, the field of transnational law studies those aspects of law that are neither national nor international. The common challenge of the field is to overcome the tension between the non-state regulatory phenomena that it studies and the state origin of the lens – law – that it uses. This thesis structures one particular debate in transnational law – the resolution of large financial institutions in national, European, and transnational law - according to this challenge, by critically examining the notion of bi-polarity, defined as the reliance on distinctions that are based on the distinction between non-state and state. The proposed framework – formalized as a matrix with six rows that distinguish the parameters to understand the implications of the non-state/state distinction and three columns that represent the legal contexts in which transnational phenomena affect law - illustrates the current debate on transnational law and its need to overcome bi-polarity.
This thesis analyses European standardisation of services and its impact on private law. It tells a story of two paradoxes. First of all, the EU – in particular, the European Commission – would like European standardisation of services to improve the internal market for services. However, it is not actually taking any steps to guarantee that European standardisation of services facilitates free movement of services. With the New Approach for goods, European standardisation of goods has been made a tool for internal-market building. Such a regulatory approach has not been developed for European standardisation of services. As a result, it is difficult for the EU to exercise control over the reasons of stakeholders to start working on European services standards. An analysis of European standardisation in the healthcare and tourism sectors shows that parties start making European services standards for various reasons, which often have little to do with the improvement of the internal market. Therefore, the Commission cannot rely on European standardisation as a regulatory strategy to improve free movement of services. Secondly, because there is no European regulatory framework in which European services standards play a clear role, the parties which make European services standards become responsible for their application in law. They want their standards to play a role in private law – in particular, in contract law and in certification schemes. However, although stakeholders want European services standards to be applied in private law, they do not really care about the requirements which are imposed by private law. European services standards are not adopted in a legal vacuum – they regularly interact and clash with existing legal regulation. There is a real risk that European services standards might contain provisions which breach the free movement and competition law provisions. This will prevent their successful application in private law.
This study explores the religious conversion of Jews and Muslims to Christianity from the mid-17th to the 18th centuries in the international city of Venice and the port-city of Corfu. It does not focus on the subjective experiences and identity formation of candidate converts, but rather on the background situations that acted as catalysts for these people’s decision to convert. More concretely, the study connects, on the one hand, the conversion of Jews to the impoverishment of a large part of the Jews in Europe in the period under consideration, while it also traces the existence of a minority of educated and wealthy Jewish converts, whose conversion it considers in connection to the crisis of Jewish identity in the late 18th century. On the other hand, the study traces two core elements in the lives and itineraries of Muslim candidate converts: a background of sustained familiarity with Christianity, and an extensive physical mobility that exposed them to and entailed interaction with multi-ethnic and multireligious contexts . Additionally, the study argues that despite the diversity of social status, backgrounds, circumstances or incentives for conversion that candidate converts displayed, a common element transcends the majority of their life-stories: the fact that before reaching the Christian institutions, they were already embedded in cross-faith and cross-cultural social networks. These networks, which often operated as agents of conversion, formed the wider framework within which the various catalysts –from straightforward coercion and poverty to intense cross-faith intimacy, physical mobility, identity crisis or the prospect of professional and status gain- were played out. The study draws mostly, but not exclusively, on material from the archive of the institution of the 'Casa dei Catecumeni' and the church of 'San Giorgio' in Venice, as well as on material from the 'Megalos Protopapas' and the Latin Cathedral archival series in Corfu.
Liquidity risk is inherent to the very nature of the banking activity which is to transform short term liabilities into long term assets. That is why liquidity crises are in one way or another implied in most financial crisis episodes. This thesis contributes to the understanding of how liquidity risk and liquidity crises in the banking and financial sector affect the allocation of resources and the functioning of the economy. It also discusses what could be the best institutional arrangements to share liquidity risk across agents and the best economic policies to avoid liquidity crises. It consists of three chapters focusing on diverse aspects of this topic. The first chapter, co-authored with Katerina-Chara Papioti, provides a new way to measure liquidity risk in the financial sector using the bidding behavior of banks in the bond auctions conducted by central banks. The second chapter examines risk-sharing between agents prone to liquidity shocks obtained through generational and intergenerational coalitions and asset trading in overlapping generation economies. Various institutional arrangements including financial intermediaries, stock markets and government interventions are studied in order to compare their risk sharing performance and optimality. The third chapter examines the international dimension of the liquidity issue and studies theoretically what combination of exchange rate regime and central bank policy is less vulnerable to a combined currency and banking crisis focusing on the sudden stop of capital flows as an underlying source of instability.
My thesis covers different aspects of applied game theory. The first paper looks at a two-sided asymmetric information game where agents make a collaborative decision not knowing each others' types. In the model, an intermediary has full knowledge about the types of agents and can make a decision that brings information to some types. However, once he puts the information on the table the agents are not obliged to pay him, which undermines his incentive to participate in the first place. I find that, nevertheless, the intermediary is still welfare-improving. In my second chapter I search for the optimal prize schemes in contests with sabotage. In the presence of sabotage, a standard prize scheme where all of the prize is given to the winner is no longer optimal as it creates very high incentives for sabotage. I show that in that case, an optimal prize structure may also assume a positive reward for contestants that are behind. With a higher number of contestants sabotage becomes a public good and therefore it is a lesser concern for the designer. In that case, when sabotage is expensive, the designer can achieve the first best by giving the whole sum to the winner. When I extend the problem to the continuous case the solution crucially depends on the cost of sabotage. When sabotage is expensive, the principal wants to give all of the prize to the winner, while when it is cheap he does not want to make a contest at all, and distributes all prizes equally. In the third paper we analyze to what extent knowing game theory alters a persons' behavior. Our experiment showed a huge difference in results before and after the course. However results suggest that players behave less cooperatively not because of the knowledge of game theory per se, but due to changed expectations. We have also found that a course on game theory increases the level of reasoning.
This thesis deals with the contribution of the Saint-Simonians, a group of early French socialists, to the political thought of Thomas Carlyle, one of the most eminent Victorian intellectuals. First, an introduction surveys the existing secondary literature, and discusses the theory and method employed in the thesis. The subsequent chapter briefly recounts the story of Carlyle's encounter with the Saint-Simonians during the early 1830s. Each of the following five chapters deals with the 'transfer' of a particular Saint-Simonian concept, that is, the use that Carlyle made of the concept in a specifically British context. These five concepts are, broadly: (1) 'Industrialism'; (2) History; (3) Democracy and Laissez-Faire; (4) the 'Organisation of Labour'; (5) Empire. Finally, an epilogue addresses the contribution of Carlyle's thought to the early Labour movement, 1880-1935.
Whilst being a period of consolidation for the Portuguese right-wing dictatorship known as Estado Novo, the 1930s and 1940s were marked by geopolitical change and major redefinition of mental maps about colonial order. This dissertation explores the intertwined dynamics between imperial and national identity discourses in Portugal during these turbulent decades, departing from the idea that they were mutually constitutive in metropolitan culture and were negotiated on an everyday basis to adjust to different challenges. In order to contest the idea that the Portuguese 1930s and 1940s were marked by a monolithic imperial-based nationalism stemming from the state apparatuses, this study moves beyond the investigation of major nationalist events and colonial propaganda. Instead, it explores the interplay between Nation and Empire through the lens of the contemporary debates about the Empire and Portuguese colonial status in the world that stood out in the public discussion during this period. Therefore, it looks at representations of Portugueseness and Portuguese colonialism’s exceptionalism in five main themes: 1) the question of native forced labour in the Portuguese empire around the 1930 Forced labour convention, 2) European colonial claims for a new partition of Africa on the eve of the Second World War, 3) Portugal and its empire as a united nation, 4) colonial migration and settlement and 5) the specificity of the Portuguese national character and its impact on the national methods of colonisation.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated in numerous reports that unless urgent action is taken to curb the emission of greenhouse gases, irreparable damage will be done to the Earth's ecosystems, with major implications for human rights. The IPCC's reports also demonstrate that developing nations are most severely affected by the consequences of climate change, whereas developed nations have reaped the most benefits from the greenhouse gas-producing activities that led to climate change. This thesis considers the relevance of international human rights law to this equity challenge, paying particular attention to the inter-relationship between international human rights law, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the general law of State responsibility. The rules of attribution contained in the general law of State responsibility are used to explain how action and inaction that contributes to climate change can be attributed to States. The analysis of substantive rules leads us to believe that the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol provide minimum standards of protection against dangerous climate change, the breach of which is likely to interfere with the enjoyment of human rights. Accordingly, a breach of the substantive provisions of the UNFCCC or the Kyoto Protocol could highlight a violation of human rights obligations related to climate change. The integrative approach presented in the thesis potentially enhances the effectiveness of each framework, as it leads to more specific standards of care for individual States as well as a broader framework for enforcing obligations.
This thesis examines how European Union law and regulation address concentrations of private economic power which impede free information flows on the Internet to the detriment of Internet users' autonomy. In particular, competition law, sector specific regulation (if it exists), data protection and human rights law are considered and assessed to the extent they can tackle such concentrations of power for the benefit of users. Illustrative case studies - of Internet provision, search, mobile devices and app stores, and the cloud – are chosen to demonstrate the gaps that exist in current EU law and regulation when applied to concentrations of private power online. It is argued that these gaps exist due, in part, to current overarching trends guiding the regulation of economic power, namely neoliberalism, by which only the situation of market failures can invite ex ante rules, buoyed by the lobbying of regulators and legislators by those in possession of such economic power to achieve outcomes which favour their businesses. Given this systemic, and extra-legal, nature of the reasons as to why the gaps exist, some 'quick fixes' from outside the system are proposed at the end of each case study, namely the potential for applying regulation and/or applying 'self-help' solutions, which are mainly technical measures using peer-to-peer design.
While it has been commonly held that both industrialisation and the emergence of modern capitalism favoured the rise of big business, regionally entrenched and decentralised modes of production have nonetheless persisted. The concept of the industrial district, which describes the spatial concentration of small to medium-sized firms and highly specialised businesses in a single sector, is one of the most well-known examples of such an alternative to big business and corporate development. The robustness of districts has been traditionally explained by a number of advantages that were generated through the proximity of firms: a predisposition towards cooperation, inter-firm networks, and the sharing of innovations or technological modifications. These factors mitigate the costs of decentralisation. A large number of historical studies have used the concept of the industrial district in order to revive 'alternative' worlds of industrialisation, to nuance the spread of corporate development, and to modify teleological accounts of modern capitalism. Most importantly, the emphasis on geographically defined industrial districts has revealed regional dynamism and economic variety beneath the level of national statistics.
La gestión del pretendido monopolio comercial de la corona castellana sobre las Indias dio lugar a la fundación de instituciones especializadas en el comercio que resolvieran sus problemas y procuraran su regulación. En 1503 fue creada la Casa de la Contratación de las Indias, institución real que en adelante se ocuparía de la coordinación del comercio colonial, funcionando, entre otras cosas, como un tribunal especializado en la resolución de las disputas derivadas de la Carrera de Indias. ¿Pero realmente la audiencia de la Casa de la Contratación contribuyó a resolver las controversias jurídicas derivadas del comercio indiano? El planteamiento surge gracias a la interpretación de algunos historiadores económicos que conciben a la monarquía hispánica y a sus instituciones como un modelo opresor y deficiente, incapaz de proteger los derechos de propiedad, señalando específicamente a la Casa de la Contratación como la expresión institucional del perfil absolutista de la monarquía. Este trabajo busca responder a esa pregunta a través de la semántica de la eficiencia, definiendo si el desempeño jurisdiccional de la audiencia de la Casa de la Contratación reunió las cualidades de las instituciones eficientes. Tales cualidades, trasladadas al plano jurisdiccional suponen que la audiencia de la Casa haya conseguido administrar justicia restaurando el orden económico vulnerado entre los litigantes que frecuentaron dicho tribunal y garantizando el cumplimiento auténtico de las sentencias; todo ello de forma ágil y expedita. En otras palabras, esta tesis busca determinar si el tribunal de la Casa de la Contratación se erigió como una institución garante de los derechos de propiedad de quienes participaron en el comercio con las Indias y si favoreció una atmósfera contractual confiable, capaz de mitigar el problema fundamental de los intercambios.
This thesis investigates the involvement of German scientific experts in the British Empire in Asia during the mid-nineteenth century. My study focuses in particular on a small band of scholars – the three Munich-born Schlagintweit brothers – who between 1854 and 1857 found employment in the East India Company, a former trading body that came to rule large parts of the Indian subcontinent. This central case study is used to demonstrate how the German lands, a country without colonies at the time, provided the scientific expertise for the exploration, administration, and exploitation of territories in South and Central Asia. Inspired by the paradigm of global history, my study makes a significant contribution to the recent endeavour to understand the transnational nature of European imperial systems in the modern period. In turn, I also assess how the contributions and ‘sacrifices’ of German scientists to the overseas rule of other European powers led to increasing claims by German politicians, journalists and public agitators that their own nation had also earned the status of a formal imperial power. By exploring the volatile nexus between science, empire, and popular discourses in Britain, India and the German lands, I reveal key elements of transnational collaboration and competition in around the mid-nineteenth century. The main focus of my analysis is on the problem of scientific authority, and how it is negotiated and contested in a transnational arena. The figure of the itinerant scientist is used to explore the fragile nature of scholarly reputation in the overlapping contexts of overseas exploration, metropolitan science and multiple public spheres in Europe.
The research seeks to explore the basic characteristics of labor conflicts in the Russian Empire from the year 1895 to 1905. The central theme of the research is the structure of these labor conflicts, which varied by year, region and branch of industry. A second main subject is the nature of the interactions between the major factors in the labor movement in pre-revolutionary Russia. This work seeks to determine if there is a correlation between the features of the conflict and the intensity of the strike movement. The dissertation gives a new vision of the important phenomenon in the social and political history of Russia in the end of 19th / the beginning of 20th century. The present study is concerned with the lack of statistical analysis of labor conflicts in pre-revolutionary Russia. Particular attention is given to the scale of the strikes that affected all the regions of the Russian Empire and all branches of industry. The period 1895-1904 which is under consideration in the dissertation is important in Russian social history because it was the decade when the workers movement becomes more organized and politically motivated on the way to the first Russian Revolution. The research is focused on the analysis of dynamics and structure of labor conflicts in Russian industries in the decade which preceded the first Russian Revolution (1905-1907). The author characterizes the historical context of the process under consideration and provides the comparative analysis of labor conflicts in the main industrial regions of European part of Russian Empire (Left-Bank Ukraine, St.-Petersburg and Central Industrial Region) on the edge of centuries. The substantial part of the work is oriented to verification of the working hypothesis by means of the statistical analysis of a variety of labor conflicts based on the materials of the two big data bases.
This thesis utilizes factor models to test the predictions of macroeconomic theory and introduces a new model for estimating structural relations in the economy. Factor models have proven useful in overcoming limited information bias. Limited information bias occurs because the information set of the actual decision makers in the economy is larger than the information set captured by conventional empirical models (i.e. small VARs). With the help of factors we can model a large dataset by using a small model of factors that still capture the majority of aggregate dynamics in the economy. In the first chapter, joint work with Massimiliano Marcellino, we introduce a new empirical model: mixed frequency structural factor augmented VAR model. We show that in a mixed data frequency setting the model reduces aggregation bias and provides more precise estimates of factors and impulse responses, than competing models. We support this claim by means of a detailed Monte Carlo examination that also tests the new estimation procedure that we design. Finally we provide three empirical applications (monetary policy, oil and government expenditure shock) to show the usefulness of the model. In the second chapter I utilize a dynamic factor model to test the predictions of the rational inattention theory as put forward by Mackoviak et al. (2009). I first estimate a time varying parameter dynamic factor model on US post-war data on macroeconomic variables and sector prices. I identify impulse responses of three macroeconomic shocks and sector specific shocks to prices. I then regress price impulse responses, void of the influences of changing variances, on the variances of the shocks, to test the predictions of the rational inattention model over time.
The dissertation investigates the Russification policy of the late-imperial Russian state, as it related to educational policy in the Middle Volga region. It seeks to understand how the tsarist authorities sought to define Russianness and how they sought to craft relations with pagan minorities and Muslims in a region where the Slavic-Orthodox, the Turkic-Islamic and the Finno-pagan worlds interacted. It asks how far the educational projects of the Orthodox missions and the secular authorities brought about Russification. The analysis of the changes in imperial policy in the period between the 1860s to 1914 allows for the conclusion that the methods, instruments and aims of Russification policy continually changed and that policy was applied quite differently vis-à-vis the Muslim and pagan, or in most cases only superficially Orthodox , population of the region. When dealing with the educational project for the non-Muslim population in the region, also known as the project of N.Ilminskii, the dissertation aims to understand how the russifying and missionary components related to each other. Furthermore, it studies the alternative educational projects aiming at Russification of the non-Russian population of the region that the Ilminskii system had to compete with. A considerable amount of the dissertation is devoted the discussion of the Muslim reform movement and emergence of Jadidism. By analyzing and comparing the curricula of old-method madrasahs and the new-methods ones, the dissertation demonstrates the evolution that the Middle Volga Muslims underwent under the influence of both inner reforms and the actions of the authorities.
Queer festivals make up a part of the legacy of queer activism, as it has developed in North America and Europe from the late 80s onwards. Their political discourse is based on a confrontational style of address, while their content is largely inspired by poststructuralist views of identities as a tool through which power operates (Butler, 1990). However, the 'constant deconstruction of identities… undermine[s] the claims to strength and unity of their own rights movement' (Jasper et al., forthcoming: 29). The anti-identity paradox (Jasper et al., forthcoming; or the 'queer dilemma', Gamson, 1995) entails the failure to avoid the construction of a new identity, built precisely on the same discourse it attempts to deconstruct. Thus, the following puzzle emerges: If we assume that queer politics are based on this 'anti-identity' paradox, on which kind of identity, then, can they mobilize? In other words, given that the identity they attempt to build leads to their selfdestruction, how can queer politics, over time, strengthen and spread across Europe?
The intention of my thesis is to shed light on a technique of integration implemented by the European Court of Justice described as 'power-based approach.' Frequently neglected and overlooked, it is distinct from the ECJ traditional rights-based approach. It materializes in a specific range of free movement cases where Member States are suspected of having impinging on the free movement principle – understood as encompassing the four economic freedoms and EU citizenship – when they exercise what the Court deems as being their retained powers. A variety of fields are concerned, such as nationality, direct taxation, social security, or education. My overall claim is that the power-based approach contributes to defining and shaping the contours of the relationship between the European Union and its Member States, of EU interstate relations and, ultimately, of Union membership. I start with an attempt at deconstruction to identify the defining features of the cases concerned by this approach: (i) they revolve around the structural notion of power; (ii) the applicability of the free movement principle stems from the disjunction of the scope of application of EU law from the scope of EU powers; (iii) the settlement of the conflicts at hand amounts to a 'mutual adjustment resolution,' which consists in putting limitations on the exercise of the powers retained by Member States, while the Court itself tends to soften its own approach to protect national autonomy. I then proceed with an effort at reconstruction. First, I identify the jurisdictional implications of the power-based approach. Next, I look into its implications for membership of the Union. Lastly, I provide an overall critical and structural reassessment. I show that the silence of the Court regarding the rationale behind its approach has the effect of weakening its legitimacy and its authority. I finally identify its resulting structural model.
The supportive environments which sustain armed groups are arguably an understudied aspect of political violence; it is widely acknowledged that all armed groups necessitate a degree of popular support if they are to be successful but the relationship between armed movements and their supporters is often underdeveloped or considered self-explanatory. This project puts forth the argument that the relationship between armed groups and their supporters is of fundamental importance to how and where armed groups mobilise and the repertoire of contention they adopt. Making use of Malthaner's concept of "constituency" (2011a), the PKK's armed struggle from its foundation in the 1970s until 1999 will be analysed. The particular manner in which the PKK actively constructed and maintained extensive support networks across contrasting socio-spatial contexts ensured its ongoing legitimacy and the material resources necessary for its survival. Although a noted power disparity exists between armed and unarmed actors, the relationship between them is always characterised by degrees of reciprocal influence; influence that is often expressed in a variety of subtle and contextually specific fashions. The project will therefore examine the dialectic between the PKK and its communities of support and how this has evolved over time and space from rural Kurdistan to the urban centres of western Turkey, and consider how it has impacted on the nature of violence deployed by the PKK in the course of its insurgency.
This thesis examines the application of general rules of public international law by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The research was conducted in light of the debate on the fragmentation of international law. Its aims are two-fold. On the one hand, it delves into the case law of the ECtHR in order to better understand the approach that Court takes to Public International Law (PIL) issues. On the other, it hopes to establish a workable methodology for legal scholars who are confronted with the need to address questions with a factual/ empirical component. Current literature does not convincingly show how the ECtHR applies norms of PIL, nor is it clear what, if any, factors may play a role in the Court's application of PIL. This is in part due to the lack of any convincing broad studies on the Court's case law. Thus, the main research question is what approach to Public International Law is used by the European Court of Human Rights? Flowing from this main question are other questions such as, is the approach consistent throughout all cases? If not, are there any aspects of a case that correlate with the different approaches taken by the Court? Does the Court's contribution to PIL constitute an example of fragmentation, or does the Court, through judicial dialogue, mitigate any such problems? The thesis consists of three parts. The first provides a literature background to the fragmentation debate as well as the methodological outline, the second part deals with the case law of the ECtHR, while the final part contains a presentation of the results of the research, and its corresponding conclusions.
State aid law is made up of rules and procedures whose main characters are the Member States – as the addressees of the norms – and the Commission – as their enforcer. The prominent position of these two actors often overshadows the impact that the administration of the rules on State aid has on private undertakings, be it the beneficiaries of State aids or their competitors. This thesis is concerned with the latter. The aim of the thesis is to assess the extent to which competitors may rely on the rules on State aid to protect themselves against the potentially harmful effects of subsidies and other forms of state, financial assistance to firms. This endeavour raises two challenges. The first challenge is to identify the channels through which competitors may voice their interest in the context of a system of governance to which they are in principle alien. This is the issue of access. The second challenge is assess the likelihood that the Commission shall heed to the concerns voiced by competitors. In other words, the challenge is to gauge the power of influence that competitors may exert through each of these channels. This is the issue of leverage. In order to carry out this inquiry, the thesis scrutinizes the means of redress available to competitors before national courts (“private enforcement”), as well as the opportunities that they have to make their voice heard in the course of the Commission’s procedures (“public enforcement”) – namely, the possibility to lodge complaints, the possibility to participate in the consultation phase of Article 108(2) TFEU and the possibility to seek the judicial review of State aid decisions.
This thesis examines the relationship between the law on unfair commercial practices and consumer contract law. The thesis develops the claim that Directive 2005/29/EC, on unfair commercial practices (UCPD) has had a strong impact on the content of consumer contract law, despite the declaration concerning the independence between both branches of law contained in Article 3(2) UCPD. In order to substantiate this claim, the thesis examines the implications for consumer contract law of the main components of the regulatory regime laid down by the UCPD, namely, (1) the notion of average consumer, (2) the duty to trade fairly, (3) the duty of information and (4) the remedies. By looking both at the theoretical underpinnings and at the actual operation of this regulatory regime, the thesis casts light on the way in which the UCPD has shaped consumer contract law. The thesis further shows that this is an ongoing phenomenon whose ramifications may be far-reaching, for it implies that the UCPD is powerfully fuelling the Europeanization of contract law.
This thesis examines the effect of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on national criminal justice practices for core international crimes. It considers that the complementarity system of the ICC is firmly based upon the issues of admissibility established under Article 17 of the Rome Statute and that positive complementarity practices should remain coherent with and based upon that system. As such, the thesis is constructed to systematically analyse the legal requirements of 'admissibility-proof' criminal justice at the national level according to the law and early practices of the ICC. Through analysis of the applicable sources of law available to the ICC, including its emerging jurisprudence on admissibility, the thesis demonstrates that the ICC provides much greater latitude to national criminal jurisdictions than has previously been accepted and that this profoundly affects the concept of positive complementarity, including its legal foundation, its definition as well as its implementation, through policy and practice. Through analysis of each of the issues of admissibility the thesis proves that the emphasis on legal reform of substantive and procedural criminal law is over-emphasised to the negligence of several other factors. These factors include quantitative restrictions, shaped by the objects of reference of the ICC's own investigations and the ICC's case selection criteria. Turning to the indicators of willingness and ability, the thesis establishes that the early practice of the ICC has demonstrated that the complementarity system functions within a plural legal order that does not require States to exercise their criminal jurisdiction as a form of mimicry of the ICC, but largely according to the national laws and practices in place at the time. Notwithstanding this, the thesis argues that legal reform may be advisable to ensure the removal the omissions or procedural bars that could render a case admissible to the ICC.
Power is a fascinating phenomenon. While this is something different than money, somehow I always had the feeling that economic sciences could provide useful tools to facilitate its understanding. In what follows, I tried to provide some - necessarily modest - contributions to its analysis, focusing mainly on how the delegation of decision-making often required by the complexity of our societies can make the true distribution of power differ from the apparent one. In the first chapter I try to understand why public institutions or government agencies often end up being given large room of maneuver regarding the definition of the missions that they will carry out on behalf of their constituencies / something we can realize by noticing how many institutions are typically doing things which have nothing to do anymore with the reasons for which they were initially set up. The second chapter, the result of a collaboration with José-Maria Alonso-Meijide, is focused on a similar kind of delegation problem, but restricted to cases where the delegation has to comply with some voting scheme, like in a democratic assemble. The third chapter , also the result of a collaboration, this time with Agnès Benassy-Quéré, investigates what kind of delegation could best serve the power of the European Union within the International Monetary Fund. The issue there is not anymore theoretical, as it has been under intense discussions within and outside the EU over many years.
The aim of the study has been to show in what ways, in the perception of the migrants themselves, family-related considerations have affected their decisions regarding long-term settlement in the UK or Italy as countries of immigration, and what aspects of their situation in these countries influenced their family life and plans for the future. The locus of the study is the migration of Poles to the UK and Italy as countries that successively opened their labour markets for citizens of New Member States after the EU enlargement of 2004. I argue that i) international mobility may serve not only as a barrier but also as an enhancement for parenthood, and ii) placing one's family in the host country produces more durable and numerous ties than employment alone and favours settlement. In the case of Polish families, migration to the UK was a way of securing more stable and comfortable conditions, through salaries and benefits more adequate to family needs. It improved their experienced quality of life, allowed them to fulfill their desired fertility, and offered better prospects for the future. In families of Poles living in Italy the perception of welfare conditions was not that favourable, however it also offered long-term stability to the ones who had been struggling to survive in Poland. Long-term settlement emerged there due to the path dependency, especially the mechanism of „tied stayer". The perspectives on settlement differed according to age at migration and stage of life (stable partnership, children's age, ageing parents' needs). On the theoretical level, the project combines sociology of migration, perspectives on intergenerational relations and life course research. The thesis contributes to the research on intra-EU migrants with a wide range of socio-economic statuses by presenting their perception of migratory trajectories and plans for the future from a family-oriented perspective.
This PhD thesis explores how the legal infrastructure for dispute resolution in transnational securities transactions can be improved, considering the regulatory and legal limits of the financial sector in each jurisdiction under study (US, Europe and Brazil). The two main objectives of the work are to a) identify the problems that currently exist for a dispute resolution mechanism in the securities area that can be used transnationally and b) propose solutions that can create a safe legal environment that can be used by the investor in case regulatory rules or the terms of the transaction are breached. The work is justified by the fact that financial markets are legal constructions, making legal certainty and the mechanisms available to enforce the terms of a transaction and apply regulatory rules, especially to the investor that is part of the transaction, essential for the own existence of financial markets. Therefore, the existence of transnational financial markets also depends on the existence of a transnational legal infrastructure, at least broad enough to protect the interest of investors. The argument developed through the work is that the creation of a transnational legal infrastructure depends on the type of dispute that is considered, since not only each type of dispute has its own peculiarities, but the national dispute resolution systems are also built based on the type of dispute that will be submitted to it. To create transnational dispute resolution systems for securities transactions, I propose the use of collective mechanisms of dispute resolution based on the initiative of private parties, the use of arbitration and the establishment of cooperation networks among national alternative dispute resolution mechanisms used to solve financial disputes.
How should social science conceptualise the informal exchange of illicit favours in the context of the modern state? And what relation does such exchange have to the reproduction of the social structure? This thesis presents a new framework for the analysis of such phenomena based upon the theoretical methodology of Pierre Bourdieu. Using Bourdieu's conceptual tools of habitus, field and capital, the kinds of informal exchange typically analysed through the paradigms of clientelism, corruption, or "informal institution" are reconstructed as a new research object - the clandestine circulation of capital - and related to the broader "economy of practices" necessary to reproduce the social structure. In a considered development of Bourdieu's initial use of the term (which related to the clandestine circulation of cultural capital), the thesis demonstrates how the clandestine circulation of other forms and guises of capital can also subvert the normative intentions of merit and equality implicit in the formal institutions of the modern state. The thesis reconciles and expands upon various of Bourdieu's theoretical writings to develop a theory identifying both the objective resources of such circulation and the principles structuring it as a social practice. This new theory is then applied in detail to the field site of urban Beirut (the capital of Lebanon), and specifically in relation to the phenomenon of wasta (an Arabic word used to refer to all kinds of social influence). Through a detailed empirical study of the field site, the thesis attempts to demonstrate how clandestine circulation operates as a mechanism for the transformation and accumulation of capitals, and hence comes to play a determinant role in the reproduction of the social order, in a manner intimately connected to the specific nature of the Lebanese state.
This thesis takes as its starting point a number of significant recent criticisms of the way in which the International Court of Justice (the Court) deals with facts. After examining the Court's substantial fact-finding powers as set out in its Statute and Rules, it is noted that the Court has not made significant use of the fact-finding powers that it possesses, instead preferring to take a reactive approach to fact-finding. It is this reactive approach, largely relying on the parties to put evidence before the Court, which is the subject of recent criticisms both from within the Court itself and from international legal scholarship. Having assessed the merits of these arguments, the thesis takes the position that such criticisms are indeed warranted and that the Court's reactive approach to fact-finding falls short of adequacy both in cases involving abundant, particularly complex or technical facts and in those cases involving a scarcity of facts, such as cases of non-appearance. Subsequently, the thesis undertakes a comparative exercise in order to examine how other relevant inter-state tribunals conduct fact-finding. Drawing on the practice of other tribunals, namely the adjudicative bodies of the World Trade Organization and a number of recent inter-state arbitrations, the thesis then makes a number of select proposals for reform which, it is argued, will enable the Court to address some of the current weaknesses in its approach to fact-finding and better ensure factual determinations that are as accurate as they can possibly be within the judicial process. Such proposals include (but are not limited to) the development of a power to compel the disclosure of information, greater use of provisional measures and a clear strategy for the use of expert evidence.
In this thesis, I show that governments bail out banks because banks are critical to capitalist democracies. Banks enjoy a public safety net. Governments, however, can make banks pay for this protection. Two of this dissertation’s conclusions stand out. The first is that the influence of business through lobbying and other channels of instrumental power is exaggerated. Banks cannot secure sweetheart deals by pointing to their track record of campaign contributions. Bailouts are not for sale. During crises, governments can use banks’ dependence on the domestic market to force them to bear the bailout costs. Only highly international banks, can parry this threat by using their structural power strategically. The second conclusion is that financial crises remove veto points. They create a large threat and leave little time for deliberation, which prompts lawmakers defer to the executive branch. Thus, financial crises shift power from legislatures—even strong ones, like the US Congress—to the head of government.
This thesis sheds new light on the process of economic divergence that characterized Italy’s regions in the second half of the nineteenth century and the Interwar period. It shows that social capital had a limited impact on the regions’ economic fortune prior to the Great War. Further, only specific dimensions of social capital affected regional economic growth. Instead, the country’s regional inequalities grew large as a result of different endowments of human capital. In turn, human capital differences inherited from pre-unification states remained large as a result of public policy, which established a decentralized education system in 1859. This choice delayed convergence in primary schooling across regions, because of the tight connection between municipal fiscal capacity and the supply of schools and teachers. Centralized education, introduced with the Daneo-Credaro Reform in 1911, loosened this link and favoured regional convergence in human capital. Contrary to expectations, local institutional mechanisms did not play a large role in the growth of mass education: a detailed analysis of the determinants of primary schooling across Italy’s provinces in the years 1871 – 1911 confirms that local economic conditions influenced the development of human capital far more than political participation and access to local decision-making. These results cast doubt on recent interpretations of the socioeconomic divergence experienced by Italy’s regions. While further research is needed on the link between local institutions and the development of basic education, this work calls for a renewed focus on the way that central policy affected regional divergence and Italy’s overall economic development before the Second World War.
This dissertation considers the relationship between the Euratom Treaty and the two EU Treaties (the TEU and TFEU). It examines the legal implications of the continued separate existence of the Euratom within the EU. The aim is to show that either the Euratom ought to be kept separate from the Union or, logically, brought into the EU framework. The first part of the dissertation considers 'structural’ issues. It examines the links between the treaties and it explores the question of whether the EU and the Euratom belong to the same legal regime or whether they are better conceptualised as separate legal regimes. The second part maps out four broad policy areas that will illuminate the relationship between the EU and the Euratom: (i) nuclear industrial development; (ii) nuclear safety; (iii) radiation protection; and (iv) non-proliferation. Gaps and overlaps are identified and the Euratom’s added value is discussed. The dissertation shows that the Euratom is very close to the EU, although an anomaly. It also demonstrates that the relationship between the Treaties is not always a coherent one. It concludes that given the expansion of the EU competences, there is no longer a need for the Euratom as a separate treaty.
Which issues does the Commission focus on in the negotiation of bilateral trade agreements? How (to what extent) autonomous is the Commission, which sources and causal mechanisms bring this autonomy to bear, and have these sources changed over time? Which is the most effective mechanism of control available to member states in the Council to rein in the Commission? These are the three interrelated questions addressed by this study. Concerning the first question, I find that the Commission focuses on inte-gration issues. These are primarily found in the joint bodies established by the underly-ing agreements as well as the number of substantive issues mentioned therein. On ques-tion number two, I find that the Commission distinctly shapes BTAs slightly over 50 per-cent of the time. The primary source of Commission autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s was asymmetric information, i.e. the Commission having greater knowledge about all contingencies in the negotiations than the member states. More recently, Commission autonomy is better captured by its agenda-setting power, here defined as its ability to put before the Council an agreement that member states can vote only either up-or-down. With regard to question three I find that, initially, member states’ credible threat of non-ratification provided the most effective backstop to the Commission running lose. Over time, member states have stepped up monitoring mechanisms to take control of negotiations earlier, making direct oversight the most important tool for Council control. I examine and expound this argument by adopting a Principal-Agent (PA) perspective and process-tracing methodology against the backdrop of six in-depth case studies se-lected in accordance with objective and replicable criteria, of which five are retained for the final analysis. In conclusion, I join the camp of scholars making the case for a significant independent causal influence of the Commission on European public policy out-comes.
Depuis une vingtaine d’années, des groupes de pères séparés médiatisent régulièrement leur mécontentement, dans plusieurs pays du monde. Souvent armés de banderoles, perchés au sommet d’un monument, ou en grève de la faim, ces pères disent avoir été floués par la justice familiale au sujet de la garde de leurs enfants. Ce phénomène est à mettre en lien avec la massification des séparations conjugales depuis les années 1970, massification qui s’inscrit dans un processus de mutation plus globale de la sphère familiale. La présente étude se propose de produire une analyse sociologique des mobilisations paternelles à la lumière de la comparaison de deux entités géographiques à la fois proches et distinctes dans leurs traditions francophones et juridiques : la France et le Québec. Le terrain d’enquête a été réalisé dans des groupes de pères de chaque pays, mais également auprès d’acteurs du mouvement familial, d’institutions en charge de la justice et de la famille ainsi que de personnalités politiques. La démarche comparative, adoptée de manière linéaire tout au long de la thèse, nous permet tour à tour de questionner la nature des intérêts défendus par ces pères, la manière dont leurs revendications sont publicisées et dont elles pénètrent ou non l’arène politique, le recrutement social des groupes et les trajectoires des adhérents et militants, les effets de la socialisation militante au droit sur les pères membres des groupes et enfin les redéfinitions de la paternité et du rapport à la filiation engendrées par la dissolution de la cellule familiale. Cette thèse s’attache finalement à questionner les enjeux que soulèvent les nouvelles configurations familiales au lendemain de la séparation du couple parental auprès d’une catégorie de pères spécifique au sein de la population des pères séparés.
This thesis compares the French and British Chernobyl debates in the period between 1986 and 2006 and investigates the transnational debate on the health effects of this accident. While the exchange of actors and arguments has resulted in a rather congruent debate at the transnational level, the internal country debates on Chernobyl have remained very much bound by the national framework. This becomes particularly obvious in the comparison of the French and British Chernobyl debates, where multiple factors, specific to the national context, have shaped the different trajectories of the debates. In France, from the outset, Chernobyl was framed as a French debate, and placed into the context of the nucleócratie. In Britain, such an interpretative framework did not exist for the civil nuclear programme, since the predominant criticism against the nuclear enterprise had always been directed against the military complex and more focused on aspects of international relations than on the national nuclear energy complex. In Britain, therefore, Chernobyl was considered from a global perspective, whereas in France the focus was placed on the accident's impact at home. However, with the end of the Cold War and the British government's decision in the mid-1990s to no longer finance new nuclear power plants, anti-nuclear positions as such lost their impetus. Thus, few people in Britain were interested transforming the debate on the health impact of Chernobyl into a proxy war in the fight over the legitimacy of the civil nuclear enterprise, as was happening in France. Leaving this discursive and commemorative gap to the solidarity movement, in Britain, Chernobyl did not become an anti-nuclear lieu de mémoire as it did in France, but instead became associated primarily with charity activities for disabled or unprivileged children from Eastern Europe which effectively 'depoliticized' Chernobyl and separated it from the nuclear debate.
This thesis starts from the consideration that law, mainly but not exclusively immigration law, can disproportionally and negatively affect immigrant women's enjoyment of their rights in conditions of equality with both immigrant men and citizen women. These perverse effects are equally evident in the fields of family life and in that of employment. In the light of this observation, the aim of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to verify the presence of such gendered shortcomings in apparently neutral norms applicable to immigrant women in the European legal space, both at European and domestic level. On the other hand, and most importantly, it aims to verify the transformative potential of human and fundamental rights law in this area, exploring the beneficial effects as well as the defects of this source per se and in its judicial application vis-à-vis biased norms applicable to immigrant women. In order to pursue this objective, this thesis explores three different levels of protection and enforcement of immigrant women's human and fundamental rights in the European legal space. Chapter 1 is devoted to the human rights framework established by the Council of Europe, with a special focus on the European Convention on Human Rights. Chapter 2 discusses European fundamental rights law, with main reference to the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms of the European Union. In Chapters 3 and 4 the national case studies of Italy and Spain will be analysed respectively, with reference to the multi-level system of fundamental rights protection in force in their legal orders.
This thesis explores the rise and decline of the farming project Vale do Rio Cristalino, run by Volkswagen in the Amazon from 1973 to 1986. This large-scale development project was built within the framework of a colonization program launched by the Brazilian military regime to promote the territorial occupation of the region. Celebrated as a technological revolution in tropical farming, the ‘VW ranch’ was supposed to be a model of civilization in the jungle, to pave the way for the conversion of the Amazon into a modern export economy and to elaborate solutions to overcome hunger in the ‘Third World’. However, this consensual image was tarnished after Cristalino became the subject of various socio-environmental scandals, leading to the mobilization of transnational networks against the project. This thesis analyzes the transformation of Cristalino from a scientifically and politically legitimized project to a space of conflict. It is a multi-layered case study of how a development project was negotiated between different groups of actors and in dialogue with environmental factors. It argues that there were three main reasons for the demise of Cristalino: the conflicting interests behind an apparent consensus of development, a growing awareness of the scarcity of resources, and disappointing results in the area of labor conditions. This historical example leads one to question the loss of authority of the politics of development in Brazil and at the international level from the second half of the 1970s. By showing how a deterministic view of development—which fixed the intensive exploitation of nature as the Amazon’s unique historical outcome—was progressively unravelled, this thesis reveals the process of politicization of a place. With the dismantling of the ‘developmentalist’ consensus, the future of the rain forest became an open issue, negotiated through the prism of multiple projections, viewpoints and scales of intervention.
Between 1800 and 1918, the Russian Orthodox Church attempted to re-unite the Old Believer schism with Russian Orthodoxy by means of Edinoverie. This was a uniate movement that would allow schismatic converts to retain their old rituals whilst being subordinated to the authority of the Church hierarchy. From the very moment of its foundation, Edinoverie was subject to high levels of suspicion from most members of the Church. The rules of Metropolitan Platon, the settlement that created Edinoverie in 1800, embodied this distrust: the provisions sought to keep the converts at the boundaries of the Orthodox confession so as to prevent them from tempting Orthodox parishioners towards the schism. Over the next 118 years, edinovertsy, churchmen and government authorities struggled with the legacy of Platon’s rules as they tried to define Edinoverie’s place between Orthodoxy and Old Belief. In doing so, they devised new ways about thinking of the Orthodox confession. However, the Church enacted reform of Edinoverie reluctantly. It was permanently held back by fear of apostasy. Pressure for change always came from without, primarily from the side of the state. The shifts in its policies towards Old Belief ultimately forced the Holy Synod to renovate Edinoverie so as to maintain its missionary appeal. By 1918, Edinoverie had not come any closer to bringing the Old Believers back into the Church. Its attractiveness was undermined by earlier state coercion, by the hostility of many churchmen and by the contradictions inherent within its foundation. Edinoverie also represented a fundamental misunderstanding on the side of the Church as to why the schism had begun in the first place.
