Rocky Road to Europe: Disciplining Croatia and Montenegro through the Accession Process

The article explores the Croatian and Montenegrin EU accession path as a two-sided disciplining process established through the negotiations. The “success” of the EU’s civilising mission in the two countries is determined through the feedback/dialogue relationship formed between the EU and the candidate country. I analyse two aspects of the accession negotiations: cooperation with the ICTY and the rule of law institutions. In Croatia, the domestic elites’ determination to ensure the membership paired up with the EU’s civilising mission in the Balkans. In Montenegro, the EU membership has not outright represented the mythical return to Europe, hence initially self-civilising was not high on the list of the priorities. Moreover, Montenegro was the success story of the Balkans and the EU initially did not insist on the institutional development. The paper contributes to the wider EU enlargement literature by specifically emphasizing the cultural studies framework and by emphasizing the importance of the overlooked feedback/dialogue characteristics of the accession process

A multifractal zeta function for cookie cutter sets

Starting with the work of Lapidus and van Frankenhuysen a number of papers have introduced zeta functions as a way of capturing multifractal information. In this paper we propose a new multifractal zeta function and show that under certain conditions the abscissa of convergence yields the Hausdorff multifractal spectrum for a class of measures

The importance of antipersistence for traffic jams

Universal characteristics of road networks and traffic patterns can help to forecast and control traffic congestion. The antipersistence of traffic flow time series has been found for many data sets, but its relevance for congestion has been overseen. Based on empirical data from motorways in Germany, we study how antipersistence of traffic flow time-series impacts the duration of traffic congestion on a wide range of time scales. We find a large number of short lasting traffic jams, which implies a large risk for rear-end collisions.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure

On the "Complexity" of Social Reality. Some Reflections about the Use of Symbolic Data Analysis in the Social Sciences

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