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271. Why the ECB should cut borrowing costs in periphery

Publication Date:
06-2013
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxford Economics
Abstract:
The European Central Bank has postponed any plans to introduce targeted measures to reduce the cost of borrowing for small and medium-sized businesses in the credit-starved peripheral Eurozone economies. Given the widening gap between the lower costs of borrowing for companies in Germany and France and the higher costs in the periphery, we think that there is a strong case for the ECB to take action. Simulations using our Global Macroeconomic Model show that if half the tightening in credit conditions seen since 2008 were to be reversed within two years, Eurozone GDP would be 0.7% higher by the end of 2017 than under our baseline forecast. There would be over 400,000 fewer people unemployed. This would be particularly beneficial for peripheral Eurozone risk assets.
Topic:
Debt, Economics, International Trade and Finance, Markets, and Monetary Policy
Political Geography:
Europe and Germany

272. Nermin Abadan-Unat, Turks in Europe (London: Berghahn 2011)

Author:
Patrick Hein
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
In his 2010 best-selling book Germany Is Doing Away with Itself former German Central Bank executive member Thilo Sarrazin denounced the structural integration unwillingness of the Turkish community in Germany. The book sparked a fierce controversy especially among young, liberal, German-speaking Turks who feltCEU Political Science Journal. Vol. 8, No. 2 267 deeply offended by Sarrazin's allegations. The German unease with Islam and Turkey has cast a shadow over bilateral relations between the two states. With the rise of radical Islam and ongoing human rights violations in Turkey, tensions have been on the increase.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
Europe, Turkey, and Germany

273. Towards a Deeper EMU: An assessment of political divisions within the EU

Author:
Juha Jokela
Publication Date:
10-2013
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Finnish Institute of International Affairs
Abstract:
Policymakers, observers and the media have referred to a vast number of divisions in crisis-torn Europe. The EU is divided between north and south or creditors and debtors. Some have emphasised the emerged division between anti-EU and pro- EU forces. Significantly, these divisions are also manifested within the eurozone, in the form of the current differences between the French and German views, and the increasing role of the populist movements in many euro countries. Yet others have highlighted the boundary between the eurozone and the rest of the EU, and suggested that the euro countries now form the core of the Union. Relatedly, some of the non-euro members are distancing themselves from the EU – most notably the UK – while many others aim to secure their influence in the Union, even if euro membership may have been put on the back burner.
Topic:
Debt, Economics, Monetary Policy, and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, Europe, and Germany

274. The Arctic Council as Regional Body

Author:
Klaus Dodds
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Abstract:
The Arctic Council (AC) is an inter-governmental organization that, since its creation in 1996, has been widely recognized as one of the most progressive regional bodies in the world. The membership includes the eight Arctic states (A8), six permanent participants, and observer states such as the UK and Germany. From May 2013 onwards, there are also new permanent observers including China, India, Japan, and South Korea. The European Union's candidature has been delayed and subject to further review and assessment. The Council is chaired by one of the eight Arctic states for a two year period. The current chair is Canada (2013- 2015) and it will be followed by the United States (2015- 2017). The permanent participants, including the Inuit Circumpolar Council, Saami Council, and Aleut International Association, enjoy full consultative status and may address the meetings of the Council. Administrative support is provided by the Indigenous Peoples Secretariat (IPS), which is based in Copenhagen. The AC lies at the heart of debates about Arctic futures. It faces two challenges – institutional evolution and membership. For its supporters, the AC occupies center position in promoting an orderly and cooperative vision for the Arctic, but there is no shortage of commentary and punditry analyzing and predicting a rather different vision for the Arctic. As Paul Berkman asserted in the New York Times, under the heading “Preventing an Arctic Cold War,” there is little room for complacency. Berkman's analysis warned of Arctic and non-Arctic states being increasingly forced to confront difficult issues relating to policing, resource management, accessibility and navigability, alongside environmental protection. His suggestion at the end of the piece appeared, seemed rather odd, “[a]s the head of an Arctic superpower and a Nobel laureate, Mr. Obama should convene an international meeting with President Putin and other leaders of Arctic nations to ensure that economic development at the top of the world is not only sustainable, but peaceful.” Bizarrely, there is little analysis of how, and to what extent, the AC and other bodies, including the United Nations Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), are actively providing “rules of the road” (Berkman's phrase) for the Arctic region and beyond. This piece focuses on some issues that require further attention (such as the protection of the Arctic marine environment) while acknowledging how the AC has changed in the last few years. As a regional body, it operates in a strategic environment where few specialist observers believe that military conflict or destabilizing resource speculation is likely to prevail. Nonetheless, it is a work in progress with pressing demands to address. I will discuss debates about membership status and the institutional evolution to respond to experts' concerns about disasters (which might involve a shipping or drilling accident) and ongoing climate change, including manifestations such as sea ice thinning in the Arctic Ocean
Topic:
Cold War
Political Geography:
Japan, China, United Kingdom, Canada, India, South Korea, and Germany

275. Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey

Author:
Ahmet T. Kuru
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Insight Turkey
Institution:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
THIS is a path-breaking book that contributes to the literature on ethnicity and nationalism from various aspects. Conceptually, it develops a typology of three regimes of ethnicity—monoethnic, multiethnic, and antiethnic. The monoethnic regime, unlike the two other types, prioritizes one ethnic group in terms of citizenship and immigration. The multiethnic regime differs from the two others by constitutionally recognizing multiple ethnic groups and even providing them territorial autonomies and some affirmative action policies. The antiethnic regime, in this regard, refuses to recognize a single or multiple ethnic identities as basis of state policy.
Topic:
Immigration
Political Geography:
Russia, Turkey, and Germany

276. Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life Turkey and the Dilemma of EU Accession Towards a Social History of Modern Turkey: Essays in Theory and Practice

Author:
Laurence Raw
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Insight Turkey
Institution:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
ALTHOUGH written from a variety of perspectives at different points in history, all three books reviewed here offer penetrating insights into Turkish politics past and present, as well as commenting on how they are interpreted both inside and outside the country. Written in English, while he was guest professor at the University of Marburg, Germany (having quit his post at Boğaziçi University in protest at the law curtailing academic freedom), Gündüz Vassaf's Prisoners of Ourselves comprises a series of meditations mostly written between October 1986 and March 1987. His basic thesis is straightforward enough: although human beings consider themselves members of the free world, they are actually subject to totalitarian rule. He surveys some familiar binaries—for example, madness and sanity—and shows how they are used to curtail individual liberties. Western historians have conventionally accepted that the Nazi period in Germany was one of collective madness. However the validity of that judgment can be called into question in the light of Adorno and Horkheimer's research, which discovered that anti-semitism in the United States was much higher than it had been in Germany after Hitler came to power. Vassaf concludes that everyone is part of that “collective madness,” in which one nation is willfully prioritized over another as a means of sustaining power (p. 35). Anyone questioning that notion is abruptly silenced.
Topic:
Politics and History
Political Geography:
United States, Turkey, and Germany

277. The Decline and Fall of France

Author:
Milton Ezrati
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The National Interest
Institution:
Center for the National Interest
Abstract:
FRANCE's ECONOMY is not just doing badly. It is in profound decline. The slide has proceeded far enough now that businesspeople and politicians across the Continent increasingly refer to France as the "sick man of Europe"-quite a distinction at a moment when Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy share the hospital ward. For decades, European Union structures were strong enough to allow Paris to ignore the country's economic shortcomings. No longer. Unless Paris reforms its economic policies and practices, it could have a disastrous effect. Further economic woes may undermine the Franco-German cooperation on which the EU has relied, confronting the union with either dissolution or, more likely, an increasingly Germanic future.
Topic:
Economics and Reform
Political Geography:
United States, France, and Germany

278. Google's Original X-Man

Author:
Sebastian Thrun
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Sebastian Thrun is one of the world's leading experts on robotics and artificial intelligence. Born in Solingen, Germany, in 1967, he received his undergraduate education at the University of Hildesheim and his graduate education at the University of Bonn. He joined the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University in 1995 and moved to Stanford University in 2003. Thrun led the team that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a driverless car competition sponsored by the U.S. Defense Department, and in 2007, he joined the staff of Google, eventually becoming the first head of Google X, the company's secretive big-think research lab. He co-founded the online-education start-up Udacity in 2012. In late August, he spoke to Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose in the Udacity offices.
Political Geography:
United States and Germany

279. Governmentality's (missing) international dimension and the promiscuity of German neoliberalism

Author:
Hans-Martin Jaeger
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
An important insight from the recent publication of Foucault's governmentality lectures for International Relations (IR) is that international manifestations of governmentalities such as police and liberalism, rather than constituting mere domestic analogies, have inherently international dimensions. Police and liberalism are both constituted by and constitutive of the international contexts in which they emerge: historically, the European balance of power and a 'globalisation' of markets, respectively. However, Foucault's account of German and American neoliberalism in the twentieth century omits references to the international context. This article first reconstructs the 'domestic-international nexus' in Foucault's account of police and liberalism, and then recovers aspects of the missing international dimension of his analysis of German neoliberalism with recourse to Wilhelm Röpke's writing on IR. The upshot of this recovery effort is threefold. First, the international remains pivotal to (mid-) twentieth-century neoliberal governmentality. Second, (German) neoliberalism's association with multiple 'international' governmentalities, including liberal and non-liberal ones, exposes neoliberalism as a 'promiscuous' mode of governance. Third, German neoliberalism's promiscuity is underwritten by (though not reducible to) a conservative ethos of moderation. More broadly, this article contributes to efforts to theorise the relationship between domestic and international politics, and to understand neoliberalism as a 'variegated' phenomenon.
Political Geography:
America and Germany

280. Paternalistic versus participation oriented minority institutions in the Danish-German border region

Author:
Adrian Schaefer-Rolffs and Kai-Uwe Schnapp
Publication Date:
05-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
European Centre for Minority Issues
Abstract:
Democracy can, according to Robert Dahl, be understood as a political system in which those affected by a decision have a proper chance to take part in making this decision. Although it is accepted by political theorists as well as many men and women on the street, this norm is not easily implemented in all situations. One situation in which implementation might not be as straightforward is the proper political participation of any kind of minority, be it national, ethnic, religious, cultural or otherwise. This question of minority political participation has grown in importance in Europe over the last decades. This is the case, because European nations are beset by a total of more than 300 national and ethnic minority groups with over 100 million members. Awareness and appreciation of this fact has massively increased recently in terms of politics as well as with regard to discussion in the social sciences. While there are at least some explicit perceptions of the institutional quality of participatory rights and facilities across Europe, there is almost no empirical account of the role and the perception of political rights and/or institutions that foster minority political participation.
Topic:
Governance, Law, and Minorities
Political Geography:
Europe, Germany, and Denmark