The EU as a Good Global Actor

This paper outlines an exploratory workshop at City Law School, City, University of London funded by HEIF/ ‘EUTIP’ Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) on understanding of the EU as a Good Global Actor.1 The EU has as its mission to be a good global governance actor yet is continuously challenged in the world. As a global actor, the EU is both a weak and strong actor in a divergent range of global governance areas. It is not comparable to study the EU as a global trade actor for example to its efforts in human rights, data, cyber or the environment. EU international relations constitutes arguably a booming field of law where the EU appears often to be a victim of its own success. The range of the subjects and objects of EU law continues to expand and the EU is arguably increasingly a victim of its own success, increasingly taking decisions with impacts on third countries or parties, subjecting more entities to sanctions regimes, being bound to consult more entities and have more third countries, parties and entities such as lobbyists interested in the directions of EU law. The assessment of the EU as a global actor includes broad checks on normative action ex ante and ex post facto- yet it is no less harsh. Ex ante metrics of EU global action include court-centred ones such as an opinion from the CJEU on legality of an international agreement, often precluded in most constitutional systems on account of its conflict with pacta sunt servanda. The contours of the principle of the autonomy of EU law have the capacity to put more stringent parameters on EU institutionalised evolutions as to international engagement. How can we assess the EU as a global actor given these realities? The aim of the event was to explore informally the nexus between trade and security, trade and economics and trade and human rights as a future research agenda with input from a variety of scholars It reflected upon four major themes: 1) The EU’s Contribution to the Democratisation of Global Governance 2) Deeper Trade Agreements and New Normative Foundations 3) The EU as a Global Actor in Trade and Fundamental Rights 4) EU’s Trade in the Era of Global Data Flows

NaChBac: The Long Lost Sodium Channel Ancestor

In excitable cells, the main mediators of sodium conductance across membranes are voltage-gated sodium channels (Na(V)s). Eukaryotic Na(V)s are essential elements in neuronal signaling and muscular contraction and in humans have been causally related to a variety of neurological and cardiovascular channelopathies. They are complex heavily glycosylated intrinsic membrane proteins present in only trace quantities that have proven to be challenging objects of study. However, in recent years, a number of simpler prokaryotic sodium channels have been identified, with NaChBac from Bacillus halodurans being the most well-characterized to date. The availability of a bacterial Na(V) that is amenable to heterologous expression and functional characterization in both bacterial and mammalian systems has provided new opportunities for structure--function studies. This review describes features of NaChBac as an exemplar of this class of bacterial channels, compares prokaryotic and eukaryotic Na(V)s with respect to their structural organization, pharmacological profiling, and functional kinetics, and discusses how voltage-gated ion channels may have evolved to deal with the complex functional demands of higher organisms

Rethinking federalism

This thesis is motivated by uncertainty in the academic literature surrounding the meaning of federalism and the appropriate usage of the concept to describe political systems. In particular, its use in characterising systems of regional integration which have moved beyond a strictly inter-governmental character, but not yet reached Statehood, is today highly contested, as in the case of the European Union. The established consensus that this entity constitutes a wholly novel ‘sui generis’ form, neither federal nor confederal in character, has been tempered in recent years by a growing willingness among scholars to deploy the lens of comparative federalism to analyse the polity. However, the precise relevance of the concept in this new context remains unsettled. Can political science achieve any more definite understanding that removes such doubt? I consider this question through the perspective of the history of ideas, by examining the evolution of federalism from inception to the present day. I argue that the history of the federal idea in the United States reveals that the heart of the problem lies in confusion over the nature of sovereignty. Ever since Philadelphia federalism has been thought to mean ‘a division of sovereignty’. However, the subsequent Civil War did appear to demonstrate that the notion of sovereignty shared between two levels of government was a false construction: either the whole or the parts could be sovereign, but not both simultaneously. This point, it seems - the indivisibility of sovereignty - was not fully taken on board afterwards in the United States and elsewhere. The thesis seeks to put this right and to systematically relate the evolving concept of federalism with the evolving and contested nature of sovereignty. On this ground, I suggest that we clarify the definition of federalism as ‘a division of the powers flowing from sovereignty’. This in turn yields two specific varieties of ‘compound polity’ where before only one was known: the single State and multi-State federal forms. The latter has to date been an unobserved species, which, it would seem, the fact of the EU’s existence now forces us to recognize.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo