Institute of European Studies

This monograph reviews Germany’s evolution from a country of emigration to a reluctant land of immigration between the 1960s and 1980s, as guest workers settled and asylum seekers arrived. During the 1990s, Germany became a magnet for diverse foreigners, including the families of settled guest workers, newly mobile Eastern Europeans and ethnic Germans, and asylum seekers from throughout the world. Germany, with a relatively structured and rigid labor market and economy, finds it easier to integrate especially unskilled newcomers into generous social welfare programs than into the labor market. Since immigration means change as immigrants and Germans adjust to each other, an aging German populace may resist the changes in the economy and labor market that could facilitate immigrant integration as well as the changes in culture and society that invariably accompany immigrants.

Until the break-up of the Soviet Union, dominant intellectual and educational cultures in Europe worked primarily with national concepts. In the twentieth century, nationalist ideologies have, of course, lost some of their glamour due to the impact of two disastrous world wars. But while leading European intellectuals over the past 50 years developed a research program that transcended the national spirit, they nonetheless remained bound by the concept of “modernity,” which comprises the concept of the modern nation state and the modern nation state system. Steeped in this cultural unconscious, Europe has neglected the systematic study of alternative modernities and alternative systems of governmentality -- including systems of democratic governmentality in the internet age -- especially as these alternative modernities relate to the influx of Muslim populations.

Key conceptual relations: modernity and violence; intellectuals north-south; ontology of peace and ontology of violence; modern modes of knowledge organization and alternative modes of knowledge organization; history of jurisprudence 1500-1700 and inversion of rights; principle of rights and principle of the mind/soul; anthropological principal of the human capacity for justice; ontology of violence and modern philosophy; ontology of violence and modern social sciences; right to the right to knowledge on global peace and disciplinary censorship.

With the creation of EMU, European Welfare States have entered a new phase of development. The margins for manoeuvring public budgets have substantially decreased, while the unfolding of the four freedoms of movement within the EU have seriously weakened the traditional coercive monopoly of the state on actors and resources that are crucial for the stability of redistributive institutions. The article explores these issues adopting a Rokkanian perspective, i.e. building on Rokkan’s pioneering insights on the nexus between boundary building and internal structuring.

The first part of the paper briefly presents the theoretical perspective. The second part sketches the development of national welfare institutions from their origin up to the early 1970s, discussing their implications in terms of boundary building and internal structuring. The third part describes the challenges that have emerged in the last couple of decades to the “social sovereignty” of the nation state: challenges that are largely linked to the process of European integration, but that are partly reinforced by endogenous developments as well. The final part offers some more speculative remarks of the potential de-structuring of the traditional architecture of social protection, with some hints at cross-national variations and possible developments at the EU level.

During the Cold War, European-American relations were often marked by differences over tactics, but we did share for the most part a strategic goal that was to be achieved on the basis of the twin principles of deterrence and détente. Yet there are some that would argue that this past year has been different; that the transatlantic rift goes deeper and will last longer. If the Americans and Europeans cannot find common ground in certain regulatory areas, it may be that we will agree to disagree on the use of GMO’s, technological standards, or Anti-trust legislation. This could lead to more competition but also to duplication in an increasingly interwoven global market. Yet, because we face a vastly more complicated environment today than during previous years — full of threats and opportunities — it will remain a challenge for the coming decade to strategize as to how transatlantic political policy problems can best be dealt with.

This lecture considers how Europe’s monetary union will evolve in the next five to ten years. It concentrates on what is likely to be the most important change in that period, namely, the increasing number and heterogeneity of participating states. By 2006, less than four years from now, it is virtually certain that EMU will be enlarged to include a number of Eastern European countries that have not yet been admitted to the EU itself. These new members will differ sharply from the incumbents in terms of their economic structures, their per capita incomes, and their growth rates. The analysis focuses on the implications of this momentous change for the structure, organization and operation of EMU.

