Influencing the International Transport Regime Complex: The EU's Climate Action in ICAO and IMO

Regime complexes entail a variety of institutions with a degree of overlap in terms of thematic issues and participating actors. The EU is such an actor engaging with other governmental and non-governmental entities in the formation and evolution of regime complexes. In this article, we examine the role of the EU in the international transport regime complex, and more specifically in two of its core international organizations, namely ICAO and IMO. Our actor-based approach focuses on how the EU navigates between these two constitutive components of the global transport regime complex, advancing climate change mitigation measures. Our empirical material shows how the EU’s active engagement in ICAO contributed to the organization’s shift vis-à-vis the role of the aviation industry in greenhouse gas emissions. Besides the EU learning process that occurred and led to a more engaging and less conflictual EU approach in IMO, the ICAO achievement increased pressure and created a more conducive environment for the respective recognition of the maritime industry’s share in climate deterioration. In this respect, the EU benefited from the structure of the transport regime complex to pursue its own preferences

What the Conference on the Future of Europe can learn from the failure of the EU constitution

The EU’s Conference on the Future of Europe is now underway, with conclusions expected to be reached by spring 2022. Spyros Blavoukos and Alexandros Kyriakidis assess what lessons the conference can learn from the Convention on the Future of Europe, which was launched in 2001 with the aim of drafting a European constitution

Assessing the Reliability and Validity of Expert Interviews

Testing the reliability of experts should be a key element of expert interviews. Using the Condorcet Jury Theorem, it is shown that expert reliability can provide an indication of the validity of expert-opinion data. The theoretical framework is applied to expert-interview data collected in the Domestic Structures and European Integration (DOSEI) project. Special attention is paid to the role of ‘leading’ experts and salient issues. Evaluating the DOSEI data, the main findings are that (i) with some exceptions, there are acceptable levels of inter-expert agreement, (ii) whether the leading expert is included or not does not make a large difference to expert agreement, and (iii) experts are more in agreement on salient issues

Pathways from the European Periphery : lessons from the political economy of development

The European economic crisis need not be considered as a problem that is sui generis. Drawing on literature from the political economy of development that centers on finance and monetary policy, we show that the economic vulnerabilities and policy predicaments facing the European periphery share many similarities with problems encountered by middle-income developing countries. Three main concerns guide our discussion: the politics of credible commitment, the significance of state capacity for stabilizing credibility, and the challenges of maintaining democratic legitimacy during times of financial volatility. Our analysis of the dynamics of hard currency pegs and monetary unions draws on lessons from the classic Gold Standard and on more recent experiences of financial crises in emerging markets. We consider how these may apply to the Eurozone periphery, before drawing out some implications for the problems of core–periphery relationships in European Monetary Union

Changing foreign policy: the Obama Administration’s decision to oust Mubarak

This paper analyses the decision of the Obama administration to redirect its foreign policy towards Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring. It attempts to highlight the issue of how governments deal with decision-making at times of crisis, and under which circumstances they take critical decisions that lead to major shifts in their foreign policy track record. It focuses on the process that led to a reassessment of US (United States) foreign policy, shifting from decades of support to the autocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak, towards backing his ouster. Specifically, the paper attempts to assess to what extent the decision to withdraw US support from a longstanding state-leader and ally in the Middle East can be seen as a foreign policy change (FPC). A relevant research question this paper pursues is: how can the withdrawal of US support to a regime considered as an ally be considered, in itself, as a radical FPC

Transplanting Anglo-American accounting oversight boards to a diverse institutional context

The introduction of accounting and auditing oversight boards (OBs) has been promoted on a global scale as a key component of the international financial architecture that has emerged over the past two decades. Such institutions, modeled on the Anglo-American tradition, are domestically organized and embedded within distinctively diverse institutional contexts. Their role is to ease agency problems, improve the quality of financial reporting, and help provide stability in the global financial system. We employ an institutional approach, located within the broader political economy framework of global capitalism, to examine the establishment and operation of the new regulatory regime in Greece. Greece, a member of the European Union, exhibits characteristics of a "delegative" democracy, i.e. a traditionally weak institutionalization, reform (in)capacity problems and a clientelistic political system. Our case study shows that the formation and operation of the newly-established system of oversight is conditioned by local political and economic constraints and, thus, does not automatically translate into concrete benefits for the quality of financial reporting. We also draw attention to the structural mismatch between a progressing globalized financial integration and the fragmented nature of the system of oversight, and illustrate that OBs' independence from local governments is an important but neglected issue

Socio-Economic Pressure Groups in Greece and Enlargement: the Case of the Confederation of Greek Industrialists (SEV)

[From the Introduction]. The paper has a two-tier structure. The starting point is the presentation of the overall economic environment in the 1990s and the examination of the economic implications of enlargement for Greece. This qualitative cost-benefit analysis is restricted to the impact of the opening up of the Eastern markets on the Greek production base without considering any potential financial losses from the support framework of the EU. The underlying assumption, which is based on the literature of economic internationalisation and liberalisation, is that changes in the economic terms of interaction at the international level will trigger shifts in the prosperity of specific economic groups and will prescribe the position of these groups to the international agreements responsible for these changes (Milner and Keohane, 1996). Hence, it is imperative to examine the economic impact of enlargement on the different Greek productive forces in order to be able to articulate hypotheses about the expected reactions of the main population groups mainly affected by the prospects of enlargement. This analysis is based on secondary academic sources about the economic impact of enlargement on Greece juxtaposed to the official position of SEV. The second tier of analysis is the actual capacity of any of these socio-economic groups, in particular SEV, to have a significant contribution to the enlargement policy-making. In other words, the extent and mode of participation of pressure groups in the Greek policy-making in general and more specifically in enlargement needs to be examined