The euro at ten: the next global currency?

Over the first ten years of its existence, the euro has proved to be more than a powerful symbol of collective identity. It has provided price stability to previously inflation-prone countries; it has offered a shelter against currency crises; and it has by and large been conducive to budgetary discipline. The eurozone has attracted five new members in addition to the initial eleven, and many countries in Europe wish to adopt it. The euro has also been successful internationally. Even though research presented in this volume confirms that it has not rivaled the dollar's world currency status, it has certainly become a strong regional currency in Europe and the Mediterranean region. Some countries in the region have de facto adopted it, several peg to it, and many have become at least partially euroized. However, the euro's impressive first decade is likely to be followed by a much more difficult period. The present financial crisis is posing at least two important challenges: real economic adjustment within the euro area and maintenance of fiscal and financial stability without a central government authority capable of taking appropriate financial and fiscal decisions in difficult times. This book is the product of a joint conference held in 2008 by the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Bruegel. It is edited by Bruegel Director Jean Pisani-Ferry and then-PIEE Deputy Director and current Bruegel board member Adam Posen. The papers and remarks in this volume demonstrate that the euro has proved to be attractive as a fair weather currency for countries and investors well beyond its borders. But it remains to be seen whether it is equipped to also succeed as a stormy weather currency. Contributors: Joaquín Almunia, Maria Celina Arraes, Leszek Balcerowicz, C. Fred Bergsten, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, Kristin J. Forbes, Linda S. Goldberg, C. Randall Henning, Mohsin S. Khan, Antonio de Lecea, Erkki Liikanen, Philippe Martin, Thomas Mayer, André Sapir, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Lawrence H. Summers, and György Szapáry.

Winona Daily News

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Combating the Hydra: Violence and Resistance in the Habsburg Empire, 1500–1900

Combating the Hydra explores structural as well as occasion-specific state violence committed by the early modern Habsburg Empire. The book depicts and analyzes attacks on marginalized people “maladjusted” of all sorts, women “of ill repute,” “heretic” Protestants, and “Gypsies.” Previously uncharted archival records reveal the use of arbitrary imprisonment, coerced labor, and deportation. The case studies presented provide insights into the origins of modern state power from varied techniques of population control, but are also an investigation of resistance against oppression, persecution, and life-threatening assaults. The spectrum of fights against debasement is a touching attestation of the humanity of the outcasts; they range from mental and emotional perseverance to counterviolence. A conversation with the eminent historian Carlo Ginzburg concludes the collection by asking about the importance of memorizing horrors of the past.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ces/1002/thumbnail.jp

Negotiating Internet Governance

What is at stake for how the Internet continues to evolve is the preservation of its integrity as a single network. In practice, its governance is neither centralised nor unitary; it is piecemeal and fragmented, with authoritative decision-making coming from different sources simultaneously: governments, businesses, international organisations, technical and academic experts, and civil society. Historically, the conditions for their interaction were rarely defined beyond basic technical coordination, due at first to the academic freedom granted to the researchers developing the network and, later on, to the sheer impossibility of controlling mushrooming Internet initiatives. Today, the search for global norms and rules for the Internet continues, be it for cybersecurity or artificial intelligence, amid processes fostering the supremacy of national approaches or the vitality of a pluralist environment with various stakeholders represented. This book provides an incisive analysis of the emergence and evolution of global Internet governance, unpacking the complexity of more than 300 governance arrangements, influential debates and political negotiations over four decades. Highly accessible, this book breaks new ground through a wide empirical exploration and a new conceptual approach to governance enactment in global issue domains. A tripartite framework is employed for revealing power dynamics, relying on: a) an extensive database of mechanisms of governance for the Internet at the global and regional level; b) an in-depth analysis of the evolution of actors and priorities over time; and c) a key set of dominant practices observed in the Internet governance communities. It explains continuity and change in Internet-related negotiations, opening up new directions for thinking and acting in this field

Citizen-Subjectivity, Experiential Evaluation, and Activist Strategies: Explaining Algerian Violence and Polish Peace under Authoritarian Rule

This project explains Polish non-violence and Algerian violence under martial law following peaceful protests against comparable material deprivation and authoritarian political exclusion. From narratives of state formation, institutional performance, and social movement evolution in postwar Poland and postcolonial Algeria a conditional model derives violent and non-violent opposition strategies from divergent practical citizenship regimes in formally similar autocratic systems. It argues that distinct regimes of citizen-subjectivity under authoritarian governance foster divergent practices of resistance and evaluations of states before and during emergency conditions that reduce activists to biological life, tempting violence. Where citizenship regimes differentiate social resources (means of protest) from state resources (means or sovereignty), affording regime opponents actual or immanent systemic subjectivity, social agitation remains non-violent despite objectively comprehensive political and social dispossession; in contrast, by subordinating social to state resources, undifferentiated citizenship regimes under martial law wholly eliminate systemic subjectivity, provoking violence. Neither the formal political regime-type nor the immediate experience of social suffering or political abjection distinguishes violent from non-violent responses to despotism; rather, violent versus non-violent protest strategies express discrepant evaluations of regime coercion, reflecting the elimination versus endurance of the citizenship regime that formed the iterated systemic subjectivity of regime opponents. Poland's worker-based citizenship regime endured fiscal crisis and martial law because it provided differentiated social resources: regime opponents had means independent of state solvency to compel policy concessions by withdrawing labor power from industries pivotal to ruling-elite incumbency. But Algeria's client-based citizenship - based on undifferentiated resources - tied activists' systemic means of compulsion to state largesse. Differentiated citizenship regimes endure state crises because citizens retain the social resources, however suspended, of systemic-subjectivity that ground their evaluations of state actions, minimizing incentives to violent pressure on ruling classes. Undifferentiated citizenship regimes perish under state bankruptcy or force, eradicating social resources and channeling the recuperation of subjectivity to anti-systemic acts. In short, Polish workers could strike and threaten the state under martial law; Algerian clients were effectively expelled from political status. In forming opposition strategies, citizens judge state policies or legitimacy, but also their status as systemic subjects. Evaluations of systemic subjectivity reflect experiences in using social resources, not merely immediate material or political conditions. The research design does not test a general theoretical model linking citizenship-subjectivity regimes to experiential evaluations of objective dehumanization, but its conceptual and causal variable analyses may complement other studies of state institutions and social agitations by promoting subject formation over abstract human universals as the key mechanism in reliable social explanation

The Persistence of Technology

Repair, reuse and disposal are closely interlinked phenomena related to the service lives and persistence of technologies. When technical artefacts become old and worn out, decisions have to be taken: is it necessary, worthwhile or even possible to maintain and repair, reuse or dismantle them - or must they be discarded? These decisions depend on factors such as the availability of second-hand markets, repair infrastructures and dismantling or disposal facilities. In telling the stories of China's power grid, Canadian telephones, German automobiles and India's shipbreaking business, among others, the contributions in this volume highlight the persistence of technologies and show that maintenance and repair are not obsolete in modern industries and consumer societies

The Persistence of Technology: Histories of Repair, Reuse and Disposal

Repair, reuse and disposal are closely interlinked phenomena related to the service lives and persistence of technologies. When technical artefacts become old and worn out, decisions have to be taken: is it necessary, worthwhile or even possible to maintain and repair, reuse or dismantle them - or must they be discarded? These decisions depend on factors such as the availability of second-hand markets, repair infrastructures and dismantling or disposal facilities. In telling the stories of China's power grid, Canadian telephones, German automobiles and India's shipbreaking business, among others, the contributions in this volume highlight the persistence of technologies and show that maintenance and repair are not obsolete in modern industries and consumer societies

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality