An economic giant, political dwarf and military worm?: introducing the concept of 'transnational power over' in studies of (the EU’s) power

This paper challenges the common depiction of the European Union (EU) as an economic giant, political dwarf and military worm. It argues that this depiction fails to acknowledge the EU’s structural power and the more subtle ways in which the Union exerts power in the international realm. Building on Susan Strange’s theory of the United States (U.S.) as a ‘transnational empire’ and Stephan Keukeleire’s concept of ‘structural foreign policy’, the paper seeks to demonstrate that EU is more powerful than is still commonly thought. To account for the more subtle and indirect manners in which the EU exerts power on the global stage, the paper presents a new conceptual understanding of power, adapted to the present-day realities of globalisation, interdependence and post-Cold War order, notably ‘transnational power over’ (TNPO). Combining insights from Steven Lukes’s work on power with reflections from Susan Strange and other scholars of international political economy (IPE), the concept of TNPO captures the degree to which international actors are institutionally, materially and/or ideationally subordinate to or dependent on a dominant actor, making it difficult for them to resist its initiatives or turn down its offers. The paper concludes by presenting a conceptual framework based on the notion of TNPO. The framework demonstrates how a dominant actor such as the EU can rely on its TNPO to negotiate favourable agreements, which in turn strengthen its TNPO

Lice in the fur of our language? German irrelevance particles between Dutch and English

The present paper compares the distribution of English ‑ever, German immer and/or auch, and Dutch (dan) ook in universal concessive-conditional and nonspecific free relative subordinate clauses (e.g. G. Was auch immer du willst ‘Whatever you want’) and in their elliptically reduced versions (e.g. D. … of wat dan ook ‘… or whatever’). By combining large language-specific corpora such as the DeReKo, SoNaR, and BYU corpora with the smaller multilingual Conver‑ GENTiecorpus, 38,748 instances were obtained while maintaining comparability. Whereas present-day English has only one option in both clausal and elliptical constructions, viz. WH-ever, Dutch and German show more variation: in Dutch, discontinuous W … ook is by far the most frequent option in subordinate clauses, while the complex particle dan ook is largely confined to elliptical constructions. In German subordinate clauses, immer in adjacency to the W-word is the most frequent option, thus corresponding to English WH-ever, but in elliptical constructions auch immer is predominates, thus corresponding to Dutch dan ook

EURO-ECOLE: Assessment of the Bioavailability and Potential Ecological Effects of Copper in European Surface Waters ; subproject 4: Evaluation and improvement of the ecological relevance of laboratory generated toxicity data

This report summarizes the acute and chronic toxicity of copper to algae, Daphnia and a few other freshwater species in standard laboratory test water and a wide range of natural surface waters (collected across Europe), with a wide range of pH, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration and hardness. These data can be used for validation of bioavailability models such as the biotic ligand model (BLM)