Cuando, en el contexto de la industrialización y la urbanización propias del siglo XIX, a principios de la década de 1830 el cólera irrumpió en Europa se hicieron patentes nuevas realidades que dieron lugar a problemáticas sociales y sanitarias complejas. En este escenario se consolidó la higiene como disciplina médica y como “ciencia de gobierno”, y fue fraguándose la profesión de higienista. Pedro Felipe Monlau (1808-1871) fue un personaje central en la introducción y despliegue de la higiene en España. En este trabajo, a partir del acceso a su archivo personal, hasta el momento ignorado, se ha podido abordar un análisis profundo de su trayectoria capaz de integrar cuestiones que por lo general se presentan por separado en la historiografía. Además de permitirnos valorar mejor a este tipo de intelectuales de mediados del XIX y los intercambios y transferencias que se producían entre los mismos, su biografía demuestra la imbricación de la higiene como disciplina con su contexto político, sociocultural y económico, en el marco del liberalismo decimonónico español, así como la vitalidad y pluralidad de este último. Se hace aquí especial hincapié en el carácter transnacional europeo de la higiene y en el importante grado de desarrollo de la comunicación y transferencia de conocimientos y prácticas de la misma. Se presta, por último, una especial atención a la difusión de los preceptos de la higiene destinada a las familias, propaganda que resultó crucial para la consolidación de la llamada ideología de la domesticidad. Se insiste en la confluencia entre discursos católicos y liberales en torno a la misión de la mujer en la sociedad española, en la identificación directa entre higiene y moral, y en el cruce permanente entre esferas privada y pública que encarna el discurso higienista y que precisamente la biografía como método ayuda a aprehender.
The question posed by this thesis is how limits can be constructed to the exercise of EU powers. While there are limits to the exercise of EU competences in the Treaties and in the Court of Justice’s jurisprudence, it is argued that those limits suffer from conceptual and practical problems. In particular, the Court does not have appropriate criteria to examine whether the limits of the Treaties have been exceeded by the Union legislator. The thesis uses one of the new, and controversial, competences that the Union has obtained, the power to impose criminal sanctions, as a case study to propose a mechanism by which legislative powers can be kept in check. This is an illuminating and relevant case study. Firstly, it nicely illustrates the limits to the exercise of EU competences. Secondly, legislative practice and political statements suggest that this competence will be used regularly in the future. The thesis makes two proposals. First, by interpreting the scope of the EU’s powers under the Treaties to impose criminal sanctions the thesis shows the limits to the exercise of EU competences. It demonstrates the scope of EU’s competences by analyzing current and proposed criminal law measures. Secondly, noting that a construction of the limits to EU competences also needs to tackle the institutional challenges of judicial review, it develops an argument for a more intense and evidence-based judicial review. It constructs a procedural standard of legality which demands that the EU legislator shows that it has adequately reasoned its decisions and has taken into account relevant evidence. By testing the legality of discretely chosen criminal law measures on the basis of this standard, it is demonstrated how the Court can enforce the limits of the Treaties.
This thesis explores the way in which EU and U.S. antitrust rules address opportunistic conducts that emerge in the context of standard essential patents (SEPs). The analysis finds that the two systems have very different scopes in addressing those practices: conduct lawful under U.S. antitrust law is condemned by the EU competition law and vice versa. In contrast to other fields of antitrust, the differences between the EU and U.S. approach do not arise from the application of different legal standards, but rather reflect the core divergences in the statutory texts that address unilateral practices. The analysis also shows that both in the European Union and in the United States, competition authorities have tried to increase the scope of competition law—first, by stretching the antitrust doctrines outside established borders, and second, by advocacy measures designed to avoid opportunism related to SEPs. The thesis shows, nonetheless, that both approaches are problematic and a more cautious strategy is needed to avoid the risk of injecting imbalance in the standardization context.
The aim of this thesis is to contribute to our understanding of the consequences of economic development on the occupational choice of agents and its effects on macroeconomic variables, such as structural change and income inequality. The interplay between different types of agents is at the center of my research, both when it comes to matching between agents and sorting from agents to sectors. The first chapter focuses on the role of financial development for structural change. When credit constrained, more talented agents sort into more labor-intensive sectors than less talented agents. When borrowing becomes more available, talented agents sort into capital-intensive sectors to optimally leverage their talent. Consequently, the capital rental rates rise and less talented agents sort into labor-intensive sectors. Thus, financial development reverses the sorting pattern. Furthermore, simulation results indicate that employment shares increase in relatively labor-intensive sectors. I show that the empirical data is consistent with these theoretical findings. In the second chapter, I analyze the consequences of cooperation on inequality. I develop a heterogeneous agents model of cooperation distinguishing between two types of cooperation, between-task and within-task cooperation. The former is the opportunity to assign different tasks to different agents. The latter is the reassignment of tasks from one agent to another in cases where the first agent fails. Cooperation increases inequality at the top and decreases inequality at the bottom. Within-task cooperation is more inequality-enhancing than between-task cooperation. I also show that cooperation can lead to a greater skill premium in economies with a more dispersed talent distribution.
Toward the Liberalization of Private Limited Companies – A comparative study of the laws of Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States and its interplay with EU law’, I try to shed light on the dynamics of private limited liability companies (PLLCs), and how they can be legally designed to become efficient units of economic development in Europe and the United States. I take a social sciences approach to the legal question: How does the design of clauses establishing restrictions on transfer of shares of private limited liability companies affect investment made in these companies and their consequent development? To answer this question, I develop two parallel lines of investigation. First, I undertake an embedded historical study to trace the evolutionary patterns of PLLCs in six countries. Furthermore, I longitudinally track the standards of behavior of market agents in the selected jurisdictions. Second, I develop my legal research by looking at an anomaly regarding the transfer of shares and changes in the ownership structure of these business organizations. Transfer of shares in PLLCs is, for the most part, regulated by default rules which impose restrictions on transfers. Typically, the parties do not contract around these default rules. The anomaly lies in the fact that, even though shareholders of these companies do not opt out of these rules, shareholders often ignore them and/or breach them at a later stage.
This thesis analyses the production, content and development of cartoonist Zhang Leping's Sanmao comic strips between 1935 and 1962 in the context of the growing political and cultural significance of childhood in twentieth century China. After years of wars and dramatic political changes, Sanmao is still a recognizable visual icon in China today, and his lasting popularity makes him an interesting case-study for understanding the development of cartoon art and the political deployment of the image of the 'child' in China over the twentieth century. This thesis investigates two main problems: firstly, it aims to analyze how through his strips Zhang Leping intervened in contemporary debates about the significance and role of children in the development of the Chinese nation  secondly, it follows the transformation of fictional child-hero Sanmao from a commentator on contemporary China in the early 1930s into a sustainer of the Chinese Communist Party after 1949. While Zhang Leping's comic strips have often been considered as a product of political graphic production or as reading material for children, this thesis analyzes the content of Sanmao strips employing childhood as an analytical category in order to understand the role of children in the political and social discourses which took place in China during war and revolution. By analyzing the production of Sanmao comic strips, their relevance in the political context in which they appeared, and the factors which propelled the popularity of the little hero before and after 1949, this thesis shows how the image of Sanmao has changed over time, and how it was ultimately appropriated and reshaped by the CCP in order to fit the party's official vision of history and educational aims.
This dissertation has studied the discourses around national history education in Belgium and the Netherlands in the middle of the nineteenth century. The literature on nation building and cultural nationalism often observes the importance of education as an instrument of nation building. Expanding school networks were one of the important conduits through which national awareness was spread among the populace. They helped to disseminate knowledge of the national language, culture and history, thus teaching the future generations about their 'home' and 'nation'. At the same time, historians often note the significance of narratives, often historical narratives, in fostering a sense of pride and attachment to the fatherland. Nevertheless, studies of the contents of and controversies surrounding history education are sparse. In this study, I hope to show that the field of (history) education is an important locus of nation building and therefore worthy of scholarly attention. Following Jörn Rüsen, I argue that history education knows a specific configuration of epistemological, aesthetic and political dimensions that makes it unique. It prioritises the political dimension over the two other dimensions, thus setting it apart from scholarly or literary and artistic forms of history-writing. Due to its pedagogical objective, furthermore, it is also different from other political forms of history-writing. History education addresses the future citizen directly and presents them visions of the good citizen. I argue that the civic virtues are an indispensable part of national identity. The education thereof should consequently be studied more in-depth. This dissertation therefore analyses notions of good citizenship present in the debates and contents of history education. Furthermore, it dissects ideas of national identity along the lines of nation and religion, nation and language, the national territory, nation and dynasty and the nation in the world.
La presente tesis pretende responder al interrogante de cómo se articuló la cultura histórica nacional en la España franquista, las estrategias aplicadas por el régimen, las narrativas diseminadas, así como la función desempeñada por los historiadores como garantes cualificados del pasado nacional. Para ello, se analizan las políticas del pasado desplegadas por la dictadura y, en concreto, las diversas conmemoraciones históricas organizadas por el régimen. Al condensar de manera espectacular las narrativas sobre la historia, las conmemoraciones se erigieron en elementos de especial relevancia en la configuración del pasado nacional. Un análisis que efectuamos mediante una pluralidad de enfoques vinculados a la historia cultural, la historia de la historiografía y la historia cultural de la política. En cualquier caso, las conmemoraciones históricas se articularon como espacios dinámicos que permitieron la competencia de diferentes agentes -tanto individuales como institucionales- y la confluencia de una multiplicidad de agendas conmemorativas. Esta perspectiva, permite analizar el carácter complejo del régimen, la diversidad de esferas (local, nacional, internacional) involucradas en la celebración del pasado, así como los diferentes proyectos político-ideológicos implicados en la producción del pasado. A su vez, el estudio de las conmemoraciones y la activa participación en las mismas de los historiadores permite analizar la disciplina histórica de manera integral, superando diversas interpretaciones lineales, y atendiendo a los fenómenos de internacionalización, las dinámicas de intercambio y los procesos de articulación de una disciplina que, como territorio políticamente intervenido, se encontró supeditada a los condicionantes del régimen.
The Asiatic Society of Bengal was founded by Sir William Jones in Calcutta (nowadays Kolkata) in 1784. It is a learned society which was to carry investigation which bounds would be the geographical limits of Asia and within these limits (…) whatever is performed by Man and produced by Nature. It was thus instituted in order to inquiring into the history and antiquities, the arts, sciences, and literature of Asia. Initially a rather selective circle of British scholars, the Society elected Indians to membership from 1829 onwards and elected an Indian as its president, Rajendralal Mitra, in 1885. Two hundred years later, the Government of (independent) India granted the Society the status of National Institution. This thesis focuses on Indian presence at, and contribution to, the Asiatic Society of Bengal between 1829 and 1885 to discuss and address the main positions in the debates on the relationship between knowledge and power in colonial contexts since the publication of the book Orientalism by Edward W. Said. Doing so, it argues that, if Indians collaborated to craft orientalist notions and discourses about India's history and culture, they did so with an agenda of their own. Thus, they appropriated and transformed orientalist ideas, knowledge and applications and which gradually infused it into an ideological framework articulating discourses on Indian national identity, socio-ritual hierarchies and the nation's place in the 'modern world'. Finally, this dissertation seeks to explore the limits of this framework, and its incapacities to integrate the diversity and variety of communities that contributed to form India.
This thesis studies the consequences of turn of the twentieth century migration on Swedish national developments. It pays particular attention to the introduction of a reform programme of internal colonisation and the consequences this had on different population groups. Arguing that the ideological origins of this internal colonisation can be found in Germany, the thesis explicitly links German colonisation attempts in the East with the corresponding Swedish colonisation in the North. By doing so it puts forward the argument that spaces in the Swedish North were cast in colonial terms and should be understood in relation to the colonial policies of the European Imperial states.  Migration also led to a new understanding of Swedish identity which drew less on spatial contexts than on the idea of difference. By constructing a complex identification matrix which drew on categories of race, class and gender, Swedish observers could overcome geographical distance and create an imagined Swedish community that stretched around the globe. Dirt and domestic degeneracy were important tropes in this discourse, acting as connecting bridges between the categories. The timing of its introduction and the contents of this discourse of difference can be explained by a Swedish perception of being part of a white man's culture that was imagined on a global scale. European imperialisms and the resulting colonial trajectories were thus decisive also for Swedish developments. The focus of the thesis follows from the above as it explores the connections between migration, regimes of difference and nationalism in Sweden at the turn of the twentieth century.
This thesis contributes to the literature emphasizing the role of incomplete financial markets for the design of macroeconomic policies. I use two main frameworks for my analysis: In a small open economy model with default risk and incomplete markets, I study two questions addressing how predictions for optimal fiscal policy over the business cycle change in the presence of borrowing constraints. I use a standard incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents to assess how government policies can alleviate the welfare losses caused by financial frictions. In the first chapter I argue that government spending can optimally be procyclical when governments cannot borrow in recessions. I decompose total expenditure into public goods and social spending and show that the latter component is crucial in driving this result. Furthermore, I show that higher income inequality exacerbates the welfare losses from conducting countercyclical policies without financial market access. The second chapter of this thesis is joint work with C. Gottlieb. We analyze to which extent a simple redistributive policy in the form of transfers can alleviate the welfare losses caused by frictional insurance markets. We find that targeting transfers towards low income households improves welfare, but reduces output per hours worked. Redistribution is more effective, and welfare is higher than under lumpsum transfers at low tax rates. In the third chapter, I study the role of spending rules on optimal tax policy in a small open economy with a government that lacks commitment to repay its external debt. I find that neither pro- nor countercyclical policy rules qualitatively change the predictions for optimal tax policy.
This thesis explores issues related to public and private insurance of income shocks, and the importance of human capital accumulation. The first chapter argues that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of labor supply is a state-dependent variable which strongly depends on the return to human capital accumulation. Estimating a life cycle model I find that the average i.e.s. is low (0.35), and comparable with micro estimates, even in the presence of human capital. However, the average i.e.s. hides important heterogeneity: for college graduates the i.e.s. more than doubles over the life cycle, whereas it increases by about 58 percent for workers without a college degree. The second chapter argues that heterogeneous returns to human capital accumulation affects the degree to which search effort of unemployed deviates from the socially optimal level, and the reason behind the deviation. I find that (i) the main social costs associated with unemployment insurance are not due to moral hazard problems, but are due to distortionary effects of labor income taxes needed to finance the insurance. (ii) The magnitude of the moral hazard problem and the tax distortion problem differs substantially by age and education. And, (iii) the degree of tax progressiveness and benefit regressiveness has important effects on the deviation of search effort. The third chapter studies the relation between co-movement of income shocks and precautionary asset holdings. If households perceive spousal labor supply as an insurance mechanism, it is evident that this mechanism should work better the lower the co-movement of income shocks. We find that (i) households in which both spouses have the same education level or work in the same industry have a higher correlation of income shocks compared to couples with different education/industry. And, (ii) households who face larger co-movements of income shocks hold larger precautionary buffers.
This thesis guides the reader through contemporary problems of the law of sovereign debt and default. Adopting a horizontal approach to the field, the state in its double role of being a borrower from the market and a regulator of the market remains at the center of this inquiry. How do problems related to sovereign debt challenge state institutions, constitutional principles and even the very concept of statehood? What kind of tools does the state have at its disposal to address these problems? Can the state improve both, its own role as a borrower and the overall functioning of the sovereign debt market? These are the core questions discussed in this thesis on the basis of numerous examples. A detailed analysis of the practice of sovereign debt is followed by an account of case law primarily from municipal courts dealing with sovereign debt disputes. The IMF's 'bailouts' are reviewed in the light of the constitutions of the recipient states before in a last chapter, a full account of the Euro crisis and its particularities is given. All these examples show strengths and weaknesses of the state's role as borrower and regulator and ultimately indicate where and how the law of sovereign debt can be improved.
Internal displacement is one of the most pressing humanitarian, human rights and security problems faced today by the international community. As a rapidly increasing phenomenon, internal displacement is putting intense pressure on international law and its capacity for adaptation to new realities and challenge. The present thesis aims at examining the phenomenon of internal displacement and concentrates in particular on the legal and institutional framework and measures guaranteeing protection for internally displaced populations worldwide. Toward this goal, I assess the role of international law and try to ascertain which legal norms are applicable to protect internally displaced persons. As a second step, I analyze the question of responsibility for the protection of internally displaced persons, i.e. whether this lies with the state of origin through its national law, or rather with the international community and the provisions of international law. Further, I discuss the activities and actions of the international and regional organisations, i.e. the European Union and relevant bodies of the United Nations, and their contribution to the protection of internally displaced persons. Although the protection of internally displaced should be based in law, it requires institutional mechanisms and actors to give it practical effect. While concluding and identifying the existing gaps in legislation and institutional framework, I demonstrate that internally displaced persons should become the objects of a specific system of law and protection. At the same time, I hope to contribute to the contemporary debate promoting efforts to strengthen the protection of internally displaced persons and to disseminate knowledge about this vulnerable group.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century the term 'privacy' is universally known  nevertheless in the legal arena it is still a concept in 'disarray'. Enclosing it within legal frames seems to be a particularly difficult task in the employment context, where the Information Revolution, by altering the nature of work, and as a consequence the character and reach of traditional instruments of employer supervision, has considerably blurred the frontiers between employees' private and professional lives. Nowadays we are facing forms of control and of employee subordination that differ substantially from those that we have known until now. In the light of the above there is a growing need to reconsider the conceptual and normative dimensions of the right to privacy in employment, a context which is frequently ignored by the privacy literature and where the encroachments upon privacy are not only potentially more frequent, but most importantly, are qualitatively different than those taking places in other milieus in modern society. The thesis is centered around a comparative examination of the models of protection of the right to privacy in employment. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the European, American and Canadian frameworks of privacy protection, assesses the need for their further particularization and complementarity with regard to the employment context, and finally, uses the record of the conceptual as well as the regulatory divergences and convergences between the different models to distinguish the conceptual and normative foundations of contemporary employment-specific paradigm of the right to privacy, as well as the pillars of a holistic approach to the protection of employees' right to privacy.
The thesis proposes an analysis of the evolving approach to abuse of dominance and monopolization through the case study of loyalty discounts as example of controversy both in the literature as well as in the case law. Much of this controversy draws from the fact that fidelity discounts constitute a price-based practice having similar effects to non price-based conducts such as exclusive dealing or tying. Therefore, evaluating their competitive impact necessarily requires a comprehensive assessment of vertical restraints as a whole. While the more economic approach to competition policy has influenced authorities' perception of rebates, different legal systems allow for different degrees of evolution in their actual assessment. This research puts into question the need for a hard law reform when it comes to practices calling for an economic assessment, given that the neutrality and consistency of economic tools may enable a soft law shifting of competition policy regimes.
A core issue confronting the multilateral trading system down the years is the extent of its competence. How is the World Trade Organization (WTO) mandate shaped? Questions concerning the appropriate reach of the WTO and whether particular subjects should be covered – and if so in what institutional context - has been the subject of lively debate, and the difference of views on this matter have often influenced the pace of progress in multilateral negotiation rounds. The concerns voiced in the late 1970s and 1980s about whether trade in services had a place in GATT were followed by similar discussions on TRIPS, labor rights, environment, competition and so on. The examination of the WTO's scope usually has taken place in the context of trade linkages debates, reflecting either an effort to determine its optimal reach or an explicit attempt to bolster its legal and political capacity to promote norms that lack an institutional venue, or are sheltered by an institution that does not have an effective compliance mechanism. Given that the WTO is embedded in a broader international environment, some have proposed the use of WTO's enforcement power to promote objectives ostensibly remote from the multilateral trading system. Others have come up with terms such 'trade-relatedness' and 'specificity' for identifying which issues should be subject to negotiation within the WTO. The shape of the WTO agenda matters because it affects perceptions about the legitimacy and efficiency of the trading system. At the same time, the compartmentalized international legal order sets certain limits to WTO's capacity to integrate non-WTO obligations. Hence, claims for WTO accountability to, or accommodation of, non-WTO values must inevitably be measured against the presence of other international regimes whose goals should cohere, but, in reality, may conflict with free trade.
Complicity is a criminal law doctrine that attributes responsibility to those who do not physically perpetrate the crime. It is an essential mode of liability for core international crimes because it reaches out to senior political and military leadership. These persons do not usually engage in direct offending, yet in the context of mass atrocities they are often more culpable than foot soldiers. The Statutes of the ad hoc tribunals, hybrid courts and the International Criminal Court expressly provide for different forms of complicity, and domestic legal systems recognize it in one form or another. This is in contrast with alternative modes of liability implied from the Statutes to address the situations with multiple accused removed from the scene of the crime / (in)direct co-perpetration, extended perpetration and the joint criminal enterprise.
This PhD proposes an analysis of what it means to talk of "hybrid” tribunals as a legal category. This category traditionally covers the tribunals that were set up in the early 2000s in particular contexts with both international and domestic elements (East Timor, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Bosnia, Irak and Lebanon).  Through a discussion of the features of the main hybrid tribunals, and a specific focus on the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the most recent and most notable in some of its features (such as the mode of creation, the applicable law or its procedural framework) the main conclusion of the research is that "hybrid” cannot in fact be defined as a legal category, these tribunals, in light of their mode of creation, being either international or domestic.  Moving on from there, the PhD suggests a more elaborate categorisation of all international tribunals through the introduction of a new model based on the "levels of internationality”, which allows to think the diversity of these tribunals in a more subtle way in their interaction with national authorities.  Having done this, the PhD moves into a discussion of two thematic case studies, that of the interaction between various tribunals and amnesties and the interaction between tribunals and truth commissions, notably in two situations where the question arose, East Timor and Sierra Leone. Finally, the conclusion moves the discussion away from the strictly legal dimensions of the discussions into broader questions relating to the interaction between legal orders in a globalised world. Ultimately, the key question that is raised by the PhD is that of the transformation of sovereignty, which, it is argued remains a necessary concept to comprehend the structures of legal orders, rather than a concept to be opposed as being too archaic.
Voting unity in parliamentary parties is an inescapable phenomenon in parliamentary democracies. Knowing only which party a legislator belongs to and how the majority of that party voted allows for the identification, with extremely high levels of accuracy, how said legislator actually voted. However, most explanations of why this is the case rests of unsustainable assumptions about the effects of institutions and electoral systems on the behaviour of parliamentarians. Further, most work ignores the most basic explanation of why legislators vote the way they do: Their policy preferences. Without first explaining the role they play in legislative behaviour, little else can be explained with confidence. This work first theorises and develops measures of how parliamentarians’ policy preferences lead to incentives for them to vote against their party’s line in floor votes, and then applies them to a series of diverse institutional setups, showing that while parliamentarians’ preferences may explain significant parts of parliamentary party voting unity, it is also clear that they cannot, except in rare circumstances, explain all of it.  Having shown that preferences cannot explain unity, this work then argues that by analysing MPs’ attitudes to party unity, we can understand why MPs choose to vote contrary to what their preferences alone would predict. Applying this logic to parliaments at either extreme of the spectrum of parliamentary institutionalisation, it is shown that there is little evidence that legislators are compelled to act in ways they do not want. Rather, what is found is that they recognise the value of party voting unity and can overcome the temptation to free-ride on their co-partisans.  Finally, analysing floor votes in the European Parliament, it is shown that what explains defection are the long-term rather than short-term goals of parliamentarians, complementing the previous findings.
This research aims to present a comprehensive analysis of the political and institutional processes that are at work in the judicial application of EU law on a national level. As a main novelty, the research intends to go beyond judicial behaviour models that focus predominantly on explaining the use of preliminary references. One could namely suggest that the way national courts participate in the preliminary reference procedure is not sufficient to assess the available modes for the judicial integration of Europe. Accordingly, the study considers the impact of political institutional and attitudinal factors affecting the judicial enforcement of EU law. This is done by posing new questions, for instance, the relevance of national judges’ preferences towards EU legal order and institutions, as well as by evaluating and reviewing the impact of political and legal institutions on their behaviour and its consequences for policy areas. First of all, the analysis confirms the influence of judges’ evaluation of EU institutions and their national counterparts on their self-perception as EU judges and, subsequently, in the application of EU law. Secondly, the study shows how national institutions, like governments and national high courts, play a prominent role in shaping national courts’ incentives for the application of EU law, as they may use their institutional power to circumvent judges’ decisions. Finally, it reviews the strategic use of European instruments such as the CJEU precedent and its doctrines (e.g. supremacy) to overcome domestic threats when applying EU law. To conclude, the study tries to expand the explanatory power of the middle range accounts of the role national courts played, by integrating the analytical strength of the legalist/ intergovernmentalist theories into neo-functionalism.
This thesis is about the police and the control of public protests in Turkey. Despite its centrality to state power, the police have never become a mainstream subject of political sociology. Particularly on a stage where governments perform state power in the face of societal dissent, the police are not bit players but lead actors who demystify curiously about the political foundations of a regime. My dissertation focuses on contemporary manifestations of protest policing in a geography where democratization incorporated previously discredited actors into the political centre while the strong hand of the state advanced in modern technologies of law enforcement. I specifically interrogate how the transformation of the police after 1980 and more precisely since the end of the 1990s reflects on the policing of public protests, and how this transformation resonates with the patterns of protest in the country. I am also empirically interested in the application of this process on contentious gatherings of different origin; namely on labour, student, and pro-Kurdish protests. Throughout the thesis, I argue that the empowerment of the police in Turkey translated into the interactive dynamics with protester groups. While the police's differential strategies resonate with divergent protest strategies, the political fabrication of "threats" is a means to justify police empowerment through increased para-militarization and legal instruments. In order to address my research question, I resort to methodological pluralism, and use multiple sources. The descriptively quantitative data on the protest events provide me with preliminary yet illustrative information, which I substantiate with the analysis of official and unofficial documents, semi-structured interviews, archival and visual material in qualitative fashion. I further benefit from secondary literature to yield a comparative knowledge on the subject.
This is an explorative study on the underlying causes and mechanisms of the diffusion of neoliberal tax policies in the 10 post-communist EU NMS (New Member States) during the period from 1992 to 2010, a process partially coined as The Flat Tax Revolution. In 1993, Estonia became the first post-communist country to introduce a Flat Tax regime, and its neighbors, Lithuania (1994) and Latvia (1996), soon followed suit while in 1995 Hungary reduced its CIT (Corporate Income Tax) rate to 20%, the most competitive rate in the region. Between 1999 and 2003, most of the 10 NMS countries enacted significant CIT cuts and by 2010, 9 out of the 10 NMS introduced some form of Flat Tax regime, and CIT rates were significantly cut, making the region one of the most tax-competitive in the world. I aim to explain variation within two different independent variables, the most important direct taxes in almost any tax system in the world: CIT and PIT. The variation of the independent variables and the presence of various explanatory factors are assessed qualitatively by analyzing thirty policy reform processes within the ten countries and quantitatively by analyzing various statistical data regarding the evolution of different indicators. The explanatory power of seven theretical approaches is tested: the (1) external pressure, (2) competitive, (3) institutionalist competitive, (4) rational learning, (5) cognitive heuristics, and (6) emulation approaches to the process of policy diffusion, as well as Kingdon’s (1984) (7) Multiple Streams Model. I argue that Kingdon’s MSM represents an adequate model to analyze policy change as a diffusion phenomenon and allows me to offer a more complex, less parsimonious but more realistic account of the causal factors that account for the observed changes. This interpretation within the MSM stresses the relevance of different configurations of causal elements determining change in each of 10 NMS.
The aims of this research are to explore the role of emotions in social movements, specifically the dynamic properties of emotions and the various ways in which they can provoke, sustain, or end activism. The case studies involved animal rights and welfare groups in the UK and US. The concept of emotions is one which has come to the fore in recent years as part of the 'cultural turn,’ but it still suffers from unclear definitions and the remnants of stigma. In this thesis I propose to study emotions by focusing on their role as activators, part of protestors agency and intrinsically linked to their thoughts and actions. To do so I look at the 'life cycle’ of activism and the various roles played by the difference emotions inherent in each stage  growing interest, finding likeminded others, joining a group, the process of bonding, the establishment of ties, then the eventual dissolution or constant reaffirmation of identification as an activist. By exploring the part played by emotions in these various stages, we can better understand the motivations and experience of those involved, in order to broaden our understanding of social movement participation more widely.
Despite their immense potential as information sources, postage stamps have been virtually ignored in academic research. Therefore, in this thesis I study how official national imaginaries have been promoted through iconographic and written messages in postage stamps; how such messages are linked to the ideology, interests and goals of political elites; and how competing elites and groups with relative power within the state try to influence such official ideas about the nation. The thesis is divided in three sections. The first presents a theoretical framework for the study of national imaginaries. It also presents the properties of stamps that made them ideal 'carriers’ of ideological propaganda. The second section analyses a random sample of 1,000 stamps by means of a typology of ideological messages. It was found that the vast majority of stamps are carrying messages related to the features, composition, and historical development of the nation that issued the stamp. Then, these 'nationalist’ stamps were further studied by means of a second typology, in order to differentiate the particular aspects of the nation that were promoted in each stamp. The third section analyses the political goals and processes behind nationalist messages in stamps. For that, both the United Kingdom during 1950-1970 and post-revolutionary Mexico were studied using process-tracing methodology. It was found that, while the most important actors are still the ruling elites, other actors such as competing elites, local authorities, pressure groups or social organizations will also try to influence the messages about the nation in stamps. A relevant finding is that intermediate structures, such as middle-range public officers in postal institutions, can have a key role not only in the promotion, but also in the shaping of official national imaginaries.
Are gender inequalities in work/life outcomes apparent among those positioned at the powerful top of society’s hierarchy, and if so, why? There is currently a lack of consistent knowledge about what happens to those women who have reached the most influential positions of society, and about whether (and how) their situation differs from that of their male counterparts. This is particularly so in the case of political elites, about whom very few current studies exist. This thesis investigates gender and individual-level work/life outcomes among political elites (national parliamentarians) comparing two cases: Sweden and Germany. The research builds on empirical investigations from self-collected survey data covering finite populations of Swedish and German national parliamentarians. Parts of this political elite data are further matched to existing, large-scale databases from the European Social Survey, consisting of representative samples of general citizens, and of general elites, of the two nations. This allows reference comparisons to be made between the political elites and average citizens of the respective countries. To provide additional depth to the findings, the quan-titative investigation was also complemented by a qualitative interview study. The results showed gender inequality in the strength of demand and support experienced in the home-sphere of the political elites (such as concerning household work and functional partner sup-port). These gender discrepancies were more pronounced in the case of Germany than in Sweden. However, gender equality was observed concerning perceived career and influence possibilities in the work-sphere, and concerning general subjective well-being, in both the German and Swedish case of political elites.
The commercial archives of the Salviati bank of Lyons record the entire activity of one of the most important companies on the 16thcentury marketplace. They also keep information relative to other businessmen and companies on the European scene at the time. This thesis scrutinises the organisation, methods and main sectors of activity of the Salviati bank (exchange, finances and commodities trade) in the middle of the 16th century, at the height of Lyons’ prosperity.   It examines mercantile practices in relation to economic spaces and underlines the reciprocal influence of Florentine mercantile traditions and Lyonese economic structures. More specifically, it shows how the involvement of Italian firms in Lyons shaped their choice of business organisation and trade objects and how the strategies of Italian businessmen impacted in turn on the functioning of the marketplace. While the study of the Lyonese branch of a Florentine firm allows to assess its adaptability to local economic structures, the analysis of the activity of the main actors on the Lyons marketplace sheds light on the economic and social processes essential to the good functioning of that marketplace (forms of collaboration between various economic operators and different levels of market integration). This leads to a questioning of many of the hypotheses formulated in the current historiography (mostly, on the basis of local sources), concerning the Italian dominion over Lyons, and a refutation of the vision of market organisation and changing economic conditions that it puts forward. The section devoted to the exchange business, the main field of specialisation of the Salviati bank at the time, challenges the notion of Lyon’s key function in the European system of exchange. The uncovering of previously unknown financial techniques, and of techniques whose use in the space-time frame of this thesis is traditionally denied, brings an additional contribution to the history of banking.
This thesis examines the history of patent law in relation to the development of early modern science. Focusing on the Dutch Republic between 1581-1621, it reconstructs the legal backgrounds to the patents system, the social construction of patent procedures, and the ways in which new procedures were being tested. I argue that the institution of a patent system was an integral part of early modern state-formation, and that it provided a distinct 'working model’ for how to arrive at truth claims through the use of experimental method. The thesis is divided in two parts. In the first part, I deconstruct the unstable notions of privilege and invention, while discussing some of the political and economic characteristics of the privilege system particular to the Dutch Republic. Important research questions in the first part of the thesis are related to the role of the merchants  the notion of competition  Dutch mercantile politics  and the relation between States-General and provincial states. In the second part of the thesis, I argue that privilege practices created a space where craftsmen and intellectuals could interact and become acquainted with each other’s methods. I deal with the social composition of the actors involved in the privileges business and enter into the legal theory relating to inventor privileges. On the basis of a number of case studies, I argue that the legal obligations within the privilege regime provided the different actors with a model on how to execute experiments. Thus, the privilege system / in essence a legal tool with an economic purpose / played a crucial role in the development of a modern attitude towards the verification of knowledge.
This thesis addresses the construction of ideas concerning the identities of geographical spaces, focusing on Venice in the period 1381-1509. It concentrates on the representations of two different roles held in this period by Venice: that of a city in a circumscribed urban setting, and that of the capital of an emerging state on the Italian mainland. Employing a corpus that consists mainly of geographical descriptions but that also includes cases of art and ceremonies, the dissertation closely analyses how fifteenth-century representations of Venice and the Venetian Terraferma were constructed, how they were transformed over time, and how these processes can be explained through the links with the various contexts in which the representations came into being. The thesis underlines, more than is currently the case in historiography, the multiplicity and transformability of simultaneously existing images of Venice. It analyses the large variety of factors to which contemporaries reacted when they created their geographical representations. Rather than merely following a centuries-old tradition of images of Venice (a tradition which in historiography has been called the ‘myth of Venice’), or rather than simply mirroring the institutionalised characteristics of the Venetian state, contemporaries took into account a multitude of contexts when constructing and transforming their representations. This is clearly shown by the very existence of different, sometimes even contradictory images of Venice and its mainland state in the fifteenth century. Taking into account the multiplicity of representations also explains that images of Venice in its role as city on the one hand, and as capital of a mainland state on the other hand, did not have to be in conflict, but that they could exist alongside each other, and that the processes by which they were created could impact upon one another.
The thesis deals with the transformations of capitalist states in Europe in the context of increased economic transnationalisation and explores the different strategies that states develop to increase their competitiveness and attract capital, thereby improving the profile of insertion of their economies in the global and regional markets. Starting from the premise that the increased economic integration apparent in market liberalizations, the intensification of trade, the transnationalisation of production and the emergence of transnational financial markets exert pressures on states to reorient their economic and social policies towards the goal of increasing competitiveness and transforming themselves into so-called Competition States, the thesis examines the extent to which this state reorientation has been apparent in Europe and whether it has led to the emergence of unique or varied types of Competition States. The main argument is that, first, pressures for state restructuring vary among European states, with the Eurozone members being much less exposed to the pressures of the international financial markets and thereby much less likely to transform into Competition States and, second, those states that are exposed to such pressures respond in different ways and devise different strategies for increasing competitiveness. Based on the comparative case-studies of the Czech Republic and Slovakia as representatives of the two different types of Competition States, the thesis argues that the choice of these strategies is primarily shaped by the features of the domestic political system - more precisely, the strength or weakness of socio-economic issue divides as the main axis of competition in the political party system - rather than being determined by the position of states in the global or regional division of labour, or by their initial social and economic institutions.
En 1888, los contemporáneos fueron testigos del gran número de católicos movilizados en todo el mundo con la finalidad de preparar la celebración del Jubileo sacerdotal del papa, que habría de tener en la organización de la Exposición Vaticana su máxima expresión. Esta tesis muestra cómo en el último tercio del siglo XIX la Santa Sede recurrió a medios religiosos y devocionales para instalar en la opinión pública mundial la idea de relevancia internacional del papado. A tal fin, se examina cómo millones de católicos de todo el mundo fueron movilizados a finales del siglo XIX con el propósito común de celebrar el Jubileo sacerdotal del papa y organizar la Exposición Vaticana. La extensión de la Iglesia, el ascendiente de Roma sobre los católicos y la amplia cobertura de la prensa propiciaron que los preparativos y celebraciones jubilares llegase a todos los rincones del planeta. En este trabajo se argumenta que la movilización internacional para el jubileo y la exposición de 1888 fue el resultado de un proceso histórico significativamente influido por el fenómeno de las exposiciones universales.
This thesis examines the actions of the Latin missionaries in the Latin Catholic community of Constantinople between 1650 and 1760. In Constantinople as well as in other mission territories, missionaries were constantly confronted with the universal claims of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church and the practical requirements of the local pluri-religious context. The main aim of this dissertation is to analyze how the missionaries acted within the local context of Constantinople.  In terms of methodology, this study combines the approaches of recent research on Early Modern Catholicism after the Council of Trent, of closely related research on extra-European local Christianities and of recent social and cultural research on the Ottoman Empire. In order to work out the processes of negotiation and appropriation between the different actors, the thesis adopts a micro-historical approach and an actor-focused perspective. First, the thesis focuses on the institutional actors, as the representatives of the local Latin Catholics, the patriarchal vicars and missionaries as well as the ambassadors of the European powers. Secondly, the tensions between Roman standards and the local requirements are analyzed with regard to the Constantinopolitan sacramental practice regarding baptism, marriage and funeral rituals. Finally, issues related to the crossing of religious boundaries are explored.  The study reveals that the multi-religious structure of Constantinople and the strong position of the French ambassador limited the influence of the Roman Curia on the Latin Catholic community remarkably. Moreover, it emerges how, rather than represent Roman standards, the missionaries acted to a large extent as representatives of the local Latin Catholics.
In the field of migration history, the history of post-war labour migration to Western Europe has been receiving the attention of an increasing number of scholars, especially since the beginning of the new millennium. Applying a historical lens to a subject that has been studied by social scientists for decades, historians are trying to contextualize this migration stream, debunk some of its ancient myths and uncover the historical realities of the relatively under-researched period before the migration stops of the mid-1970s. Taking the integration processes of Mediterranean immigrants in the Belgian city of Ghent over the course of the 1960s and 1970s as a case study, this thesis engages with both the sociological and historical literature on the subject. It studies the ways in which these immigrants have constructed their lives in an urban environment over the course of the first decades after their arrival, dealing with the structural elements that framed their integration processes, looking at the strategies they used in order to realize their goals and focusing on their social life-worlds and the networks they created. In addition to a detailed narrative of these structural and social integration processes, the thesis also provides a thorough analysis of the interplay of structure and agency in these processes, following Nancy Green’s call for a poststructural structuralist approach. Further, it studies the integration processes of immigrants from a multi-dimensional rather than an ethno-focal perspective. The thesis also takes a critical stance towards phenomena that are generally qualified as 'ethnic’, and pays special attention to those aspects of immigrants’ lives that crossed ethnic boundaries. What comes to the fore is a picture of post-war 'guest worker’ populations that is characterized by more agency and less ethnicity, less homogeneity and more interethnic contact than is generally the case.
This thesis is a collection of three essays on voting as a means of collective decision- making. The first chapter builds a model of how voters should optimally behave in a legislative election with three parties under plurality rule. I show that, in contrast to single district elections, properties such as polarisation and misaligned voting can be mitigated in legislative elections. The second chapter studies a model of committee decision making where members have career concerns and a principal can choose the level of transparency (how much of the committees decision he can observe). We show that increased transparency leads to a breakdown in information aggregation, but that this may actually increase the principal’s payoff. The theoretical model is then tested in a laboratory experiment. The final chapter introduces a model of legislative bargaining where three parties in the legislature bargain over the formation of government by choosing a policy and a distribution of government perks. I show that when individual politicians are responsible for the policies they implement - that is, those outside of government are not held accountable by voters for the implemented governments policies, while each individual politician in the ruling coalition is - then a given seat distribution can result in almost any two party coalition.
Cette thèse se propose d'analyser l'accès à la justice civile pour les victimes de violations de droits de l'homme commises par des entreprises multinationales, au regard des règles de compétence internationale des tribunaux de international privé en matière de responsabilité civile délictuelle.  La recherche mettra en exergue la double fonction que peuvent endosser les règles de compétence de droit international privé dans ce domaine, en assurant, d'une part, un accès effectif à la justice et à la réparation pour les victimes de tels abus, et en participant, d'autre part à l'effort de régulation des entreprises multinationales sur le plan global.
The recognition of the legally binding value of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights has profoundly transformed the Union system of fundamental rights protection. The novelties not only concern the sources of this protection, but also the conditions for the application and interpretation of EU fundamental rights. In particular, before the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty the Court of Justice was the exclusive architect of its approach to fundamental rights, whereas in the era of the legally binding Charter is confronted with written rules on the subject. Moreover, if there is no doubt that the Lisbon Treaty has put an unprecedented emphasis on the protection and promotion of EU fundamental rights, the Member States have contextually expressed, and with equal emphasis, concerns towards an ever-increasing expansion of the scope of EU fundamental rights, at the expense of domestic standards and material competences. Against this background, the aim of this thesis is to reconstruct the scope of the protection offered (better, that should be offered) by the EU Charter. The analysis covers problems relating both to the scope of application of the Charter and to its effects. Some of the questions addressed are new, as they stem from novelties introduced by the Charter  others are veritable topoi of the EU discourse on fundamental rights, which nevertheless need to be revisited in light of the new scenario just described. The leading idea is that, in order to overcome the ambiguity of the Charter on many crucial issues concerning its scope of application and effects, reliance must be made on the role assigned to EU fundamental rights by the revised Treaties. These, and the progressive evolution of the EU system of fundamental rights protection, suggest that fundamental rights are constitutive values of the EU legal order.
