The crisis in Greece: the semi-rentier state hypothesis

This article offers an alternative explanation of the ‘Greek crisis’ by using the rentier-state theory. Past explanations referred to domestic pitfalls of the Greek economic development or to external constraints such as the incomplete architecture of the Eurozone. Without rejecting these interpretations, we offer a complementary interpretation underlining the facility and large scale with which external funds have flowed into Greece. This pattern was reminiscent of cases of resource-rich countries of the developing world and have created a semi-rentier state. External resources have spread a ‘rentier mentality’ among state actors and a ‘get-rich-quick mentality’ among business entrepreneurs and interest groups. Political decisions were characterised by riskaverse attitudes, while private actors spent their energy in seeking political protection rather than in initiating new enterprises. Three factors that played a significant role in shaping the Greek crisis and continue to plague Greece are foreign loans, EU funds and tax evasion

A Development Consensus reconciling the Beijing Model and Washington Consensus: Views and Agenda

Reconciling the two dominant development models of the Washington Consensus (WC) and Beijing Model (BM) remains a critical challenge in the literature. The challenge is even more demanding when emerging development paradigms like the Liberal Institutional Pluralism (LIP) and New Structural Economics (NSE) schools have to be integrated. While the latter has recognized both State and market failures but failed to provide a unified theory, the former has left the challenging concern of how institutional diversity matter in the development process. We synthesize perspectives from over 150 recently published papers on development and Sino-African relations in order to present the relevance of both the WC and BM in the long-term and short-run respectively. While the paper provides a unified theory by reconciling the WC and the BM to complement the NSE, it at the same time presents a case for economic rights and political rights as short-run and long-run development priorities respectively. By reconciling the WC with the BM, the study contributes at the same to macroeconomic NSE literature of unifying a development theory and to the LIP literature on institutional preferences with stages of development. Hence, the proposed reconciliation takes into account the structural and institutional realities of nations at difference stages of the process of development

Die Afrikapolitik der USA im Wandel

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

European security governance after the Lisbon Treaty: Neighbours and new actors in a changing security environment

The EU has been making strong inroads into the realm of security over the last few years. This is a remarkable development since security matters used to be the preserve of states. The EU has generally been considered a rather weak security actor. However, it is necessary to remember that any assessment of the EU’s role in international security is always underpinned by a specific understanding of security, although this may often be left implicit. This special issue – and, indeed, the European Security and Supranational Governance Conference and the whole EUSIM project – are based on a broad understanding of security. We consider that security concerns are increasingly triggered by challenges such as terrorism, climate change, mass migration flows and many other ‘non-traditional’ security issues. The articles presented in this special issue all testify to the breadth of the EU security agenda as they all try to capture some aspects of the EU’s fast changing security policies following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 December 2009. There are several common themes stemming from a combined reading of the various articles gathered in this special issue. One of the themes that emerges particularly strongly from the various analyses is the existence of a complex relationship between values and security at the heart of several EU policies, particularly in relation to its neighbourhood. As emphasized by the various contributors to this special issue, it appears that the EU has sought to simultaneously pursue its security objectives and spread its values, such as democracy, rule of law and human rights, by encouraging reforms in its neighbourhood. However, it is increasingly evident that there are tensions, and perhaps even contradictions, between these two objectives. We argue in this introduction that it is only one of the challenges faced by the EU that can be illuminated and better understood by considering another strand of literature with which there has been little engagement in EU studies to date – the literature on human security