Industrialization and urbanization are seen as twin processes of economic development. However, the exact nature of their causal relationship is still open to considerable debate. This paper uses firm-level data from the manuscripts of the decennial censuses between 1850 and 1880 to examine whether the adoption of the steam engine as the primary power source by manufacturers during industrialization contributed to urbanization. While the data indicate that steam-powered firms were more likely to locate in urban areas than water-powered firms, the adoption of the steam engine did not contribute substantially to urbanization.

Now that the decision has been taken to admit to the European Union eight of what were once called the transition economies, attention has naturally turned to whether these countries should also join Europe’s monetary union. But where is a consensus that joining the EU, while posing certain difficulties, will be a source of net benefits, there is no such consensus about the adoption of the euro. In part this uncertainty reflects the unusual difficulty that monetary economists have in translating theory into policy. We specialists, in other words, cannot even agree amongst ourselves.

In this lecture I suggest that this uncertainty is unwarranted. Adopting the euro is clearly superior to the other monetary options available to the new EU members. These countries are right to be committed to joining Euroland as soon as possible. And the incumbent members of the euro area should be happy to have them. To be sure, enlarging the monetary union will pose difficulties for both the incumbents and the new members. But these are minor compared to the difficulties that will arise under other scenarios. From this point of view, it is regrettable that the incumbents appear to be placing unnecessary obstacles in the path of the aspirants.

Europe’s single currency is widely invoked as a potential solution to the monetary and exchange rate problems of other regions, including Asia, Latin America, North America and even Africa. This lecture asks whether the Europe’s experience in creating the euro is exportable. It argues that the single currency is the result of a larger integrationist project that has political as well as economic dimensions. The appetite for political integration being less in other parts of the world, the euro will not be easily emulated. Other regions will have to find different means of addressing the tension between domestic monetary autonomy and regional integration. Harmonized inflation targeting may be the best available solution.

"...It is impossible for any community to have very full employment and completely free collective bargaining and stable prices. Either one of the three will be completely sacrificed, or else all three will have to be modified."

"...In the last resort the answer will be given not by economists or by administrators but by the public opinion. At each corner of the triangle, the limiting factor is what public opinion will stand, and the degree of comprehension that public opinion will show for an economic policy that tries to preserve balance between competing objectives."

(The Economist, August-October, 1952: 376, 435)

Can Germany in the 1990s provide a contemporary example of the “uneasy triangle” posited by The Economist in the early 1950s? As the millennium approached, Germany’s inflation rate was very low; its unemployment rate unacceptably high; and its system of collective bargaining arguably the strongest to be found in any major industrial country. Public opinion appears to have played a more limiting role in the first of these corners of Germany’s triangles than in the other two.

This paper compares approaches towards food safety regulation in Europe and the United States. It focuses on mad cow disease and examines how the British Government and the European Union handled the first big crisis in the nineties, juxtaposed to the American response. This worst public health disaster in Europe has led to new agencies and policies. However, these institutional changes do not abolish fragmentation, but extend the existing landscape of regulatory bodies. The paper emphasizes that fragmentation – as the American case shows despite its shortcomings – prevents science from being captured by the state, allows interest groups broader access and ensures a distinct pattern of checks and balances.

In the late 1990s, the European Left seemed to be once more in the ascendancy with Social Democratic-led governments in power in the majority of EU countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. At the same time, the debate about the so-called ‘Third Way’ — as an icon of the apparent electoral revitalization of European Social Democracy — rose to become the most important reform discourse in the European party landscape.

In Germany, the much heralded ‘Neue Mitte’ reform agenda of Gerhard Schroeder’s incoming new cabinet of 1998 owed obvious intellectual debt to the Blairite doctrine of the Third Way. Against this background, some observers claim to have identified a convergent trend within European Social Democracy, while others stress the importance of national contexts and point to distinct national profiles ranging from market-oriented New Labour to (what used to be) statist ‘Jospinism’. In this context, this paper seeks to set the policy agenda of Germany’s Red-Green government into a comparative European perspective.