The thesis studies the application of EU free movement law and competition law to private regulation, understood as rule-setting, implementation and/or enforcement by private actors, whether on their own or in partnership with State bodies. Such private or co-regulatory schemes can be a beneficial way of achieving various public interest aims. They may also, however, restrict trade or competition. I argue that free movement (Chapter 2) and competition (Chapter 3) rules have been used as a form of meta-regulation, affecting the way private regulatory schemes are organised and structured. By doing so, however, they were forced to deal with situations that cannot be classified neatly following a public-private distinction. In response, the case law of the Court of Justice and the practice of the Commission have adapted by extending scrutiny over a wider variety of measures of private regulators while also broadening the scope for justification. This, however, increases the likelihood of overlap of the free movement and competition rules, which I analyze in Chapter 4, arguing that the two sets of rules should not be mutually exclusive but that their limits should be defined more clearly on their own terms. Finally, I look at the interaction between free movement and competition, as well as their impact, in three sectors where private regulation is prominent: sports (Chapter 5), legal services (Chapter 6) and standard-setting (Chapter 7). I discuss the justifications for regulation in all three sectors, as well as the legislative and institutional setting in which private regulators operate. In all three case areas, the two sets of rules were used in a partly strategic way to influence reforms of private regulation. The application of the rules was mainly driven by institutional choices rather than the objective‘ requirements of legal doctrine.
This thesis proposes that the creation of the norms prohibiting forced labour and trafficking in persons did not reflect lacunae in the international legal system, and that their codification into international law has created legal confusion that obstructs the achievement of the object and purpose of the original 1926 Slavery Convention: the legal abolition and suppression of slavery. It seeks to describe how these norms were introduced into international law, to explain why the international community deemed them necessary, and to examine the legacy of their codification, as legal scholars, human rights organisations, and domestic and international courts struggle to explain, for example, how forced labour is different from slavery, or how the human rights law norms prohibiting slavery, forced labour and servitude relate to the more recently codified norm prohibiting trafficking in persons.
Doctrines developed by the EFTA Court have placed considerable demands on the various national courts in the EFTA States. The Court now considers the EEA Agreement to form an "international treaty sui generis which contains a distinct legal order of its own." This thesis will study the interaction between the EFTA Court and Icelandic courts. The basis of this research rests on two levels. At the EEA level, it is the ECJ and the EFTA Court that form the basis of the study. At the national level, the thesis studies Icelandic Supreme Court and district court decisions. I will approach the question of the impact of EEA law on Icelandic domestic law from two dimensions: substantive and procedural. In substantive terms, the study examines fundamental European judgemade principles, as well as the impact these doctrines have had on Icelandic law. This will indicate how Icelandic courts deal with potential conflicts of law between EEA and Icelandic law, and how they respond to EFTA Court decisions and EEA principles. This part examines many fundamental concepts of EEA law, but the subject mainly raises questions concerning four specific concepts and the reaction of the Icelandic system to them. These are: first, the question of direct effect in EEA law second, the obligation of national courts to interpret national law in the light of EEA law third, the primacy of implemented EEA law and fourth, the principle of State liability. These legal concepts have all been seen as posing specific challenges to Icelandic courts. In its second stage, the thesis will, in procedural terms, study the relationship between the EFTA Court and the Icelandic courts, by investigating how the reference procedure under Article 34 SCA has been applied by the national courts in Iceland. It is only by looking at the discretion exercised by the courts as to whether or not to make a reference that one can form an opinion of Icelandic courts' openness to the EEA legal order.
The phenomenon of people crossing regional and national borders to seek assisted reproduction occurs in many countries across the world and involves different actors, including patients, doctors, fertility clinic practitioners, law-makers, donors, surrogates, children, brokers, and others who take part in the globalised industry of assisted reproductive technologies. This dissertation focuses on the experience of Italian reproductive travellers who seek donor conception treatments outside national borders, as a reaction to Italian regulations on assisted reproduction banning gamete donation in Italy. Through the qualitative analysis of the narrations and practices of heterosexual couples, same-sex couples and single women, this work explores the ways in which people face different reproductive itineraries with the aim of achieving reproduction through donor conception in a context of law evasion. In particular, it takes into account the process that leads people to choose donor conception abroad and investigates the ways in which people make sense of this choice in relation to their understanding of kinship formation. The feelings that accompany this process, the concepts that people mobilise to make both law evasion and donor conception practice coherent with their reproductive goals, and the strategies that they employ to "kin" their donor-conceived children are presented and analysed. This study highlights the fact that Italian CBRC travellers who seek donation treatments abroad mainly consider their reproductive experience as a transgressive act, because by doing so they circumvent laws that forbid those treatments locally. They tend to support the moral validity of their choices by arguing that it aims to accomplish what they perceive as a "normal" goal (having a child). Nonetheless, the recourse to such a reproductive experience challenges existing cultural understandings and the social organisation of kinship.
This thesis enquires into the legal dimension of the Migration-Development Nexus (MDN) within the policy framework of the European Union (EU). Departing from the observation of the paradoxical absence of more legal analyses of this notion in the current context, this research aims at defining the contours of the MDN as both a policy and legal notion. In particular, this thesis looks at the evolution of the notion and its various meanings in the EU policy context. This analysis reveals the existence of different policy practices to implement the MDN, whether at the supranational or national level. By examining such practices, I intend to show that the way in which the MDN is conceptually framed and concretely implemented is influenced by competing 'policy logics’ underlying the understanding of the nexus by different policy actors.  The aim of such an analysis is to identify ways for genuine policy integration of both migration and development in the EU context. To achieve this purpose, I argue that, as the MDN is gradually becoming a legal concept (being incorporated into legal instruments), it also needs to be defined in a more substantial way, for its legal dimension to be complete. In this respect, I first argue that, as a policy concept, the MDN should be 'enriched’ with interdisciplinary analyses and, second, I explore the possibility for grounding the MDN in human rights in order to 'flesh it out’ as a legal concept.
Abuse of collective dominance under Article 102 TFEU is a bit of a blind spot in European competition law. The concept has been relatively well developed for the purpose of merger control and serves to support the Commission in blocking a concentration that could facilitate tacit coordination of strategic behaviour between competitors in an already concentrated market. Case law and literature agree that tacit collusion in a tight oligopoly may also subject companies to theduties and prohibitions of Article 102 even in the absence of individual dominant market power, but little has been written about when such abuse might occur. The possible application of Article 102 to "oligopoly behaviour" remains an abstract theory with little practical applicability. That is dangerous, given the fact that the doctrine laid down in merger cases Airtours and Impala gives lots of discretion to a competition authority determined to remedy suboptimal markets by sanctioning oligopolists for abuse of collective dominance. This dissertation presents a novel approach to the application of the concept of abuse of collective dominance to behaviour by interdependent companies in a concentrated market. Rather than trying to catch tacit collusion or supracompetitive oligopoly prices, the focus of enforcing Article 102 in oligopoly should be on practices by which one or more incumbents exclude outsiders (newcomers, innovators and fringe competitors) to the benefit of the incumbent 'insiders' of the oligopolistic equilibrium. Doctrinally, this approach necessitates a breach with the objective concept of abuse as used in cases of single dominance, because it requires the demonstration of a causal link between market power and abuse. The resulting test for abuse of collective dominance in oligopolistic markets is a tough one to satisfy, but considering that oligopoly is still infinitely more dynamic than monopoly, that may just be the right outcome.
This thesis intends to deepen our understanding of how the Internet influences democracy. The proposed framework for analyzing this question draws from the discourse theory of democracy. More specifically, I integrate Habermas's politico-philosophical perspective into the debate on the Internet's socio-legal effects. This approach will allow me to examine how the Internet influences the core elements of democracy discursively conceived. In order to guide my analysis towards practical observations, I will apply the proposed theoretical approach to one particular democratic state, namely, Brazil. In a nutshell, the main aspects of Habermas's theory, which will guide my analysis, are as follows: (a) the understanding of autonomy as a twofold developmental concept divided into the two co-original dimensions of private autonomy and public autonomy  (b) reciprocal recognition as the basis and moral reference of the legal order  and (c) the role of law as a social integrative force. I will examine how the Internet might impact on the legitimacy of a democratic order and whether and how it might yield opportunities for democratic empowerment. I shall observe whether, following the penetration of the Internet in the Brazilian democratic order, (a) citizens have become more autonomous in choosing the laws that will shape their space of freedom, and (b) the laws that govern their behaviour have become more linked to their choices. I shall also assess the ways in which law, as an institution and a system, reacts to the changes and challenges brought about by the Internet. I intend to single out, in particular, the ways in which law may retain its strength as an integrative force, avoiding a "virtual" legitimacy crisis. Thereafter, I shall present concluding remarks on how a constitutional order may incorporate the Internet-induced changes consistently with its democratic values and objectives.
The interwar period is key to the course international history took in the twentieth century. This thesis examines the conditions under which the new international order instituted after World War One led to violent local reactions. It traces American, British, and French expertise and policies from the peace planning processes begun just before the end of the First World War right up to the Paris peace talks in 1919. Furthermore, it addresses attempts by the League of Nations to stabilise the peace architecture in the 1920s and 1930s. The level of international politics is linked to two prominent 'Western' and 'Eastern' European case studies: the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in 1918-19 and the Greco- Turkish conflict between 1919 and 1923. In both cases, border changes caused ethnic violence, albeit with very diverse outcomes. While France managed to contain the onset of ethnic cleansing, the Greek-Turkish conflict degenerated, resulting in a fully-fledged war that ended in the forced exchange of roughly 1.6 million civilians across the Aegean Sea. The study demonstrates that the use of ethnicity, as a concept and a political instrument, significantly shaped the course that conflict-prone local settings took. As a shorthand form of national self-determination, ethnicity informed expertise and political decisions on where to alter territorial borders. As a political instrument, it was a powerful tool for nationalist mobilisation. The dissertation concludes that one of the primary structural factors that contributed to the breakdown of the international order in the 1930s was the failure of the international community to provide an alternative to or to successfully contain ethnic and state-sponsored violence as the most effective means to 'correct' the perceived shortcomings of the Paris peace treaties.
This thesis examines the difficult creation of a common European research policy as part of the process of the emergence of the European Community (EC)/European Union (EU) as an increasingly powerful global political and economic actor. It shows that strong discursive continuity and institutional path-dependency, together with the ability of the promoters of the common research policy to adapt their claims to a broader ideational framework, were the key factors that enabled the EC to enlarge its role in a field in which it originally lacked policy competence, and in which states have traditionally been reluctant to pool national sovereignty in supranational institutions. Moreover, the concept of EC/EU research policy, and the concrete steps towards its realisation, would not have been possible without three fundamental ideational and political transformations: the changing relationship between science and the state and the subsequent establishment of national institutions and practices to promote and orient scientific activity  the emergence of economic growth as an ubiquitous political objective in all industrialised countries and the increasing conceptualisation of science in economic terms  the rapid liberalisation of the world markets, where knowledge soon became regarded as a vital resource for power and money. These three developments were the origins of the crucial change in perception of the European policymakers concerning not only scientific research but also the major goals of European integration.
The present thesis studies the dynamics of reasoning in the public sphere with the aim to offer a novel way to justify public authority, especially under conditions of broad administrative discretion, and to provide criteria to evaluate the legitimacy of such decisions. The main normative claim I defend is that decisions are justified when they are premised on appropriate reasons, so in the process of rule-making the stated reasons of the authorities (and of participating citizens or organisations) ought to matter. The importance of reasons have always been emphasised by deliberative democrats and civic republicans, but I specify that these should not be reasons which all can accept as commonly argued, but rather reasons which the others may accept (or at least which the others cannot justifiably reject). In my view, the we-perspective is constructed not by an appeal to universal standards purportedly acceptable to all, but by the inclusion of the actual perspectives of different groups of citizens. With this in mind, in the rest of the thesis I show how reasoning in the public sphere makes a difference, so that it can serve both as a standard for non-arbitrariness and as a practical method to achieve it. Thus, apart from its normative function, the requirement for rigorous reasoning gives authorities the needed flexibility, while preventing them from acting arbitrarily.  The normative part raises the question how to design institutions to make reasons matter more, or, in other words, how to contain power by the use of reasons. In the empirical part that follows, I study some existing institutions of the European Union from the suggested perspective to provide a few preliminary answers to it. Far from claiming that the EU is a democracy of reasons, I illustrate how a democracy of reasons could look like, how the existing institutions contribute to it, as well as the limits of their contribution.
This thesis studies and analyzes the current paradigm governing the legal protection of retail investors in the United States and the European Union, by framing both of the legal systems within the transnational financial regulatory arena. In order to do so, the thesis carries out an evolutionary analysis of the European and American statutes dealing with financial markets regulation and gives an account, also grounded on the previous professional experience of the author, concerning the relationship between a retail investor and an investment services provider. It, then, examines whether and how far the US and EU legal systems either are affected by or affect transnational financial regulation, namely those (soft-law) rules adopted by the International Organization of Securities Commissions IOSCO, in particular as regards the protection of retail investors. Subsequently, the thesis describes the Organization’s governance structure, the decision-making process, the content of its financial rules and how far these are implemented into national domestic legislation. The third and last part of the thesis gives an analysis of the different legal tools provided by the European and American systems for public and collective private enforcement mechanisms, with the purpose to check whether a set of tools is preferred over the other (private VS public), and how far retail investors have the chance to concretely protect their rights. At the end, an assessment will be provided regarding the workability of the current paradigm from the point of view of retail investors.
The field of cultural property protection in armed conflict is composed of many conventions but little law. This is because: (1) there is no single understanding of the concepts of "cultural property" or "protection"  (2) due to the principle of reciprocity, the more international an armed conflict is, the lower the chances that a treaty concerning cultural property will apply  and (3) no convention has yet devised a specific safeguarding regime for "cultural heritage", which refers to the most outstanding class of cultural objects. Legal scholarship often accepts this situation, or suggests adopting a new convention to solve the field's problems. However, attempting to counteract law's failure with more laws is a nonsensical exercise that would, in the long-run, worsen the current situation. This thesis rejects law-making as an alternative and argues in a new direction. It contends that it is already possible to identify a branch of international cultural heritage law (ICHL) underpinned by a set of specific principles and a systemic objective (telos). The cross-fertilisation of such principles and telos with those of IHL provides the rationale underlying the protection of cultural property in armed conflict. The thesis proposes to re-interpret this field in light of such rationale using the World Heritage Convention as its common legal denominator. Pursuant to the postulate of systemic integration and that of effet utile, the interplay between the World Heritage Convention and the 1954 Hague Convention, its 1999 Second Protocol, the 1977 Two Additional Protocols and customary international law is examined. Their interplay vests this field of law with a more consistent understanding of "cultural property" and "protection"  it affords a specific regime of protection to "cultural heritage"  and it ensures that, as a minimum, the obligations of the World Heritage Convention will apply in international armed conflicts.
This thesis places the debate on the relationship between fundamental rights and the internal market outside the field of negative integration (where it is usually takes place) into the field of positive integration. It examines the extent to which there is an internal market competence to deal with fundamental rights and analyses new mechanisms for fundamental rights protection outside the Courts. Against this backdrop, this thesis analyses the existing harmonisation practice in the EU through the lens of four fundamental rights: (i) data protection, (ii) freedom of expression, (iii) fundamental labour rights [the right to collective bargaining and the right to fair and just working conditions] and (iv) the right to health. The research reveals that there is a considerable amount of internal market legislation dealing with fundamental rights (even pre-existing the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights) but that most of it is not couched in fundamental rights terms. This thesis identifies the determinants, which account for the current prevalent conceptualisation and assesses the consequences of such approaches both for the substantive content of legislation and for its judicial review. The thesis provides a much more differentiated account of the EU's fundamental rights policy in and through the internal market than perhaps initially expected. It builds the case for a conscious approach to dealing with and enhancing fundamental rights protection in and through internal market legislation, and advocates a leading role for the legislator in the establishment of an internal market that is firmly based on respect for fundamental rights.
This thesis examines the influence of the Russian Empire on centralized state authority in Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It analyzes how Russian policies in Iran became effective and how they were shaped by mediating groups as well as by local resistance. I argue that the Russian Empire pursued its goals in Iran to an important extent by relying on an alliance with the Qajars, the dynasty ruling Iran throughout the nineteenth century. On different levels, Russian officials were therefore drawn into conflicts over the quality and structure of Qajar authority and had a formidable influence on its development. By demonstrating the interrelatedness of processes of imperial expansion and state building in Russia and Iran, as well as by drawing extensive comparisons between them, the thesis aims to contribute to a larger recontextualization of Russian history within a Eurasian framework.  The first chapter examines the relations between the Russian and the Iranian monarchies and the cultural transformation, especially the militarization, of Iranian monarchical power under Russian influence. A second chaper focuses on the emergence of an Iranian state territory, demonstrating how the demarcation of international borders between Russia and Iran in Central Asia was connected to changes in the relationship between tribal nomads and sedentary states. The third chapter then concentrates on the turbulent urban politics of Tabriz to analyze the Russian attempt to use and at the same time limit Iranian state sovereignty through a system of consulates and trade privileges for Russian subjects. Finally, the last chapter studies the role of Caucasian revolutionaries in the Iranian Constitutional Movement (1905/1911), who transposed political practices and goals shaped by resistance to Russian colonial rule into an Iranian setting.
During the 19th century Export Economy had consequences on land markets. In this way, some "institutional arrangements” in land property rights were required, which had consequences on land prices, distribution and ownership. Due to the difficulty for collecting quantitative information, they are few quantitative writings about land for the case of Colombia. In this sense, the aim of this work is to understand, through quantitative information, the importance that land and land property rights had in Colombian history and its current economic performance. I will take into consideration the Region (Departamento) of Cundinamarca. As primary sources I used the information contained in the Cadastres Surveys made in 1878 and in 1890 and in the land deeds taken from the office of Notaría I in Bogotá (1868-1900). Based on this quantitative information this book is composed by three chapters. First chapter reveals that in Cundinamarca land was distributed in an unequal manner (land gini were quite high). Nevertheless, this research goes beyond this result of land inequality. In fact, contrary to the traditional neo-institutionalism point of view this research proves that land concentration not necessarily led to bad economic outcomes but that may lead to good or bad outcomes in human capital accumulation, depending on the institutional context. The second chapter that composes this research is about the trend of "urban” land prices in Cundinamarca (1868-1900). In this chapter I estimated a deflated series of land prices using the information of the Notaryś I office from Bogotá. The last chapter analyzes the relationship between Export Economy, land ownership, prices and distribution (Gini).
While the question of the compatibility between Islam and democracy has captured the attention of researchers, journalists and politicians for many years, Asef Bayat believes that this question is irrelevant. In his book, Making Islam Democratic, Bayat argues that the relevant question is not whether Islam is compatible with democracy, but rather under what conditions Muslims can make the two compatible (Bayat 2007). This new approach has opened the way for research on the conditions under which religious actors offer support for democracy. While my research starts from this same point, I have come to the conclusion that religious authorities' attitude is neither a fixed position nor an ideological one  rather the attitude of the same religious group might change from one phase to another. Hence, the research question this dissertation seeks to answer is not only why certain Islamic actors have offered support for democracy while others have not, but also why the same religious actors have shifted their position on democracy over time. The answer lies, I argue, in the institutional rules governing religion-polity relations. While the four religious actors studied here share the same material and ideational interests, they have adopted different strategies, which in turn vary with different institutional settings, in order to achieve these interests. Religious actors' attitudes towards democracy reflect a rational choice that is made after assessing to what extent democracy advances or hinders their other strategies and interests.
The thesis seeks to widen our understanding of the general principle of equality within European Union law. In its approach it is theoretically ambitious yet grounded in case law analysis. After an introduction into the origins of the notion of equality, the thesis sets out to deconstruct the adjudication by the European Court of Justice as well as by selected Member State courts on some of the most pressing issues of European equality law via the means of comparative institutional analysis. More specifically, it examines the diversity of applied standards of testing by the European Court of Justice, its handling of reverse discrimination and its dealing with affirmative action. Moreover, it looks at the Austrian and German case law on reverse discrimination. Through this exercise, the thesis illustrates that the judges are in their decisions both guided by reaching a 'fair' outcome to the cases and by reflections on their ability to rule on egalitarian issues. The work describes in detail how institutional considerations inform judicial decisions in matters of equality.  Building on the finding that institutional thinking influences judicial decision making, the thesis continues to ask whether this practice is desirable. Its concluding chapter argues for an adaptation of the existing equality doctrine in European Union law in order to provide judges, practitioners and academics with tools to merge institutional considerations along with legalist interpretation of equality guarantees in an open and comprehensible manner.
This thesis comprises theoretical work on financial markets and banking. The first essay features a model of liquidity provision. I analyze how the severity of adverse selection problems in one market is affected if alternative sources of finance, which are not subject to adverse selection problems, become more easily available. In particular, I find that the adverse selection problem can be either mitigated or amplified, giving rise to new implications for equilibrium welfare, efficiency and policy. Furthermore, I examine how and under what conditions a central bank can address a market failure during a financial crisis by using existing market institutions to re-allocate liquidity in the economy. The second essay develops a new contagion mechanism in coordination games. With our model we offer an explanation why a contagious spread of a crisis can occur even if agents learn that their country (or bank) is not exposed to crisis events elsewhere. What is more, we show that the likelihood of a spread of the crisis can be higher if agents learn that their country is not exposed to the crisis in the other country, than if agents stay uninformed about the actual exposure and believe that a cross-country exposure is possible. The third essay examines the effect of state aid on the collective competitive behavior in a repeated-game setting. We consider an application to the banking sector and find that a systematic bailout regime may increase the likelihood of (tacit) collusion in an industry characterized by idiosyncratic shocks. The reason being that state aid increases the expected profits from cooperation and simultaneously raises the probability that competitors will still be in business to carry out punishment against cheaters.
This thesis, based on Eastern Sichuan boatmen's work songs, haozi, analyzes the way river workers understood and interpreted the world, work and society that they lived in. Spanning the period between 1880s and 1930s, it explains how such professional groups dealt with the dissolving social and economic order of the late-Qing China and the chaotic republican decades. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part reconstructs the social history of Sichuan boatmen, discusses the methodological issues connected with working on popular song traditions, and explains the importance of work songs as tools of boatmen's work. The second part is devoted to reading, analysis and discussion of these traditions. Three fundamental topics are analyzed in this section: boatmen's understanding of the social world they lived in  the way they perceived their work and the manner in which they comprehended their social position. The thesis demonstrates that boatmen created representations of the Sichuan river towns to claim their own social, cultural and physical spaces. Boatmen largely refused elite aesthetics and shaped their own ones, corresponding to their tastes, habits and forms of socialization. Analyzing the issue of work and labor relations, the thesis demonstrates that boatmen resisted exploitation by stating their moral superiority enshrined in the ideal of brotherhood  and by bemoaning their harrowing labor, cruelty of the bosses and lack of family life. Finally, by examining boatmen's imagination of death, the thesis unveils how culturally potent representations were exploited in order to protest against the social injustice, at the same time expressing vulnerability, weakness and lack of control over one's destiny. The thesis provides us with deeper understanding of the way early twentieth century non-industrial Chinese workers conceptualized their social standing, interpreted surrounding reality and struggled to adjust to oppressive social conditions.
This thesis investigates the changing conditions in the European art market after the Congress of Vienna (1815). It focuses mainly on the socio-professional development of the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini and analyses his first visit to Paris in 1823 from a social, cultural and political point of view. It redefines the issue of grandeur in the context of urban renewal (Paris as a capital city) and a political regime in search of legitimacy (the Restoration period). Rossini's first visit to Paris is examined in reference to his life experiences as well as the changing geopolitical face of Europe at the time. First, a micro-analysis of his stay in Paris explores the construction of this symbolic event and makes a prosopography of the various institutional, political and artistic actors involved. Second, this thesis examines the reasons for Rossini's occupation of the French cultural arena. France's cultural policies are highlighted by concentrating on the French Restoration government's strategies in bringing Rossini to Paris. This thesis also examines the other side of the coin, namely how market logic was established in theatrical productions and amongst authors and institutions, and how this marked the progressive dismantling of the privilege system in Parisian theatres. To do so, the thesis analyses the play: Rossini à Paris ou le grand dîner, the Scribe's libretto of which describes a banquet given in Rossini's honor during his stay in Paris. Third, the debates connected to Rossini's visit reveals how musical "traditions" are radicalized around a national paradigm. Crossing varied and original sources (correspondences, scores, play librettos, newspapers, institutional sources), this thesis contributes significantly to the study of the relationship between the artist, the power and their representations.
The thesis is a collection of essays in Applied Economics. The first essay employs unique Italian data to jointly consider different aspects of the relationship between agglomeration and labor market pooling. The paper looks across all industries from the perspectives of both workers and firms. The study finds evidence of a positive relationship between turnover and agglomeration, evidence of on-the-job learning and evidence consistent with agglomeration improving job matches. However, the estimated labor market pooling gains seem unlikely to account for a substantial share of the agglomeration benefits accruing to workers and firms. The second essay evaluates the effectiveness of a major Italian place-based policy through which the government endorses and finances an industrialization plan proposed by private firms. By using as counterfactuals the areas exposed to the same policy later in time, the study finds little evidence of a positive effect of the program on plants and employment growth rates, which is confined to a small area (municipality) and crowds out the economic growth of the surroundings. The third essay uses the consolidation of Italian municipalities brought about by the fascist dictatorship in the 1920s to gauge the role of the size of local jurisdictions for economic development. It finds that the consolidation was associated with relevant net welfare gains for the communities involved. In particular, the advantages related to the bigger economies of scale in larger jurisdictions overwhelmed the costs owing to the higher heterogeneity. The fourth essay investigates the impact of financial development on the quantiles of the conditional growth distribution. The study presents a growth model showing the quantile effects of finance on growth and provides empirical evidence consistent with the idea that countries in the upper tail of the conditional growth distribution react more than countries in the lower tail to the same financial stimulus.
This research aims to analyse the prohibition of State aid and compatibility assessments in the EU from the perspective of the 'more economic approach’ (MEA). The hypothesis enunciated in the thesis is that the MEA in State aid is applied in an instrumental manner, which goes beyond the paradigm of control justified by the coordination of national policies and the reduction of distortions of competition. Hence, the shift takes place with regard to: (i) the definition of the aims of public intervention  and (ii) the methods of aid assessment. Firstly, by means of the MEA the Commission pursues a horizontal industrial policy, which presupposes a more pro-active approach and verification of the positive effects of aid, to the detriment of its negative effects. Secondly, the use of the MEA is policy driven - the Commission chooses the MEA to better regulate positive criteria for compatibility of aid, while avoiding applying refined economic analysis: (i) to the definition of aid  and (ii) to assess the magnitude of the negative effects of aid. The research conducted here is oriented around four horizontal lines: (i) conflict and complementarities between competition and industrial policy, based on the analysis of State aid rules  (ii) shift from negative to positive integration, which implies a transformation of State aid control and coordination into a State aid policy and has consequences for the aims and substantive criteria of the legal framework  (iii) a 'better regulation’ of State aid by means of the MEA  (iv) the competence of the Member States versus the competence of the Commission in the State aid legal framework.
The analysis of rationales for preferential rules of origin presented in the thesis brings forward the assumptions that, contrary to what has been written in the literature, it still seems legitimate to maintain preferential rules of origin as distinct from non-preferential rules of origin. However, multiplication of rules of origin regimes causes systemic problems and fairness concerns. The thesis aims therefore at analysing diversification and harmonisation patterns and their interaction with the systemic problems identified. The final objective of the thesis is to analyse the possible methods for regulating rules of origin in light of these systemic issues. The thesis employs an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand rationales for and systemic problems derived from preferential rules of origin. The methodology, adopted to understand patterns of diversification and harmonisation, combines instead comparative analysis and case study approach with the analysis of WCO and WTO law. While it is impossible to find a solution that could solve all the systemic problems (beside the complete abolition of the rules), this thesis argues that the first objective of the WTO should be to achieve a greater level of correspondence between rules of origin and MFN concessions and address fairness concerns. This should allow the enforcement of rules of origin in line with article XXIV GATT, while recognising the particular role of preferential rules of origin in guaranteeing that the partner only benefits from the preferential liberalisation. Contrary to the current literature, the thesis hints that this can be addressed effectively without resorting to international substantial harmonisation and without leaving regulation simply to partial regional harmonisation processes, which are respectively either politically difficult to achieve or ineffective means for properly addressing systemic issues related to rules of origin.
This thesis tries to determine the impact of transnational family migration on the gendered division of labour and power dynamics between the couples either entrenching inequalities and traditional roles, or challenging and changing them. It shows also how ideas about gender shape transnational family migration patterns, and affect the individual family life of transmigrants. And eventually, it examines the social and family-related consequences of these processes. The research questions have been formulated as follows: How do gender role beliefs and family gender arrangement (gender practice, family gender organization) affect transnational family migration? And how are gender role beliefs and family gender arrangements affected by transnational family migration? It is crucial to stress that the answer to these questions will shed light on potential gender transitions, its directions, circumstances and social and familial consequences of transnational family migration. In order to explain the research problem from a dynamic perspective and distinguish various transnational family phases, I introduce three stages which I call  pre-transnational, transnational and post-transnational family stage. The pre-transnational stage refers in retrospect to the time of decision making process about migration, the transnational family stage is about the time of transnational family separation due to migration and the nature of family life during this time while the post-transnational family stage considers the time after family reunification which in my thesis is limited only to the reunification in Ireland.An important part of the thesis is a chapter that is dedicated to the role of Polish Church in Ireland and the correlation of migrant’s religiosity and their gender roles.
This thesis is devoted to exploring the emerging area of research known as  global administrative law  as a particular lens from within which to analyse key transformations in the domain of regulatory governance, including the rise of forms of public law about governing in settings now external to the state. In the first section, the thesis attempts to background the idea of  global administrative law  in broader controversies surrounding the possible role and function of law in an age of global governance. Viewed in this light, it considers the 'procedural' solution offered by the project's participants in response to the challenges of unaccountable and non-inclusive forms of governance. The thesis argues that-far from offering to its audiences a set of theory-neutral descriptors and procedural solutions-the very idea of  global administrative law  invokes competing understandings over the legitimate methods, aims and purposes of the project, and, in a broader sense, law itself.   In light of the fluidity of the normative languages of  global administrative law , the thesis proceeds, in a second section, to draw out specific justifications of the project. This prepares the ground for an assessment of the possible limitations of these different conceptions, set against the most troubling aspects of current arrangements and realities. Adopting a critical theory lens, this thesis considers the broader failures and disappointments of contemporary legal thought, and the constraints it places on our ability to construct a broader, and better, vision for law and society. The thesis concludes by suggesting that we might seize this moment to reimagine a different vision. It proposes a mission for legal scholarship that concerns itself with empowering a diverse transnational politics  subjecting to public criticism the distributive consequences of global authority and targeting, for reform, the structural causes of the unjust and inhumane.
The topics covered in this paper cover a broad range of subjects, from a reputation system in a discrete and infinite time model over to a three period game on a network and concluding with the optimal default decision in continuous time framework. The first paper, entitled  Firms’ Strategic Competition and The Dynamics of Reputation: The Case of an Online Market”, a joint work with Clodomiro Ferreira, analyzes, both theoretically and quantitatively, how sellers strategic competition for high valuation buyers in a context resembling on-line markets shapes reputation building incentives, and how it determines the dynamics of prices and reputation itself. The second paper, joint work with Agnese Leonello, investigates interbank market freeze and contagion that arises through asset sales in a financial network in which mark-to-market is the accounting standard in place. The paper develops a simple three-period theoretical model in which banks can borrow liquidity on the interbank market or sell assets at fire sale prices to meet their liquidity needs. Interbank market freeze and contagion arise in equilibrium as consequence of uncertainty of the counterparty risk and miscoordination in the sell of assets. Finally, the third paper written together with Mariana Khapko analyzes the issue of debt overhang in a Leland(1994) type of model and shows how the presence of a credit rating agency can mitigate this problem to some extent. Our results point out to the fact that a firm with performance sensitive debt in place might find it worthwhile to invest earlier in better projects whenever the investment reduces the coupon payments. The effect of the credit rating agency’s policy in the underinvestment issue is nevertheless non-monotonic.
This thesis investigates the social dimension of entrepreneurial activity, showing the importance of embeddedness with local communities and institutions in affecting corporate strategies. The first two chapters contribute to the literature on family firms. The focus on family businesses allows us to study the importance of non-pecuniary benefits and costs attached to control, which are tightly linked to the degree of personal accountability that shareholders have for the actions of the company. The two chapters both use a difference-in-difference identification strategy to study how employment policies, and access to bank lending, differed between family and non-family firms during the recent economic and financial crisis. In particular, the first chapter looks at the geographical distribution of workforce adjustments, finding evidence of a systematic preference in family firms for job preservation and job creation close to their headquarters. The second chapter shows how the presence of a family block-holder had a positive effect in mitigating the adverse effects of the credit crunch. The third chapter of the thesis instead studies the importance of shared norms and values arising at the level of local social networks in reducing the uncertainty involved in hiring new workers. Specifically, it shows that a shared community of origin between employers and employees positively affects both the likelihood of retaining a job after a takeover and the economic performance of the acquiring firm.
The dissertation is about the genesis of the Ottoman Constitution, which was promulgated on December 23, 1876. The main objective is to reconstruct the nineteenth-century Ottoman constitutional movement in relation to Europe and international politics without neglecting the internal administrative developments that affected the process. The dissertation traces the transcultural and transnational dimension of the internal process of the genesis of the Ottoman Constitution and shows that the Ottoman constitutional movement developed beyond the control of Ottoman bureaucracy and state apparatus, through a web of relations that exceeded the boundaries of the Ottoman territory. The movement incorporated, from domestic authorities to foreign powers, a plurality of formal and informal agents of different ethno-religious, cultural and ideological backgrounds and of different legal norms. The dissertation investigates how Ottoman reformers synthesised different legal traditions, imported from the West to the Ottoman context through various human channels, and how the Ottomans' constitutional thought was shaped and negotiated by the encounter of European models with the imperial political culture as well as by the encounter of foreign actors with domestic draftsmen.
This thesis analyses the functioning of Soviet rule in the Uzbek Soviet republic from 1945 to 1964. Thereby, it focuses on the effects of two fundamental forces that characterised Soviet rule in Uzbekistan: On the one hand, the Moscow leadership held a strong claim to power resulting in quasi-imperial practices to ensure the implementation of central government interests in the Uzbek Soviet republic. On the other hand, even during the Stalinist dictatorship, the Uzbek periphery was subject to a continuous integration into the Soviet Union through central government investment in all spheres of the country in the name of communism. This ambivalence of Soviet rule was accompanied by the condition of limited statehood. Yet, instead of merely understanding limited statehood as a sign of weakness of the Soviet state or as opposition to the Soviet project on side of the Uzbeks, the thesis uses limited statehood as an analytical concept to provide a better understanding of the centre-periphery relations in the Soviet Union. The thesis thus contributes to a growing body of literature on the late-Stalin and the Khrushchev periods and sheds light not only on the tremendous changes Soviet rule had for Uzbek society, but also on the changes and continuities in its form under Stalin and Khrushchev.
This thesis offers a contribution to the economic literature applying a networks perspective to economic issues. The focus of my thesis is the role of agents that are in particularly prominent positions within networks and how such agents affect the creation and workings of their surrounding networks. In Chapter 1 I study bargaining and exchange in a networked market with intermediation. Possibilities to trade are restricted through a network of existing relationships and traders bargain over the division of available gains from trade along feasible network routes. Using a stochastic model of bargaining, I characterise stationary equilibrium payoffs and study efficiency and the relationship between network structure and payoffs. In Chapter 2 I study the role of intermediaries in network formation. Intermediating agents can conduct  introductions  and create a connection between two agents that share them as a common neighbour. Such introductions leverage the existing structure and are formed at lower cost than non-mediated connections. I study the properties of networks formed from the perspective of myopic stability, farsighted stability and through a game of link formation. In Chapter 3, co-authored with Anja Prummer, we offer a perspective on opinion leadership in influence networks. We study the integration of immigrant communities through a model with distinct channels for social influence and skills acquisition, which act as complements in the integration process.
Structural vector autoregressions are of great importance in applied macroeconometric work. The main di culty associated with structural analysis is to identify unique shocks of interest. In a conventional approach this is done via zero or sign restrictions. Heteroskedasticity is proposed for use in identi cation. Under certain assumptions when volatility of shocks changes over time, unique shocks can be obtained. Then formal testing of the restrictions and impulse response analysis can be performed. In this thesis I show how identi cation via heteroskedasticity can be used in di erent contexts. In the rst chapter I analyze the dynamics of trade balances in response to macroeconomic shocks. I show that identifying restrictions, which are known in the literature, are rejected for two out of seven countries. Partially identi ed models fail to provide enough information to fully identify shocks. The second chapter, coauthored with my supervisor, demonstrates how one can bene t from identi cation via heteroskedasticity when sign restrictions are used. The approach is illustrated with a model of the crude oil market. It is shown that shocks identi ed via previously known sign restrictions are in line with the properties of the data. Use of tighter restrictions uncovers that the approach can be discriminative. The third chapter reconsiders the con icting results in the debate on the e ects of technology shocks on hours worked. Using six ways of identifying technology shocks, I nd that not all of them are supported by the data. There is no clear-cut evidence in favor of positive reaction of hours to technology shocks. However, it is plausible for real wage and disentangled investment-speci c and neutral technology shocks, even though conventional identi cation of the latter shocks is rejected.
Despite law’s many failures, we see it being deployed everywhere both at the domestic and the international level. This thesis approaches that puzzle and attempts to provide a better understanding of the role of law in society through the concept of juridification. I conceive the problem of juridification of Western societies in qualitative rather than quantitative/managerial terms. This conceptual strategy allows me to challenge the literature on de-regulation and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms concluding that, contrary to common wisdom, these counter-movements to juridification actually reinforce it. I argue that the coupling between judicial review and the constitutionalisation of rights produced a qualitative change in the role of law that enabled the legal system to supersede the political one. This leads to a lock-in situation where the legal system has the capacity of deciding its own reach, thereby becoming, with qualifications, autopoietic. This historical narrative also shows that, contrary to autopoietic theory, juridification is not a purely legally endogenous process. The expanded role of law in society is not without problems. I show how European case law extended state liability in domestic legal orders replacing the once predominant public-interest justifications by the one size fits all” rights talk. For the same reason, while often heralded as a sign of progress, I demonstrate how a rights-based social order is plagued by practical problems. In particular, I focus on the way in which three projects advanced to solve conflicts of rights / balancing, specification and trumps / hide its fundamental agonistic nature. Finally, I evaluate recent conceptualizations of international juridification. I focus on: (i) the inadequacy of the evolutionary metaphor; (ii) the complications behind importing systems theory to the international level and; and, (iii) the lack of a political community and a shared meaning of what law is.
Human rights are among the chief values on which the EU is ‘founded’ (Art. 6 TEU) and which it seeks to promote through its external relations (Art. 21 TEU). Coherence with values is a significant rhetorical tool which is used, on the one hand, to justify the development of new policies and instruments, and, on the other hand, to challenge EU actions by civil society, the European Parliament, commentators, but also third countries. This thesis examines whether human rights are indeed a ‘silver thread’ running through everything that EU does as argued by the EU High Representative. To that end, I first analyze why coherence as such, and coherence with values in particular, hold an important place in the EU’s foreign policy integration. As a second step, I discuss the nature of human rights as an international and EU framework for coherent action. I then investigate one particular area of EU external action, namely counter-terrorism policy, with a view to assessing coherence with values in practice, and more specifically to analyzing how successful the EU actually was in integrating human rights in its counter-terrorism instruments such as sanctions, provisions of its international agreements, and external assistance. On this basis, I outline in the third part the legal and policy aspects of human rights coherence, before concluding with the steps which still need to be taken in order to ‘weave a silver thread’ of human rights into EU external policy.
Early Modern Professors of Law in the Holy Roman Empire were more than mere teachers. In judicial matters they were called upon to judge and speak justice / especially in witch-trials. This study focuses on bridging discourses of demonology as they were elaborated and taught at Protestant universities in Northern Germany with the social and cultural sphere of the professors. By coupling an intellectual approach to theories of witchcraft, the role of the Devil and demons, with micro-historical investigations into the social and cultural practices of professors engaged in theorising and judging witchcraft, this study renders a more complex and nuanced contribution to the history of the university, its epistemic culture as well as its impact on its surroundings. This study traces the academic discourses of demonology from the high-times of orthodox belief and persecution to that of scepticism and reform. It does so by focusing on the demonological argumentation and the scientific methods employed by Hermann Goehausen (1593-1632), Heinrich Bode (1652-1720), and Christian Thomasius (1655-1728). What comes to the fore is a system of beliefs that accommodated the Devil, demons and witches in compatible and consistent ways with other intellectual dealings until academic practices, including the rendering of legal decisions in witch-trials and new methods of scientific enquiry (the purging of Scholastic Aristotelianism in the context of the Early German Enlightenment) necessitated a reconsideration of the theoretical principles underpinning the theological, philosophical and political aspects of demonology.
European integration challenges the social boundaries of nation states and this phenomenon is not without consequences for individual attitudes. Within public debate, the impact of European integration on the welfare states has been extensively discussed, but we still lack conclusive analysis of the consequences for individual support for Europe. This thesis is an attempt to complement our knowledge on the logics of support for European integration. It investigates how individuals account for the economic and social consequences of integration and documents the logic underlying one the most salient issues in the present debate on Europe: redistribution. It investigates the individual and structural effects of redistribution on attitudes towards Europe, with a particular emphasis on how these effects develop across time and across different national contexts. Specifically, this study determines under what conditions European integration is perceived by citizens as a threat to national welfare regimes, and what are the consequences in terms of political allegiance. The causal mechanism is tested at three levels and over three different periods: at the European level (public opinion in Europe Twelve) and from 1986 to 2010, at the national level (public opinion in the Member states of Europe Fifteen), from 1996 to 2006, at the individual level, in 2009, in the twenty seven Member states of the European Union. Findings show that social protection has both structural and individual level effects on support for Europe, providing a narrative for changes in the level of support for Europe over time and explaining a large share of between-country differences, at the aggregate level. At the individual level, both welfare regimes and welfare issues have a strong impact on support for Europe. When it comes to social protection, the European Union works like a distant, yet strong, threat for individuals.
