Open Forum - CES Papers
Welcome to the CES's new Open Forum series. The goal of this series is not only to bring new work on Europe to a wide audience but also to facilitate discussion of the papers among authors and readers. Papers will be available online and new interactive feature will enable readers to post comments and authors and others to respond. Our aim is to foster the same sort of fruitful and vigorous intellectual conversation that goes on at the Center online. We invite you to take part. To read and comment on any of the papers, please click the 'join the discussion' link under the title. You many also download the PDF version of the paper or the abstract.
- 10. Daniel Mügge, Financial regulation in the European Union: A research agenda (April 2012)
Over the past two decades, the European Union (EU) has become a central actor in financial regulation and developed complex institutions to fulfill its roles. Pre-financial crisis scholarship has provided key insights into the functioning of this institutional cobweb and its evolution over time. However, the financial crisis has highlighted four facets of EU financial regulation (EUFR) that deserve more scholarly attention than they have received so far: (1) the permissive pre-crisis consensus on the merits of financial liberalization and integration, (2) the embeddedness of financial regulation in the political economy of EU integration at large, (3) preference formation of public and private stakeholders in EUFR, and (4) the global economic and regulatory context of EUFR. This paper presents the key scholarly challenges across these four areas. Addressing them promises not only academic insights but also promotes the relevance of EUFR research for real-world policy dilemmas.
- 9. Eleni Mahaira-Odoni, Too Famous to Name: C.P. Cavafy's Lefkios (April 2012)
It has been assumed that C.P. Cavafy's elegiac poem "In the Month of Athyr" (1917), an epitaph addressed to Lefkios, refers to an imaginary character at an imaginary date. This paper proposes that, in the poet's circumspect style, the use of that name probably camouflages at least two illustrious historical characters, one pagan and one proto-Christian; hence the intentional ambivalence of the epigraph's date. Both personages shared lives torn between sensuality and the changing moral codes of their time -- preoccupations much felt by a poet constantly struggling to conceal his homosexuality while also protecting the dignity of his painstakingly constructed, strait-laced public image. By revisiting several poems, this essay highlights C.P. Cavafy's dissimulating techniques and the literary masks he employed in order to veil two iconic personalities most akin to his own self-censuring lifestyle and the exigencies of his artistic concerns. Finally, this article attempts to establish a clear symbolic and existential link between these paradigmatic martyrs and Julian the Apostate, the figure the poet celebrated in twelve poems which distill his bitter self-awareness, all the while sheltered by the timeless city of Alexandria, his safe haven.
- 8. Emiliano Grossman and Cornelia Woll, Saving the Banks: The Political Economy of Bailouts (April 2012)
How much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007-2009 financial crisis? This paper analyzes comparatively what explains government responses to banking crises. Why does the type of intervention during financial crises vary to such a great extent across countries? By analyzing the variety of bailouts in Europe and North America, we will show that the strategies governments use to cope with the instability of financial markets does not depend on economic conditions alone. Rather, they take root in the institutional and political setting of each country and vary in particular according to the different types of business-government relations banks were able to entertain with public decision-makers. Still, “crony capitalism” accounts overstate the role of bank lobbying. With four case studies of the Irish, Danish, British and French bank bailout, we show that countries with close one-on-one relationships between policy-makers and bank management tended to develop unbalanced bailout packages, while countries where banks have strong interbank ties and collective negotiation capacity were able to develop solutions with a greater burden sharing from private institutions.
- 7. Amandine Crespy, European integration and resistance to institutional change: The politics of services liberalization in the European Union (December 2011)
This paper demonstrates how the historical and discursive strings of neo-institutionalism can bring new insights for drawing a bigger picture than is currently done in EU studies. The central claim is that this requires exploring not only the drivers but also the obstacles to further policy integration in the EU. In this respect, it is fruitful to consider the intertwined way in which both institutional reproduction over time and ideas conveyed by agency can explain the success or failure of coalitions and hence policy outcomes. Throughout the paper, these reflections are applied to ongoing research about the politics of services in the EU, a matter of inter-sectoral relevance that implies major political, social and legitimacy issues.
- 6. Paul-André Bempéchat, Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony and the Culture of Assimilation (September 2011)
Felix Mendelssohn's "Reformation" Symphony, opus 107 (1829-30) - "the beast," according to his sister Fanny - remains, along with his oratorios Saint Paul (1836) and Elijah (1846), one of his most controversial works. The symphony, composed in competition with works by other composers, was intended not only to honor the tercentenary of the Augsburg Confession, the principle doctrine of the Lutheran faith, but to convince Germans that one of their nation's most prominent Jewish families, recent converts to Protestantism, had assimilated. Mendelssohn's supreme efforts, spiritual, psychological, and technical, proved fruitless, most likely due to his Jewish origins, and to the thematic ecumenism of his symphony, which, projecting its author's own reconciliation of these traditions, unites motives from the Christian and Jewish traditions. Mendelssohn's religious convictions have, since the end of the Second World War, become an unnecessarily divisive source of controversy between musicologists and social historians. Aided by an analysis of Mendelssohn's spiritual hybridity as expressed in the symphony, this essay will strive to resolve the controversy by elucidating the psychological intricacies of German Jewish conversion during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the futile drive by German Jews to assimilate into a society that would ultimately affirm and reject them as outsiders.
- 5. Martijn L.P. Groenleer, The actual practice of agency autonomy: Tracing the developmental trajectories of the European Medicines Agency and the European Food Safety Authority (August 2011)
In recent decades, a series of regulatory agencies has been created at the European Union (EU) level. The existing literature on EU agencies focuses either on autonomy as reason for their creation or on the autonomy that they are granted by design. As a result, we do not know much about how EU agencies' de facto autonomy comes about. This paper therefore probes into the development over time of two particular agencies. On the basis of document analysis and interviews with agency officials and external actors, it explores why in practice the European Medicines Agency (EMA) seems to have developed a higher level of autonomy than the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA), whereas on paper EMA appears to be similarly autonomous as, or, if anything, less autonomous than EFSA. The paper demonstrates the importance of tracing the developmental trajectories of EU regulatory agencies for understanding the actual practice of their autonomy.
- 4. Radosław Sikorski, European Security: Does It Matter To The United States? (February 2011)
Prepared Text for the 2010-2011 August Zaleski Lecture
Radosław Sikorski, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland
February 28, 2011 at Harvard University
European Security matters. In contrast to the pseudo-security of the Cold War, European security today is vastly different but despite the demands for freedom around the globe, there is still unfinished business in terms of democratization in Europe and on its immediate borders. In Poland, defence spending is significant and its forces have gained international experience that will soon allow it to deter conventional adversaries. But what about unconventional warfare? We don't know what the next war will look like or what we face; to be prepared, global cooperation with trusted allies is crucial and why the US/European relationship will continue to be central to global security. European security must take Russia into account. While Poland is committed to maintaining good relations with Russia, the difference with the US and Europe is Poland shares the values of democracy, markets and individual rights with the latter. Until Europe is surrounded by states who also share those values, its borders will not be secure. Security takes many forms, both military and non-military. The US needs partners in managing global security; Poland is one of them and in some areas such as sharing experience in democratic transitions has a comparative advantage. Without the closest cooperation between the US and Europe, we run the risk of violent disarray and global insecurity stretching out into the foreseeable future. There is no time to waste.
- 3. Vivien A. Schmidt, Analyzing Ideas and Tracing Discursive Interactions in Institutional Change: From Historical Institutionalism to Discursive Institutionalism (January 2011)
Comparative political economists who use historical institutionalism have made great contributions in describing what happened in cases of political economic change in advanced industrialized democracies, but they have great difficulty explaining much of why this happened. This paper argues that a discursive institutionalist analytic framework helps to explain why, and it will show how by offering methodological guidelines for the analysis of ideas and discourse in action. It will focus on such issues as the timing and content of change, both revolutionary and evolutionary; the agents and context of change through their articulation of ideas in discursive interactions in both the meaning-based frameworks of communication and the structural frameworks elucidated by historical institutionalists. The paper illustrates throughout with examples from the historical and discursive institutionalist literatures on national capitalisms and welfare states.
- 2. Kristin Makszin and Carsten Schneider, Education and Participatory Inequalities in Real Existing Democracies: Probing the Effect of Labor Markets on the Qualities of Democracies (January 2011)
Does the type of capitalist system affect the qualities of democratic systems? We approach this big question by narrowing down the definition of the qualities of democracies (QoD) to political equality and by operationalizing the latter in terms of equal participation of politically relevant groups in elections. The concept of market economies we narrow down to labor markets and we rank countries on a scale that reflects the degree of regulation and protection of their labor markets. Using rare event logistic regression on micro-level data for 16 countries from multiple waves of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), we show that more strongly regulated and protected labor markets do reduce the distorting effect of education on political participation: lower educated citizens in regulated market economies turn out more than the same type of citizen in less regulated market economies; and, at the same time, the over-representation among the politically active citizens of highly educated citizens is less pronounced in regulated than in not regulated labor markets. We interpret these findings such that the type of market economy does matter for QoD and that, more specifically, more regulated labor markets help mitigate the effect of one important source of political inequality.
- 1. Torben Iversen and David Soskice, Two Paths to Democracy (January 2011)
We argue that differences in economic and political structures at the turn of the previous century caused two distinct paths of democratization in the currently advanced democracies. Countries which were "proto-corporatist" in the early to mid nineteenth century democratized subsequently under working class pressure (mainly Northern Europe and Scandinavia), while democracy was voluntarily extended in those countries that were "liberal" in this period (Britain and its settler colonies, and partially also France). Three reasons lay behind this: (1) Shaping an effective labor force in early industrialization required public goods, notably elementary education and sanitation, but proto-corporatist societies did not require democracy to provide them. Liberal societies, on the other hand, in which landowners were politically powerful and hostile to reform did. (2) In liberal countries the working class was fragmented into uncoordinated craft unions, hence not capable of sustained political pressure to bring about democracy; instead, democracy was the result of an inter-elite conflict, thus voluntarily extended by reformist elites. Industrialization in proto-corporatist societies, the other hand, generated industrial unionism and unified working class parties that could organize political pressure to bring about democracy. (3) Reformist elites in liberal countries did not fear that democracy would lead to major redistribution, since the fragmented working class meant that skilled workers and the middle classes would be opposed to redistribution to low income groups - reinforced by an elite-skilled worker-middle class coalition behind a majoritarian political system. By contrast, a unified working class threatened industrial elites in the proto-corporatist countries with redistribution once democracy was pushed through. As a consequence of these differences, liberal societies extended democracy voluntarily (after intra-elite struggles) because modernizers and industrialists needed political majorities to support public goods expansion, and they did not need to fear a unified working class; elites in proto-corporatist societies resisted democracy because they had the public goods anyway and had good reason to fear a unified working-class.