There is, in theory, a plausible role for the European Union as the partner of a militarily assertive United States: the peacekeeper that follows in the wake of the peacemaker. The war in Iraq, however, has raised the possibility of a diametrically different role for Europe: as a potential imperial rival to the United States. There is no need to invoke the memory of either Rome or Byzantium to make the case that Europe is capable of spoiling America’s unipolar party. The successful conclusion of accession agreements with ten new member countries – not to mention the sustained appreciation of the euro against the dollar since Kennedy’s article appeared – have seemingly vindicated this analysis. So too, in the eyes of some commentators, has the vociferous and not wholly ineffectual opposition of at least some E.U. member states to American policy in Iraq. If the U.S. has an imperial rival today, then the E.U. appears to be it.

Shared fundamental liberties and democratic principles have long provided the core of what observers of international affairs termed the West. While national institutions and policies have at times varied, they rarely challenged the foundations of the transatlantic partnership. With the rise of information technology and the new security environment, however, local variations in fundamental rights have produced significant international implications. Examining recent transatlantic disputes over privacy and free speech, the paper argues that a new set of international issues have emerged dealing with transnational civil liberties. Once core unifying principles of the transatlantic relationship these basic freedoms have transformed into flashpoints for conflict. After identifying this new trend, the paper argues that the nature of these conflicts is framed by the timing of international interdependence relative to the maturity of national regulatory regimes.

An Atlantic partnership is acceptable if the European cultural, linguistic, social and economic diversities are preserved. And yet, Europe feels a threat through the now Globalisation which is so often seen as a form or aspect of Americanisation. The European Union is weak but not drifting away. If the Union do wants to behave as “a global power in the Economic, Social, Environmental governance of the world” (Josaiane Tercinet), it must talk as a united power. This short overview of the period 1945-2006, made by an historian who is aware of the long term influence, shows that it is European integration that has recreated the conditions of the European renewal. Of course, Atlantic economic integration represents a mighty trend ever since 1944. But the Atlantic economic and financial interactions do not necessarily create the political unity of action between the two sides of the Atlantic ocean. It seems that trouble between the two banks of Atlantic is rising because the political, even mental, position of now US leaders and not because economic or commercial tensions. However, it doesn’t only depend on the short term situation. We will conclude on the specificity of the two sides of Atlantic. Beyond an economic integration which seems inevitable in an open world and which will spread to another part of industrial countries, beyond the necessary bilateral cooperation due to the old friendship, to hope overcoming the political and cultural differences between the two is both an unrealizable dream and a mistake.

Keywords: Atlantic partnership, European diversities, European Union, European integration, economic integration, European power

In October 1910 a revolution drove out the king of Portugal and established the Portuguese Republic. In 1926 a military coup overthrew the parliamentary system and led to the authoritarian regime of Salazar, but in April 1974 a revolution led by the military restored the parliamentary republic. In this book edited by Richard Herr (Berkeley) and António Costa Pinto (Lisbon), eighteen Portuguese and American authors present essays in celebration of the centennial of the Portuguese Republic. With a review of its course and needs for the future, they offer an assessment of accomplishments of the two periods of the republic, the nature of republican institutions, the role of women in politics and letters, and the republic’s social, economic, religious, and environmental policies. Much thought has gone into analyzing the two revolutions, the challenge of an authoritarian tradition, and the difficulties posed for establishing a workable parliamentary government with a democratic suffrage.

An outgrowth of a library exhibition in UC Berkeley’s Doe Library, this book commemorates the 40th anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution (Revolução dos Cravos) which took place on April 25, 1974. The poem “As portas que Abril abriu” first published in 1975 by the fabled poet of the revolution José Carlos Ary dos Santos and graphically reinforced by António Pimentel’s illustrations provided a fitting and powerful structure for the installation. Because a translation was not available, the curators provided one there and now documented in this book the first-ever parallel English translation of the text.