Comment un fait obtient-il force contraignante? Pourquoi la réalité sociale se transforme-t-elle en règle juridique? Telle est la question principale de l’étude. D’après sa première hypothèse de travail, l’élément volitif, bien que toujours présent, ne conditionne pas la genèse de la coutume -la deuxième hypothèse relative à cette même question étant que, la norme coutumière étant dépendante de la nécessité sociale, elle ne lui doit pas seule sa normativité, mais aussi les limites de son effet. Mais, si l’on conclut que la volonté étatique, bien qu’influente, ne suffit pas à elle seule pour donner au fait social la force normative, pourquoi faut-il exclure du processus coutumier les autres sujets du droit international, à savoir les organisations internationales et le facteur dit privé? Quant à la question de l’étude, qualifiée de préliminaire, celle-ci dérive du besoin de délimiter l’objet et la méthodologie de l’analyse. La coutume est-elle une source du droit positif? Afin d’examiner cette question, l’étude introduit une autre hypothèse de travail, d’après laquelle le juge joue un rôle central dans la positivité de la coutume, à la fois en tant que règle juridique, qu’en tant que source du droit. La norme coutumière est posée car, comme toute « règle » sociale, que celle-ci soit juridisée ou non, elle est créée, voire construite par la société, par tous et par personne en même temps. Cependant, en tant que tel, le fait social oscille toujours entre l’être et le devoir être, le fait et le droit. Ce qui lui manque, c’est la « positivité » dans le sens d’une forme certificatrice de la genèse d’une obligation juridique. De fait, tel est le rôle joué par le juge - international en premier lieu -, lorsque celui-ci reconnaît la juridicité du fait coutumier.
In this thesis, I analyse justifications for preferential admission to citizenship based upon ethno-cultural grounds. My point of departure is the puzzling observation that, in matters of membership, states not only differentiate between citizens and foreigners, but also between different categories of foreigners, as well as between different categories of citizens. In the first part of this work, I explore possible justifications for boundaries of membership. I look into arguments of justice, nationalism, liberalism and democracy in order to identify principles for demarcating boundaries and for assessing various claims of inclusion/exclusion. In the second part, I address more specific questions related to the regulation of admission to citizenship. For this purpose, I examine a set of concrete rules of citizenship presently enforced by 27 EU countries. My proposal is to overcome the boundary problem by shifting the focus from the constitution of the boundary towards policies of boundary making. I affirm the principle of general openness of membership that is intended to provide normative corrections to the actual structure of boundaries. Against the common view that perceives citizenship as a fruit that is soft on the inside and hard on the outside, I argue that citizenship should be seen as soft on the inside and even softer on the outside. In order to respond to different claims of admission, I suggest breaking up the unitary concept of citizenship and distinguishing between legal, political, and identity memberships. This proposal is not meant to weaken or devaluate citizenship, but to reaffirm its essentially political value. By rejecting ideas of automatic and inherited citizenship and by insisting upon democratic recognition and commitment to political membership, I aim at recasting admission to citizenship as a transformative process through which individuals not merely receive membership but become members in a political community.
The years between 1850 and 1918 in Britain saw the ascendancy of political Liberalism. The same period in Italy included the central years of the Risorgimento, a process of economic, social and cultural revival during which foreign rulers were expelled from the Italian peninsula, and the various Italian states unified. The aim of the thesis is to trace the Victorian debate on the Italian Question – the question of whether, if and how Italy might be united as a single nation – in order to shed new light on English Liberal culture, understood both as a system of governing values and as the common languages and media through which these were communicated.
This thesis was written out of the desire to gain a deeper understanding of competition in imperfect markets, in particular oligopolies. Firms have many possible strategies at their disposal that may effect present and future payoffs, and the structure of their markets. In the first two chapters we study R&D and innovation, that have received an ever increasing amount of interest, for a variety of market frameworks, including Cournot and Bertrand oligopoly, and repeated patent races. Here firms compete by innovating; we study how they do it, and in which direction competition will evolve. Still, many questions remain unanswered even in now classic static models of oligopoly, as the Cournot oligopoly, which he have used as a building block in the first two chapters. In chapter 3, we set out to examine the equally classical questions of existence and uniqueness of equilibrium, and the reaction of the market to the entry of new firms. Our analysis is innovative since it deals with heterogeneous goods and makes use of a very new set of methods.
In 1962 in an article published in Foreign Affairs eminent Italian Federalist Altiero Spinelli noted that ‘Western Europe, thanks to American protection, has become a paradise of political, military and social irresponsibility’. The political dominance of NATO during the Cold War prevented the creation of a strong independent European defence. The NATO and the United States military guarantees to Europe on the one hand gave the Europeans the opportunity to concentrate more on economic and social issues, but on the other prevented Europe from creating common defence institutions and closer political Union, which from a long term perspective would have been more valuable than NATO.
This thesis looks at the issue of growth and technology adoption in two areas, Örstly the impact of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and secondly the optimal protection of intellectual property rights in a world of cross-country income differences.
This dissertation suggests a new theory of lex mercatoria that takes into account the complex and spontaneous order of international commerce. Since the emphasis is put on the nature of this order, the concept of lex mercatoria is examined as an ex post governance mechanism resolving contractual disputes with a view to maintaining and restoring the order of international commerce, without focusing on the traditional distinction of the doctrine between national and non-national legal rules applicable to the substance of such disputes in explaining the concept. The aim is to reflect lex mercatoria’s subtle effect on the practice of international arbitration, and to provide an explanation of lex mercatoria as a solution to the problems of the institution of international arbitration in terms of uncertainty and unpredictability of awards, rather than representing it as a factor aggravating those problems. Lex mercatoria is defined as the law of adjudication of the disputes arising from international commercial contracts on the basis of a few substantive and procedural principles, under which the reasonable expectations of the parties to a particular contract become the single source of their contractual rights, obligations and risk allocations. The argument is that lex mercatoria can be applied to both the choice of law analyses and the substance of the disputes in international arbitration. In choice of law analyses, lex mercatoria addresses specific difficulties relating to the conflict of laws through a principled decision making, such as the applicable conflict rules, and the interpretation of the parties’ intentions as to the applicable substantive rules. In its substantive application, lex mercatoria deals with, either as lex contractus or as lex fori, the interpretation, supplementation and correction of the contract as well as the applicable national laws in accordance with the basic principles, on which the order of international commerce rests.
The object of this thesis is Europeans’ orientations to democracy. It is argued in this dissertation that an important variable has been missed in the literature, namely, citizens’ cognitive support for democracy. By including this concept in the analysis of Europeans’ support for democracy, a number of aspects which had been much uncertain until now are inspected. First, conceptual clarification of support for democracy is possible, by distinguishing different types of orientations to democracy. Second, and from an empirical perspective, classical indicators of support for democracy are examined, in order to assess for validity. Interesting results have emerged from the analysis: 1. Determining the structure and the levels of affective support for democracy in Europe. The classic churchillian indicator (‘democracy best’) overstates levels of affective support for democracy in Europe. The structure of affective support for democracy is in fact not homogeneous across Europe, but differs substantially from one group of countries to the others. 2. Mapping types of democrats across Europe. There are different types of democrats across Europe, depending on their cognitive orientations to democracy. These are not evenly spread within each country, but there is correspondence between the structure and levels of affective support and the predominant type of democrats in a country. 3. Studying why people are dis-satisfied with democracy in Europe. The congruence hypothesis (are citizens’ orientations to democracy meaningfully related among them?) is tested. Most citizens are indeed fairly congruent: cognitive and affective supports have an impact on the evaluations of their democratic systems. As such, not only is it possible to determine some of the causes of dis-satisfaction with democracy, but also to claim that the indicator of satisfaction with democracy does reasonably well as a measure of general support for the performance of the regime.
In this thesis I explore the question of how the Holy See translates its own normative vision into concrete diplomatic practice. Drawing upon Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of a ‘living tradition’, I argue that Catholic Social Doctrine (CSD) is an exemplary case of a ‘historically extended, socially embodied argument’ about the good life that provides the Holy See with a source of inspiration and advice, shapes its perception of global politics, constitutes its identity and preferences, and constrains its diplomatic practice. However, due to its ‘living’ nature, CSD does not provide blueprints for action and falls short of determining papal diplomacy in global politics. A living religious tradition needs to be inherited, interpreted, and incarnated. This process is complicated and leads to political and ethical policy dilemmas as well as to changing patterns of conflict and cooperation with other international actors. I will examine this problematique in the context of four major case studies of papal diplomacy in the post-Second Vatican Council era: the Vietnam War, the Polish crisis in the early 1980s, the United Nations (UN) conferences on population control and women in Cairo and Beijing in the mid-1990s, and the Jubilee 2000 anti-debt campaign. My research findings have four broader implications. First, they will lay out a more fine-tuned approach to the study of religious traditions in IR. Second, they suggest a need for the field of religion and politics to avoid reducing the impact of religious ideas and practices to their causal impact on outcomes. Third, they undermine the analytical accurateness of widespread invocations of ‘holy alliance’ arguments for characterising Holy See diplomacy. Fourth, they provide good reasons for a more holistic perspective on CSD in particular and religion and politics in general.
This dissertation examines the forms and spaces of entertainment, such as theatres, cinemas and music halls, in Rome between 1911, when celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Italy’s unification took place, and the First World War. This was a time characterized by the emergence of popular and mass culture and by the spread of a specifically nationalist culture that changed dramatically after the war against Libya in 1911.  By adopting a broad definition of "culture,” including both high and low culture, this dissertation explores the ways in which a specific theatrical tradition staged the nation’s history, in particular that of the Risorgimento, after Italian unification. It then broadens the analysis to other forms of entertainment.  This dissertation argues that the 1909-1911 celebrations were marked by a renewed attention to the "patriotic” tradition, and spurred the emergence of new theatrical and cinematographic productions, which became particularly relevant in the context of the First World War, thus giving substance to the "culture de guerre”. I argue that theatre shows and movies avoided representing the violence and suffering that characterized the war, partly because of the existence of various forms of censorship. However, the presence of wounded bodies among the audience gave way to a dual representation, and transformed theatres, cinemas and music halls into privileged spaces where the war and the domestic front met. By taking into account the case-study of a girls’ school, I show the gendered dimension of civil society mobilization.  Finally, this dissertation analyzes the role entertainment played in "building the enemy,” identified with Kultur, and the emergence of a moral discourse about entertainment, which coincided with the spread of popular culture - especially the cinema - and became even stronger and more complex with the outbreak of the First World War.
This thesis studies the interplay between network structure and strategic decision making given the backdrop of economic and social networks. The first two chapters study how firms’ incentives to invest in costly R&D are affected by the pattern of R&D collaborations in a certain industry. These two chapters propose formal models that build upon and enrich the previous literature, which abstracted from two crucial dimensions of the problem. The first chapter introduces the possibility that inter-firm links aiming at R&D collaboration could facilitate market collusion. The second chapter incorporates network-based externalities resulting from informational flows and congestion that are associated with R&D collaborations. These chapters suggest that the benefits of possible inter-firm collaboration must be reevaluated from the point of their welfare consequences. The last chapter aims to improve our understanding of how collective action spreads in large and complex networks in which agents use online social networks as communication tools. To this end, we develop a dynamic game-theoretic model of the “on-set of revolutions” that focuses on the local spread of information in order to study how network structure, knowledge and information-sharing interact in facilitating coordination through online communication networks.
D’un côté de l’échiquier, l’Union européenne, arc-boutée sur la vénérable jurisprudence Internationale Handelsgesellschaft, aspire légitimement, en tant qu’auteur d’un droit commun, à la primauté de l’ensemble de sa production normative sur l’ensemble du droit des États membres, y compris constitutionnel. Elle apparaît à première vue indifférente vis-à-vis de constitutions qui ne seraient que l’expression d’un «narcissisme des petites différences» de mauvais aloi dans un contexte d’unification européenne. De l’autre côté de l’échiquier en revanche, les États membres, après avoir accepté - non sans mal - que les normes de l’Union puissent prévaloir sur les lois nationales même postérieures, restent inflexibles sur la supériorité ultime de leurs constitutions sur tout autre droit. Les juridictions constitutionnelles des États semblent même se coaliser afin d’imposer leurs constitutions respectives comme ultime horizon. Aussi, le conflit apparaît insurmontable. Beaucoup s’y sont essayés en vain: on ne saurait réconcilier l’inconciliable. La litanie est bien connue et peu encourageante. Une telle vision manichéenne - oserons-nous dire dualiste, à moins qu’il ne s’agisse en fin de compte de monisme - occulte cependant l’imbrication qui est déjà à l’œuvre entre la constitution matérielle de l’Union et les constitutions des États. C’est cette imbrication que nous souhaiterions montrer dans cette étude de droit constitutionnel européen et comparé, sous l’angle de l’identité constitutionnelle nationale. Il apparaît en effet que l’identité constitutionnelle des États membres pourrait être cette passerelle tant attendue : en tant qu’elle est à la fois un concept du droit de l’Union et un concept du droit national, elle fait figure de norme de convergence entre ordres juridiques susceptible de fournir une réponse - probablement imparfaite mais néanmoins bienvenue - au conflit constitutionnel. Miracle ou mirage? Tout ne sera finalement qu’affaire de points de vue.
Over the last few years, political and academic attention has focused on the future of copyright at the EU level. Following two decades of piecemeal legislative interventions, which have resulted in a limited harmonisation of the copyright laws of EU Member States, a debate has ensued as to the feasibility and desirability of achieving full copyright harmonisation at the EU level. This might be obtained either through a EU copyright code, encompassing a codification of the present body of EU copyright directives, or by way of a regulation (to be enacted pursuant to new Article 118(1) TFEU), aimed at creating an optional unitary copyright title. Thus far, however, no such legislative initiatives have been undertaken. Despite this impasse, the CJEU has notably been acting in a proactive way, inching towards full harmonisation. With its 2009 decision in Case C-5/08 Infopaq, the Court provided a EU-wide understanding of an important principle of copyright: the originality requirement. The CJEU further elaborated upon this in subsequent case law (notably, Case C-393/09 Bezpečnostní Softwarová Asociace, Joined Cases C-403/08 and C-429/08 Murphy, Case C-145/10 Painer, Case C-604/10 Football Dataco and Case C-406/10 SAS). The meaning of originality adopted by the CJEU as a EU-wide standard is akin to that envisaged in continental Member States’ copyright laws, thus differing from the loose notion of originality under UK law. As such, an examination as to the implications of CJEU harmonising jurisprudence in this Member State shall be undertaken, with regard to the scope of copyright protection and subject-matter categorisation. Overall, this contribution wishes to assess how, and to what extent, CJEU case law has resulted in de facto EU copyright harmonisation. In addition, it will attempt to foresee the fate of EU copyright in light of copyright reform projects which are currently being discussed in political and academic circles both in the US and Europe.
The present dissertation aims at the comparative study agenda-setting (i.e., the impact that media content has on the importance people give to several political and social issues) in Europe. The focus is set in the 2009 European Parliament election campaign period, and one of the central goals is to observe whether the media agenda-setting capacity varies from country to country or not, and why. The hypothetical causes of cross-country variability are the nature of the several European media systems (in terms of development of press markets, freedom of press, journalist professionalization, state intervention, media partisanship) and their effects in the informational environment, both from the perspective of the supply (information quality) and demand (trust in the media). The results show that these macro-level dimensions vary considerably in Europe, and that there is a link between media system dimensions related to politics, information quality and agenda-setting.
Dennis-Jonathan Mann’s thesis contributes to a growing body of literature that uses the framework of comparative federalism to “make sense” of the European Union. On an empirical level, the thesis contrasts the EU discourse with an in-depth analysis of two (historic) cases of nature of the Union debates: that of the (early) United States and Canada. Empirically, a core insight of the study is that the puzzle regarding the nature of the EU is largely misunderstood as being an exceptional or sui generis case. Rather, a (temporary) “state of limbo” is found to be the rule and not the exception in the systems studied. In terms of its theoretical contribution, Dennis-Jonathan Mann’s thesis seeks to overcome the positivistic (and often teleological) approaches prevailing in the field of comparative federalism by drawing upon insights from constructivist epistemology. Thereby, a positivist reliance on “hard facts”, strict typologies and formal institutions can be shifted towards a perspective that allows for an analysis of the debates and discourses about the systems’ alleged “facts” and structures. Hereby, Dennis-Jonathan Mann not only shows remarkable analogies between the three nature of the Union debates, the findings also raise questions over some of the core assumptions found in the European integration literature. Above all, the findings suggest that essentially contested federal systems can be sustained in spite of rivaling concepts regarding their nature and telos, thereby refuting widely held beliefs that the European Union must either “clarify its nature” or fail. Contrary to the latter view, the findings of this thesis actually suggest that—rather than endangering them—a contested nature and constitutional ambiguity is what holds these Unions together and what enables them to “go on”.
The present study offers an analysis of the life and thought of Estêvão Rodrigues de Castro, a Portuguese philosopher and physician working in the court of Grand Duke of Tuscany in early seventeenth century. It traces Rodrigues de Castro’s intellectual development from the time he studied medicine at the University of Coimbra to his activity as a physician in Florence and university professor of medicine in Pisa, showing the connections between his philosophical thought and medical theories and practices and placing these in the cultural context of seventeenth—century Portugal and Tuscany. For a long, historians have attributed a very specific role to Portugal in the history of early-modern philosophy. Ruled by the Tridentine canon, Portuguese culture was seen as dominated by scholasticism and Tridentine theology, a culture based by and large on Aristotelian philosophy. Little (or even none) space for alternative philosophical trends was recognized to exist in Portuguese early-modern culture. This study focusing on the development of philosophical and medical thought of Estêvão Rodrigues de Castro demonstrates that the theory of Portuguese intellectual homogeneity is fundamentally incorrect. The thesis argues that Castro’s thought was characterized by a renewed appropriation of ancient Greek atomistic theories. This innovative theoretical approach was generated in Portuguese context and then incorporated by the Florentine medical actors and institutions. More broadly, this study demonstrates the place and importance of this Portuguese physician in the European cultural framework.
Why do people trust certain political institutions and not others, and how best to account for trust’s relationship with democratic participation? This dissertation focuses on the relationship between democratic participation and deliberation, and its influence on political trust. It is based on a puzzle, showing almost as high a level of trust in the European Union (EU) vis-à-vis the national democracy.1 This finding is counterintuitive. Most recent research on the EU emphasizes a converse relationship. A popular interpretation of “the EU democratic malaise” is that the EU is neither transparent nor understood by its people. Hence people cannot trust it, and they reject or show reluctance towards further integration, for example, in popular referendums or by the very low voter turnout in the European Parliament elections. My initial descriptive findings show a different pattern. People actually trust the EU to quite a high degree in comparison to the trust they place in the national democracy.2 So I ask the question: to what degree does enhanced deliberation and participation lead to increased political trust? Thus, the dissertation tests the relationship between political trust and different kinds of participation. The first part of the dissertation (chapters 1 and 2) places the puzzle in a theoretical context, and provides the framework of the study. Chapter 3 describes Denmark as the study’s case. The second part (chapters 4 and 5) explores the research questions empirically through OLS regression analysis and laboratory experiments. The study has two main conclusions:  The relationship between trust and deliberation and participation is curvilinear. If provided with too much or too little deliberative participation, people have less political trust.  Differences exist between what constitutes trust at the EU level and the national level as well as between different cultures and different political systems.
This PhD thesis analyses the ways in which technological and scientific knowledge was acquired, circulated and employed in Renaissance Europe, and how technological innovation was practiced at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. Janello Torriani (b. Cremona ca.1500 – d. Toledo 1585) was a craftsman from a minor centre of Northern Italy. In his late forties he was employed in the capital of the duchy of Milan at the service of the imperial governor. This was the first prestigious stage of a career that later took him to the imperial court of Charles V and later that of the Spanish ruler Philip II: a very late but remarkable professional blooming. Torriani created a number of technological devices that were hailed by contemporaries as mechanical marvels, such as the Microcosm, the most complex and compact planetary clock ever built, and the first gigantic machine: the Toledo Device (a 300 meter complex structure that could elevate water for a good 100 meters)1. Moreover, Torriani participated in the Gregorian reform of the calendar, contributing a tract and mathematical instruments for calculus. Further mathematical and mechanical endeavours included a waterworks-survey, celestial observations, automata and other curious clockworks. Historiography so far has mainly investigated Torriani as part of a narrative of Renaissance genius. The category of genius has been extremely popular in accounts dealing with the problematic and multi-faceted notion of Renaissance. Yet, it has little to offer when it comes to research that seeks to construct the social and cultural contexts in which careers as rich in innovation and craftsmanship as Torriani’s was, were moulded. This thesis aims to observe an existing topic - Janello Torriani’s career - through a new perspective. My PhD is thus intended as an essay in the social and cultural history of knowledge, and especially in its declination of technological innovation.
This dissertation explores the social and cultural history of two Anatolian famines in the late-Ottoman Empire, situating them in the economic and political environment of the 1870s. It focuses on the central Anatolian famine of 1873/75 and the eastern Anatolian famine of 1879/81. It investigates how and why these disasters emerged, and how the local, imperial and foreign actors in Ottoman lands experienced and perceived them. It argues that particular socio-economic and political environments transformed droughts and natural events into severe disasters. It is at the crossroads of social, cultural and environmental history, but focuses more on relationships between people than relations between people and nature. Thus, despite the fact that it draws on environmental historical sources and findings in several instances, it mainly contributes to the social and cultural history and narratives of Ottoman Anatolia. It asks the following questions: 1) How did the famines impact the everyday lives of various communities in central and eastern Anatolia? 2) How were the famines perceived by imperial, local and foreign actors? 3) In what ways did these disasters threaten the internal and external legitimacy of the Ottoman state? 4) How did the famines create the conditions for the emergence of social clashes, and also for the development of solidarities within and between different communities? It demonstrates that famine led to simultaneous cases of violence and solidarity. Economic problems crosscut religious-ethnic tensions  and socio-economic problems and ordinary political complaints, when merged with famine, were expressed as communal tensions as well as solidarities. Famine was not the sole reason for this  however, it became one of the most significant triggers of social, political, ethnic and religious unrest in the following decades in a region already exhausted by war-time requisitons, plundering, violence and poverty.
This thesis presents a re-interpretation of the role played by latifundia in Italian economic history based on a new theory of the effects of land inequality, namely that high landownership concentration leads to market power in rural factor markets in the presence of restrictions to factor mobility. According to such a view, market power had basically distributive effects and did not imply any technical inefficiency in agricultural production. Thus, while severely distorting factor returns in latifundia areas, land inequality is unlikely to have caused Southern backwardness, at least from a static point of view. The model is fully confirmed by a new database on land inequality, output and factor prices encompassing all local labour markets of Italy at the end of the 1930s. From a technical (TFP) point of view, indeed, Southern agriculture in interwar years cannot be considered more inefficient than the Northern one, which used much higher quantities of both capital and labour per hectare. Thus, at the present stage of the research, a factor-lead accumulation process seems to be a better candidate for the North-South agricultural divergence that happened during the first half of the twentieth century. A mechanism in the spirit of Von Thünen linking output and input intensity, as well as rents, to access to markets fully accounts for such a process and is strongly confirmed by the spatial patterns of Italian agriculture around 1930.
Why were the Tarocchi cards invented? Historiography gives two disjunctive answers: gaming and fortunetelling. This thesis offers a third original answer. Tarocchi as Renaissance Memory Places shows that these figurative playing cards, invented during midquattrocento at the courts of Milan and Ferrara, were mnemonic systems created for educational purposes such as the remembrance and reconstruction of the past (reminding of the family biography and genealogy, the moral values reflected through virtues and mythology). They were influenced by and influenced the contemporary mnemonic literature, while opening the European pedagogical cards tradition. The following variant of cultural history offers an eclectic, comparative and crossdisciplinary approach, being a meeting place for history and literature, art of memory and gender, visual and textual analysis. The analysis focuses on two major aspects of the art of memory in relation to the Tarocchi cards: the visual content and the decks formation. These two aspects do not exclude, but complement each other. The content, the Tarocchi imagery, as chapters 4 and 5 will show, is moral, pedagogical and genealogical. Chapters 6-11 look mostly at the formation of the decks, arguing that they were mnemonic systems. The thesis is moving from a more generic understanding of “memory” (chapters 4 and 5), to a particular, technical understanding of the “mnemonics” (chapters 6-10) and then focuses on the very specific aspect of mnemonic games (chapter 11, dedicated to the Appropriati lists). The chapters differ in respect to both subject and methodology. The decks discussed are from quattrocento. Chapter 11 makes a chronological exception, including primary sources from cinquecento to settecento.
This thesis investigates the implications of imbalances within a monetary union. In the first chapter, I study how international financial frictions lead to international imbalances and affect optimal fiscal policy in a two-country, two-good DSGE model of a monetary union. I show that the presence of international imbalances affects the optimal conduct of cooperative fiscal policies when the traded goods are complements. Government expenditures optimally play a cross-country risk sharing role which is in conflict with the domestic stabilization role: optimal fiscal policy consists in setting government expenditures such as to reduce international imbalances at the expense of higher domestic inefficiencies. In the second chapter, I assess the implications of strategic fiscal policy interactions in a two-country DSGE model of a monetary union with nominal rigidities and international financial frictions. I show that the fiscal policy makers face an incentive to set fiscal policy such as to switch the terms of trade in their favour. This incentive results in a Nash equilibrium characterized by excessive inflation differentials as well as sub-optimally high current account imbalances within the monetary union. There are thus non-negligeable welfare losses associated with strategic fiscal policy making in a monetary union. The third chapter investigates empirically the degree of risk sharing in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), using two different methods. The first measure relates to the capacity of consumption smoothing. This measure indicates that risk sharing is rather low and that the introduction of the common currency did not lead to higher intra-EMU risk sharing. The second measure is based on the welfare losses associated with deviations from full risk sharing. These welfare losses have fallen since the introduction of the common currency. However, this is mostly due to changes in macroeconomic risk - not to changes in risk sharing per se.
This thesis focuses on three distinct topics around healthcare and ageing. The first chapter assess the effectiveness of the current regime that regulates the entry and geographical distribution of pharmacies in Italy. Using a structural model from the recent literature on entry I find that the public interest view is not supported in the Italian case. Alternative policies that combine entry deregulation and markup reduction are found to achieve the same if not better geographical coverage by pharmacies, higher supply of pharmaceutical services, entry by new pharmacists and important government savings. The second chapter seeks to see whether financial literacy can be a factor that affects demand for private long-term care insurance. Using detailed data from the Health and Retirement Study I construct two comprehensive indices for financial literacy that capture various aspects and degrees of financial skills and knowledge. Using an instrumental variables approach I find that those with higher financial literacy are more likely to own private long-term care insurance. The third chapter investigates the effect of gradual retirement on a variety of health outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity approach I find that partial retirement has a preserving health effect in old age contrary to full time work that is found to deteriorate health. The effect of partial retirement on health is in fact larger in magnitude, suggesting that the health effects of working are non linear in old age.
Islamist activism is on the rise across the Middle East and North Africa. In the light of the post-revolutionary elections in Egypt and Tunisia, Islamist parties are sweeping the polls supported by the overwhelming majority of voters. This dissertation investigates the dynamic of this support for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The explanation of individual activists’ motivation behind this form of middle-class activism has been investigated by exploring individual beliefs, emotions and identities. Activists’ motivational explanations and representation do not develop in a vacuum, outside of a specific context. Explaining the configuration of collective action therefore requires an analysis of a pattern of social characteristics using a spectrum of social movement theories. The long-term contentious relationship between the various Egyptian authoritarian regimes and the Muslim Brotherhood produced an Islamist resistance culture with a particular set of incitements for would be activists. Middle-class activists have primarily been motivated by the Brotherhood’s ability to educate its followers through a multi-stage membership process. During this process youth activists have acquired a strengthened sense of individual purpose. They also possess organizational skills and have successfully ascended the social ladder, leading to a feeling of moral superiority and a degree of personal autonomy even within an authoritarian sociopolitical context. The social movement organization serves as a facilitator of structured dissent and its success depends ultimately on its ability to recognize the basic needs of a frustrated population. Sympathizers of a particular social movement organization in turn seek realistic forms of dissent which correspond to their system of values and practices.
The musical genre of Italian oratorio—unacted, sung drama in two parts on a hagiographic, biblical, or moral plot—witnessed a great boom of interest in the priod around years around 1900 and the decades around 1700. During the first of these two periods the roots of its modern historiography were laid. One of the characteristics that emerge from both the historiography and performance tradition of Italian oratorio is its ambiguous position between the sacred and the secular spheres. The thesis argues that this was a defining characteristic of the genre as such, and that it was among the things that contributed to the popularity of the genre in the decades around in 1700. Its perceived ambiguities as a genre allowed it to be employed in and adapted to widely different performance contexts. It is further argued that the signification, function, and adaptability of the genre best emerge from studying how one and the same work was used in various differences places and circumstances. The thesis takes therefore as its basis the study of what it calls the use histories of a corpus of six librettos. By tracing how these six texts and the musical settings they engendered functioned in different contexts, a more precise picture emerges of these works’ (and the genre’s) versatility. Simultaneously, the use histories of these works highlight the relative importance of the ‘musical work’ compared to the specifics of performances, as well as add an element to a broader history of the circulation of objects in early modern Europe.
Located at the point of intersection of Northern, Eastern and Central Europe, the Baltic Sea Region has historically been a setting of an, at times, vivid exchange between the shores of the small inland sea. Challenging the perception of the region as a merely peripheral borderland of the Cold War in Europe, the present study aims to investigate to what degree the Baltic waterways maintained their specific entangling function in an era largely characterised by demarcation and disintegration. In order to move beyond the bipolar pattern that still dominates Cold War historiography, this study focuses on networks and channels of communication that could develop underneath the level of the official political relations across the Baltic Sea. The neutral Nordic states are in this context seen as a so far underestimated but crucial element in the geopolitical constellation of Cold War Europe. The proximity of Sweden and Finland to their Polish and Soviet opposite coasts and the comparatively low level of political tensions in the region triggered an exceptionally dynamic field of interaction, which was fuelled by the vigorous anti-communist activism of the numerous Polish and Baltic exiles in neutral Sweden. In a chronological framework that covers half a century of resistance and opposition against the geopolitical status quo, the study will reconstruct a topography of uncontrolled communication between the societies around the Baltic rim that hitherto has received undeservedly little attention. Based on so far mostly unexplored archival sources and oral history interviews, the thesis aims to present the first synthesis of the Baltic Sea Region’s Cold War history. It is supposed to form a counter-narrative to the prevailing emphasis on disintegration and conflict and constitutes a first step towards a European Cold War history that efficiently challenges the topos of the Iron Curtain as an impermeable barrier.
This dissertation will investigate the emergence of an Egyptian Jewish bourgeoisie and its multi-layered imaginary in the period that goes from the 1880s up to the 1950s. More precisely, the research will aim to clarify how a largely imagined bourgeois identity emerged among the Jews, looking at schools, family life, gender, sociability, and how all this interweaved with processes of social and cultural change that invested the urban societies of Egypt and the Middle East. Last but not least, the dissertation will show how old and new ideas merged, and to what extent binary oppositions such as tradition/modernity, Jews/non-Jews, local/foreign might not be appropriate to fully understand the Egyptian Jewish past. It will be argued that a porous and in-between approach seems much more pertinent for historicizing the Jews, and reconsider the role that they had in modern Egypt and in the Mediterranean at large. Focus will be placed on details and events that occurred at a micro level, paying attention to practices, discourses, and feelings disseminated along the history of modern Egyptian Jews. The study of the latter will be integrated into a narrative that reconceptualizes the notions of centre and periphery, attesting to the existence of histories that traversed the Mediterranean and moved from Europe to the Middle East, and vice versa. In so doing, the investigation of this case study will also clarify aspects of the modern cultural and family history of the Middle East and its Jewish communities.
Casanova’s memoirs have inspired an incredible number of books, commentaries, and creative reinterpretations. While the reception of this text in literature has been analyzed in many studies, relatively little attention was paid to the analysis of films based on the book. The aim of this thesis is to fill in this gap. The study argues that film adaptations of a text can be regarded as part of its general reception and treated as creative reinterpretations which explore the potential meanings of the original and are anchored in a certain context that they inevitably reflect. These theoretical and methodological issues are addressed in the first part of the thesis. The second and third parts are dedicated to the analysis of the structure of Casanova's Histoire de ma Vie and its four screen adaptations (the films of Alexandre Volkoff, 1927, Luigi Comencini, 1969, Federico Fellini, 1976, and Ennio Flaiano's script of 1968), respectively. The study demonstrates how the semantic exploration of the original text in each case was influenced by various extra-textual factors: production determinants, aesthetic and genre issues, the filmmaker's tastes and background, the cultural environment, etc. It shows how the perception of Casanova changed over the 20th century and analyzes the mechanisms which determined these changes. The thesis thus advances our knowledge and understanding of the European cultural history and can be regarded as a case study which contributes to the theoretical discussion of film adaptations as a branch of reception studies.
This thesis argues that the present provisions on public enforcement are inadequate for the effective promotion of compliance with Community law and seeks to provide solutions in order to improve them. Article 226 and 228 EC are both cumbersome and lengthy, particularly with regard to environmental protection. In order to reach this conclusion, the thesis reviews the subject of the enforcement procedure, the infringement itself. It gives a definition of compliance and offers reasons why and how Member States comply or fail to comply with Community rules. It analyses the Commission's role in applying the public enforcement mechanism, before it reviews the problems occurring in the application of Article 228, as the “ultima ratio ultimae rationis” in infringement procedures. Although the Commission attempted several times to clarify the application of that Article, there are still open questions. Environment is the field of law which produces the most enforcement problems and if we find solutions to them, we may be able to use the experiences in other sectors, too. After introducing the main approaches promoting compliance, it is argued that more attention needs to be paid to enforcement than to the managerial approach. Reviewing the managerial instruments reveals that they are more powerful when complemented by enforcement means. Consequently, the thesis focuses upon the latter methods, by referring to the case law on Article 228, which demonstrates the success of the public enforcement procedure. The enforcement mechanism, however, is not perfect, thus a variety of solutions is proposed to make it more effective. Along the lines of the amendments introduced in the Treaty of Lisbon, some improvements to these articles are proposed together with a so-called urgency measure, which empowers the Commission to stop – at an early stage – an infringement that might otherwise mean irreparable damage to the environment.
This PhD thesis takes issue with the practice of enforced disappearance as a multiple and complex human rights violation and covers various topics related to enforced disappearance. The point of departure is the historical development of the UN reaction to enforced disappearance and the creation of special mechanisms within that organization, which were drawn up in order to confront this practice. Linking the main theme with public international law, the thesis continues with the examination of the sources of law, both treaty and customary based, and juxtaposes the definitions of enforced disappearance that are found in international instruments with a view to ascertaining whether any discrepancies exist. In the subsequent chapters, the main methodological tool is the cross-jurisdictional comparative and interpretive assessment of the practice of three different human rights bodies, namely of the Human Rights Committee, the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In this connection, the thesis identifies the areas of convergence and divergence in the work of these bodies. Further, the thesis also engages in the discussion of two significant topics that are directly related to the general theme, namely the right to truth and the phenomenon of extraordinary renditions. With regard to the right to truth, the main focus is on the interplay of this right with amnesty laws. At the same time the latter’s compatibility with international law is examined. As for extraordinary renditions, the argument that is advanced is that this phenomenon is a new form of enforced disappearance and that it must be confronted as such. Overall, the thesis centres on the UN Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances and assess the evolution of human rights protection that this convention brings about.
This thesis examines the added value of the fundamental right to data protection within the EU legal order when law enforcement measures are at stake. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the concept of data protection, its underlying values and aims, and the approaches to this right. It discusses the current theories and the existing case-law on data protection by identifying their shortcomings. It introduces a new theory on data protection that reconstructs the right and reshapes in a clear and comprehensive manner its understanding. The thesis tests the added value of the ‘reconstructed’ right to data protection in the most difficult context: law enforcement and counter-terrorism. Three specific case-studies of data processing in the field of law enforcement are used: 1) the information collection  2) the information storage  and, 3) the information transfer case. The information collection case discusses the EU Data Retention Directive and addresses the conceptual confusions between the rights to privacy and data protection that surround it, before turning to a substantive fundamental rights assessment of the Directive. The information storage case examines the added value of the fundamental right to data protection in the context of the access of law enforcement authorities to information stored on EU-scale databases such as the second generation Schengen Information System (SIS II), the Visa Information System (VIS) and Eurodac. Finally, the information transfer case discusses the role of the rights to privacy and data protection with regard to the transfer of data from the EU to the US for counterterrorism purposes. In this context, it addresses the EU-US PNR and TFTP cases.
This thesis deals with the protection of landscape in international law. It focuses mainly on Europe. Landscape has gained increasing importance on the international stage since the inclusion of ‘cultural landscapes’ within the scope of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention in 1992. ‘Cultural landscapes’ were to give recognition to the intangible and associative values attached to certain landscapes, to sustainable agricultural practices and to ‘people and communities’ – essentially the human dimension of landscape. This shift has come full circle with the adoption of the European Landscape Convention in 2000. The European Landscape Convention conceives of landscape above all as a people’s landscape and accordingly, provides for the active participation of the public in the formulation of plans and polices. It not only focuses on outstanding landscapes, but also on the everyday and degraded landscapes where most people live and work. This brings landscape back to its early etymological origins and has a number of implications for human rights, democracy and access to justice. With this in mind, the thesis then explores the interplay between landscape and human rights from cultural, environmental and procedural rights perspectives. It demonstrates that outside the indigenous context, a ‘right to landscape’ is difficult to articulate in cultural rights terms. This is illustrated by the two cases studies (Tara and Rospuda), through a comparative analysis of the case law of a number of regional human rights courts and through the work of the UN Human Rights Committees. The thesis highlights how such a right is also difficult from an environmental rights perspective – since the very existence of a right to the environment itself is not well-established. In conclusion, it is the procedural environmental rights – such as participation and access to justice – which offer most scope for the protection of landscape in Europe.
Combating nuclear weapons proliferation involves diplomacy, nuclear safety and security, disarmament measures, intelligence, effective safeguards, and many other strategies. One of the most important non-proliferation measures is the control of nuclear trade. Nuclear export controls constitute the various measures managing the trade of nuclear technology, materials, and equipment, and analyzing how to strengthen this important non-proliferation tool forms the research question of this thesis. The observations and arguments presented in the following chapters attest to the conclusion that strengthening export controls to combat the global problem of nuclear proliferation, whether by the activities of informal regimes or states acting bilaterally or multilaterally in the trade of nuclear goods, lies in effectively implementing domestic nuclear export control measures on a national level. The original contribution of this thesis to existing knowledge on the subject is an in-depth, analytical study of the role of nuclear export controls in stemming nuclear weapons proliferation, and in particular the presentation of this topic from a legal dimension in order to propose, throughout the work, tools for viable policy options, as well as the policy options themselves.
This thesis analyzes the role of private regulation in European integration. Taking three selected sectors – payments, professionals and housing – as a testing ground, this thesis portrays the actual functioning of private regulation in the EU and looks at the mutual correlation between the process of European integration and private regulation. The study follows along the European and national lines in three countries: Germany, Poland and the UK. The role of private actors in European integration has not been duly acknowledged in the Treaties, and there has been little scope for the participation of private regulators among the institutions pursuing European policies. However, private regulation has always been present in Member States, and fragmented private rules could constitute barriers to the internal market. Despite the lack of an institutional framework for European private regulation, the launch of European integration has triggered the transformation of business and professional associations in Europe. The literature, however, has focused on the role of interest associations in affecting public policy processes. Less attention has been given to the role of private organizations in formulating rules governing market transactions. This thesis shows that regulatory functions performed by private organizations – that is, rulemaking, monitoring and enforcement – have gradually been shifted towards the supranational level. This process has intensified in recent years due to increased efforts by the European Commission to enroll private organizations in the integration process and an increased focus on the completion of the internal market. At the same time, the role of national private regulators has remained significant. Private rules and enforcement practices are of great relevance is the higher as they do not only complement publicly made rules but very often affect the content of such rules.
This thesis examines decision-making in value conflicts, and argues in favor of a unified approach to decision-making that accepts partial success of a plurality of decision-making methods, and that uses these as alternative heuristic tools the appropriateness of which is established and guided by interpretative and creative reasoning. This general conclusion is reached in numerous steps. First, an uncontroversial form of prima facie pluralism is accepted as the point of departure. Second, the diversity of value conflicts as well as the variety of different relations that values can have to each other (the degree of comparability) is established. Third, the impact of representations and the importance of the selection of matter for reasoning are illustrated and named the problem with representation. This, fourthly, undermines the possibilities of monistic value theories to dissolve conflicts, but also means that explanatory models of values need to account for both currencies of values and the way in which representations of the world are created. Such types of explanatory models are dubbed explanatory pluralism. Once the problem with representation and need for explanatory pluralism are settled, it is shown that prevalent approaches to decision-making (including maximizing methods, subsumption under principles, and by Aristotle inspired approaches that assign importance to judgment) have some merit, but all fail to account for the complexities surrounding what it is like to make a choice in a value conflict. The only way of dealing with these complexities is by combining a plurality of first order methods so that these can be matched with particular situations with the assistance of interpretative and creative reasoning. A unified approach to decision-making that furthermore accepts the necessity of its procedural nature as well as the dialectical relation between holding a value and making a decision manages best to deal with the identified problems.
