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2541. International energy security challenges for Europe in the coming years

Author:
Iana Dreyer
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Issues: Slovak Foreign Policy Affairs
Institution:
Slovak Foreign Policy Association
Abstract:
The European Union's approach to "energy security" has strongly focused on diversifying its gas import sources and routes, and mitigating the risks of supply disruptions from Russia at home. Yet gas markets have changed dramatically recently: Liquefied Natural Gas trade and new suppliers of gas have emerged. The shale gas revolution in the United States has made markets more liquid. Today's key energy security challenge is domestic: increased recourse to intermittent sources of renewable energy has destabilized electricity markets and blackouts cannot be excluded. To prepare for the future, the EU will need to introduce coherence in its climate change policies, as recourse to coal - the most CO2 emitting of all fossil fuels - is rising again. It could also engage more closely with China and India to deal with shared concerns about rising oil and gas import dependency and pollution from coal, and rethink its approach to Russia and other energy suppliers in its neighborhood.
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, and Europe

2542. Europe: Strategic Drifter

Author:
Jakub Grygiel
Publication Date:
08-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The National Interest
Institution:
Center for the National Interest
Abstract:
THE EUROPEAN Union's unfolding crisis tends to be seen as purely economic in nature and consequence. The EU is a common market, with a common currency adopted by most of its members and with fiscal problems of one kind or another facing almost all of its capitals. Most analyses of the euro crisis focus, therefore, on the economic and financial impact of whatever “euro exit” may occur or of a European fiscal centralization. In the worst case, they project a full-fledged breakup of the common currency and perhaps even the EU itself. Not much can be added to this sea of analysis except a pinch of skepticism: nobody really knows the full economic impact, positive or negative, of such potential developments. In fact, not even European leaders seem to have a clear idea of how to mitigate the economic and political morass of the Continent. While it is certain that the EU of the future will be different, it isn't clear just how. If we look at the current situation of the EU from a security perspective, however, it becomes much more difficult to foresee any long-term positive outcome. That's because the euro troubles of today will have powerful negative effects on the security of the region, resulting in challenges that will preoccupy Europeans as well as Americans in the years to come.
Topic:
Security and Economics
Political Geography:
America and Europe

2543. Left Out

Author:
Henning Meyer
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, social democrats in Europe believed that their moment had finally arrived. After a decade in which European politics had drifted toward the market-friendly policies of the right, the crisis represented an opportunity for the political center left's champions of more effective government regulation and greater social justice to reassert themselves.
Topic:
Economics and Government
Political Geography:
United States, Europe, France, Denmark, and Slovakia

2544. "Legitimating Power: The Domestic Politics of U.S. International Hierarchy"

Author:
David A. Lake
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Security
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
The United States has maintained extensive international hierarchies over states on the Caribbean littoral for more than a century and over Western Europe for nearly seven decades. More recently, it has extended similar hierarchies over states in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf. International hierarchy is based on authority relations between states; once they took the form of empires but today are restricted to informal political relationships such as spheres of influence and de facto protectorates. Authority, in turn, is a form of legitimate power that entails a right to command by the dominant state and an obligation or duty to comply by the subordinate. This raises a series of key questions. How does the United States build and sustain legitimacy for itself in subordinate countries? In this postcolonial age, the dominant state must rule indirectly through client regimes. How does the United States ensure legitimacy for such collaborationist regimes? Most important, how does the United States sustain this "double game" of legitimating both its rule and that of its clients, given norms of the sovereign equality of states and, increasingly, of popular sovereignty and democracy? How one answers these questions is relevant not only to theories of international relations but also to current policy debates, especially those on the role of the United States in the Middle East. If the United States cannot legitimate its role in the region, as I argue it cannot for reasons explained below, it should consider following its imperial forefather and withdraw "East of Suez."
Political Geography:
United States, Europe, and Central America

2545. EU investment agreements and the search for a new balance: A paradigm shift from laissez-faireliberalism toward embedded liberalism?

Author:
Catharine Titi
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
Abstract:
In July 2012, in an internal document, the European Commission's Directorate-General for Trade suggested that future EU investment agreement s (EUIAs) should incorporate regulatory flexibility in the same way in which EU free trade agreements (FTAs) safeguard parties' policy space. Since it is expected that a number of treaties on the EU's negotiating agenda will be concluded in the near future, and given the policy shift that has already taken place in Canada and the US, it is time to start thinking about a new balance in a move away from investment treaties' traditional laissez-faire liberalism toward WTO law's embedded liberalism, a model whereby liberalization is embedded within a wider framework that enables public regulation in the interest of domestic stability.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, International Trade and Finance, World Trade Organization, and Foreign Direct Investment
Political Geography:
Europe and Canada