It is often argued that elections in established Western European democracies have become more unstable during recent decades. Much scholarly work has thus focused on the study of changes in election results in order to understand the causes of this apparent increase. In doing so, volatility has been usually associated with voter instability, but the individual-level mechanisms of electoral change have been subject to very scarce research. This thesis is an attempt to shed more light on this providing a comparative account with data from dozens of elections in six Western European countries. It  rst investigates how and to what extent di erent types of behavior translate into changes in election results. Findings show that most of the volatility is caused by the action of switching voters. Due to the presence of canceling out, the relationship between the proportion of switchers and volatility is, however, far from perfect, although it can be approximated by introducing some of the variables that intervene in the translation of switching into net change. The second part of the thesis focuses on vote-switching and provides two main  ndings. First, inertia molds voters' preferences and impacts on their future behavior, which explains why most of the switching that takes place in elections is produced by young adults. Second, variations in the number of switchers across elections tend to be caused by the impact of short-term factors in the form of cyclical peaks. These peaks are usually followed by subsequent periods of stability. Sometimes, however, volatility produces changes in the terms of competition and generates a new equilibrium in the number of switchers at subsequent elections. This seems to be the reason why Western European voters appear more unstable in recent decades.
This Ph.D dissertation aims at answering two questions, which are closely related to each other: 1. How do politicians decide about the independence they give to regulatory agencies? 2. Is there a link between the amount of independence which an agency enjoys and the way in which it performs its tasks? The first question investigates the factors that lead politicians to delegate in the field of competition policy. The second question concerns, more broadly, the relationship between costs and benefits of delegation. This dissertation focuses on national competition authorities (NCAs) in the EU member states, being antitrust one of the few really “European” policies, enforced in the same way in all the countries by the European Commission and by the NCAs. The main empirical analysis (Chapter 3) tests a theoretical framework, based on both original hypotheses and previous contributions. In order to measure formal independence, an index based on several features of agency autonomy has been developed. The results confirm the two original hypotheses advanced in this work. On the one hand, the degree of independence of NCAs is influenced by political polarisation and by the presence of big firms in the national economy (the higher the polarisation, the higher the negative impact of big firms on independence). On the other hand, independence is related to EU membership: the longer the country has been member of the EU, the more independent the NCA is. These findings have been “cross-checked” with a series of interviews with expert and members of competition authorities in France, Italy, and Greece (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, the hypothesis of a relationship between independence and performance has been tested. According to the results of this statistical analysis, greater formal independence leads competition authorities to investigate more cases and to issue more decisions.
The increasing provision of military support functions such as logistics and armed security by private military and security companies (PMSCs) is often conceptualized as a functional response to new operational, financial and technological imperatives. The tendency to privatize military support functions, however, is also driven by domestic political factors. Drawing on neoclassical realism, I conceptualize the use of PMSCs as a strategy dictated by the need to circumvent the tightening hurdles to the conversion of societal resources into military power. Other things being equal, I argue that the tighter the constraints on the extraction and mobilization of societal resources, the higher the propensity to rely on the market as a complementary source of military power. I provide evidence for this theoretical connection by drawing a comparative analysis between military privatization in the U.S. and in the U.K. Specifically, I investigate in detail the tendency to resort to private military contractors during U.S. military operations in Iraq and U.K. military operations in Afghanistan. In both cases, the privatization of military support functions provided decision-makers with the possibility to circumvent existing constraints over the recruitment and deployment of active duty and reserve military forces. I then assess the explanatory power of my neoclassical realist explanation of military privatization against other theoretical perspectives, developing two competing explanations based on neorealism and organization theory. Although these theoretical perspectives offer valuable insights on the use of PMSCS, I show that due to its emphasis on domestic political constraints neoclassical realism proves better capable of shedding light on the privatization of military support and its variations across countries and over time.
The security of identification systems such as passports and national identity cards is a current policy priority for many governments. False identities allow criminals to cross borders, launder money, claim benefits and gain access to other people's information  whilst perceived insecurity in identification systems is widely seen as holding back the development of egovernment and online commerce. All over the world, nation states are investing heavily in the security of their identification systems, trying to protect themselves against such threats, especially through the creation of “electronic” identification cards and the increased use of biometric technology. Existing literature on these new identification systems has so far focussed on the politics of security, especially security crises like 9/11, and how the legitimating power of this politics enables the creation of these systems. Many authors have argued that this politics serves expand the powers of government surveillance systems, whilst drowning out competing concerns about the impact these systems may have on human rights such as privacy and liberty, and some have even gone as far as to claim that European nations are developing into “surveillance states”. Ten years on from 9/11 it is clear that this literature is at best incomplete. Far from instituting totalising societies of surveillance and control, many of these systems have run into significant trouble following their creation. Some have suffered from years of delay, going vastly over budget in the process  others, once created, have seen poor usage of supposedly central features. The implementation of new electronic services remains difficult  whilst many question if our borders are really any more secure than they were a decade ago. This thesis seeks to explore what happened, and in so doing provide an insight into how the dynamics of security politics affect the construction of identification systems.
Alla fine della seconda guerra mondiale la casa editrice Einaudi, nata a Torino nel 1933, avvia una politica di sprovincializzazione e aggiornamento della cultura italiana che si traduce in un’azione di consolidamento delle relazioni con i paesi e gli editori europei. L’obiettivo principale di questa ricerca è stato quello di indagare la dimensione europea dell’attività della casa torinese negli anni del dopoguerra e della ricostruzione. A questo scopo si è scelto di adottare un approccio che privilegiasse lo studio dei cultural transfers e di rivolgere l’attenzione ad alcuni casi, momenti e figure che sono parsi più adatti a chiarire i rapporti dell’Einaudi con l’editoria e la cultura europee. Dopo aver ricostruito il progetto di una collana di «Éditions européennes» elaborato da Giulio Einaudi ed Ernesto Rossi durante il loro esilio in Svizzera, tra il 1943 e il 1944, e dopo aver analizzato la delicata fase di passaggio dalla gestione commissariale della casa editrice alla ripresa dell’attività editoriale all’indomani della Liberazione, si è scelto di prendere in esame il rapporto fra l’Einaudi e le case francesi Gallimard e Albin Michel, cercando di mettere in luce i meccanismi di trasferimento e adattamento dei testi acquistati e tradotti in italiano. È stato poi ricostruito il tentativo di «esportare» e far tradurre in Inghilterra uno dei testi più significativi del catalogo einaudiano del dopoguerra: le Lettere dal carcere di Antonio Gramsci. Il rapporto fra l’Einaudi e l’Unione Sovietica è stato invece analizzato e interpretato attraverso tre figure di mediatori culturali: Pietro Zveteremich, Renato Poggioli e Franco Venturi. Si è cercato infine di ripercorrere la storia della casa editrice nel decennio postbellico dal punto di vista della sua politica economica, soffermandosi in particolare sulle ragioni della sua trasformazione, nel 1955, in società per azioni.
This thesis examines the Anglo-American relationship at the United Nations during the Congo crisis from 1960-1964. The United Nations headquarters in New York became a focal point for British and American foreign policies as it was the crucible for the clashing of the process of decolonisation with the Cold War. In its three forms as a public space in which nations could act, a multilateral context for the exercise of foreign policy and as an actor in its own right in the Congo, the UN provides a multi-dimensional prism through which to examine the Anglo-American relationship. It was at its most powerful at this moment due to the rise of Third World nations to the world stage who advanced the agenda for decolonisation and diluted the traditional power base of the West. The effect of such reveals new insights into the ‘special relationship’, exposing the conflict between the two over events in the Congo but also at moments how the traditional power balance between them evolved contrary to expectations.
This thesis features three closely related chapters investigating the role of the investment wedge in affecting macroeconomic fluctuations. The first chapter shows that the Business Cycle Accounting (BCA) methodology is sensitive to the specification of households preferences in identifying the role of the investment wedge. A poor performance of the investment wedge and of the financial frictions it represents, such as the one BCA finds on 2007-2010 US data and other past events, is compatible with a simulated recession fully driven by financial factors and financial accelerator mechanisms when preferences are not correctly specified in the BCA tool. The second chapter investigates the conditions under which a shock to the risk premium paid by entrepreneurs on bank funds, i.e. a shock to the investment wedge, is able to generate a pro-cyclical response of aggregate consumption. The analysis shows that a minimum degree of nominal stickiness a-la-Calvo and non-separable households preferences of the GHH type, are sufficient conditions for solving the problem of counter cyclicality of consumption in the presence of financial shocks. The third chapter is an application of the BCA tool-kit to the Swedish boom-bust cycle of the late 1980s. The efficiency wedge plays an essential role in explaining the cycle while the investment wedge plays a minor role, adding to the persistence of the recession. Calibrating a BGG model to Sweden according to the findings of the BCA shows that financial deregulation reforms in Sweden did not affect the vulnerability of the economy to the recessionary shock.
This thesis studies the causes and consequences of sovereign defaults focusing on non traditional links between sovereign default and the domestic economy: the impact of sovereign defaults on the external financial conditions for the private sector  and the ex-ante implications of the redistributive effects of default and repayment on the political support that the government requires to implement either of these decisions. In the first chapter of my thesis I analyze the worsening of the external financial conditions for the private sector that follows sovereign defaults. To explore the issue I develop a signaling model in which sovereign defaults reveal negative information to foreign lenders regarding the institutional quality in the country. Foreign lenders care about institutional quality because it affects the expected repayment of loans. Therefore, if foreign lenders receive negative information on the institutional quality from the sovereign default they worsen the financial conditions they offer to local firms triggering a sharp reduction in credit and investment ( updating effect ). The model can rationalize the worsened financial conditions in international capital markets for the private sector observed after default episodes. In the second chapter, a joint work with Guido Sandleris and Alejandro Van der Ghote, we analyze how the presence of political constraints affects sovereign governmentsborrowing and default decisions. We do so in a standard DSGE model with endogenous default risk where we introduce two novel features: heterogeneous agents in the domestic private sector and a requirement that the government obtains some of their support to implement the fiscal program needed to repay the debt. In this framework, we demonstrate that sovereign default can also arise due to insufficient political support and we explore the implications of different income distribution, political systems and tax systems over the repayment decision.
In the first chapter of this dissertation, we approach the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models through a moments-based estimator, the empirical likelihood. We try to show that this inference process can be a valid alternative to maximum likelihood. The empirical likelihood estimator only requires knowledge about the moments of the data generating process of the model. In this context, we exploit the fact that these economies can be formulated as a set of moment conditions to infer on their parameters through this technique. For illustrational purposes, we consider the standard real business cycle model with a constant relative risk adverse utility function and indivisible labour, driven by a normal technology shock. In the second chapter, we explore further aspects of the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models using the empirical likelihood family of estimators. In particular, we propose possible ways of tackling the main problems identified in the first chapter. These problems resume to: (i) the possible existence of dependence between the random variables; (ii) the definition of moment conditions in the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models setup; (iii) the alternatives to the data generation process used in the first chapter. In the third chapter, we investigate the short run effects of macroeconomic and fiscal volatility on the decision of the policy maker on how much to consume and how much to invest. To that end, we analyse a panel of 10 EU countries during 1991-2007. Our results suggest that increases in the volatility of regularly collected and cyclical revenues such as the VAT and income taxes tend to tilt the expenditure composition in favour of public investment. In contrast, increases in the volatility of ad hoc -type of taxes such as capital taxes tend to favour public consumption spending, albeit only a little.
Since corporate investment is a key driver for economic growth, it is very important to find out what are the drivers of the cost of financing for private firms. In particular, this thesis studies the determinants of spreads of bonds issued by advanced and emerging market borrowers and the determinants of foreign-currency corporate credit ratings. Chapter 1 demonstrates that the impact of debt market illiquidity on corporate bond spreads is exacerbated with a higher proportion of short-term debt. This effect is present in both investmentgrade and speculative-grade bonds and is smaller in banks as they may have the support of a lender of last resort during periods of market illiquidity. The paper’s major finding is consistent with the predictions of structural credit risk models that argue that a higher proportion of short-term debt increases the firm’s exposure to debt market illiquidity through a ‘rollover risk’ channel. Although credit rating agencies have gradually moved away from a policy of never rating a corporation above the sovereign (the ‘sovereign ceiling’), it appears that sovereign credit ratings remain a significant determinant of corporate credit ratings. Chapter 2 examines this link using credit rating data for advanced and emerging economies over the period of 1995 to 2009. The results are consistent with a sovereign ceiling ‘lite’ policy or ceiling that is not an absolute constraint, but a limitation that tends to decrease corporate ratings when these ratings are above the sovereign rating. Finally, chapter 3 investigates the impact of capital account restrictions on spreads of corporate bonds issued in international markets by developed and emerging market borrowers. The main finding is that capital account restrictions on inflows significantly increase corporate bond spreads. A second main finding is that capital account restrictions on inflows matter a great deal more during times of financial distress.
Über das Thema "Recht auf Arbeit" ist in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in den letzten Jahren relativ viel veröffentlicht worden, Politisches, Wirtschaftliches, Rechtliches. Eine rechtsvergleichende Darstellung gibt es dagegen nicht. Es lag nahe, die Rechtsordnungen zweier Länder in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft zu untersuchen, die wirtschaftlich und politisch grundverschiedene Ausgangspunkte haben. Auf der einen Seite die Bundesrepublik Deutschland als traditioneller Industriestaat, als wohlhabendes Land mit einem 3-Parteien-Parlament mit großer politischer Stabilität. Auf der anderen Seite Italien, das den Sprung vom traditionellen Agrarland zur siebtgrößten Industrienation der Welt noch nicht verarbeitet hat, ein armes Land mit chronischer Schuldenlast gegenüber dem Ausland, politisch zerrissen, mit einem Vielparteien-Parlament, in dem sich Linke und Konservative gegenseitig paralysieren. Was haben beide Länder bisher für die Verwirklichung des Rechts auf Arbeit getan? Wie sehen ihre Verfassungen aus? Welche einzelgesetzlichen Regelungen bestehen? Und welche Zukunftsperspektiven gibt es, um des Problems der Arbeitslosigkeit, das wohl das letzte Drittel dieses Jahrhunderts in den Industriestaaten des Westens beherrschen wird, Herr zu werden? Der Verfasser ist auf Grund seiner Studien am Europäischen Hochschulinstitut gerade zur Bearbeitung dieses Themas ermuntert worden, weil er aus beruflicher Erfahrung in beiden Ländern die rechtlichen und wirtschaftlichen Fragen, die mit dem Thema "Recht auf Arbeit" verbunden sind, übersehen zu können meint.
This thesis contains three chapters relating to the field of household finance. In the first chapter household life cycle investment behaviour is investigated using a panel of Norwegian administrative data and tax records. Dealing with selection and identification issues, the data suggests a double adjustment as people age: a rebalancing of the portfolio away from stocks as households approach retirement, and a peak in stock market participation around the time when they reach retirement. A theoretical model predicting these life cycle patterns of investment behavior is then provided. This is achieved by extending existing models with a per period participation cost in risky asset markets and a small perceived probability of being cheated. In the second chapter the relation between household financial asset holdings and unemployment is investigated. Consistent with a simple theoretical model, the data shows increased savings and a shift towards safer assets in the years leading up to unemployment, and depletion of savings during unemployment. This suggests that at least some households can foresee and prepare for upcoming unemployment, which indicates that private savings can complement publicly provided unemployment insurance. The final chapter identifies the causal effect of lump-sum severance payments on non-employment duration in Norway by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility at age 50. A severance payment worth 1.2 months' earnings lowers the fraction re-employed after one year by six percentage points. This effect is decreasing in wealth, which supports the view that the effect of severance pay should be interpreted as evidence of liquidity constraints. Finding liquidity constraints in Norway, despite its equitable wealth distribution and generous welfare state, suggests they are likely to exist also in other countries.
The thesis examines the practices and spaces of Second World War commemorations following the fall of the Soviet Union. Drawing on the case of the Republic of Moldova, it addresses two dimensions of the topic: the temporal - how remembrance of the Second World War is transmitted with the passage of time - and the spatial - how symbolic changes to war monuments and cemeteries have occurred in post-Soviet Moldova. It employs the concept of "symbolic appropriation" in order to examine the recurrence of certain themes and symbolic representations: emergent religious elements such as signs and practices; inclusive commemorations of "all the dead"; and syncretism of Soviet war memorabilia and revived national symbols. By exploring the interaction of various agents and narratives at the local, national and international levels, the thesis provides a comparative framework in which to analyze the role of Soviet spaces and commemorative practices in the post-Soviet context.
The dissertation deals with a forgotten vision of the future from the 1960s: the construction of underwater habitats on the sea-floor. Between 1960 and 1980, 17 states built 60 stations on the seabed. Dealing with the underwater habitats Helgoland (Federal Republic of Germany) and Tektite (United States) the dissertation focusses on the links between underwater habitats and the debate on the "conquest" of the seabed, the international law debate of the sea-floor as a common good and the popular culture of settling the oceans. The history of underwater laboratories is a history of man´s adaptation to other atmospheres. The idea was to find out if and how long one can live in a habitat beneath the sea under different atmospheric pressures. Living in a habitat beneath the sea was also a possibility for marine biologist to carry out "in situ" studies. The habitats were also used to expose humans to different mixtures of gases: At the same time when these biologists were sitting in the habitat, medical studies were carry out on them to see how the human body can adapt to different atmospheres. Especially these questions were important for working out parameters for future space cabins. Therefore underwater laboratories reproduced the terrestrial atmosphere as a life-enabling system. The idea was not only to reproduce the same atmosphere as it is on the earth, the idea was to recreate an atmosphere which would enable human living. However, on the first aquanaut mission in the German underwater laboratory, problems such as ear infections (caused by the humid atmosphere) were observed in the aquanauts. Apparently, the idea of recreating an “environment” beyond the Earth entailed basic problems related to human adaptation. If our understanding of the environment is circumscribed within the biological, chemical and physical habitat of Man, the case study of the underwater laboratory then begs the question of how culture and Man’s nature interact, and is affected by habitat.
This research first sets out to verify whether the measures in the EU’s peacebuilding toolbox indeed turn out to have converging objectives, an overlapping scope and provide for similar activities across the CFSP / non-CFSP divide. Does the European Union live up to expectations as to the extensiveness of the range of its tools? And, if in the affirmative, do they have the potential to leave a substantial and sustainable impact? These tools include primarily the non-CFSP external assistance instruments, on the one hand, and EU operations under the aegis of the CFSP, on the other. Both are presented in detail in order precisely to classify their objectives on all levels, from the Treaty level to the instruments’ implementing decisions and programmes, and to identify the possible activities undertaken to this end. Underpinned by the objective of shedding light on the competence allocation in EU peacebuilding, this analysis yields questions such as: what actually is the difference between an EU contracted police officer mentoring and monitoring third country police officers in conducting an effective crime investigation according to predetermined action fiches, and an expert funded under an EU technical assistance or twinning project to establish a detailed workplan and strategy for enhancing the effectiveness of crime investigation? And what is the difference between awareness raising, training and trial monitoring with the objective of advancing in the fight against corruption, as opposed to capacity-building and financial assistance in the public sector in this respect? And does the establishment of a transparent and objective case-allocation system in the judiciary call for a non-CFSP financed project, or can it also be achieved through mentoring in the context of an EU strengthening operation?
The dissertation before you is designed as a contribution to studies of phenomena that have been described either as the “recasting” of 19th century capitalism, or as the “deglobalization” of the global economy after 1914. In connection with this central inquiry it deals with the effects and outcomes of state intervention in national economies triggered by the First World War. Given the choice of states under study, it might seem rather strange to undertake examination of deglobalization process in the countries and regions that were either completely out or, at best, on the troublesome easternmost borderlines of the Atlantic economic system. For the most part, the economic systems in Southeast and East-Central Europe were disconnected from global trade and labour markets, and were under the strong control of the state, even in the most prosperous period during the so-called “first globalization”. Yet, as we will see in following chapters, the changes which affected these countries were very much analogous to those that took place in the core economies. In this regard, the dissertation title does not suggest that an ideal laissez-faire or market economy form of capitalism actually existed in the region or anywhere in the world before 1914; it only implies a general trend moving away from the conventional rules of the market economy in the decades preceding the war. The dissertation points out the degree of change indicated in cross-country and cross-regional comparison.
The object of this thesis is to defend ideal political theory from a series of objections that question its theoretical and practical soundness. My preliminary thesis is that ideal political theory is theoretically as well as practically sufficient in terms of providing us with valid normative prescriptions. The first three chapters explore the nature of ideal political theory and provide a qualified defence of its theoretical force whereas the last three chapters are somewhat more practical and focus on whether and how ideal theory can inform political action. In chapter 1 I provide a critical overview of the most recent debates on the nature of ideal theory and show how these are related to meta-ethics. The aim of chapter 2 is to provide a preliminary defence of the necessity and sufficiency of ideal theory for normatively ranking alternative states of affairs as well as for helping us to decide what to practically do. The aim of chapter 3 is to defend the claim that mere incongruence between a theory and the nonideal circumstances of its application does not constitute an argument against its theoretical and practical soundness. In chapter 4 I argue that a fixation on political feasibility, from the part of contextualist political theorists, comes at the price of theoretical incoherence as well as suboptimal and arbitrary suggestions concerning political reforms. In chapter 5 I engage with the real-world problem of climate change and show how ideal political theory can practically serve as a guide for political action in nonideal circumstances. Finally, in chapter 6, I show in what ways the complex reality of partisan party politics and political pluralism is compatible with ideal political theory.
In the long debate about the EU constitutional and institutional reform which accompanied the Central and Eastern enlargement of the Union, political parties at the European level – in brief: Europarties – have rarely featured. This research, acknowledging the growing role played by political parties in the EU polity and their importance for its legitimization, addresses the following question: what impact has the mega-enlargement of the Union had upon the process of institutionalization of the Europarties and the EU party system? Theoretically, this work draws from the literature on party and party system institutionalization in the developing polities, and makes these concepts 'travel' to the European Union. More specifically, it identifies two main dimensions in the concept of party institutionalization: a 'structural' dimension, referring to party organizational consolidation, and a 'value' dimension, capturing the party value-system and ideology. By treating enlargement as an 'external shock', and relying on the literatures on partisan formation and development, three main propositions are then advanced. In sum, enlargement is expected to have a positive effect on the party structural dimension, but a more negative impact on the value dimension of institutionalization and on the competitiveness of the EU party system. Empirically, the validity of the above propositions is assessed by combining qualitative and quantitative research strategies. On the one hand, the impact of enlargement upon the Europarty organizations is evaluated through an analysis of their 'official stories' and by interviewing Europarty elites and administrators. On the other, its impact on the value dimension is tested by using descriptive and inferential techniques on different data: attitudinal and textual data (Euromanifestos and EU Profiler data) are combined with behavioural data (roll-call votes).
No abstract available.
This dissertation elaborates on a new concept – post-transitional justice – to define the re-emergence of the issues of the authoritarian past onto the political agenda after democratic consolidation. The thesis sets out to understand the reasons why the past is coming back in certain consolidated democracies and not in others. It argues that in order to understand why these issues return to the agenda it is necessary to analyze them in light of the politico-institutional characteristics of each post-authoritarian democracy. The results suggest that ‘political willingness’ and ‘institutional capacity’, as they have been theorized in this research, are two strong factors that help explain the link between the ‘politics of the past’ and the ‘politics of the present’. The analysis of the two positive and one negative case have shown that the past returns to the political agenda because parties aim to change the dominant narrative of the past, but also the narrative of the transition and of the transitional justice process. The absence of post-transitional justice may result from either lack of willingness or capacity, but while the latter may represent a short-term constraint, the former is likely to be more structural and therefore more enduring. Hence, understanding the qualitative dimensions of ‘willingness’ to bring back the past (or the lack thereof) seems to lead to a more solid knowledge about the ongoing impact of authoritarian legacies in consolidated democracies. There are two major conclusions to be drawn from these cases: first, post-transitional justice seems to be more likely to occur when democracy emerges from a negotiated transition instead of a clear break with the past; second, post-transitional justice seems to be more likely to occur when the former elite has been legitimized in the new regime and has had formal access to government.
Regulation in pharmaceutical markets is pervasive in most countries, especially in Europe. The nature of existing regulations is diverse, as they serve a number of purposes: guaranteeing safety, efficacy and security of drug usage; but also ensuring patients access to treatment, preserving affordability and fostering pharmaceutical innovation. A number of regulatory interventions are purposely designed to bring about more efficient pharmaceutical markets. These interventions are ultimately intended to increase welfare for patients today and patients tomorrow. Welfare today requires ensuring patients access to existing pharmacological treatment at an affordable cost. Welfare tomorrow requires ensuring a continued effort on research and development to produce pharmaceutical innovations that respond to currently unmet medical needs. The chapters of this thesis focus on a number of regulatory interventions that attract notable attention due to their effect on access, affordability and innovation. These include the regulation of pharmaceutical parallel trade, direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs and off-patent pharmaceutical markets. By assessing the impact of public interventions on market outcomes and patients welfare, this thesis aims at contributing to the debate about optimal regulation of pharmaceutical markets.
This research focuses on the Spanish women involved in the transatlantic emigration to the Viceroyalty of Peru during the period 1550 to 1650. Through the analysis of passenger records, travel’s licenses and personal correspondence, I study the specific characteristics of women emigration to America, its particular evolution and constrains, emphasizing the role played by women in the family groups of travel. The research uses a transnational approach with documents from both Spanish and American archives. The combination of sources from both sides of the Atlantic allows me to link the evolution of the marriage market in the city of Lima with the process of Spanish female emigration. Moreover, by selecting diverse case studies this thesis analyzes the opportunities that Spanish women had to succeed, and how their options changed over the period due to the appearance of the new Creole elite. The increasing difficulties in the marriage market and the restricted access to the elite motivated the social problem of single Spanish women in colonial Lima. This conflict was already solved by informal ties of mutual help and the creation of formal institutions of charity and convents. By focusing on issues like gender, emigration and social mobility, this dissertation analyzes the social constrains of women both in Spain and Peru and the existence of a family structure that allowed them to participate in the emigration flow. Furthermore, this migration process and the subsequent settlement in America produced the empowerment of women during the first decades of the colony.
This dissertation examines the making of the WWII disabled as agents of memory focusing on the experience of mutilation of the specific group of war veterans. A large part of the research is based on oral testimonies, various ego-documents, legal documentation, newsletters and material from disabled associations. Starting from a presentation of the declaration of the war and its process it seeks to find the main constitutive elements of the Greek-Italian war legend in the period of its consolidation. The way in which invalids conceptualize this legend in their memories and the interaction between those memories and the legend’s thematic structure is put forward in a concise unit. What follows is an attempt to track the invalids’ trajectory from the front to the hospitals and further on to their life in the post liberation years, the period of their rehabilitation. Importance is given in the process of hospitalization. Hospitals, far from being a space of confinement, acquire new meanings through the social interaction developed among patients, visitors and the medical staff forming thus a locus of their constitution as war-disabled. It is in this exact place, the hospital, that the disabled form their associations, get involved into the resistance and finally suffer the repression of the occupational government. In the first decade of the post-war years, disabled rehabilitation is examined within a political, social and legal framework. There is an analysis of the war veterans’ survival strategies, the political discourse, the structure of the associations and the economic and social positioning of the disabled subjects. The final chapter offers an historical perspective and functions as an introduction to the prehistory of the subject, dealing mostly with policies, legal regulations and institutions of the war-disabled in the interwar years.
Most of the studies on political underrepresentation have tried to explain the factors that account for the underrepresentation of some groups in political power. The present research project focuses on the link between descriptive and symbolic representation and seeks to understand what consequences a more proportional political environment produces on the attitudes of both underrepresented and overrepresented groups towards the political system. Women remain among the least politically represented groups and therefore this project focuses on and analyses them in various political positions. Two dimensions of the relationship between citizens and politics are analysed: the level of political engagement and the evaluation of the political system. While there is a clear gender gap in the former, the same does not apply to the latter. This dissertation reaches three important achievements. The first one is to develop the first theoretical framework of the potential causal mechanisms that are likely to operate behind the impact that female politicians have on both women and men. The second is to show that men can indeed be positively influenced  but mainly to clarify that the way they evaluate the political system is nearly the only way they are affected – their level of political engagement does not change. The third achievement is to show that, while most scholarship has been focusing on the topic political involvement, the presence of female politicians seems to be more connected to the way women evaluate the political system. This means that the ‘role model effect’ is not the main mechanism at work here. Instead, the idea that the presence of women is necessary to represent women’s interests and the fact that they are seen as bringing something new into the political world appear more influential factors. Altogether the signs of the impact of the presence of female politicians are modest.
The task of this thesis is to provide a conceptual analysis of the phenomenon of competition law. It argues that the competitive process represents a distinctive feature of liberal democracy. The suggested constitutional recognition of competition implies that its legal status can be reduced neither to the cost-benefit calculus nor consumer welfare benchmark. This research proceeds as follows. The introductory chapter offers an overview of the main topics. The next chapter looks at the historical evolution of the concept of competition and explores the phenomenon of competition from the perspective of economic theory. The third chapter analyses the conceptual foundations the US and EU competition laws. The fourth chapter addresses the main theoretical background of the competitive process, comparing the role of competition in political, cultural and economic systems, developing the normative premises of the research. The fifth chapter concentrates on mechanics of balancing, which reflects the main methodological aspects of coexistence of competition with other economic and social values. In the sixth chapter the phenomenon of competition is explored from the broader legal theoretical perspective, contextualising the competitive process with the main theoretical problems of jurisprudence. It concentrates upon the jurisprudential aspects of the problem of balancing, trying to apply the techniques, developed in the previous chapter to the legal discourse with the purpose to demonstrate the significance of the competitive process not only in economic, political and cultural aspects, but also for the law itself. The final chapter explains the normative proposal, which this analysis puts forward, explores its practical implications and summarises the main finding of the overall research.
no abstract available
The rules on state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts foresee that states can be responsible towards subjects other than states (including individuals) in case of breaches of international rules having erga omnes character that also protect individuals’ rights. The rules of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) regulating the conduct of hostilities (also referred to as the ‘Hague law’) protect sensitive state interests and thus lie at the heart of state sovereignty. At the time of their adoption, they were conceived as being applicable in the relations between belligerents only, and were not meant to bestow rights on individuals. This conception of the ‘Hague Law’ jars with the ongoing trend towards the progressive humanization of IHL. It is argued that in contemporary international law there are several elements that warrant an interpretation of those rules in light of human rights norms. For instance, one can mention the practice of those human rights supervisory bodies that have dealt with human rights violations arising out of the unlawful conduct of military operations, the practice of UN organs recognizing a right to remedy and reparation for victims of IHL violations, and the emergence of the principle of individual criminal responsibility for breaches of the ‘Hague law’. Moreover, some domestic courts have recognized that individuals injured by IHL violations have a private right of action against the state. The above elements foreshadow the emergence of new trends whereby human rights norms are progressively reshaping the interpretation of the ‘Hague law’. If practice develops coherently with the interpretation suggested above, individuals’ rights could emerge also under the rules at stake. Individuals injured by the unlawful conduct of military operations would thereby acquire legal entitlements vis-à-vis the wrongdoing state, matched by corresponding obligations of remedy and reparation on the part of the latter.
Cette thèse analysera l’interaction entre la mobilité des sociétés et les règles de conflit de juridictions européennes applicables aux litiges du travail. Elle montrera comment la grande liberté de mouvement que l’application directe des libertés économiques par la Cour de justice a assuré aux sociétés, risque de compromettre le bon fonctionnement des règles de conflit de juridictions européennes en matière de contentieux international du travail. Ces même règles risquent d’être manipulées par les sociétés afin d’en tirer un avantage processuel. Il s’agira également de s’interroger sur les rapports entre deux politiques européennes différentes: d’une part, l’intégration économique et la création du marché intérieur, notamment dans le domaine de l’exercice de la liberté d’établissement et de prestation de services par les sociétés commerciales. D’autre part, il faudra réconcilier cette politique avec les objectifs de l’Union européenne dans le domaine de la protection et de la promotion des droits fondamentaux. La recherche mettra en exergue la tension entre l’intégration économique et la protection des droits fondamentaux et l’impact de celle-ci sur le fonctionnement des règles de conflit de juridiction. Finalement, la thèse proposera des changements aux règles de conflit de juridiction applicables aux contentieux du travail.
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the adoption of network-centric warfare (NCW) by two military organisations – the British and the German Armed Forces – in the first decade of the 21st century. NCW stands for the belief that through the extended application of information technologies and the integration of intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, command and control systems and weapons into one single network, military organisations will be able to better collect crucial military information, thus reduce operational uncertainty and gain a decisive information advantage over their enemies, which thus would translate into superiority over the enemy on the battlefield. NCW was invented by U.S. senior military officers and Pentagon officials and was introduced into the U.S. Armed Forces as part of the U.S. military transformation during the tenure of Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld (2001-2007). Although NCW had been criticised from the beginning, initial military accomplishments in the Afghanistan war (2001) and the invasion in Iraq (2003) have been widely interpreted as success stories for NCW. Since 2001, a number of U.S. military allies and partners – among them the United Kingdom and Germany – have started to adopt this U.S. innovation. Yet, in a number of cases the adopted national versions of NCW diverged considerably from the original U.S. concept. This study seeks to uncover the reasons for the variation in concept adoption. Building upon an organisational institutionalist framework, I argue that, in the United Kingdom, NCW was adopted to increase the military effectiveness and efficiency of the armed forces, whereas the adoption in Germany was mainly driven by the aim to maintain the armed forces’ institutional legitimacy. Thus, in the case of NCW adoption, the British military was an efficiency maximiser whereas the German military was a legitimacy maximiser.
no abstract available
This dissertation is an examination of the departure of the Greek population from Egypt from 1937 to 1977 and the various, often contradictory, strategies they adopted concerning not only their departure but also their continued residence in the Nile Valley. To date, the historical literature has discussed the departure of the Greeks from Egypt as a result of factors external or internal to the paroikia, as the Greek entity was called. This study takes a critical, historical perspective on the matter and provides a more complex view, taking into account the general historical context of post-Capitulations Egypt, the Second World War, the creation of the Israeli state, the Cold War and decolonization. To do so, I consider the social stratification of the Egyptian Greeks and the changing social and economic profile of paroikia members in the post-Capitulations era. I reveal important issues regarding issues of identity and belonging among the members of the paroikia. I emphasize mobility in terms of physical movement as one of the basic features of paroikia life. This dissertation, through the examination of many dissimilar sources, brings to the fore the departees as agents of migration but also the state and paroikia officials who played an active role in the departure. This study captures the complexity of the phenomenon and hence contributes to the history of people on the move.
As its title, the social choreography of the Viennese waltz, suggests, the thesis can be situated in the research tradition that studies dance history from sociocultural and sociopolitical point of views. In this work, however, the term social choreography is not understood merely as a system, in which the choreography of the dance reflects and represents society. Rather, what is of interest here are the socio-cultural and economic circumstances in which the Viennese waltz developed. In other words, this thesis examines the consumption of the Viennese waltz within the different social classes in Vienna and Europe between the years 1780 and 1825. In practice, this is done via two different strategies, the first of which includes local developments, more precisely the development of the Viennese waltz in the turn-of-century Vienna. The second strategy, for its part, includes the study of the transfer of the waltzes in and out of Vienna. Despite the fact that in ealry 19th-century Europe the fast waltz style began to be called Viennese, the dance did not develop merely in the Viennese dance halls. Since turn-of-century Vienna was anything but an isolated city, its dance culture was open for all kinds of external influences. The early forms of the waltz were danced in the ballrooms of the European elite from where they spread into Vienna through dancing-masters, dance manuals and printed dance scores. Then these dances, first adopted by the Viennese elite, were taught to the lower classes in the suburban dance schools and dance halls. Thanks to the wide networks of the contemporary music publishers, Viennese waltz music circulated over large distances in Europe already at the beginning of the 19th century.
More than one thousand East European Jewish women came to Belgium during the interwar years to pursue higher education. Who were these women? What political, economic and social developments caused these young women to leave their home countries at such a young age and embark on a foreign adventure? Furthermore, why did they end up at Belgian universities? And what kind of experiences did they have in Belgium? The aim of this study is to contribute to the question of transnational student migration by focusing on a case study that serves to combine social class, gender and foreignness. This work will attempt to demonstrate that these women encountered obstacles on several levels: as foreigners, as Jews and as women. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, this study mainly relies on methodological tools utilized in social history and migration history. Combining macro and micro level perspectives, the narrative follows the life trajectory of female students by examining the situation in their home country, their social backgrounds and their pursuit of education. Precariousness was the price these women had to endure to rise up the social ladder. East European Jewish women who migrated to study in Belgium took major risks: they left their homeland, and with it the secure, comfortable middle-class environment that most of them grew up in. They consciously made the choice to challenge their condition and they ventured that they would improve their lives and achieve their dreams by taking such a gamble. They were independent, determined and emancipated  they were full of fighting spirit and had real ambitions to prosper. These women knew that the insecurity they opted for was necessary to advance further and to succeed in life.
The political power to direct society is legitimate only when it expresses the identity of society and is attached to social values and norms. The problem is that, in Russia, the demolition of the Communist ideology and the disappearance of the country’s borders as defined by the Soviet Union called the essence of Russian identity into question. This question was mainly answered in negative terms by rejecting the Soviet model of social and individual existence. The paradox is that the majority of the new political elites in fact possessed rather extensive records of political, professional and personal commitments to the now defunct Soviet constitutional order. This thesis undertakes to illustrate the elements upon which the newly institutionalized elites subsumed themselves into self-legitimizing narratives with the goal of obtaining, maintaining and exercising power in the remote Russian regions. Provided that the cohort of central elites had been historically recruited from the pool of regional elites, the findings of the thesis present a viable study of successful narratives of legitimization for the securing of elite positions far beyond the regional level.
Does history matter for economic development? How do events taking place a long time ago continue to affect long term economic performance? To answer these questions I examine the long run impacts of the 19th century division of Poland into Prussian- and Russian- controlled sectors. Using micro-level data in a regression discontinuity framework, I show that the exposure to different socio-economic conditions during 100 years led to emergence of marked differences in development between regions in Poland. I find evidence that those differences persisted until the present through transmission by norms and beliefs. Nowadays, people living in the former Prussian sector have 12% higher referenda turnout, 11% higher general trust and 28% higher income. Various falsification tests indicate that there is something distinct about the historic frontier. Interestingly, the differences resisted subsequent switches in regimes from a market to centrally planned economy and back again to a market economy. The results are put in the context of the ongoing debate in the literature about the possible channels of persistence of distant historic events. Additionally, an extensive historical discussion is provided to shed some light on socio-economic differences in the 19th century between Prussian- and Russian-controlled sectors.
No abstract available.
Why did European member states agree to liberalise an industrial sector by decreasing the level of state aid allocated to it? In this thesis, I aim to research the neglected study of the European shipbuilding industry from the late 1970s onwards. I first develop some theoretical arguments based on the rational choice institutionalism and bargaining theory. Then, using strategic interaction analysis and conceptual experiments, I propose a number of hypotheses in order to account for the changes in European shipbuilding policy over time. European legislation on state aid to shipbuilding is operationalised in the qualitative index as the dependent variable. The independent variables include the international market, the number of European member states, international agreements and political decision-making rules. After the conceptual experiments, methodologically, I apply comparative statics to empirically assess whether or not the explanatory variables have an impact on the output of European shipbuilding policy. The empirical results indicate that international agreements and decision-making rules may lead to changes in European shipbuilding policy. Furthermore, I extend the argument to another industrial sector, the European aerospace industry, based on the most similar case selection. However, evidence shows that international competition leads to an increase in R&D expenditure in aerospace, while international agreements merely play a marginal role. The different inferences drawn from these two sectors may be a result of their industrial characteristics, and this deepens our understanding for the IPE literature.
Confidence in capitalist societies about the state’s capacity to exert rational control over markets and commit them to wider social values is waning. In Western Europe employment trends since the 1970s above all have casted doubt on the feasibility of active statehood. At the same time, governments have proven conspicuously unable to renounce their commitment to the promise, so central to modern industrial society, of an economy that serves man, and provides decent, socially valuable work for all who seek it. This has been true in particular for the German welfare state and its deeply rooted reliance on the imagery of full ‘normal’ or ‘quality’ employment as a critical touchstone for policy makers. It is the seeming paradox that German governments have sought justification for employment policy after the mid-1970s primarily through liberalization that this thesis addresses. The argument draws on a theoretical framework that champions ‘ideas’ as the dual foundation of policy making – in the form of institutionally supported knowledge that defines the practice of making policy in a democratic context, and as the semantic structures internal to policy related arguments that determine which aspects of a given policy reality can come to inform rational policy projects. Based on an analysis of the semantic structures underlying employment debates in Germany, and the arguments with which policy makers have designed and justified legislative initiatives, the thesis draws attention to the relation between the normative tensions faced by policy makers and the nature of diagnostic arguments through which employment problems are interpreted through time as a key to understanding rhetorical choices. The diagnostic framework that informed the liberalization of German employment policy then becomes intelligible as the politically most viable and pragmatic solution to the rhetorical problem of reconciling multiple and conflicting demands on state authority.
When dealing with norm compliance, we can talk about three different layers. First, law's addressees consider their potential legal liability in case they don't abide the norm. Monetary sanctions, incentives and other deterrence measures are essential. Second, the morally persuasive role that is inherent to law, `it's the right thing to do'. Sometimes the `threat' of punishment is not the main reason for conformity, and non-pecuniary considerations must be taken into account. Individuals belong to communities, and share general respect for a system of values and norms. Norms are seen as a re ection of the set of behaviors that are desirable or legitimate in the shared view of society, and whose violation elicits at least informal disapproval. This socio-cultural aspect of law has deep implications in terms of policy: instilling a norm in countries where it currently does not prevail nor is culturally accepted may be a daunting task. This leads us to the third aspect of normative behavior proposed in this manuscript: the procedural aspect. Once the norm is established and the efficacy of its deterrence methods evaluated, authorities must find an adequate way to deal with cases of possible liability resulting from non-compliance. In order to disentangle the real nature and dynamics of normativity, the first issue requires finding the proper way to study the development of such phenomena: is it a spontaneous process over which individuals have little control, and which depends on psycho-cognitive human characteristics, or is it a more complex phenomenon? My suggestion is that it should be con- ceived within a social learning approach, emphasizing the cognitive out- comes of cultural learning. Furthermore, I believe that an interdisciplinary approach to the issue, mainly based on theories of social and customary norms and agent-based modeling, could offer fresh new insights.
This thesis explores the social usages of the law in scholarly and professional spaces, in the North, that are sites of production and legitimation of tools devised to diagnose and prescribe solutions over armed conflicts on the African continent since the end of the Cold war. Based on the hypothesis of the “weak” character of an internationalized space of conflict management, it aims at tracing the triggers and logic of a “sens commun réformateur” over armed conflicts in the South, expressed in a three-pronged emphasis over prevention, pacification and punishment. It favors an empirical entry, the usages of the law by non-governmental organizations based in the United States and Western Europe. Its focus is restricted to social usages of the law ranging from the legitimation of military interventions to para-judicial tools such as “Alternative dispute resolution” to judicial international arenas. Divided in three parts, it traces firstly, the genesis and turn, expressed in policy and scholarly discourses and practices, towards a political economy of intervention, justified as triggered by the diagnosed failure of the recipient State in the African South, and articulated with a redefinition of intervention as a continuum ranging from prevention to military interventions. It shows, secondly, how non-governmental forms of intervention have been integrated within this redefinition of intervention as a modality not only of circumventing recipient States, but also of rebuilding social peace in the South, i.e. of building a “bottom up” State, and analyzes the redefinition of forms of legitimation of non-profit modalities of interventionism. It explores, thirdly, the instrumental role played by the law as a symbolic capital and a moral resource in accommodating a tension between constraint, including in the moral and legal arsenal deployed to justify military interventions, and order, in that the effect is one of legitimation within objectified legal hierarchies.
No abstract available
This doctoral thesis inquires into the role and perspectives of the ‘European’ (mandatory) and ‘USA’ (persuasive) constitutional models of the right to freedom of expression for the constitutional debate in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This survey is based on the study of socio-legal developments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, embracing the period of post-communist transition until 2010. The research focuses on three controversial issues in the realm of freedom of speech, namely (1) hate speech, (2) historical revisionism, and (3) pornography, before the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights. The essential novelty of the project is an assessment of European standards of free speech and non-discrimination beyond the mechanisms of the Council of Europe, encompassing the relevant aspects of EU law (judgements of the European Court of Justice and harmonised instruments) as mandatory standards for courts and legislators, including those in CEE. The research methodology transcends a standard case law assessment (comparative constitutional, public international, and EU law), normative jurisprudence and analytical philosophy, incorporating critical approaches stemming from post-structuralist scrutiny, rhetoric, sociology, legal history, history of ideas, and art criticism.
Democratic politics are structured by elections. Governments come and go, campaigns come and go, policies come and go, and so forth. In representative democracy, the mere existence of elections strongly alters the behavior of representatives who are interested in re-election and of voters who are affected by political communication. Unlike many of our models, the real world structures politics through time, and especially through time between elections. When elections approach, democratic systems seem to be transformed to a degree that facilitates the analysis of a wide variety of campaign effects. Voters and parties do not change significantly through the electoral cycle. Their environment does. The aim of this book is to develop concrete theory for the functioning of political time and to demonstrate its effects with empirical data. At the core of the theory is a dual mobilization cycle. One leg of this cycle concerns the creation and decay of structure in voting behavior. The book traces the causal path preceding the result: the dynamics of voter perceptions, the determinants of party preference, and the logic of turnout and choice. The other leg of the dual cycle concerns the configuration of the party system. Here the causal path leads from the dimensions of conflict within parties over the ability of the leadership to enforce unity in parliamentary behavior to the implementation of campaign strategies. The book also spells out the connections between the two legs and locates them in political time. The methodology developed for this purpose, labeled “Quasi Time Series,” serves to transform cross-sectional data (which are available in abundance) in a way so that they fulfill functions of time series (which are exceedingly rare). The comparative approach exploits data from several decades, dozens of countries, hundreds of parties, thousands of legislators and about 100,000 voters.
Alterglobalism in Postsocialism. A Study of Central and Eastern European Activists' is a doctoral thesis that presents the development and the characteristic of the Global Justice Movement in Poland, the Czech Republic and in Hungary. Using tools and approaches derived mostly from anthropology this thesis is supposed to give an insight into the movement in Central and Eastern Europe, but it also relies on the tradition of sociology (in particular social movement studies) with some references to postsocialist and historical studies. Although far from being complete, it is one of the first comparative ethnographies of the movement and of the activists in the region. One of the main ways to explain the specificity of the movement in this part of the world is the existence of the postsocialist condition – a set of factors that have shaped the ways of organization of contentious politics. This thesis also attempts to analyze the movement from various perspectives by looking at its relations with the civil society, subcultures and countercultural milieus and with other actors of the global movement. At the core of the analysis are the repertoire of actions used in the region and the frames used to link local protests with more global struggles. In particular I was interested how do the social activists manage to deal with the notion of postsocialism and how do they adapt the frames derived from activism in other parts of the world to their own cases. I have tried to analyze these processes by looking at the practices of the activists in order to get a more realistic image of the movement, not biased by the self-imaginations of the activists.
Recent trends of euroscepticism seriously challenge Deutsch’s transactionalist theory that increased transnational interactions trigger support for further political integration. While transnational interactions have indeed proliferated, EU support has diminished. This dissertation aims at solving this puzzle by arguing that transnational interaction is highly stratified across society. Its impact on EU support therefore only applies to a small portion of the public. The rest of the population not only fails to be prompted to support the integration process, but may see it as a threat to their realm. This is even more the case as parallel to European integration, global processes of transnationalisation create tensions in national societies. Consequently, the hypotheses guiding this dissertation are as follows: (1) The more transnational an individual, the more (s)he is prone to support European integration. (2) This effect is more pronounced in countries and regions that are more transnationalised. These hypotheses are tested using multilevel analyses of survey data from the Eurobarometer waves 75.1 (2007) and 77.1 (2007). The analyses show that transnational interactions and networks are concentrated among a small group of highly educated, young Europeans. Individuals highly engaged in transnational interactions and well endowed with transnational human capital are significantly more likely to support EU membership and to consider themselves as European, even more so in highly globalised countries. This relationship is weaker, however, in intra- European border regions, where transnational interaction is less stratified across society.
In this thesis, I argue that we should conceive of morality as a set of overlapping practices and of moral knowledge first and foremost as the competence to participate in these practices. On the basis of a Wittgensteinian understanding of language and meaning, I defend two interrelated claims: the claim that some propositions are beyond reasonable doubt in moral practices and the claim that understanding moral principles amounts to the mastery of those practices. My reflections on a number of propositions which it seems impossible to doubt from a moral standpoint lead me to the view that for a morally competent agent, some propositions are removed from doubt. In conceiving of justification as a response to doubt based on reasons, I follow Wittgenstein and those contemporary philosophers who defend what are called ‘contextualist’ approaches. Given the close relationship between justification and doubt, the claim that some propositions are beyond reasonable doubt in moral practices implies that certain philosophical demands for justification make no sense. Like contextualists, I oppose both foundationalist and coherentist accounts of moral justification and moral knowledge. Unlike them, I argue that moral knowledge ultimately amounts to knowledge how. This practical knowledge involves cognitive as well as emotional capacities, which are developed through training. On the basis of my account of moral competence, I am able to reject the view that morality can be justified from an extra-moral standpoint. The ‘why be moral question’ turns out to be one of those purely philosophical questions which lack a role in practice. Despite denying the availability of any practice-independent standards of moral truth and critique, my account allows for moral criticism and moral progress.
The aim of this work is to study Spanish-Italian diplomatic relations in the period 1943-1957. However, and in spite of the fact that the question of Spanish-Italian diplomatic relations between 1943 and 1957 will remain at the heart of this research, this is not merely a history of bilateral relations. In fact, the present work contends that this bilateral relationship cannot be studied in isolation and that a broader context is key, in order to obtain a full understanding of it. In this way, this research will also focus on how these two countries responded to the challenges of the post-war period, and how they struggled to pursue a more independent foreign policy with respect to the major powers. Hence, it is clearly important to analyse the degree of influence which Great Britain first and the United States afterwards exerted both in Spain and Italy and over their relations. The role of France will also be scrutinised, although it will be under a different light, since France did not possess the material capabilities to display a hegemonic policy in Western Europe after 1943. However, the French role in Spanish- Italian relations cannot be ignored either, especially after 1950 when the diplomats at the ‘Quai D’Orsay’ began to intervene more actively in the affairs of the two neighbouring states. Therefore, this research will also address the question of how much room for manoeuvre the Spanish and the Italian Governments really had in the diplomatic field. By accomplishing these objectives, the present research will enrich the existing field of scholarship of both the Spanish and Italian foreign policies after the Second World War and, at the same time, it will contribute to obtaining a better understanding of international relations in Western Europe during the post-war period and, especially the role of the major powers.
Macroeconomic concepts such as inflation and real economic activity are not directly observed. Researchers often use factor models in order to measure these unobserved concepts. The underlying view is that a small number of factors exist which represent the concept and drive many related variables. Consequently  the U.S. economy is often modeled as an affine function of some factors. If indeed there is such a factor structure for the U.S. economy then it can be represented by a generalized dynamic factor model (GDFM). In the  first chapter I describe and summarize the literature on GDFMs. In the second chapter I investigate the interactions and mutually independent dynamics of changes in inflation and real growth by applying the GDFM to a block of real growth variables a block of inflation variables and to their joint panel. In this manner an empirical decomposition of the U.S. economy is obtained and this allows the reconcilitaion of forward and backward looking Phillips curves. In the third chapter I build and study a discrete time generalized dynamic affine term structure model. This is characterized by three main features that are conceptually important for a ne yield curve models. I allow: (a) for state vector dynamics beyond Markovian types  (b) that all yields may contain an idiosyncratic component to reflect measurement-errors in the data  and (c) that idiosyncratic components may be cross sectional as well as time-serial correlated. It is possible to directly compare this model with the version that is restricted by Du e-Kan's no-arbitrage conditions. Chapter four addresses whether or not changes in yields can be explained by changes to the latent dynamic factors which underlie the macroeconomic concepts of inflation and real growth. As such I contribute to the debate about whether or not monetary policy should react to real activity measures.
No abstract available
Recent empirical firm level studies reveal the structural heterogeneity of firms in process and product innovation, as well as the central role of product quality in determining world trade patterns and intensities. This calls for a better understanding of the link between firm heterogeneity and the innovation and export decisions of firms which are at the base of productivity growth and, hence, economic growth and development. My dissertation contributes to this debate focusing on the supply side. I propose a novel way to model the production technology of firms by introducing two attributes of firm heterogeneity: cost efficiency and product quality. The goal of the first thesis chapter is to study the effects of process and product innovation on firm dynamics, productivity and endogenous long run growth. In the second chapter an open economy framework with trade between symmetric countries is analyzed. Here the focus is on quantifying the impact of trade as well as trade liberalization on firm innovation dynamics and productivity- and aggregate growth. The third chapter abstracts from endogenous growth and examines the role of the two attributes of firm heterogeneity in shaping the trade patterns and intensities within and across developed and developing countries.
This Ph.D. thesis offers a fresh look at the difficult connection between race and law in the continental European context. So far, the analysis of race and racism in legal scholarship has mainly occurred in terms of traditional dogmatic criteria. Here instead, civil law jurisdictions of Europe will be looked at through the prism of Critical Race Theory, an American legal theory that has placed the problematic relationship between race and law in the United States at the core of its scholarship. What emerges from that perspective is that in spite of the general idea that race and ethnicity played only a marginal and exceptional role in mainland European legal systems, law is just as deeply involved in constructing and discriminating racial minorities, albeit in somehow different ways. In particular, this claim is substantiated by problematizing the historically conditioned reluctance in mainland European states to speak and research in terms of ‘race’. In the legal domain this position translates into proposals to eliminate race from constitutional and legislative provisions and into very narrow legal definitions and perceptions of what is racism and who is deemed to be racist. This ultimately happens to the detriment of the victims of racism and to the benefit of the white, Christian majority. Three case studies on the Roma, France and Italy then provide a more contextualized analysis and also show in which ways colonialism, anti-Semitism, anti-Roma and anti-Black racism, and Islamophobia are anything but exceptional and constitute the open or unspoken assumption in the relationship between law and race in the continental European context.
No abstract available
The dissertation investigates various aspects of Bayesian inference in time series econometrics. It consists of one expository chapter and two research papers. The first chapter presents on an easy example of a production function for the USA the development of Bayesian models in the context of time series analysis. The model analysed is the Cobb-Douglas production function with covariance stationary AR(1) disturbances. The methods presented are used extensively in the next two chapters. The first research paper tackles the issue of identifiation in a SVAR model with an error term being a Markov mixture of normal distributions. Non-Gaussianity can be employed for the identification of shocks. So far only classical methods have been proposed for this class of models. Bayesian methods for inference are presented, in particular an efficient method for testing homogeneity of shock process. An empirical example presents the workings of the tools developed. The topic of the second paper is the forecasting with Bayesian VARs. Owing to the shrinkage, the original Minnesota prior was reported to provide significant improvements in forecasting accuracy. Its limitations however, gave rise to research trying to relax restrictive treatment of the residual covariance matrix, and to allow for the possibility of cointegration in the system. This paper first disentangles in a unified framework and a balanced environment of optimizing choice of hyperparameters the impact on the predictive power of BVARs of developments of priors along the above two dimensions; a well known historical dataset is analyzed for this purpose. As the second contribution, the paper presents a novel prior characterized by explicit modelling of cointegration that avoids certain unattractive restrictive properties of the previously used priors; the potential of the prior for elicitation from the well established Litterman beliefs is demonstrated as well as predictive accuracy improvements over the benchmarks.
This thesis contributes to the literature on EU studies by analysing how and why the European Union adopted a new trade agenda in the mid-1990s that departed from previous policies. While the EU was focused largely on its internal market from the mid-1980s onwards, external trade strategy became a key item on the agenda a decade later, wrapped in a more aggressive and free-market stance. I argue that the European Commission rather than the EU member-states was the key player in the decade that followed the signature of the Uruguay Round, and introduced services into trade negotiations. More precisely, based on empirical data from the years when Leon Brittan (1994-1999) and Pascal Lamy (1999-2004) presided as EU Trade Commissioners, the thesis analyses the European Commission’s central role as a skilful ‘network creator’ both in pushing for, and legitimising, an expansion of the free-trade agenda from goods to services. However, this research also argues that the Commission did not act alone, and that different kinds of non-state actors must also be analysed in order to understand changing EU trade governance at the dawn of the 21st century.
We live in a world surrounded by uncertainty and within this uncertainty human beings have to decide every action, every turn of life. When individuals take decisions the true value of parameters relevant for that decision are usually unknown and rarely important ex-ante. The final outcome, realized ex-post, indeed depends on the true parameters, but the decision does not. It usually depends just on the beliefs individuals have about these parameters. The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of the formation of individuals’ beliefs under realistic economic environments. 
Chapter 1 deals with the information acquisition decisions of individuals who face uncertainty about their own ability. At a theoretical level (Bénabou and Tirole, 2002), it has been shown that overconfident individuals (people with beliefs about themselves higher than reality) with time inconsistent preferences would more often prefer not to know their true ability before performing a certain task. A field experiment in the area of education is designed and implemented confirming the theoretical hypothesis. Chapter 2 explores the dynamics of beliefs with respect to the benefits of the introduction of the single currency (Euro) in Europe. The main result supports the existence of more optimistic beliefs during both the dates of the introduction of the Euro (the non-physical introduction in 1999 and the physical introduction in 2002) with respect to the period before and the period after the implementation. Finally, Chapter 3 explores the determinants of trust in order to better estimate the causal effect of trust on social efficiency. The reverse-causality problem is addressed by introducing an innovative set of instruments for trust from the field of neuroeconomics. The depurated effect is higher than in previous research, emphasizing the relevance of trust in increasing the efficiency of social organizations.
The goal of the present thesis is to analyze the diverging savings and investment behavior among countries. The purpose of this work is to suggest possible explanations for the so called .global imbalances.. In particular, the focus is on the negative asset positions of the US and the positive asset positions of emerging economies. The .rst two chapters study the effects of capital market liberalization among countries with structural differences and in particular different financial market depth. Global imbalances are generated by higher propensity to save as well as lower propensity to invest in financially underdeveloped countries, with respect to countries with better financial institutions. The analysis is able to reproduce medium term net capital flows towards financially advanced economies as a result of financial integration. Moreover, capital liberalization generates welfare losses for emerging economies and a reduction of their capital convergence towards the steady state. The third chapter focuses on one of the most debated aspects of international capital movements, namely sovereign reserve accumulation by emerging countries, as a form of precautionary saving to be employed to face liquidity crises. The analysis investigates the determinants of the opportunity cost of holding reserves, and finds that countries optimally decide to hold a positive amount of reserves. Countries’ lenders set the cost of debt by taking into account countries’ decisions and their economic and financial characteristics.
This thesis focuses on different aspects of Competition Policy and analyses questions related to market power, collusion and the European Commission's fining policy. The first chapter provides a theoretical setting to study a particular abuse of dominant position, known as margin (or price) squeeze. It explores the conditions under which margin squeeze arises as an equilibriumoutcome and discusses policy implications of introducing price squeeze testing. In the field of cartel detection, the leniency program has been instrumental in competition authorities' fight against cartels. This is the topic of the second paper, which examines the deterrence effect of the leniency program in a setup where all cartels are failing cartels. The third chapter provides an overview of the fining decisions of the European Commission in the field of antitrust. It analyses the incentives of firms to appeal Commission infringement decisions and examines whether the fining Guidelines have led to lower appeal rates, possibly through providing greater transparency in the way fines are set.
This thesis takes latent variables seriously. It consists of three chapters discussing the determinants of economic success for a British cohort. The evidence presented shows that abilities during childhood and adolescence are important predictors of adult educational, labor market and social outcomes. The problem is that abilities are unobserved. I hence rely on a novel item response theory method (Spady 2007) to measure these unobservables by using questions that are related to them. The assumption is that the latent variables cause the outcomes of interest but also the answers to questions that provide the basis for their measurement.
This thesis is targeting a complex topic of integration of economic analysis (economic theories and evidence) into the legal framework of EU merger control. Inspired by the calls for a "more economic approach" in EU competition law this work attempts to highlight both the limits and perspectives for incorporation of the economic analysis under the set of legal rules (both substantive and procedural) that govern initial merger assessment of the Commission and the subsequent review of the Commission’s findings exercised by the Courts. The correlation between legal rules and economic analysis is studied on the example of non-horizontal concentrations that should be assessed taking into account both anti-competitive effects stemming from the future conduct of the merged entity and economic efficiencies that can be generated through vertical integration or conglomerate diversification. Application of economic theories and assessment of economic evidence is placed in the context of the applicable legal rules and standards such as standard of proof, standard of judicial review, margin of assessment in complex economic matters, and legal standards governing admission, presentation and assessment of economic evidence. The correlation of the specified legal rules and economic analysis was studied on the examples of unilateral (vertical foreclosure) and coordinated (tacit collusion) effects’ scenarios which are typical for non-horizontal settings. The observed enforcement practices demonstrated the need for further development of functional rules, tests and methodologies, which are pre-requisite for an effective and consistent application of the effects-based assessment.
This study deals with the use of comparative arguments as non-mandatory (persuasive) authority in judicial decision-making at the level of national supreme jurisdictions. The study has two elements: empirical and theoretical. The empirical research assesses the practice of the supreme jurisdictions in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, France and England and Wales in relation to the quantitative aspects of the use of comparative arguments in their decision-making. The theoretical element comprises two levels: firstly, the level of the national legal systems studied, where mainstream doctrinal views concerning the role and legitimacy of comparative reasoning by courts are analysed; secondly, the national theoretical approaches which serve as the starting point for determining the common denominator for a positivistic approach to comparative reasoning by courts. The national theories and practice are furthermore used to comparatively discuss: issues of authority and its display in a judicial decision; reasons for which even the state-centred national mainstream doctrine accepts the judicial use of extra-systemic arguments, including comparative inspiration; domestic legitimacy for the use of comparative arguments, with discussion of the specific scenario of transitional legal systems and their use of external comparative authority; reasons for citation or the intentional silence with respect to foreign inspiration used; method of judicial comparisons and the traditional objections propounded in relation to it, including superficiality and selectivity; finally, against this background, the aims and purposes of judicial use of non-mandatory foreign authority are freshly reassessed.
This thesis examines the politics of memory in the Czech Republic and Poland after 1989 in relation to restitution of nationalized property as a measure of post-communist transitional justice. The dominant historical discourses in both countriees are analyzed on the basis of restitution legislation and procedures and public debates. The latter saw the emergence of various historical narratives of victimhood, constructed around memories of different historical injustices, and justifying or opposing claims for restitution or compensation for lost property. The thesis compares restitution claims made by various groups of former owners expropriated during several waves of property revolutions in the twentieth century: property issues related to the post-war forced population transfers, property issues related to the Holocaust, the claims of the former aristocracy and the landed gentry, and, finally, those of the Catholic Church. The analysis shows that the dynamics of restitution and memory were for the most part determined by the general processes of coming to terms with the communist past, and demonstrates that memories of communism have influenced the processes of dealing with World War II. In both national cases it is possible to identify dominant memory discourses that shaped the dynamics of restitution debates. In the Czech Republic, there was a condemnation of communist crimes presupposing the principle of compensation for past wrongdoing, while in Poland the idea of property restitution was rejected on the basis of arguments relating to universal victimhood and the impossibility of universal compensation. In both countries the different narratives were legitimized by law. In the Czech case this came in the form of the adoption of restitution laws at the beginning of the 1990s, while in Poland the situation was marked by legislative silence and far-reaching legal continuity with the communist legal order.
This thesis explores the impact of the increasing role of systematisation in European law on the example of EU risk regulation as a reference area. It argues that systematisation in European law has a much wider impact than what is regularly perceived as rationalisation. It creates a new integration-method, which economises European law to an extend that it effects the state-making and society building in EU law. In this respect, it also contributes to the legitimacy of EU legal action and shapes the EU constitution. Risk regulation forms an ideal test case for this thesis as it has emerged in recent years from a sector-specific and reactive field of law to an increasingly coherent and autonomous legal system at European level, which follows its own rules and procedures. While within the two main regimes of risk regulation, which I call ‘new approach’ and ‘new governance’, systematisation developed at a different speed and under different circumstances, these concepts are increasingly merged at European level. When I talk about the technique of systematisation, however, this concept requires adjustment as to the features of European law. While systematisation has been a main feature of the state-making agenda of nation-states, the same technique of systematisation in the EU nowadays creates a common market. Hence, in the EU, systematisation is in the first sense a tool of economisation. This impact of systematisation of risk regulation falls also within the EU’s competence. Although the principle of proportionality may require adjustments according to under- and over-inclusiveness of individuals and groups within systematised EU law, the EU legal order requires such systematisation in principle.
The thesis assesses whether States are required to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes of international concern. To this effect, it analyses the regime determined under treaty law, customary law and general principles of law for the prosecution of core crimes. It examines whether the prohibition to commit core crimes embodies jus cogens and, if so, what consequences derive therefrom for the duty to prosecute perpetrators. Further, considering that the ICC was established in order to fill in lacunae of accountability derived from States’ unwillingness or inability to prosecute, the thesis scrutinizes the jurisdictional framework established by the Statute, in particular the principle of complementarity. On the basis of the study undertaken, it is argued that complementarity as determined in the Rome Statute is a specific materialization of a broader concept of complementarity. The thesis concludes that core crimes law has been motioned forth by the principle of substantive complementarity, which binds the custodial State to prosecute, where extradition is not feasible and international jurisdiction cannot step in, if necessary on grounds of universal jurisdiction. Finally, taking into account that the Statute of Rome articulates the mandate of the Court with the authority of the SC to maintain international peace and security, the thesis proposes a model of coordination of the competences of States, the ICC and the UN political organ, in accordance with the law of the Charter, the Rome Statute and peremptory norms of the international community. Against this backdrop, a systematic framework of the duty to prosecute core crimes is submitted, such that sovereignty and the principle mandating the fight against impunity are operatively reconciled.
The aim of this research is to analyse the interrelationship between Private International Law and European Union law in the area of contractual obligations. The Rome I Regulation on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations is used to delimit the scope of research. The material rules of Rome I will be discussed in order to demonstrate that the instrument follows the traditional European conflict of laws approach without any specific orientation towards internal market objectives. The influence of Union law upon PIL goes however beyond positive harmonisation, being the codification of conflict of law norms on the European level. In the analysis of the effects of Union law upon the conflict of law process, a distinction will be drawn between international and =European‘ contracts. As regards international contracts Rome I could be used to establish the international scope of application of secondary Union law when the contract involves a link with a third country. However the legislator seems to have given preference to an autonomous approach based upon the object and purpose of the relevant instrument. These directives create nuisance in the conflict of law process and it will be proposed to integrate sector specific scope rules in Rome I. With regard to contracts that exclusively have connections with two or more Member States it will be analysed to what extent rules of contract law are caught by the fundamental freedoms. It will be argued that primary law does not favour ex ante the application of the law of a specific Member State, but may correct the applicable law. Rules that can be set aside by parties by a mere choice of law can however not have the potential effects of hindering the smooth functioning of the internal market. The overall objective of the project is to identify the methodological disharmony between Union law and PIL in the regulation of cross border contracts and to propose suggestions to improve their mutual understanding.
Using consumer credit regulation as a case study, this thesis investigates how the specific legislation in this field can be explained by the major streams of economic philosophy. Based on an analysis of the evolution of European consumer credit legislation it is shown how the EU legislator’s approach towards consumer protection has changed and, more importantly, who are the addressees of this legislation. Finally, the thesis discusses how the role of contemporary consumers is conceptualized by European legislators. It can be shown that EU consumer credit regulations are a perfect example for illustrating the wider changes in EU consumer legislation. The thesis addresses the question whether consumer credit legislation is only regulated by economic law or also by social law and hence, whether it has a social dimension in addition to an economic one. Further, it discusses the implications of two competing approaches to consumer regulation, namely a free consumer credit market (neoliberal approach) and one that is characterized by public intervention (social market approach). On the European level, the issue of the character of law which regulates consumer credit has consequences on the legislative competences shared by the EU and member states legislators in this respect. This is inseparable from the question concerning the choice between the minimum or maximum harmonisation approaches. The core argument of this thesis is that all above-mentioned aspects converge into a common focal point in that there is tension between two fundamental goals of the European Community, namely economic efficiency (understood as a competitive market society) and consumer protection (understood as, broadly speaking, a social justice society with its distributive role). The dissertation discusses whether and how these two goals can be reconciled, and which of them actually prevails in the EU consumer credit legislation.
The aim of the thesis is to explore the function of proportionality analysis (PA) as a tool of judicial adjudication in European law. In this effort the author analyses in the first part of the thesis the way in which European supra-/international courts, notably the ECJ, the EFTA Court and the Human Rights Court, apply PA. The analysis reveals that PA is a flexible instrument of judicial review. In the second part of the thesis the application of PA by UK and Norwegian courts is discussed. The respective countries´ courts have not traditionally applied PA but various reasonableness tests. The purpose of the investigation is thus to shed comparative light on PA by contrasting it with comparable assessment schemes. To the extent PA is taken on by the two national courts the investigation may display the persuasive nature of PA. The legal dogmatic approaches taken in part one and two of the thesis does only partly help determine the function of PA. A broader approach is needed to this end. In part three of the thesis the author firstly discuss what it means that PA consists of both rationality and reasonableness tests and thereafter whether PA is of a substantial or a procedural nature. Concluding that PA is of a procedural nature - securing a legal safeguard for individuals - it is nevertheless clear that PA implies the strengthening of the judiciary. This leads to an elaboration on the virtues and vices of 'judicial governance'. In this connection it is suggested that the establishment of PA as a (general) principle of law (together with the tri-partial structure) is a way in which courts may attempt to legitimise the extensive judicial power, which lies intrinsic in PA. The author then embarks upon a discussion of the nature and function of principles of law including the rule of law qualities of PA.
Article 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice lists the sources of international law: treaties, customary international law, general principles, judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists. Traditionally, the formation of customary international law is constituted of two elements, state practice and opinio juris, in other words, the action of states and the subjective belief that the action is required by law. On occasions, however, the rules labelled under customary international law are not found through the process of establishing state practice and opinio juris, but stem from other normative considerations, as the case-study of international criminal tribunals illustrates. This thesis examines the nature of customary international law and the ‘modernised’ version of it; what distinguishes the traditional and novel concepts; where do they arise from - the process of their formation; and their relationship with other sources of international law. The critical analysis concentrates on this transformed process of discovering rules categorised as customary international law, and the impact of this novel process on the understanding of the nature of customary international law, as well as on the legitimacy of the resulting rules. The thesis does not, finally, purport to renounce the expansion of the sources of international law, but rather directs the criticism on the methods of finding customary international law and the compliance to the principle of legality, and notes that criminal trials may not be the appropriate venues for the discovery of novel sources of law or the explicit extension of the scope of existing sources.
The first chapter aims at assessing the importance of political connections for the profitability of privately owned firms. The value of connections is estimated using a unique quasi-natural experiment: The September 2006 Thai coup d’état. Connections are found to be potentially very valuable, accounting for as much as 20% of market capitalization for the best connected firms. Benefits from connections include lower taxation and better access to debt financing. Firms operating in domestically dependent industries and industries with high external financing needs appear to benefit the most from being politically connected.
The second chapter incorporates a model of endogenous corruption into an intra industry trade model. The purpose is to study how trade liberalization impacts bureaucratic corruption. We find that trade opening leads to tougher competition and thereby reduces the officials ability to extract rents from firms. We also analyze the incentive for governments to fight corruption and find that incentives are stronger when trade costs are lower. Finally, we empirically test the main prediction of the model, and find that more remote and less easily accessible countries also suffer from higher levels of corruption.
The third chapter aims at estimating trade creation and trade diversion under the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA). Previous studies - mainly conducted prior to the implementation of the treaty - have put into question SAFTA’s potential for trade creation. However, according to our estimates, conducted on post treaty data, SAFTA has increased intra regional trade by as much as 40% for eligible products. This figure is higher than estimates for most other trade blocks. Further, trade diversion appears to have been limited, though this is due mainly to the treaty being accompanied by significant reductions in external tariffs.
The three chapters included in this thesis all touch upon very different aspects of the disciplines of international trade and economics. The first chapter shows that trade liberalization can lead to a permanent increase in growth rates in a model of selection and imitation. The second chapter takes a very different approach to gains from trade, and demonstrates that trade liberalization can be a potentially effective tool for curbing corruption. The third chapter is more policy oriented, and motivated by the recent explosion in the number of both North-North and South-South regional preferential trade agreements.
As indicated in the title, 'The Rights to Water', this thesis will argue that one self-standing, comprehensive and legally-binding human right to water does currently not exist on the international level. However, it is important to note, that this is not the same thing as stating that 'there is no human right to water'. It is simply to say that this human right does not meet some of the characteristics of many other human rights (in particular: self-standingness, comprehensiveness and legalbindingness) all at once. The research question will be addressed in three steps. A first analytical part will examine the present status of the right to water in international, European and domestic law. A second, theoretical part, will scrutinize whether and in which form it is even conceptually possible and meaningful to consider water as the object of a distinct human right. Finally, a third, applied part will consider how concrete reforms and developments can improve the effectiveness of the right in practical terms, if accepted. Only by considering the right to water in its legal, philosophical and practical context can the present status and future potential of the right to water be addressed fully.
This dissertation seeks to analyse the production of a historical work during the Enlightenment, focussing on the specific case of William Robertson and his masterpiece the History of America (1777). The crux of the research lies in the understanding of how history was written, sources collected, and opinions moulded during the Eighteenth Century. On a larger perspective, this thesis contributes to the European historiography in analysing the practical dimension of the cultural transfer theory. Once attested that circulation of knowledge took place during the Enlightenment, the question posed was how it really operated. The focus on the textual dimension of the History of America sheds new light upon the reason behind the historian’s decision to write the history of the Spanish conquest and colonization with a different approach. In a time in which philosophy often shaped history, Robertson was claiming the right to apply le métier d’historien to the historical writing, intended as the absolute attention towards the sources and towards a detailed and faithful reconstruction of the historical past. Within this context, the thesis analyses the sources that Robertson had used, included the questionnaires, and reconstructs the system of information networks he had arranged. Such examination offers an opportunity to appreciate his attempt to profit from the abundant circulation of knowledge of that time so as to produce a history which could revise the image of Spain in Europe. Finally, the paradoxical fortune of the book is resolved. It is only by taking into account the colonial policies at the dawn of the American revolution that it is possible to disentangle the reason why the History of America - despite the amendment of the Leyenda Negra - was ultimately prohibited in the Spanish territories.
European Union’s (EU) legislature allows for EU level private interest governments (PIGs): stakeholders, industry, professional and co-operative bodies; and control entrepreneurs (PriCEs) to complement regulatory strategies. However, governance studies have infrequently conducted cross-sector analysis on how they assist in implementing EU policies. This study conducts cross-sector analysis of private compliance instruments (PCIs) utilised as partial implementing strategy to EU’s business regulation across consumer, worker health, safety and environmental policies. It introduces several opportunities to learn from differences. PriCEs appear operational PCIs throughout several legislative and private regulatory frameworks; regulatory sectors; targeting sector- or business-specific compliance; and employing either command-and-control or reflexive/responsive regulatory modes. However, workable 'in-house' PCIs implemented by PIGs necessitate specific market architecture and legislative pressure. Within sectors of health and safety of consumers and workers specific conditions may support in-house PCIs, which control business-specific compliance within command-and-control mode. However, within environmental sector, such in-house PCIs appear unfeasible. The EU legislature has also architected PCIs, which somewhat equate to reflexive/responsive mode, to consumer and environmental policies, whilst it has abstained from introduction of such instruments to worker health and safety due to autonomous social dialogue. Generally, at EU level, the potential for using outfitted reflexive mode PCIs appears greater than employing command-and-control mode in CPIs.
This thesis explains the divergent outcomes in the evolution of political and economic institutions in two neighboring countries : Belarus and Ukraine between 1991 and 2007. Beyond the principal focus on these two pathways, the thesis also incorporates the examination of a third one, that of Russia, for various empirical, theoretical and methodological reasons. It explores in detail how the disparity in a quality of domestic political competition (largely determined by the strength of nationalist movements, the constellation of elites, and the European leverage and linkage) together with the variables of the external rent flows (timing of the external rent-expansion, costs, ownership and the perceived stability of rents) set the two countries on divergent paths. Going deeper, it analyses the logic behind both reproduction and change of political and economic institutions in Belarus and Ukraine. The focus on the dimension of external rents is the main added value and that what contributes to the uniqueness of this project, for it explains - why, when, how and in conjunction with what other factors, external economic rents steered the pathways away from autocratic socialism.
This thesis presents an opportunity to look at an important aspect of the genesis of national identity-making in the specific stateless and multicultural context from which Polish nationalism emerged. It sheds additional light on the nation-building practices of Eastern Europe, which on the level of theory have remained understudied, or still fall prey to simplification, with the Kohnian dichotomy on Western civic and Eastern ethnic nationalism being the most persistent. These prevailing perspectives strongly essentialized East European nationalisms and gave them a solely Herderian birth certificate, interpreted as the source of their negative aberration. According to these theoretical apriorisms, it is the history of the Eastern peoples which has predestined them toward ethnic, illiberal, exclusive, organic, and in a word ‘Eastern’, nationalism. The Western type, on the other hand, has always navigated towards civil, voluntaristic, liberal, inclusive and proper nationalism. These premises became the starting point for the research on typologies of nationalisms since Hans Kohn and later John Plamenatz codified them in their influential works.
This thesis examines secularisation theories and explores the question of their capability to capture and explain contemporary conflicts in Europe centred on the space and role for, primarily Muslims, religion in the public sphere. From the 1980s onwards, the "resurrection of religion” has reigned as the paradigm for the development of religion in the modern world, substituting the otherwise prevailing prediction that religion would “die out” as the inevitable effect of modernity. The prediction of revitalising religious vitality was motivated by the Iranian Revolution and a general worldwide rise in what broadly came to be labelled as 'religious fundamentalism'. Subsequently, this was fuelled by incidents such as the Rushdie affair, the 9/11 terror attacks, the Madrid and London bombings, the murder of Theo van Gogh and the Mohammed caricature crisis. Besides causing somewhat of a Kuhnian shift within secularisation theory and the social sciences more generally, these incidents, among many others, have also aroused a secular retort in Europe responding to what is perceived to be an inappropriate increasing religious vitality in otherwise modern and secularised societies.
This thesis investigates how progressive social movements deal with religious pluralism and religious political activism by engaging in a cross-country comparison of Muslim activists and their participation within the movement against neo-liberal globalisation (also known as the Global Justice Movement). Taking the example of two nation states which have a similar post-colonial history of migration and settlement, Britain and France, the thesis seeks to explain why we observe such differences in the reactions of social movement leaders to the novel development of Muslim activism within the movement. Using concepts developed in the study of social movements; in particular political opportunity structures (POS) and framing processes, three main findings emerge. Firstly, religion itself is not an explanatory factor behind the involvement of Muslims in this movement, although it may be strategically employed to encourage others. Secondly, reactions to Muslim participation by social movement organisations can be largely attributed to the respective philosophies of integration in each nation state. Social movement leaders in Britain are keen to show how diverse their organisations are by encouraging Muslim participation. In France, such diversity is perceived as weakness because it challenges their collective identity. Counterintuitively, we find more French Muslims willing to participate in social movements despite hostility to their presence by others. This is due to a stronger tradition of mobilisation within the left. Thirdly, different biographical outcomes of activism by Muslim activists within the GJM can be accounted for due to external political opportunity strucutures. British Muslim activists went on to form an electoral alliance with the radical left because of favourable opportunity structures but their French counterparts failed to do the same because opportunities were closed.
This thesis analyses the general restrictions to the exercise of human rights in three parts; dealing respectively with the limits of individual rights and the aim and specificity of general restrictions, states of emergency, and abuses of rights. It analyses the distinctive position of human rights norms in the general architecture of the international system and reconstructs the concept of individual rights along those lines. It, then, compares the different means by which states can limit their obligations under international law. It highlights the need to regard these suspiciously and not to allow them, whenever it can be prevented. The main claim is that, in view of the distinctiveness of human rights treaties, only restrictions aimed at ensuring a better protection and more stringent respect of these rights should be admissible. It argues that only the general protective clauses allowing limitations in states of emergency and prohibiting abuses of rights fulfil this purpose. In this regard, it singles out the latter general clause as the main guarantee on which rest the different conventions, as well as the only justifiable limit to recognised rights. Besides, it defends that even these dispositions should be strictly construed, in order to respect both their protective nature and the wording of the international treaties in which they are inserted. For this, they need to satisfy a number of conditions related to the exceptional measures’ trigger and the content and extent of the restrictions. Different types of guarantees must also be provided. Finally, it further studies the corollary question of the horizontal application of human rights provisions in interpersonal relations.
The difficulties and obstacles faced by the poorer nations of the global economy on the path to development are extremely diverse. It is the aim of this thesis to address some of the interesting questions related to the key obstacles. As such, this thesis is neither wholly empirical or theoretical, macro or micro and instead may be viewed as an eclectic mix of approaches and ideas that go some way toinvestigating the challenges faced by the world's least developed economies. The first chapter explores the varying effects of aspects of institutional quality on different categories of economic volatility, introducing a unique exogenous instrument for political aspects of the institutional bundle. The second chapter investigates the theory behind the largely failed policy of import substitution industrialisation and promotes a policy of diversification across production in the primary commodity sector within developing countries; specifically that this type of diversification can insulate developing economies from the effects of highly volatile primary commodity prices. The third chapter develops the general equilibrium model of appropriation and production of Grossman and Kim (1996) in order to investigate the effect that the pointiness of the contested resource can have on conflict intensity. The fourth and final chapter extends the discrete time, overlapping generations model of Chakraborty and Das (2005), demonstrating that the inclusion of child mortality reinforces the persistence and prevalence of child labour.
This thesis attempts to shed light on the role of financial factors and vulnerabilities in shaping macroeconomic fluctuations. It contributes to the literature that integrates financial factors into the real business cycle paradigm by introducing asymmetries and disaster risk in financial conditions, reflecting the low probability of sharp worsening in financial conditions that is found in data. The introduction of disaster risk in this thesis is done within a small open economy modeling framework. In this sense, while the trigger of disaster events is not endogenized, the emphasis is on exploring the role of financial frictions (such as working capital requirements or time-varying leverage) and of modeling features (e.g. variable capital utilization, the use of imported intermediate inputs, etc.) in affecting the propagation mechanisms when external conditions show a rare disaster pattern.
The focus of this investigation lies on the dynamic of national interests versus international collaboration among the so-called foreign academies in Rome during the immediate post-war period in Italy. This is a study of individual, local and national representation and mentalities, as well as of national scholarly institutions. The study covers the period 1935-1953, and concerns scholarly interaction at five foreign academies in Rome - the Swedish Institute in Rome (SIR), the British School at Rome (BSR), the American Academy in Rome (AAR), the École française de Rome (EFR) and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Rom (DAIR) - all representing national academic structures and scholarly paradigms in relation to the study of antiquity and perceptions of common classical heritage and tradition. The investigation attempts to illuminate and contextualise the foreign academies in Rome, and has been inspired by the conspicuous general lack of assessment of the foreign academies beyond national ‘hagiographical’ histories, and by a need for self-reflective evaluation of the academies in historical context.
This is a thesis on micro-history that has the life-experiences of individual women as its central theme. These women did not live spectacular lives; they were not famous or well known by their contemporaries and hardly any of them are remembered today. What made them remarkable was their migration overseas from their home regions in Norway to the Dutch Republic. This is their contribution to history. The central theme of this book is the Norwegian female migrants in the early modern Dutch Republic in general and, specifically, the Norwegian female migrants in Amsterdam and Hoorn. On an individual level these Norwegian women have been studied and their life-experiences have been analyzed by using numerous different sources, both Dutch and Norwegian. However, though the results are unique, satisfying and will certainly contribute to ongoing research on migrants, there are lacunas in this work which need to be addressed before the results are presented.