2546. Diminishing Quality of Fiscal Institutions in the United States and European Union

Author:
Thomas Grennes
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
The value of government debt relative to the size of the economy has become a serious problem, and the problem is likely to grow in the future. Total debt of the U.S. government relative to gross domestic product increased substantially since the financial crisis and the Great Recession that began in 2007, but the debt ratio has been increasing since 2001. Gross debt relative to GDP increased from 55 percent in 2001 to 67 percent in 2007 to 107 percent in 2012. Comparable figures for debt held by the public (net debt or gross debt minus debt held by various government agencies) were 80 percent in 2011 and 84 percent in May 2012 (IMF 2012). As a result, the debt ratio is now the highest in U.S. history, except for World War II, when it reached 125 percent of GDP (Bohn 2010). U.S. debt is also high relative to the debt of other high-income countries, and projections of future debt place the U.S. government among the world's largest debtors (IMF 2011, 2012; Evans et al. 2012). Gross debt consists of all the bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury, but a broader measure that includes contingent debt results in a much larger debt (Cochrane 2011). Contingent debt includes unfunded obligations related to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and loan guarantees to agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and these obligations are so large that they have been described as a “debt explosion” (Evans et al. 2012). The sovereign debt crisis of the European Union has similarities to the U.S. debt problem, but it also has significant differences, as will be shown below. Interestingly, the poorer countries of the world that have frequently experienced debt problems in the past, have avoided major debt problems so far.
Topic:
Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United States and Europe

2547. Incredible Commitments: Why the EMU Is Destroying Both Europe and Itself

Author:
George Selgin
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
When the merits of a European Monetary Union were first being debated, many skeptics fell into one of two camps. The first camp consisted of “Keynesians” (for example, Eichengreen and Bayoumi 1997, Salvatore 1997) who, referring to the theory of optimal currency areas, doubted that Europe constituted such an area, and believed that the proposed monetary union would eventually fall victim to country-specific (“idiosyncratic”) shocks. Unemployment and other burdens stemming from such shocks would, these critics argued, eventually force the monetary authority to either abandon its commitment to price-level stability in order to offer relief to adversely affected members, or cause the members to abandon the union so as to be able to realign their exchange rates.
Political Geography:
Europe

2548. Caribbean development alternatives and the CARIFORUM–European Union economic partnership agreement

Author:
Anthony Payne, Matthew Louis Bishop, and Tony Heron
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) signed in October 2008 between the Caribbean and the European Union has been the subject of much controversy. There has been a marked split within the Caribbean between the officials and politicians who negotiated — and thus championed — the EPA and the wider academic and civil society community that subjected it to heavy criticism. The paper examines these debates in detail and situates them within the broader intellectual and practical panorama of Caribbean development alternatives. Specifically, it discusses how the terrain upon which development has been both theorised and practised in the region has narrowed significantly since the 1980s, with the EPA being the latest manifestation of this evolving trend. The paper consequently goes beyond an analysis of the short-term politics of the EPA to elucidate the deeper, structural explanations for the divisions over the EPA between the policy and academic communities and the wider implications of the Agreement for contemporary Caribbean development.
Topic:
Development
Political Geography:
Europe and Caribbean

2549. The Common Agricultural Policy Health Check: time to check the health of the theory of the reform?

Author:
Marko Lovec and Emil Erjavec
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
In 2008, the ministers of agriculture of European Union member states made a political agreement on the Common Agricultural Policy reform, also known as the Health Check. The reform coincided with three things: the ongoing Doha round of the World Trade Organization negotiations; political pressures to limit the costs of the policy financed from the common budget; and various 'new' policy issues. Rational institutional and constructivist approaches, which are often viewed as theoretical alternatives with each explaining some aspects of the reform, have employed simplified and narrow abstractions in conceptualising the role of these policy contexts. In order to identify the mechanisms facilitating the Health Check, a critical realist approach is proposed here, arguing that the relationship among the trade negotiations, budget bargaining, new issues and the policy reform can be explained by theoretically endorsing the asymmetrical development of the agricultural production factors and of production relations. A qualitative analysis is used to determine which of these three approaches seems to be better able to explain the empirical evidence.
Topic:
Development and Reform
Political Geography:
Europe

2550. Regional Blocs, Transnational Actors and Interest Mediation: The Cases of Mexico and Turkey

Author:
Isik Özel
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG)
Abstract:
This working paper explores the processes in which accession to different regional blocs has affected the ways the state interacts with societal actors, along with the interest representation and mediation models in both member and accession countries. Focusing on Turkey and Mexico, two upper-middle-income countries situated on the fringes of major powers and integrated into the regional blocs led by those, the paper examines the differential impact of the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the organization and mediation of business interests; the ways in which these interests are incorporated into policy-making; and the processes of social dialogue. Taking into consideration the fundamental differences between these two regionalisms, it looks into both direct and indirect mechanisms with respect to the influence of regional-level actors on domestic actors and institutions. Maintaining that the impact of regional blocs cannot be easily isolated from that of international, transnational actors and processes, the paper scrutinizes the respective roles of international actors and transnational networks which, at times, have become more influential than the regional blocs in bringing about major institutional changes at the domestic level. Thus, it sheds light on processes of comparative regionalization and their varying influences on distinct polities, which is usually combined and even furthered or, rather, obstructed by the influences of transnational, international and global forces, along with domestic actors and institutions.
Topic:
Economics and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
Europe, India, and Mexico