This thesis, a feminist history of mission in the context of gender, has started on the premise to develop an alternative perspective on the missionary encounter rather than the attempt to enrich existing narratives by adding women. Therefore, it mainly draws on the sources that its principal subjects, western missionary nuns, produced. These are mostly correspondence with Europe, travelogues, chronicles, reports and, to a lesser extent, articles, photographs and memoirs, all of which allow us to gain new insights into the nuns’ religious and practical worlds and their gendered dimensions as they moved within and across imperial and religious systems. In addition, it uses colonial records and ecclesiastical sources in order to scrutinize the power relations that structured the nuns’ missionary engagement and their ambiguous roles as enthusiastic missionaries that took their privileged position as 'white Christians' for granted on the one hand and subordinated to male religious and secular power on the other one. Ultimately, theological perspectives are accorded a prominent place because, to borrow from Andrew Porter, missionaries 'viewed their world first of all with the eye of faith and then through theological lenses'.
Charles C. Gillispie saw the metamorphosis of the Jardin du Roi into the Muséum d’histoire naturelle as an “epitome of the French Revolution in botanical microcosm” – in other words, a historical object belonging to the realm of culture and science marked by the immense event. The years 1789-1804 were a key-period in the establishment of French collections of natural history. The period was characterized by an intense circulation of specimens: the specimens which were collected or confiscated, exchanged or purchased, converged towards the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, while a portion of the duplicates from the national collections were  sent to the départements. In these large-scale movements, the confiscations of aristocratic, ecclesiastical and foreign cabinets played a major role, as did the consignments sent to the Écoles centrales. The Muséum was then the centre around which the collecting and the subsequent dispersal of the specimens was organized and Paris became at one point the undisputed capital of natural history in Europe. The dissertation aims to study what is at stake in the transfer of the collections of the old cabinets to the Paris Muséum, and from there, to the new museums in the départements. The main focus will be on the proximity of these scientific collections to the art collections at the time when the notion of patrimony came into being. Emphasis will also be put on the meaning and purposes of the distribution of material between the various Parisian institutions, between the Muséum and the cabinets in the départements as well as in the various galleries within the Muséum itself.
This thesis is the first comprehensive interpretation of J.H.G. von Justi’s political and international thought. It demonstrates that the intellectual world of Justi was much more diverse and open than has previously been admitted. The same is true of the tradition of cameralism which has been largely misunderstood. Cameralism was not an obstacle for the reception of natural law theories that emphasised the passionate and self-interested side of the human nature. On the contrary, it was Justi who built his sciences of state on the foundation of natural law. So far those scholars who have admitted the importance of the natural law to Justi - with the exception of Horst Dreitzel - have fallen back on the idea that the natural law Justi adopted was that of Christian Wolff, an interpretation which is in itself another sign of the belief that German enlightenment was a unitary movement. However, it was the natural law of Schmauss and not of Wolff on which Justi built his theory of the state and similarly, of international relations. The German enlightenment was not a singular movement solely in the hands of rationalist metaphysicians. One of the guiding lines of this thesis is that Justi’s entire thought was constructed to oppose this tradition.
This research focuses on the appearance of modern femininity in the mass media of Buenos Aires of the interwar period, showing the diverse range of meanings that the modern young woman phenomenon had in post-war Argentina. These diverse meanings were related to how male intellectuals, journalists, writers and filmmakers interpreted the changes in gender identities that characterised this period as well as their connection to the creation of a national identity for Argentina. In particular, by selecting images of modern femininities, I analyse how competing images of womanhood revealed anxieties associated with changing roles for women as well as how these images expressed the possibilities and dangers of modern life. I also study how different modern female figures reflected wider hopes, tensions and fears connected to the emergence of a modern nation and how these figures were both linked to and distinct from those that occurred elsewhere in the world. By focusing on key issues like consumption, mass culture, female fashion and sexuality, the broader scope of my inquiry is to study how the tensions and debates generated by modernity depended on and moulded gender notions in Buenos Aires.
This PhD thesis is a study of the development of the concept of the Baltic Sea region as a historical region in the Polish and Swedish historiographies in the interwar and post-Cold War periods. Taking as the point of departure an enthusiasm for Baltic Sea region history that appeared after the end of the Cold War, the aim is on the one hand to determine what intellectual traditions and earlier concepts the post-Cold War concept of the Baltic Sea region is based on, and on the other – to compare the two historiographies. The research shows first of all an asymmetry between the two cases in the two time periods: whereas the topic of the Baltic Sea region was discussed in Poland in the interwar period and almost ignored in the post-Cold War period, the situation in Sweden is reverse. Furthermore, two visions of the Baltic Sea region history are present in the historiography of the region: a more nationalistic one, striving first of all to secure national interests and seeing itself as an objective depiction of static past reality, and cross-national history, which adopts a post-modern view of history as an interpretation of the past, an ongoing process, and a definition of a region as a network of interactions or an arena of processes. It aims to create a basis for regional integration. These different approaches can be explained by the two countries’ distinct political cultures and intellectual traditions, but first of all - their different geopolitical situations in the interwar and the post-Cold War periods.
How do state economic institutions come about? And why do developing countries give different accounts of state institution-building? This study argues that state economic institution-building is a function of the ruling incumbents’ motives and scope conditions. Motives refer to the incumbents’ identification of state institutionbuilding with their immediate and direct interest of political survival in office. Meanwhile, scope conditions refer to the enabling or constraining factors that the incumbents confront in pursuit of reform which either supplement or limit their autonomy and resources. The study examines the cases of Turkey and Egypt following the embarking on economic liberalization in 1980 and 1990 respectively. On the one hand, Turkey witnessed considerable institution-building in export-related policy and regulation areas with remarkable implications for export expansion and restructuring from raw materials into manufactured products. Conversely, postliberalization Egypt suffered from institutional stagnation associated with a poor export performance and persistent dependency on oil exports. The claim is that Turkish incumbents have been more motivated and enabled to undertake encompassing institutional reforms with the aim of export expansion restricting than their Egyptian counterparts.
This thesis argues that the 1848 revolutions played a key role in the development of the political thought of the Young Hegelians, Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer, Moses Hess and Karl Marx. They all developed revolutionary ideas in the 1840s and hoped for revolutionary events as those that unfolded in 1848, but their theories failed to predict the outcome of the revolution. In the empirical analysis this thesis clearly demonstrates that the Young Hegelians under study changed their theoretical outlooks as a direct result of the 1848 revolutions. It is argued that the mechanism for this change is intellectual disillusionment. The idea is that these intellectuals became disillusioned with the theories they had developed in the 1840s because they experienced the 1848 as an intellectual failure.
O estudo que me proponho realizar, centrado no caso português, pretende perceber de que modo o clero capitular participou no processo de alteração do campo dos poderes que, iniciado no século XVI, se prolongou pela centúria seguinte. Na esfera da Coroa, foram criadas novas instituições, no contexto de uma crescente burocratização e afirmação do poder régio. A Igreja assistiu a grandes transformações na sua organização e funcionamento, consolidadas num concílio que, realizado em Trento, foi implementado nos territórios que se mantiveram fiéis a Roma.
Sul principio del Cinquecento l’industria della stampa offrì ad un tipografo di grande talento della Bassa Franconia l’occasione di partecipare attivamente alla produzione e alla diffusione della più alta cultura scritta dell’Europa della prima età moderna. Dal 1513 Johannes Froben legò il proprio nome a quello del 'principe degli umanisti', Erasmo da Rotterdam, conquistandosi negli anni a seguire il privilegio di pubblicare a Basilea le sue opere più celebri: gli Adagia (1513 e, soprattutto, 1515 e tutte le successive edizioni ampliate, corrette e approvate dall’autore); l'Enchiridion militis christiani nell’edizione pro-Lutero preceduta dalla lettera a Paul Volz (1518); i Colloquia (1522 ed edizioni successive ampliate e corrette dall’autore); il Novum Testamentum in greco (1516, 1519 ed edizioni sucessive); la serie delle edizioni vagliate, corrette e commentate dei Padri della Chiesa. La collaborazione con Erasmo influì in modo preponderante sul successo editoriale dell’impresa di Froben, sia in termini di incremento della produzione libraria sia in termini di prestigio e di celebrità. A sua volta la collaborazione con Johannes Froben incise sulla vita di Erasmo da Rotterdam garantendogli una totale indipendenza di pensiero e di azione, al riparo da rapporti clientelari e di mecenatismo con i grandi del tempo. Negli anni trascorsi nell’officina di Froben a Basilea Erasmo, dedicandosi unicamente al paziente lavoro di studio e di cura delle sue edizioni, divenne quell’illustre 'Sole d’Europa' come è diventato uso appellarlo. Lo studio che qui si presenta costituisce la prima parte di una ricerca che si propone di esaminare, di interpretare e di valutare le ragioni e le modalità di questa collaborazione assumendo come punto di osservazione privilegiato la vita e l’attività del tipografo Johannes Froben.
Joseph Roth possessed a sharply observant eye which allowed him to clearly read the signs of his times – those divided years of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe – a quality that has earned him the dubious epitaph “prophet”; a drunken prophet, as Europe’s demise into another world war went hand in hand with his own physical decline through alcoholism. Roth, his black coat draped around his shoulders, newspaper under his arm, cigarette and drink in hand while slowly moving from one hotel to another, was a border crosser, a train traveller, an observer and a hotel patriot.2 He was a literary exile who chose an itinerant existence; a highly prolific journalist and novelist who entertained friends and acquaintances at his café table in Paris and who drank himself to death at the early age of 44. Often noted for his cosmopolitan flair, Roth received extraordinarily high book advances but spent most of his time in a perpetual financial worry; a man who, in line with his skilled journalistic eye for detail, had a great passion for the miniature universe of watches and clocks, a predilection mirrored in his miniscule and delicate handwriting.
Livland ist im Verlauf der Jahrhunderte ein Schauplatz vielfältiger ethnischer Begegnungen, Kontakte und Konflikte gewesen. Esten und Letten, Deutsche und Russen, Dänen, Schweden und Polen haben den Landstrich an der Ostsee, auf dessen Territorium später die Republiken Estland und Lettland entstehen sollten, geprägt und seine Geschichte gestaltet. Wem diese Vielfalt an Ethnien aber noch immer zu wenig ist, möge bei einem frühneuzeitlichen Gelehrten nachschlagen, und er wird die Geschichte Livlands um weitere Akteure bereichert finden: Römische Adelige, die die Tyrannei Kaiser Neros ins Exil getrieben hatte, hatten sich in Livland angesiedelt und dort ihre Kolonien und Reiche gegründet, genauso wie versprengte Krieger aus dem Heer Alexanders des Großen und jüdische Flüchtlinge, die es nach der Zerstörung Jerusalems an die Ostsee verschlagen hatte. Hinzu kommen Daker und Wallachen aus den heutigen Rumänien, Inder und Byzantiner, die Neuren – ein Volk leibhaftiger Werwölfe aus dem Steppen der Ukraine – und zahllose andere Stämme wie die Agathyrsen und Gelonen, bei denen auch ein historisch interessierter Mensch sich nicht zu schämen braucht wenn er noch nie etwas von ihnen gehört hat. Sie alle sollen in Livland gelebt haben, und in ihnen glaubten frühneuzeitliche Gelehrte die Vorfahren der Esten und Letten gefunden zu haben.
Coherence is a powerful rhetorical device that is prevalent throughout decades of EU external relations discourse and practice. There is intuitiveness to coherence, an implied sense of ‘good fit’ between the different elements of an all-encompassing system. Yet, any attempt to concretize coherence will open up a plethora of context-specific legal and political questions. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) is a recent example of an external policy drawn up explicitly with the objective of achieving coherence across different EU and Member State external policies. Positioning the ENP in the legalhistorical context of political Union, this thesis first argues why coherence is an issue at all in EU external relations, and why law is integral to attaining the ever-enigmatic single voice of the European Union. Subsequently, the text examines the role of EU external relations law in attaining a coherent neighbourhood policy. It is argued that the innovative nature of the ENP for coherence lies beyond the narrowly defined legal sphere, but stems mostly from its hybrid composition of hard legal, soft legal and nonlegal policy instruments. It is concluded that from a purely EU-internal and institutional perspective, this approach was reasonably successful in involving different actors towards common objectives in the neighbourhood. However, coherence should be more than rhetorical gloss, and agreeing that a wide range of initiatives should be included in soft legal instruments is no guarantee for coherence in actual policy substance. To examine the latter issue this thesis then moves beyond the realm of legal inquiry, and employs content analysis to investigate the extent to which the ENP is substantively coherent between the different norms, actors and instruments this policy encompasses.
Language has always been one of the most pertinent factors contributing to the cultural diversity of societies throughout the world. Whereas the socio-historical processes of stateformation and nation building in the modern age have been accompanied by exclusive language policies aiming at linguistic homogenisation of the population, language rights have been central to the claims of national minorities for recognition of their identities. The preservation of linguistic diversity has, thus, become a major concern to many researchers, politicians and leaders of linguistic communities in Europe in general and countries of the former Soviet Union in particular. The issue of linguistic minorities has taken on a particular urgency because of the increasing recognition of the threat of extinction faced by many minority languages. The need for immediate action has become obvious. Europe has slowly but steadily started to come up with responses to how to keep the most vulnerable languages from extinction and guarantee rights to speakers of such languages at the same time. Today we can talk about the emergence of a European minimum standard of protection of language rights as it has developed since the 1990s in the European conventions and their monitoring activities. The impact of such standard varies in different countries and is being assessed in the present doctoral thesis with respect to Russia and Ukraine.
The thesis explores how the principle of supremacy of EU law has been construed by the case law of constitutional courts of new member states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The thesis analyzes the jurisprudence of constitutional reservations against the background of CEE countries as political entities with a regained sense of nationhood, ethnos and sovereignty and, in the light of a pattern of powerful and activist constitutional courts which have appeared willing to engage in domestic sensitive issues. Then, the interaction between national (constitutional) law and EU is transferred in the context of pre-accession adaptations in the Western Balkans, by analyzing the path towards Europe of Croatia and Albania. The thesis suggests that the jurisprudence of constitutional reservations in CEE often replicates that of other powerful constitutional courts in old member states, although it appears to be more receptive and less sceptical towards the unconditional supremacy of EU law. The thesis puts forward the idea of 'holistic constitutionalism' understood as the full commitment of national and EU institutions in achieving the aims of European integration on the basis of the treaty mechanisms, substantive guarantees and the common constitutional principles which are at place in Europe. The share responsibility of integration and adherence to common agreed constitutional principles among political actors, national governments, national parliaments, EU institutions and national (constitutional) courts would lead towards a less conflictual relationship between EU law and national constitutional law.
This book provides a model for the evaluation of potential biased regulatory actions by stock exchanges in relation to their own governance as well as in relation to the governance and activity of their regulatees; based on the analysis of the ownership, governance, allocation of regulatory powers, discretion‘s exercise and rule‘s content, this book gives the reader a comparative analysis that addresses how different exchanges‘ organizational and regulatory structures can lead to different forms of biased regulation as well as externalities in the financial system. The book develops case studies regarding three major stock exchanges‘ holding companies (BME, the LSEG, and NYSE-Euronext) and the markets they operate in Spain, the UK, France and the US. One of the main findings of the book is the relation between the ownership/governance of exchanges and the quality of their regulatory output; stock exchanges subject to concentrated and path dependent ownership structures and weaker governance regimes in which there is low separation between the ownership of the exchange and its governance, tend to produce rules that maximize the interest of the persons exercising control over those exchanges. Moreover, these persons have the incentive to keep a lock on control because, by doing so, they extract important private benefits of control in the form of regulatory power and discretion that can be used in a biased manner in their own interest. This finding has important implications in terms of policy making; if there is such a relation between governance and regulatory output, efforts by public regulators should be put on the governance of exchanges in order to avoiding the possibilities of biased influence over exchanges‘ regulatory processes.
Great prosperity is derived from innovation, which in turn prospers in an environment with a large public domain of free knowledge, property rights and unfettered competition. Generally, this was the basic theory for prosperity under the antitrust laws with reference to joint R&D, technology transfer and technology standardization in the US and Europe for many years. This perspective was slowly abandoned in the 1980s and 1990s, replaced by a belief that the greatest wealth was derived from innovators having large resources to perform R&D, the ability to cooperate with competitors and the possibility of jointly protect and exploit newly discovered knowledge through intellectual property rights, technology standardization agreements and joint licensing schemes. The antitrust policies on both sides of the Atlantic have closely and swiftly been adapted to mirror this change of theory. The thesis illustrates this transformation by analyzing the modifications and amendments made to legal acts and guidelines, and the slow shift in the scant case-law detected both under the antitrust laws of the USA and the Competition Rules of the EU. The thesis shows that the prevailing antitrust policies towards R&D collaborations, technology standardization agreements and patent pools are very similar in the US and EU and they both mirror a lenient or even supportive attitude towards collaboration between competitors in reference to creating innovation.
This work does not seek to provide a panacea for the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians, nor does it try to present a skewed version of this conflict. Instead the sole intention is to discuss the legal issues surrounding the legality of the present status of the City of Jerusalem. It also discusses the historical context and legal implications of Resolution 181 in regards to the status of the city of Jerusalem. It did so by assessing the British/ Jordanian/ Israeli legislations concerning the City of Jerusalem according to international law governing conflict. The thesis examined the role of Self-determination in view of the determination of its legal status and post-status accommodation between different stakeholders and studied the two prominent concepts of international law that are useful in resolving the conflict. Mainly, this thesis focused on the Right to Self-determination and the Protection of Cultural heritage and the effect the two concepts will have on the future status of any settlement. 
The main argument in the thesis is attributing any solution to the status of the city of Jerusalem to the role of protecting cultural heritage in the city of Jerusalem. It examined the de lege lata on how the general interest of humanity in the preservation of Jerusalem, as attested by the inscription in the WHL, can influence the future settlement of Jerusalem and at the same time can limit the claims of both Arabs and Israelis to an exclusive possession of the City in terms of memory and in terms of actual administration. Eventually, this thesis concluded with establishing a new status for the city of Jerusalem as an International City, using the 181 Resolution as a landmark for its guide.
The dissertation discusses the development of competition law in the emerging economies. In particular, the research focuses on the systems of merger control, taking Brazil and Argentina as case studies. The core subjects discussed in the dissertation concern the institutional issues undermining the enforcement of competition law in the emerging economies, the features that a system of merger control should have in an emerging economy, and the problems faced by the competition authorities of the emerging economies when they have to review multi-jurisdictional concentrations. Brazil and Argentina have been selected as case studies due to the fact that they have an enforcement record of a system of merger control of ten and fifteen years respectively. Moreover, the number of cross-border competition law cases involving Brazil and Argentina has recently increased, due to the strong trade links that these countries have established within Mercosur. From a methodological point of view, the research is based on the analysis of the Brazilian and Argentinean legislations in the field of competition law, as well as the main merger decisions adopted by the competition authorities and the judgements held by the courts of these countries. In addition, the empirical analysis is based on the interviews conducted by the author between April and July 2008 in Buenos Aires, Brasília and São Paulo with competition lawyers and officers of the competition authorities of these countries. In the final chapter of the thesis the findings concerning Brazil and Argentina have been discussed against the background of the literature concerning the topic of competition law in the emerging economies. The overall objective of the research was to identify a number of policy lessons applicable to other emerging economies which have recently introduced a system of merger control at the internal level.
This thesis aims at analyzing to what extent different forms of social capital can help immigrants in the Netherlands and Germany to make headway on the labour market. Two forms of social capital are identified. Bonding refers to a dense network with thick trust and is measured as the strength of family ties, co-ethnic ties and trust in the family. Bridging implies a crosscutting network with thin trust and is measured as inter-ethnic ties and outward orientation. Making use of quantitative research methods, it is examined to what extent bonding and bridging for immigrants in the Netherlands and Germany explain a higher likelihood of employment, higher income, higher occupational status and shorter unemployment duration. Results show that 1) bridging networks positively affect all economic outcomes identified; 2) bonding networks do not affect economic outcomes; 3) levels of trust (neither thick nor thin) do not explain economic outcomes; 4) returns to social capital are much higher for men than for women; 5) findings are similar for Germany and the Netherlands. Limitations and implications are discussed.
The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the institutional realignments in the biomedical innovation system brought about by changes in the intellectual property (IP) regime that enabled the expansion of patent protection to new areas, such as living organisms and basic biological information, and new actors, such as universities and public research institutes. These changes brought about two risks: a weaker dissemination of knowledge due to high access costs to research tools and findings, and the disruption of the norms of openness, traditionally associated with scientific progress. The available empirical studies that attempted to assess the effects of patenting on scientific exchange and on technology transfer often gave inconclusive or inconsistent results, pointing at deeper theoretical and methodological problems. The present study is based on an in-depth analysis of the various IP responses of public research actors in three biomedical fields: genomics, stem cell research and synthetic biology. The study elaborates a typology of public scientists’ IP responses with respect to research tools and traces the main factors behind them. The co-existence of different and often conflicting IP responses shows that public researchers operate in a hybrid institutional system, which forces them to juggle constantly between the rules of the market and the conventions of 'open science'. Although they are often able to do so relatively smoothly, some responses clearly point at problems and dysfunctions in the patent regime. Moreover, they are indicative of some major changes in the innovation system, where new IP practices and growing science and technology interaction profoundly affect science funding policies, firm creation propensity and the organization of R&D across the public and the private sphere.
The regulation of water and marine resources is undergoing profound structural transformations under the conceptual influence of policy integration and community-based approaches. Including environmental considerations at the early stages of policy-making, as well as acknowledging usage inter-dependencies and their impact on ecosystems, has led to the multiplication of localised participatory policies and multi-stakeholder platforms. In that context, the objective of the PhD is twofold. It aims to analyse how local politics, through political parties, influences those new participatory forms of management, especially in the implementation of EU environmental directives. On the other hand, it explores how the diffusion of participatory norms of governance affects the strategies of political parties. The results show that electoral position and territorial levels strongly condition the local politics of participatory governance. It also provides evidence that collaborative management reduces formal accountability and parties’ political discretion. In that sense, it confirms the cartelisation hypothesis: parties’ governing functions are strengthened, while participatory provisions have relocated the representation of interests outside the party system. The thesis highlights the positive effects of participation and holistic environmental approaches in terms of social regulation and transparency, especially in long-established national administrations. Yet, it questions its environmental strength, namely its capacity to solve deeply entrenched distributive dilemmas and the exclusiveness of social groups’ stakes. Even if multi-stakeholder participation must be appreciated as an empowering and more sustainable process, it is essential that practitioners and academics alike deal with its limitations and political ambiguities.
It is a central political goal to secure involuntarily unemployed individuals the same opportunities as others to pursue their conception of a good life. This goal reflects an ambition to combine an egalitarian and a liberal intuition. The egalitarian intuition is that any inequality between individuals must be justified by appealing to differences in some responsibility factors. The liberal intuition is that redistribution only can be justified by appealing to differences in some non-responsibility factors. In this dissertation I analyze how a system of unemployment insurance should ideally be designed in order to respect both the egalitarian and the liberal intuitions. The dissertation asks how the different unemployment insurance instruments, such as the UI benefit level, the entitlement conditions, the eligibility criteria, and the distribution of the costs associated with UI should ideally be designed and combined given that the aim is to maximize conformity to both the egalitarian and the liberal intuitions. The dissertation also asks how the different OECD unemployment insurance schemes have combined the egalitarian and the liberal intuitions in the design of their respective unemployment policy instruments.
This thesis aims to explore the way the Albanian nationalist intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century articulated the existence of an Albanian nation. The existence of such a nation assumed the recognition of certain values and, therefore, the entitlement to enjoy certain rights. The thesis concentrates on the work of four leading Albanian intellectuals and Ottoman imperial statesmen. It is thus a contribution to the study of the intellectual history and political thought as regards to the development of nationalism as an idea and ideology. The study of the nation in the Albanian context is intended to enhance an understanding of the dynamics of nationalism in the context of the decaying Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The study also has a wider theoretical dimension. It employs Western ideas on nationalism to study the particular dynamics of the Albanian national movement. But ideas developed in the west do not always correspond to the particular circumstances of the emergent Albanian national movement. As such the thesis offers a critical examination of some of the main Western theories on nationalism and through an examination of the Albanian case poses the need for a rethinking of some of the basic conceptions as regards to the development of the nationalist movements, in the context of a decaying multi- national empire, and in the context of backwardness where the national idea had to be constructed, and in which the role played by intellectuals was especially important.
The dissertation examines the role of German and Polish feature films in the Europeanization of the construction of the Holocaust memory. The role of the global media representations in providing foundations for a 'transnational Holocaust memory' was highlighted by Natan Sznaider and Daniel Levy (2002; 2006). However, while the authors of Erinnerung im Globalen Zeitalter concentrated on the international resonance of such Holocaust representations as Steven Spielberg‘s 'Schindler‘s List', my aim is to view the Holocaust films selected here primarily from the perspective of the nationally specific historical debates to which they relate. Employing a comparative perspective, I hope to show a dynamic picture of the role of cinema in current public processes of remembrance in Europe, and examine the ways in which different visions of national and European past clash or interact. The conceptual framework of the dissertation is located at the crossroad of the following areas of intellectual debate: the question of possibility of representing the Holocaust in film and other media; the concept of collective memory and the discussion about film as a legitimate media for historical discourse; historical and public confrontation with World War II and the Holocaust in Germany and Poland since 1945, especially after 1989; finally, the debate about a European identity and the place of the Holocaust within it.
It is my contention that a historically and thus philosophically accurate understanding of Arendt’s and Strauss’s projects cannot be gained without knowledge of the debates and controversies that shaped their early thought. I will also argue that it is insufficient to limit such a reconstruction to a single or few contemporary figures of influence, or even more so, to their engagement with the canon of philosophy or the 'problem of modernity'. Instead, Arendt’s and Strauss’s intellectual and political maturation took place in the broader context of a variety of overlapping contemporary conceptual fields, conventions and concerns. By reconstructing the unfolding of Arendt’s and Strauss’s scholarly and political outlook against the background of these discursive contexts, I hope to show that what are often understood as their critiques of modernity - and confronted as such, in this general sense, or used as a source of inspiration - emerged from their engagement with these particular disputes. Alongide the ways in which the conventions and concerns of their time influenced their philosophical and political sensibilities, I will also spell out their early critiques of these conventions, intellectual or political.They did not only intellectually inherit certain disciplinary traditions of discussion, but also sought to overcome what they deemed had led these astray.
The deconstruction of masculinity crisis in Greece during the 1950s and 1960s has a central part in the research objectives of the current project. More precisely, the main research questions of my study are as follows:
- How are hegemonic and subordinated types of masculinity represented in Greek popular films?
- How are gender relations represented in Greek popular films?
- What is the impact of cultural transfers on the cinematic representations of masculinity and gender relations?
- How do films represent the negotiation of tradition with modernity with regard to changes in masculinity and gender relations?
- How do the representations of masculinity and gender relations relate to those of class and locality?
- How do cinematic representations of masculinity and gender relations connect to their historical context?
From the early 21st century, the discipline of Economic History has paid a growing amount of attention to the phenomenon of preindustrial trade. Estimations of GDP per capita by Maddison (2001) and (2003) and Van Zanden (2005), for example, have attracted significant interest from scholars in different countries and have emphasized the relevance of Atlantic trade and its consequences for economic growth. Especially noteworthy in this regard has been the contribution of Acemoglu et al. (2002) and (2005). Their analysis of the different growth patterns among western States has placed Atlantic trade firmly in the spotlight. Taking the year 1500 as a starting point and conducting a long-term analysis, these authors have assessed the importance of political institutions as a major explanation for differences among States in terms of GDP per capita. They argue that the introduction of a parliamentary monarchy regime in England and the Netherlands explains the increments in GDP per capita for both countries. By contrast, countries such as Spain and Portugal, which continued as absolute monarchies, experienced much lower levels of development.
Questa ricerca esamina teorie e pratiche della repressione anti-ereticale nella prima metà del Trecento attraverso una ricostruzione dell’elaborazione teologica, dell’attività inquisitoriale e della politica pontificia di Jacques Fournier (Iacobus de Furno, ca.1285-1342), eletto papa sul finire del 1334 con il nome Benedetto XII. Monaco cistercense, vescovoinquisitore, cardinale teologo vicino a papa Giovanni XXII ed infine pontefice, Fournier tracciò le linee di un multiforme intervento teso a combattere la dissidenza religiosa. La sua carriera si svolse contestualmente al declino dell’eresia manichea in Languedoc e all’esplosione delle persecuzioni della dissidenza minoritica, nel vivo dei più accesi dibattiti teologici intorno alla Postilla super Apocalypsim di Olivi e alla nozione di povertà evangelica e francescana.
Political mobilisation of immigrants has been a subject of research throughout Europe with different sorts of approach. In this thesis, we make a revision of the extensive literature on the issue. Several perspectives have been developed that we use to frame our research design. We use an institutional approach to analyse immigrant and pro-immigrant political mobilisation in two countries: Portugal and Italy. We use two empirical sets of data to give a general overview of immigrant political mobilisation, on the one hand, and in-depth analysis of political mobilisation with different sorts of actors, on the other hand. We use a political opportunities structures approach for each country, analysing the immigration and immigrant laws in the nineties and beginning of the current decade. We continue with the anaysis of two immigrant groups for each country, comparing political mobilisation forms, frames, identities and repertoires of action promoted by those immigrant groups. This sort of case study approach allows discerning differences and comon aspects among both groups. We finally analyse the civil society structure for each country with the intend to establish the kind of civil society structure and how each state configuration conditions the political mobilisation of proimmigrant actors. Our main findings outline the importance of both factors: the political opportunity structures and immigrant group characteristics. We find different paths to political mobilisation for each immigrant group in each country.
This research represents a longitudinal study of changing patterns of governance in six microregions in Hungary. Its findings indicate that the dominant trend was a move from a nonhierarchical mode of governance, including integrated developmental policy making by diverse local state and non-state actors in the early 1990s, towards fragmented and hierarchical modes of governance by the 2000s. By the time Hungary had moved closer to EU accession, non-hierarchical and inclusive institutional solutions (heterarchies) had started to disappear from micro-regional governance in comparison to the early 1990s. Only a few micro-regional collaborations could survive the Europeanization of sub-national governance. These evolutionary trends were mainly shaped by domestic factors, the EU having only indirect influence on the process through providing the central state with prerogatives near the end of the decade to control regional and sub-regional development policy. This is only part of the story, however. Pre-accession support programs had also strengthened the governance capacities of sub-national state and non-state actors and enabled local political entrepreneurs to organize micro-regional territorial development through heterarchies even in the face of asymmetric power constellations between central governments and local state and non-state actors. The basic underlying assumption of this research, based on heterodox development theories, is that there is an interplay between heterarchic governance patterns and socioeconomic development. The case studies confirm that in an unstable and swiftly changing political, economic and institutional environment, heterarchic institutional solutions are necessary to maintain at least an average developmental level or to change a development path.
Most studies of pre-industrial economic and structural change focus on the economically leading regions or countries of the time, or use this development as an ideal by which to evaluate and compare change occurring in other countries. By doing so the scholarly debate loses sight of the many possible roads to economic development, as well neglecting the changes occurring in other less successful regions. This thesis aims at abating this. It will do so by examining the structural and economic changes which occurred in Norway during the pre-industrial period, a country lying in the outskirts of the European economic growth area. It asks what were the implications of changes in production, the gradual development of a Norwegian internal market, decisions made at the household level concerning market participation, as well as changing trends in the consumption of durable, semi-durable and perishable goods, for economic and social development in Norway. It also examines how these changes impacted on Norway’s later Industrialisation and entry into a modern market economy. The time period focused on is primarily 1750 to 1830.
One of the most relevant events of the last decades has been the fast integration of international financial markets. As most restrictions to cross-border asset trade were removed, the volume of activity in international financial markets increased dramatically, and so did the cross-country flows of resources due to external borrowing and portfolio returns. Many of the macroeconomic consequences of these stronger financial linkages still have to be fully evaluated. This thesis investigates two facets of the strengthening of cross-border financial linkages. First, have developments in international financial markets raised global insurance against national income fluctuations? Second, what would be the macroeconomic effects of changes in the portfolio preferences of big international investors? Chapters 1 to 3 deal with the first issue, the insurance role of international financial markets, both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Chapter 4 is focused on the second topic, and is devoted to studying the macroeconomic implications of the growth of large international investors, Sovereign Wealth Funds.
This thesis aims at understanding the origins, evolution and economic meaning of public pensions, by looking at the particular case of Spain during the first two thirds of the twentieth century. The only way of adequately framing the particularities of this national case is to place the Spanish experience in the wider context of social protection systems in other countries. At the same time, this is the most suitable strategy in order to engage the dominant debate among specialised scholars of Southern Europe welfare states and particularly so in Spain. This debate concerns the poor Spanish performance in the area of social protection, a phenomenon which is commonly attributed to two facts. Firstly, it stems from the country’s position as a peripheral economy, at least since the advent of modern economic growth. Secondly, and more decisively, the welfare gap is believed to be related to Franco’s dictatorship and the big slump that it represented for state engagement with welfare issues. Therefore, even if the country has experienced significant improvements in this sector during the last quarter of the twentieth century in terms of welfare state standards, the roots of the still existent gap in welfare provision have concentrated significant research efforts on Spanish social policy
No abstract available
This thesis addresses the problem of how to identify and model sources of common fluctuations of economic variables. It is an interesting question not only for researchers but also for policy makers and other authorities. The literature presents two approaches. The first one is based on an assumption that the important structural shocks can be captured by a small set of macroeconomic variables. The most popular models used in this context are structural vector autoregression models (SVAR). The second approach follows from a belief that there exists a small number of factors that affect many economic processes. Therefore, it involves analysis of large data sets, with both time and cross- sectional dimensions large enough to describe the factor structure. We dedicate the first part of the thesis to the problem of identification and estimation of structural shocks in small SVAR models. We follow the ideas of Rigobon (2003) and Lanne and Lütkepohl (2008), which show that the statistical property of the data may provide enough information to identify the structure of the model. The papers argue that a shift in the error covariance matrix allows for the estimation of the structural parameters of interest. The literature concentrates on models in which the shift is a result of a structural brake or a mixed distribution of errors.
The labor market is central to many issues in economics, including business cycles, unemployment, inequality, education, and growth. Moreover, it is the largest single market in most economies and it is fundamental in determining individual and household well-being.
Therefore, a good understanding of the many phenomena that we observe in modern societies requires knowledge of the functioning of the labor market. It is the aim of this dissertation to improve and to deepen this knowledge and it does so by investigating three important labor market phenomena.
In the first chapter, I address the divergence of unemployment rates between the U.S. and Europe. 
In the second chapter, I investigate the life-cycle dynamics of individual job mobility.
The third chapter empirically sheds some light on the causes and consequences of job separation. In particular, it addresses the following three questions: 
(a) What are the factors determining the separation hazard of employment relationships? 
(b) Which employer-employee matches are more likely to dissolve due to a layoff rather than a voluntary quit?
(c) What are the effects of a voluntary quit and a layoff, respectively, on re-employment wages?
Individuals living in developing economies are subject to a wide variety of risks. Moreover, since private and public formal institutions designed to help individuals coping with risks tend to be weaker and narrower than in rich countries, these risks very often bear a heavy burden on welfare. If the preferences of agents can be characterized by concave utility functions, these agents will want to spread risk across time and among themselves. We focus here on mechanisms allowing agents to share risk among themselves, and we look more particularly at environments where formal insurance options are incomplete or absent. This thesis offers three chapters which goal is to analyze the extent to which risk sharing is affected by imperfections in the insurance or in the credit markets. In the first two chapters, we take a microeconomic perspective and we examine how rural farmers cope with income shocks in village economies characterized by the absence of formal insurance markets. In the last chapter, we adopt a macroeconomic perspective and we look at the role of the domestic financial sector development in fostering risk sharing through financial integration between countries.
The aim of this thesis is, first, to reconsider property as a legal concept and as a social institution, by taking into consideration several insights provided by social sciences. Secondly, several regulatory measures are proposed in order to enhance an adequate protection of property. The author stars by analysing the protection of property as a fundamental right under EU law. She claims that the ECJ’s challenge is to strike the right balance between property rights and market build-up. Such a balance is to be found in the communicative network of discourses of the case-law of the ECtHR, and common traditions of Member States. Accordingly, the author suggests that the ECJ should be open to inputs from the ECtHR, namely through the ‘excessive burden’ criterion. The second regulatory analysis takes into consideration that property is intrinsically linked to consumption, and that owner is often necessarily a consumer. The function of EC consumer [protection] law, the function of European consumer policy, and the definition of the European consumer are the three interrelated questions that have guided the inquiry in Chapter III. Consumer policies, it is claimed, should be asymmetrical: they shall create benefits for those who are boundedly rational while imposing little or no harm on those who are to be considered fully rational. This distinction will provide the basis for a new standard in the assessment of the costs and benefits of regulatory options. Finally, the author inquires about situations where a conflict of properties might exist between a corporeal thing and an intellectual property right. It is claimed that lawmaking bodies must autonomously consider the interest(s) of the owner of the corporeal thing in the overall assessment of granting an intellectual property right. Before formulation of property rights, an appropriate weighing and balancing of all relevant interests is thus in need, in order to avoid normative inconsistencies.
What is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and how can we explain the phenomenon from an economic perspective? Is there a business case for CSR and was Milton Friedman right when writing in the New York Times in 1970 that "the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits"? Chapter 1 of this thesis will address all these questions and create a coherent conceptual framework for further analysis in the subsequent chapters. In this function it will serve as a natural introduction to the economics of CSR. One of the main issues emerging from the literature on CSR is the need to identify and explore a new kind of classical dichotomy, i.e. the trade o¤ between market provision of public goods via CSR and its public counterpart via regulation. The two theoretical essays that follow will focus on novel and potentially unexpected interaction between ?rm strategy and classical regulation in light of CSR and imperfect information, thereby suggesting the need to revise and eventually adapt the traditional use of public policy or to think about completely new policy tools.
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The object of this thesis concerns the institutional complementarities between the national systems of corporate governance and employee representation (including collective bargaining) in an evolutionary comparative and European perspective. This thesis defends that there appears to be currently a phenomenon of hybridisation of the patterns of corporate governance in Europe that is introducing market elements in relational/governmental systems and relational elements in market systems. The systems of employee representation appear to be also converging towards a phenomenon of controlled decentralisation that consists in the diversification of the powers of the actors at the level of the company and in the development of new types of agreements. The underlying intention appears to be the recognition of employees as stakeholders of the company. This thesis concludes that the new types of collective agreements may not be effective as a means of counterbalancing the pressure of shareholders and employees are left in a delicate position.
The study attempts to fill a gap in the research on the legacies and incentives of minority policies in four Central Eastern European countries by comprehensively examining post-communist minority policy developments from the perspective of internal factors as well as external impacts. The main objective of the study, which encompasses four countries - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia - is to identify policy incentives and historical legacies that influenced the current minority policies. In addition, it also aspires to adjust existing typological theories which aim to explain the development of minority policies in the four countries after 1989. By comparing minority policies in the light of three hypotheses on their main factors, namely the historical, international and domestic, it is argued that in spite of different initial policy directions, the minority policies in the four countries gradually converged. The early post-1989 minority polices were shaped primarily by historical legacies and domestically conceptualised strategies, which reflected the importance of both domestic minority issues and kin nationals in neighbouring states. Together with the appearance of stronger international incentives (particularly the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) and the European Union assessment during the accession processes), the countries gradually modified their positions, framing their policies around the norms provided by the FCNM. In the conclusion, the thesis argues that existing theories on the development of minority policies in CEE could partially explain the preference for particular policy directions in the four countries. However, in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the contemporary shape of the minority policies, any further explanatory attempts should also carefully address the legacies of previous policy choices and the role of international norms on minority protection.
The objectives of this enquiry are essentially concerned with reaching a better understanding of the course, form and intensity of constitutional transfer by analysing the transnational impact (or perhaps ‘non-impact’) of the Charte constitutionalism on what is generally referred to as ‘Southern German constitutionalism’. Even though the Southern German countries weighed lightly in the European balance of power, their history is singularly interesting, not least because they were the first two territorial states in Germany which received a constitution after 1814. Developments there thus served as a signal for political life and constitutionalisation processes throughout Germany during the 19th century. Undoubtedly, a study encompassing all the Southern German states would be desirable. However, this enquiry cannot and does not set out to fulfil such task. What it does do is to take a closer and more in-depth look at a limited number of research cases by focusing on the two examples of Bavaria and Baden. Both these states accomplished constitutionalisation over the shortest period of time and in doing so became, so to speak, the ‘foremost of forerunners’. They, therefore, exemplify in their constitutional demands, issues and challenges the whole process of constitutionalisation in Southern Germany. Württemberg, and sometimes also Hesse-Darmstadt, are usually also considered to be an ‘integral part’ of early Southern German constitutionalism, but will not be dealt with in detail in this study. The reason for this being is not least, apart from the pragmatic demands of having to limit the number of cases, that Württemberg is by far the best researched of all the Southern German states due to the conflict-ridden nature of its constitutionalisation process.
The present study returns to Giovanni Gioviano Pontano's role as a thinker and philosopher. It is based on the treatises and tracts Pontano wrote, to which scant attention has been paid until now, but also on his ad hoc political writings and his better known dialogues and poems. It moves between different fields of inquiry including history, philosophy, and literature, trying to represent Pontano's thought not only in its doctrinal aspects, but in a more comprehensive and contextualized perspective. Within this perspective, his thought will appear as mercurial as Pontano himself. It is not a set of explicit, philosophical doctrines that can be described within a coherent theoretical framework, but a cluster of different thoughts, attitudes, and practices.
El estudio que aquí se presenta trata de la historia compartida por el Partido Socialdemócrata de Alemania (SPD) y el Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) durante el periodo 1962 - 1977. Su objetivo es acercar al conocimiento de las diversas facetas de una relación desigual entre el partido de izquierdas más influyente de Europa Occidental en aquel tiempo y una pequeña organización que fue ilegal durante la práctica totalidad del periodo de estudio pero que emergió con extraordinaria fortaleza al final del mismo, jugando desde entonces un papel central en la construcción de la democracia en su país. Los contactos de estas dos organizaciones de muy distinto carácter, dimensiones y capacidad de influencia se expondrán aquí en el contexto que les da sentido, el de las relaciones hispano-alemanas. El hilo argumental de las páginas que siguen es el lugar que el SPD, partido con responsabilidades de gobierno en la RFA a partir de 1966, reservó al PSOE en el conjunto de su política hacia un régimen en decadencia que finalmente decidió transformarse en una democracia al desaparecer el dictador. Al adentrarse en el estudio de las motivaciones, los objetivos, los medios y los resultados del contacto entre el SPD y el PSOE, la investigación dará respuesta a una serie de cuestiones que resultan de interés para conocer la intrahistoria de dos de las organizaciones de la izquierda europea con más tradición y peso en la vida de sus países. Pero, por encima de ello, lo que esta tesis pretende es realizar una contribución a nuestra comprensión de la influencia que el país más poderoso en la Europa de los años setenta ejerció sobre el proceso que llevó a España de una dictadura a una democracia.
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In 1932, Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means espoused their vision of the quasi-public corporation as the new organizational paradigm of the economic sphere in “The Modern Corporation and Private Property”. The quasi-public corporation, characterized by the separation of ownership and control, and “as all embracing as was the feudal system in its time”, has long dominated our approach in most fields of economics and corporate finance. We have recently begun to question the Berle and Means vision of the modern corporation on empirical grounds. The seminal paper by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Schleifer (1999) first highlighted the rarity of the dispersed ownership structure, even in large publicly traded firms in developed economies. In addition, the corporate structure as outlined in 1932 has progressively evolved into more complex organizational structures, such as those represented by conglomerates (Maksimovic and Phillips, 2007) and business groups (Khanna and Yafeh, 2007). As a result, new fields of research emerged to try to account for the diversity of ownership structures and to re-interpret their economic impact. The study of the relationship between ownership structures and firm behaviour is the central object of the present thesis. My focus lies with two organizational forms, business groups and family firms, and how their specificities affect their management and product market strategies. In the first chapter of this thesis, ownership structure instruments are used in order to study the interaction between R&D subsidies and financing constraints. The second chapter revisits the traditional deep pocket theory on the entry deterrent effect of firm cash holdings, taking into account the existence of internal capital markets within business groups. The third chapter explores, during times of CEO transitions within family firms, the influence of the identity of the successor on labor contracts.
The title "From Economic to Sustainable Development: Enlarging the Concept of Law" signals a meta-theoretical approach. However, this thesis is also firmly centred in practice by questioning if, and in what form, law has a role to play in implementation of sustainable development, apart from being a tool for shaping concrete legal mechanisms, such as international conventions and national laws and regulation. Thus, at its core, the research is focused on the role of law in a process of political and socio-economic change and on the relationship of theory and practice.
The topic of this thesis is decision-making under risk. I focus my analysis on expected utility theory by von Neumann and Morgenstern. I am especially interested in modeling risk attitudes represented by Bernoulli utility functions that belong to the following classes: Constant Absolute Risk Aversion, Decreasing Absolute Risk Aversion (understood as strictly decreasing) and in particular a subset thereof - Constant Relative Risk Aversion.  I build a theory of buying and selling price for a lottery, the concepts defined by Raiffa, since such theory proves useful in analyzing a number of interesting issues pertaining to risk attitudes' characteristics within expected utility model. In particular, I analyze the following: - Chapter 2 - expected utility without consequentialism, buying/selling price gap, preference reversal, Rabin paradox - Chapter 3 - characterization results for CARA, DARA, CRRA, simple strategies and an extension of Pratt result on comparative risk aversion - Chapter 4 - riskiness measure and its intuition, extended riskiness measure and its existence, uniqueness and properties
Network economics is a fast growing area of study, with a lot of potential for addressing a wide variety of socio-economic phenomena. Networks literally permeate our social and economic lives. The unemployed find jobs using the information and assistance of their friends and relatives. Consumers benefit from the research of friends and family into new products. In medicine and other technical fields, professional networks shape research patterns. In all these settings, the well-being of participants depends on social, geographic, or trading relationships. The countless ways in which network structures affect our well-being make it critical to understand: (i) how network structures impact behavior, (ii) what can be done, in the way of design by policymakers, to improve systemic outcomes. This area of study, broadly called network economics, is at the heart of my research interests. In my dissertation I focus on three specific applications of network theory. The first application concerns networks in trade, where network structure represents the organization of trade agreements between countries. The second application deals with networks in financial market, and the network is used to model the structure of interbank exposures. Lastly, for the third application, I consider networks in labor markets and migration. In this context, the network represents the structure of social relations between people. Each of these applications of network analysis is addressed by one of three chapters in the thesis.
The traditional trade models, which rely on a comparative advantage based on regions’ technology or endowments, or the new trade theory, designed to explain trade between the countries at a similar level of development, fail to replicate recent evidence on world trade patterns and prices. This evidence reveals North-South specialization across products of the same industries and product groups but different quality, rather than across different industries. Furthermore, countries at a higher level of technological development have higher export prices, which shows that more advanced technology does not necessarily imply higher cost efficiency. Therefore, in order to analyze the endogenous growth mechanisms and implications of the IPR protection policy in a North-South trade set-up, this thesis develops a fully-endogenous theoretical framework based on the notion of quality vintages, which results in the North-South production and trade specialization in different quality segments of the market. The model is used to investigate the growth effects of the South opening to trade and the welfare effects of different IPR policy instruments. Finally, the last chapter abstracts from endogenous growth mechanisms
Does financial globalisation increase inequality? Should households with little financial wealth still hold foreign assets? Are consumption patterns of low income earners more dispersed than those of the rich? Do aggregate savings rise or fall when a society becomes more unequal? These are some of the questions I raise in this thesis. Its central theme is the role of individual heterogeneity in an international economy, with a focus on idiosyncratic risks and income inequality within countries. This allows me to look at some well-recognised policy issues from a new angle, such as the fall in the US current account, which I argue could be influenced by changes in the structure of domestic income inequality. But the combination of the individual with the international level of analysis also enables me to ask new questions, for example whether wealthier households are less biased towards domestic assets in their portfolio decisions than poorer households, and why this could be. The thesis can thus be understood as an attempt to link two literatures that have largely remained separate in the past: that on imperfect domestic risk-sharing, on the one hand, and the international economics literature on the other. This is especially true for chapters 1 and 2. They build on the analysis in chapters 3 and 4, which concentrate on an economic environment where risk-sharing is imperfect because agents cannot commit to honour financial contracts, and analyse the resulting equilibrium and its characteristics in a closed economy.
In this thesis, I demonstrate that the degree of political independence that a public service broadcaster has depends on the degree of legal protection given to it, and on the size of the market for news in that country. The latter affects broadcaster independence by creating more standardized and professionalized news, which in turn reduces politicians’ incentives to intervene in the broadcaster. The former affects broadcaster independence by making it less likely that such intervention will be effective. I demonstrate these claims in two ways. First, I conduct a large-N statistical analysis of 36 public service broadcasters (PSBs), in which I demonstrate that legal protection news market size are statistically significant predictors of PSB independence (as I operationalize it), and that other suggested explanatory factors — party system polarization and bureaucratic partisanship — have no effect. Second, I carry out a comparative historical analysis of six European PSBs—Radiotelevisione Italiana, Radiotelevisión Española, Radio Telefís Éireann (Ireland), the British Broadcasting Corporation, Danmarks Radio, and Sveriges Radio and its associated companies (Sweden) — and substantiate the claims made in my statistical analysis. In particular, I demonstrate that where the market for news was bigger, broadcasters capitalised on pre-existing journalistic experience, adopting the house-styles of press agencies and learning from journalists’ associations. Conversely, where the market was small, that experience could not be drawn on, and broadcast journalism attracted political intervention.
This thesis consists of three chapters that examine different aspects of frictional labor markets in a DSGE framework. In particular, my thesis investigates the implications of different wage bargaining regimes, labor adjustment costs, and endogenous on-the-job search. The third chapter represents my contribution to a joint project with Agostino Consolo from the European Central Bank.
This doctoral thesis aims at investigating this new international right of persons belonging to minorities to effective participation in public affairs. What is its content? What is its justification and what is it aiming at? Are there any limits to its implementation and what kind of problematic issues are involved? The example of Bosnia and Herzegovina as described above illustrates that organising representation along ethnic lines raises challenging questions. These will be explored in this PhD.Our investigation of the right of minorities to effective participation in public affairs will run through five chapters: Chapter 1 will outline the theoretical framework; Chapter 2 will examine the political rights in the general human rights instruments; Chapter 3 will study the provision on effective participation in public affairs in the three key minority rights instruments of the 1990’s; Chapter 4 will look at the range of possible domestic mechanisms implementing the right of minorities to effective participation in public affairs through a comparative national law approach; and Chapter 5 will illustrate Chapter 4 by zooming in on three case studies, namely Belgium, Italy and Hungary.
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As tiny little ants go about their ant business, travelling around in cavalcade, developing ant civilisation on hilltop towns wherever they go, do they contemplate the possibility that the world is bigger than the empires that they build? Do they know why they have to turn the cavalcade around when they come to the edge of the garden patio? Do they understand what has happened if a human foot kills forty of them in an instant? In all their industry and organisation, do they allow for the fact that there is something beyond them, which they cannot control? More specifically, I wondered as a little girl, did they know that I existed, and that I liked to spend summer afternoons watching them, and that if I took one of them in my tiny palm, it still would be smaller than the nail on my little finger? And if they didn’t — and from my lengthy study of these creatures it seemed to me that they didn’t - then how did we know that we weren’t making the same mistake? As we build up human civilisation, do we allow the possibility that the world is larger than our empires? That, for all the things we can create and construct, there are still things that are beyond us? That perhaps we too could be held in the hallow of a palm that is greater than ours? And if I could think of this possibility, even if my ant friends could not, then wasn’t it important that I should take it seriously? But, actually, just by holding this possibility and wondering about its implications, wasn’t I already taking it seriously in an important way that the ants weren’t?
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Both the European Community (EC) and its Member States agree that it is in their best interest to coordinate their action vis-à-vis the rest of the world in international trade agreements. Theory and Practice of EC External Trade Law and Policy looks at the intricacies of the institutional framework of EC trade law, and with special emphasis on services trade, examines the law and practice of EC external trade relations from a policy, economic, legal and an overarching European constitutional perspective. The objective of the author’s analysis is not only to find ways to nurture and preserve the unitary character of EC external trade relations in areas of shared competence between EU Member States and EU institutions, but also to understand the management of the EC’s external trade relations. The book begins with an analysis of the evolution of the EC common commercial policy, through which the author examines the checks and balances at the micro, meso and macro levels. The author then proceeds to analyse the problems faced by the EU in its external relations and the legal complexity of mixed agreements. This unique legal phenomenon is tackled from an intra-EC perspective as well as from an extra-EU perspective taking into account various implications for third parties. The major EU institutions are examined: the Commission as the negotiator of international trade agreements, the role of the EU Council and the European Parliament in concluding and ratifying of agreements and the European Court of Justice in relation to judicial enforcement. The EU’s decision-making process in the trade arena and its relation with national institutions are examined. The book concludes with an analysis of the EC’s contribution to the Doha Round in the area of services trade.
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The present thesis explores the application of Article 82 to exclusionary abuses throughout the history of the Community Courts’ jurisprudence with the purpose of identifying the evolution and the outstanding problems in the case law. Armed with this knowledge the thesis then considers options for reforming the current application of Article 82 to exclusionary abuses so that the interpretation of the provision accommodates modern economic theories and that it applies in the interest of consumers. The thesis seeks to answer the question of whether a 'soft' reform can attain these objectives, or whether there is instead a need for a more revolutionary approach.
The principles of the modern criminal law in Europe date back hundreds of years. As we shall see, the first coherent treatises of criminal justice laying down many of the principles to which we still adhere appeared in continental Europe during the mideighteenth century. Enlightenment philosophers, concerned with the relationship between the state and the citizen, between the collective and the individual, found criminal justice a natural area of study. Even before then, however, embryos of principles we today hold as fundamental can be found in charters, bills and constitutions limiting the power of medieval Kings over their subjects. If we then take the concept of the criminal law, the idea that the collective can and should exact punishment for violations of certain pre-determined rules, it dates back to the dawn of civilisation.
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This thesis, starting from the premise that territorial borders retain their importance in public international law, examines in detail the EU's regulatory framework for the management of its external borders. It will argue that there are in fact two sets of external borders: those of the area in which the rules on the free movement of persons apply, and those of the Schengen area. The border crossing rights under the two corresponding sets of rules will be examined in detail. The focus will then shift to the broader Schengen rules for the management of the external borders. The thesis will discuss the rationale of the EU's interest in borders, the legislative acquis adopted, and the relation between legislation and executive action. An elaborate discussion on the organisation and functioning of the "European Border Agency" (Frontex) serves to illustrate the importance of operational cooperation in this area. A final chapter will look at the external dimension of this policy field. A distinction is made between the relations with third countries for the purpose of managing the external borders and the exportation of Community standards. Also in the external sphere, the objective of controlling irregular migration and the operational nature of EU action are prominent. It is concluded that the management of the external borders takes places in a much more complex and uncertain legal framework than is often assumed. Whilst border management should be a part or rather complement to a Common European Asylum and Migration policy if now risks to become a substitute for it. Even where legislation is adopted, it has a strong operational character, which carries risks in terms of accountability and legitimacy. The legislation in this area is both far-reaching and ill thought-through at the same time. From this lessons could be drawn for the broader cooperation between law enforcement authorities.
This thesis aims to highlight the importance of the organisation and functioning of the judicial power in complex or composite polities and its relevance as a determinative element of the complex or composite nature of the polity itself. For this, it carries out a comparative analysis of the organisation and functioning of the judicial power in three models which - whilst all sharing the duality in the executive and legislative powers - present very a very different structure: Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom. This comparison requires the construction of a theoretical framework for the analysis of judicial federalism, which in current literature has still not been fully developed. On the basis of the existing theoretical instruments for the analysis of political federalism, a concept of "judicial federalism" is constructed, characterised by two main features: the geographical distribution of judicial power, and the granting of a sphere of judicial autonomy (understood as a combination of institutional autonomy, jurisdictional autonomy and governmental autonomy) to both the federation and the component units. An initial overview of these issues highlights the minimum or common element in all models of judicial federalism is the existence of a "supreme court" at both levels. The main part of the study focuses, then, on the higher courts of the component units and their relations with the higher jurisdictional body of the federation. In addition, a final chapter is included which compares the interrelation between constitutional review and judicial federalism in the selected models.
Ever since the Nuremberg Tribunal delivered its historic judgment, the principle of individual criminal liability for the unlawful use of force has been characterized by an unbridgeable gap between theory and practice. With the exception of the post-war trials against World War II enemies, the trial and punishment of individual perpetrators has never been seriously contemplated in response to violations of the jus ad bellum, not even in the face of the most egregious aggressions. At a time when the practical import of the "supreme crime" seemed to have fallen into oblivion, its inclusion alongside the other core crimes within the Rome Statute not only reignited the debate on this topic, but, more importantly, mobilized unparalleled resources in order to pass from words to deeds. After years of intense work, in February 2009 the Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression, established under the auspices of the Assembly of States Parties, completed its mandate and submitted a series of Draft Amendments to be considered at the first Review Conference, to be held in Uganda some time in the first half of 2010. If only for this reason, taking stock of the law governing individual criminal liability for the unlawful use of force is both appropriate and timely. Looking at the abundant scholarly works that exist on the jus ad bellum and aggression as a "state crime" - two true classics of international law over the past few decades -, one cannot help but puzzle over how little is known, in comparison, about aggression as an individual crime. This thesis fills this identified gap in the legal literature, first of all by providing a comprehensive study of the law governing the crime of aggression as it emerges from the post-war jurisprudence and, secondly, by taking stock of the last decade of diplomatic negotiations in the light of said regime.
This study asks what justice is in the situation where two sides are disputing and, in particular, how a third party should act justly in deciding the matter. A paradigm of this situation is legal dispute, and in the main body of the thesis I analyse the ethics of legal dispute resolution, such as the activity of hearing both sides, and I illustrate how the origins of certain abstract conceptual structures for understanding justice, action, and rights beyond the judicial setting lie in this concrete context of justice. The study proceeds in three parts: 'Formal, Substantive, and Procedural Justice'; 'Judicial Determination of Relevant Similarity and Difference'; and 'Rights as Judicial Resolutions and the Limits of Distributional Considerations.' Generally, I argue for the equal recognition of several notions of justice, which have separately seemed primary (for example, equality and distributive justice; law- or ruleapplication) or secondary (corrective justice), and I show the overlap between many formal and procedural notions and legal dispute resolution: Legal dispute is a social situation constituted by the rule of hearing both sides. In a circle of three activities - doing justice to particulars, resolving the case, and justifying the decision - engaged in by the judge, the activity of doing justice to particular facts is regulated by grounds of relevance. Justification in terms of equal treatment of similar cases includes giving reasons for relevant similarity or difference. The formal justice of like treatment justifies also following a precedent, unless the current case is relevantly different from the prior one. Corrective justice follows as an outcome from the third party's resolution between the parties to the dispute. On the other hand, distributional considerations are not categorically excluded from a legal dispute, because redistribution is not necessarily more efficient through taxation than through other legal rules.
This thesis examines the meaning and scope of freedom of religion and the principle of separation of state and religion, as well as their interaction, in both theory and practice. The first part explores the theoretical aspects of these two principles and tries to create a basic framework of interpretation for further research. In the second part of the thesis, the practical interaction of freedom of religion and separation o state and religion is examined in four European countries. A recurring question goes to the current and expected European influence on the matters discussed. Throughout the thesis, I will therefore specifically look at European law and the European Convention on Human Rights, if applicable.
In matters concerning state and religion, legal and political considerations are intertwined. Nevertheless, it is possible and desirable to define core, legal principles of religious freedom and to distinguish these from questions of a more political character. Discussions on religious freedom would benefit from more consistent judicial reasoning.
In this thesis I aim to contribute to the labor economics literature by casting more light on i) measurement errors regarding data on occupational affiliations, ii) worker mobility across occupations and iii) wage differentials between part-time and full-time workers with comparable skills. Throughout, I focus on German labor markets. Germany is one of the major economies in the world and the most important one in Europe. I employ individual level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The GSOEP has started in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1984 with around 12,000 respondents representative of the entire residential population. Since then, several samples are added occasionally to reflect the changing population structure of the Germany, like the expansion of the GSOEP to the former German Democratic Republic in June 1990. GSOEP has several advantages as it is based on a rather stable set of questions regarding the demographics, education, earnings and labor market dynamics. Due to its panel data structure, individuals can be followed over time. Together with recently developed econometric methods for panel data, this allows for analyzing the importance of dynamics in individual’s decisions.
Insurrection is frequently viewed as a vertical theme in Irish history, both by historians and the conspirators themselves. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic, delivered by insurgents during the 1916 rebellion, depicted their actions as the logical extension of a historical tradition in a country that had already seen violent rebellion four times during the long-nineteenth century.1 Tradition kept the rifles warm, or so the manifestos claimed, and not successful precedents of insurrectionary action. After the penultimate uprising of 1867, however, rebels began to rethink the merits of insurrection and canvas alternative strategies, which led to an urban-guerrilla or bombing campaign in the 1880s. The present study investigates this transformation in revolutionary action and seeks to challenge the frequent analytical collapse of militant Irish nationalism into 'traditions of violence' explanations. Instead, I argue that the rebels’ actions may be better grasped if placed in concurrent contexts and in connection with specific milieux. Between the insurrectionary movements of the nineteenth century and the organised revolutionary parties of the early twentieth lies a field of action ill-defined. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate that field.
The present study addresses the most important mediations of klezmer which have not been given attention in the existing scholarship, mapping new functions and meanings ascribed to klezmer music, the representations this particular music scene generates, the public debates it provokes and the dynamics of the social encounter between Jews and non-Jews that it enables.
From the outset of his intellectual life Doria had been a civil philosopher interested in reflecting, in a secular manner on the foundations of civil society thereby departing from the more traditional discussions that took as their framework moral philosophy and natural law theories. Unlike other Catholic thinkers, when discussing happiness Doria was not interested in debating religious issues such as salvation, revelation, or the states of beatitude or contemplation and how these might give meaning to ‘ happiness’. For this reason this thesis explores Doria’s varying and evolving conceptions of human nature and happiness, trying to follow their development and their role in shaping Doria’s political thought. A further aim is to ascertain the implications of these developments and to analyse Doria’s discussions of the foundations of the civil life, his understanding of men as individuals, their sociability and the legitimation of human politics. I am interested in elucidating to what extent he believed that men act as moral beings in Doria’s political philosophy, which features of their psychologies he considers decisive in judging men’s rationality and morality, i.e. how he grounds their judgements and acts in order to justify their legitimacy. In short the key question here is: How, in other words, does Doria ground his theory of human agency and men’s freedom to act in politics? Doria is writing at a critical moment in the history of civil and moral philosophy not only in the Neapolitan but also, in the European context.
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This thesis analyses recent developments in the field business regulation associated with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) through a study of mechanisms for institutionalizing it. I analyse these developments from three different perspectives: academic, practice, and legislative. My aim is to assess if CSR is conceptualized in the same way and if not to understand why. The ultimate goal was to confront these different approaches hoping that the results of the comparison will enrich and improve the knowledge in this field. In the first part of the thesis, I focus on the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility and I analyse the main issues of the debate. Moreover, I present the legal and non-legal mechanisms for institutionalizing CSR at the level of business organizations suggested over the years in the academic literature. In the second part of the thesis, I focus on the impact of globalization and of the sustainable development movement on the CSR debate. I focus on two main aspects: the standards for corporate social and environmental performance set in the so-called 'CSR instruments' and the integration of CSR at the level of the organization. This part is mainly based on case studies in order to present the business point of view on CSR. In the third part, I analyse CSR in the specific context of three legal systems: United States, United Kingdom and Germany. I analyse the national policies in the field of CSR adopted in United Kingdom and Germany. Moreover, I analyse the weight that various mechanisms for institutionalizing CSR presented in the first part of the thesis have in each legal system presented. The core research question is: Which is the precise scope of Corporate Social Responsibility, assuming that it is desirable, and which are the suitable mechanisms for institutionalizing it? The law and other developments are stated as at the end of August 2008.
This thesis lays down in seven chapters a revised theoretical foundation for European integration - the theory of European Bund. Relying on a social constructivist meta-theoretical methodological approach, it starts off with an observation that European integration, as a social phenomenon, has been socially constructed through the activities of social actors, which have been conducted on the basis of certain narratives - the narratives of European integration. As the process of integration has run into problems this has been, following the social constructivist maxima, due to its deficient narratives. Because of the complex discontinuity of European integration and in particular due to the narratives' intrinsic reliance on the monistic mindset, these have in their battle for domination through institutionalization not only failed to grasp the existing nature of European integration, but have moreover and because of that furnished it with unfeasible, incoherent and hence undesirable normative guidance. The proposed theory of European Bund splits with the monistic mindset. It is based on three founding pillars: legal-institutional, socio-political and philosophical, which constitute its distinct character and set it apart from the other theoretical approaches in the field. As such, the theory of European Bund not only provides a better descriptive and explanatory account of European integration, but it also comes with advantageous normative prescriptions for the integration's long term viability that make the best of it, given its unique, above all legal, but also socio-political pedigree. Last but not least, the theory of European Bund is not a constitutional theory, it shall not be addressed as such, and consequently the nature of European integration ought not to be regarded as constitutional either.
Zunächst geplant als Studie über Zwangsarbeit in Frankreich unter deutscher Besatzung, hat sich das Projekt zu einer vergleichenden Untersuchung der Besatzungssituationen in Frankreich und Italien am Beispiel der Organisation Todt entwickelt. Die Präzisierung und Eingrenzung, welche die Arbeit durch die Fokussierung auf die Organisation Todt erfuhr, ging einher mit einer Ausweitung auf drei Ebenen: geographisch, methodisch und in Teilen auch hinsichtlich der Fragestellung (durch die Berücksichtigung institutions- und unternehmensgeschichtlicher Aspekte). Dass ich die Möglichkeit hatte, das Promotionsvorhaben am Europäischen Hochschulinstitut in Florenz durchzuführen, war für diese Entwicklung von entscheidender Bedeutung, denn die Zeit in Florenz hat mir in vielerlei Hinsicht neue Horizonte eröffnet. Ich habe dies immer als Privileg empfunden.
This study aims to reveal traces of Spanish cultural influences on the seventeenth-century Austrian Habsburg monarchy, or to be more precise, on courtly and aristocratic culture. The focus is however less on the ruling houses, but rather more on the aristocratic society and its contribution to cultural transfer processes from Spain to Austria. Tracing themes of alteration in aristocratic selfrepresentation, evoked by political, social and cultural changes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this study examines the role of culture in general, and cultural borrowings in particular, in the process of aristocratic re-invention. "A nobleman has to be curious", Prince Karl Eusebius Liechtenstein once argued. "Thereby he distinguishes himself from the ordinary man." This curiosity in every respect was beyond any doubt a decisive factor for cultural transfer processes.
This thesis presents three papers in macro labor theory. All of them share the particular approach to the theory of unemployment pioneered by Dale Mortensen and Chris Pissarides. In these models unemployment is frictional, and emerges as an equilibrium outcome in an economy where workers and firms are value-maximizing agents trading labor services.
To date, the Mortensen-Pissarides search and matching model has become the standard framework for the macroeconomic analysis of labor markets. The heart of its success lies in its ability to offer an appealing description of the functioning of the labor markets together with analytical flexibility. In my thesis I exploit these virtues of the canonical framework in order to study different topics of interest in the macro labor literature.
No abstract available
This thesis attempts to explain the erratic record of compliance with EU and US demands for ‘full cooperation’ with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY): where both Serbia and Croatia sometimes complied, regularly stalled and often resisted ICTY demands. Further, protracted delays and outright resistance was often exercised in the face of - or in spite of - EU membership conditionality as well as US financial assistance and sanctions. The period of assessment is post-2000, after the fall of both the Milosevic regime in Serbia and the Tudjman regime in Croatia. The key research questions are: How do we best explain the changing pattern of ICTY cooperation and compliance in Post-Milosevic Serbia and Post- Tudjman Croatia? How was it that governments sometimes complied, while at other times resisted cooperation with the ICTY? The Serbian and Croatian cases provide a challenge for conventional IR assumptions regarding the practice of political influence (international theory), the meaning of political compliance (conceptualization) and the study of political action (methodology). Each of these theoretical dimensions is discussed in the opening chapters for the purpose of developing better analytical tools to study influence-making and compliance in international politics. Subsequently, the story of ICTY compliance in Serbia and Croatia is then explored in empirical chapters which identify political facets involved in the making of ICTY justice and ICTY compliance.
No abstract available
This study examines the work of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006). Its aim is to provide an inter-textual and contextual interpretation of Koselleck’s scholarly production. While a variety of articles, reviews, opinion-pieces and obituaries offer valuable insights into his work, there is as yet no monographic study examining Koselleck’s oeuvre in a comprehensive manner. The present investigation addresses this lacuna. Instead of highlighting one aspect of his historical writing on behalf of others (and presenting Koselleck simply under one label, e.g. as a ‘conceptual historian’, a ‘social historian’, a ‘historian of memory’ or as a ‘theoretician of history’, as other commentators have done), it draws a full thematic, theoretical and biographical - or instead intellectual - profile that takes into account Koselleck’s entire scholarly production and the intellectual and social contexts in which it emerged. The study not only reinterprets known and uncovers unknown aspects of his work; it also offers a new overall interpretation of Koselleck’s entire scholarly production. It describes a set of recurrent motifs and discursive features in Koselleck’s texts that reveal the contours of a unifying pattern and a common objective in his varied and multi-faceted body of work.
In many EU countries, the infrastructure for supplying electricity and gas (electricity networks, gas pipelines, and storage facilities) are still properties of the so-called vertically integrated undertakings (VIU) responsible for the extraction or generation, supply, and transmission and distribution of the energy. While competition can be promoted in the generation/production and supply side of the vertical integration, transmission and distribution segments remain natural monopolies that hinder market mechanisms. Vertical integration simply raises the possibility for incumbents to favor their own divisions and to block new entrants. As a result, the Electricity and Gas Directives of the European Commission proposed several measures to foster competition in politically delicate structures of the electricity and gas markets. These measures involve non-discriminatory third party access to the gas and electricity infrastructure, independent regulation of the natural monopolies and the unbundling of the VIU. Unfortunately, my research shows that there are still many obstacles to fulfilling the potential of the internal market in electricity and gas. What is more since substantial delays have occurred in implementing the Directives, it is difficult to clearly evaluate what the final effect will be; nevertheless, it is possible to argue that the steps already taken are insufficient to create functional market.
no abstract available
The aim of my thesis is to present an intellectual biography of Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623) by researching three different but intertwining sides in his intellectual activities: natural philosophy, religion and politics. My central argument is that it is possible to justify Sarpi’s political theory by his natural philosophy and by his conception of religion. More specifically, it will be argued that Sarpi was an advocate of absolutism, divine right theory and Bodinian concept of sovereignty. Like Hobbes’ political philosophy, Sarpi’s political theory evolves around the idea of a ubiquitous motion that needs to be checked, around the notion of unconditional obedience, and around an unfaltering anti-papism, which resulted in his excommunication. While some scholars have seen Sarpi as an atheist or a religious skeptic, here he will be regarded as a believer. It will be shown that Sarpi was not ideologically volatile, as hypocrisy would entail, but adhered to his few but constant principles even when it was unadvantageous to him. I argue that this constancy grew from a coherent theory of a universe, where God was unfathomable and omnipotent, man weak and mortal by nature, the Pope fallible, and temporal rulers supreme executors of God’s will. Sarpi’s universe was ruled by eternal and transient laws, by divine, natural and civil laws, by laws of causation and predestination, and within this complex system, which God only understood perfectly, man’s role was to obey the law and to rest assured that faith in God was enough to guarantee the resurrection of his mortal soul on the day of judgment. Infringement of any of the abovementioned laws was a violation against God’s will.
The thesis examines how the European Commission responded to the challenges posed by Britain’s and Ireland’s attempts to join the European Economic Community (EEC) between 1958 and 1972.1 The part played by the Commission in the enlargement process of the 1960s is one that has received little critical attention by scholars dealing with the history of European integration. Each chapter examines the enlargement question largely from the Commission’s perspective intertwined with British and Irish views. It therefore moves beyond the more traditional focus of scholarly research that has to date been almost exclusively based around national accounts of how the Community went from six to nine members in January 1973. This dissertation aims, in part, to fill this void in the history of the early years of the EEC.
The thesis examines four cases of sovietization (modernization) as realized in Central Asia and especially in Uzbekistan in the 1920s, with particular emphasis on the period between 1924 (the regionalization of Central Asia) and 1930 (the end of the last general purges of the 1920s). Showing how Moscow intended to transform the region along the lines of Soviet ideology with the idea of converting the Homo Islamicus speaking Muslim into Homo Sovieticus speaking Bolshevik, the cases embodied by the four main parts of the thesis represent the intersection of soft-line and hard-line policies and bureaucratic control. Women, as a surrogate of the proletariat and as communicators between the population and the establishment, are the central subjects that tie the four cases together. The first part focuses on visual propaganda and introduces the first level of soft-line control with state-sponsored posters being regarded as direct means for modifying the attitudes of Central Asians using images and slogans. The second part, devoted to the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, represents the second level of soft-line bureaucracy with nuances of hard-line control, highlighting the interconnections between a supposedly neutral international (front) organization and party-state and Red Army institutions. The third part of the thesis is devoted to gender policy with particular emphasis on the hujum, the reactions among the indigenous population that emerged in the form of resistance in the second half of the 1920s, and the counter-reactions by the establishment through the first stage of purges, illustrating the transition from soft-line to hard-line policy, and leading both chronologically and conceptually to the fourth part dealing with the general purges of the 1929-1930, which represent the highest degree of hard-line policy and further confirm that the Soviets intended to sovietize the region beginning with its women.
No abstract available
The aim of this dissertation is to answer three real life economic questions with the following three chapters. Chapter 1, (joint with Matteo Bobba), deals with the problems of weak instruments in identifying the effects of education on democracy. This chapter shows that when the problems caused by weak instruments are properly considered Education affects Democracy. Chapter 2, (joint with Mario Mariniello), analyzes both theoretically and empirically what are the effects of potential competition on actual competition in public procurement auctions in Italy. A model of endogenous entry in auctions is adapted to inspect the theoretical problem and a regression discontinuity design is exploited to identify the causal effects of advertisement on entry and competition in this market. Chapter 3, (joint with Stefano Gagliarducci), explores the relationship between politics and the functioning of public procurements auctions in Italy. In particular, we use the introduction of the two-limit law in 1993 to identify the causal effect of political longevity in office, longer tenure of the mayors, on several outcomes of the auctions. The channel of discretional renegotiations appear to be the tools to distribute political favors which building entry barrier limits competition at the auction level.
This thesis, which provides an account of research conducted at the European University Institute between 2002 and 2006, is an application of microeconometric analysis to testing models suggested by economic theory. It consists of three chapters which are selfcontained and can be read independently. While the chapters deal with different topics (two are 6 related to labour economics and one - to corporate finance and governance), it is the use of microeconometric methods - regression analysis of cross-sectional and panel data on the level of individuals or firms - that bring them together in this volume under this title.
This thesis consists of an analysis of different aspects of optimal fiscal policy in dynamic economies, with a special emphasis on the consequences of dropping the assumption of full commitment to future policies: the Third Best environment. As is now well known in the dynamic optimal taxation literature - namely after the seminal contributions by Kydland and Prescott (1977) and Fisher (1980) - the fact that governments choose their fiscal policy sequentially means that they cannot credibly make promises on future taxes that fall on investments made today. When the future arrives, previous choices are bygones and namely the previous investment decisions will have been translated into inelastically supplied factors of production [such as physical and human capital]. It will then be optimal to revise past promises and tax heavily such inputs so as to lower the remaining distortions. As such, each government should set its policy as a best response to the expected, time-consistent, future policy rules. This generally represents also deviating from the second best solution for the first period. The aim of my dissertation is to provide new insights on how should benevolent governments optimally set their fiscal plan in scenarios where policy is chosen sequentially [as it is done in real economies] and to contrast the obtained results both to what we observe in developed economies and to the Second Best. Furthermore, special emphasis will be put on the design of the fiscal constitutions and its role in alleviating the burden of policy discretion over social welfare. For that, I will focus on two particular examples of the time-inconsistency problem in intertemporal policy making, hoping that the lessons derived therefrom can be extended easily to qualitatively similar problems.
Disasters can strike at any time and can be of various types: natural like the Tsunami of 2004 that left over 300,000 people dead or man-made like the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah fighters. In face of the recurrence of major emergencies both inside and outside the EU borders, EU governments agreed in 2001 to set up a system which would allow them to pool their resources. The Council Decision of 2001 created the Community Civil Protection Mechanism (CCPM) relying on the so-called Monitoring and Information Centre (MIC), as the crisis centre for civil protection located in Brussels at the European Commission. In 2005, another major step was made regarding EU emergency management, with the creation of the Emergency and Crisis Coordination Arrangements (CCA). These arrangements, which are legally dealt with by the Council, were developed to share information, ensure coordination and collective decision-making at EU level in an emergency. It is dealt with by the Joint Situation Centre (SitCen). These two new organizational structures of EU emergency management, the MIC and the SitCen, and the two new organizational architectures of EU emergency management (commission- and council- based) are the object of my research. I address the question of their creation, adoption and implementation, developing a sociological neo-institutionalist approach based on the concept of divergent isomorphism. Incorporating an agency aspect, I demonstrate thanks to the use of the process-tracing method that new EU organizational structures emerged in an institutional context of fight for legitimacy: On the one hand, EU officials relying on input-legitimacy based on the isomorphically copied model; On the other hand, national officials relying on output-legitimacy drawn from their actions during crises. Thus, I contribute to the development of both EU integration theory in the field of security and organizational theory in the field of emergency management.
All three chapters of this thesis explore how models with heterogeneous firms can improve our understanding of international trade and FDI activities of firms in a globalized world economy. The first chapter 'Gravity and Information': Heterogeneous Firms, Exporter Networks and the `Distance Puzzle"' addresses the issue that distance effects in empirical gravity equations appear to be too high to be explained by transport costs alone. The second chapter 'Export-Supporting FDI' investigates the role of `export-supporting' activities of multinational companies. In the third chapter 'Heterogeneous Firms', `profit shifting' FDI and International Tax competition" which is joint work with Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr, we propose a stylized model of international tax competition between a large country and a tax haven.
This thesis straddles two seemingly quite distinct fields within macroeconomics, namely endogenous growth and business cycle theory. The unifying element of the thesis is the fundamental role played by firm entry and exit in each chapter. In the longrun, I find that if entering firms imitate incumbents, firm turnover promotes growth by removing inefficient firms and replacing them by more productive ones. In the shortrun, fluctuations in the number of firms lead to movements in sectoral relative prices. In particular, pro-cyclical net entry leads to a fall in the price of investment in terms of consumption goods during booms; those relative price movements may be delayed if it takes time to set up a firm. The first chapter deals with the long-run effects of firm turnover. I set up a dynamic general equilibrium model with firm-specific productivity shocks. Those firms whose productivity has fallen too low exit, and entrants’ expected productivity is a function of current average productivity. Because of the resulting selection and imitation process (similar in some ways to the concept of natural selection), aggregate productivity in the economy grows endogenously. When calibrated to U.S. data, the model suggests that around one-fifth of productivity growth is due to such a selection effect. The following two chapters deal with the short-run effects of net firm entry within a framework of imperfect competition. I argue that the counter-cyclical  fluctuations in the price of investment in terms of consumption goods which are observed for the U.S. are due to pro-cyclical competitive pressure through variations in the number of firms. The idea is that, since investment is much more variable than consumption, competition will be more variable in the investment sector, thereby pushing down prices more strongly in the latter sector during expansions.
No abstract available
In this work we will attempt to evaluate which of these scenarios is most likely to become prominent in the future by focusing essentially on three issues: 1) the usage of the online forum by observing how diffuse the phenomenon is and who the users of the online debates are; 2) The offer of the online political forum, by analyzing which are the political actors (civil society, media, institutional actors) who are more susceptible to host the online political debates; and 3) the quality of the online debates by assessing their deliberativeness. By elaborating a sophisticated method for measuring the deliberativeness of the online debates and by analyzing a great variety of online debates our objective is to provide an appreciation of the deliberative potential of the web-debates that avoids shortcuts and inappropriate generalizations, but that recognizes that this may be determined by a multiplicity of factors. From a theoretical perspective the results obtained through our investigations contribute to evaluate whether the deliberative model of democracy could be fostered by the virtualization of the political debates and, more generally, it should also contribute to the elaboration of a deliberative model of democracy that is grounded not only on theoretical principles and suppositions, as this tends to be the case, but also on empirical studies that test its adaptability to the 'real life politics'.
The EU has engaged in the promotion of an unprecedented process of policy export which involves not only candidates to enlargement, but also a wide range of countries beyond the Union’s present and future expected (at least at the moment) borders. In this framework, Russia and Ukraine have been an important test-case for the European Union which asked them to 'endeavour to ensure' that their legislation will be 'gradually made compatible with that of the Community' already in the mid-90s. This dissertation is intended to explore the mechanisms which have allowed the EU to promote legislative approximation in these 2 countries across 3 policy areas which are at the core of the internal market and where I, thus, expected the pressure for Europeanisation to be higher: competition policy, company law and consumers’ protection. In particular, I tried to understand if and how far the EU has been able to induce Russia and Ukraine towards the desired outcome as a result of the engagement of the parties in strategic inter-action. Then, on the other hand, I tried to assess if and how far rule adoption has been motivated by internalized, socially constructed identities, values and norms. The analysis has shown that there are interesting cases of Europeanisation not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia, allowing me to highlight the limits deriving from the use of conditionality in the new neighborhood and the need to reconsider the mix between different Europeanisation strategies.
The third wave of democratization has been accompanied by a resurgent faith in political engineering and the crafting of democracies. This study aims to scrutinize one particular form of crafting: of the party system. It seeks to answer the question to what extent the party system can be the conscious and purposeful creation of electoral engineers. In the end, this study should provide an answer to a question that was posed more than thirty years ago, but still stands today: "Can a party system be planned?". Or, more precisely: "Can a party system be planned as part of the planning of democracy?". The answer comes from an investigation of the experience with crafting in the three regions where the third wave of democratization has been most successful so far: Latin America, Eastern Europe, and, more tentatively, Africa. The aim is not to present a detailed and exhaustive overview of crafting in all the relevant countries from all three regions, but to concentrate on the strongest cases of crafting. The idea is that such "extreme cases" bring out most sharply the possibilities and limitations of crafting. In short, the thesis will discuss why, how, and with what effect the crafting of party systems takes place. Descriptively, the thesis analyzes how countries have dealt with the twin dangers of fragmentation and the politicization of subnational cleavages. Prescriptively, the thesis evaluates the effectiveness of the various methods of crafting in relation to the different goals. Success of crafting is linked to the democratic legitimacy of particular interventions in the development of the party system to see whether there exists a trade-off between the two. By sketching the possibilities and limits of electoral engineering, this study hopes to contribute to the study of institutional design and performance in new democracies as one of the main contemporary frontiers of empirical democratic theory.