EU Foreign Policy Identity: A Case Study on the EU’s Engagement of the Islamic Republic of Iran. College of Europe EU Diplomacy Paper 06/2019

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is often referred to as the biggest foreign policy success of the European Union (EU). It ended twelve years of tough negotiations, stabilising one of the most volatile regions of the world. The EU’s engagement with Iran was distinct from that of the United States or even that of its member states as it focused on promoting multilateralism and diplomatic dialogue, making the EU-Iran relationship of utmost importance for both parties involved. This paper seeks to answer the research question to what extent the EU possesses a foreign policy identity that is more than the sum of that of its member states and how it expressed this identity in its engagement with Iran. Exploring EU foreign policy identity is important because it explains what type of actor the EU is in the international system and sheds light on the decision-making process of its external action. The study argues that the EU has indeed an own distinct foreign policy identity which reflects its values such as a unique commitment to diplomatic dialogue and multilateralism as the solution to international problems as well as a guarantee to upholding the rule of law in the international system. Through a qualitative content analysis of the American, British and French press as well as expert interviews with EU officials and member states’ diplomats the existence and importance of a distinct brand of EU foreign policy identity will be demonstrated

Thrift as a Virtue, Historically Criticized

Thrift has been viewed since the blessed Adam Smith as the foundation of economic growth. Economists, the theorists of prudence, wsh it so. But it was not, and is not true. Modern economic growth came from some other source---perhaps the stunning shift 1600-1776 in the rhetoric of economy-talk.thrift; savings; industrial revolution; growth models;

Bourgeois dignity and liberty: Why economics can’t explain the modern world

Two centuries ago the world’s economy stood at the present level of Chad. Two centuries later the world supports more than six-and-half times more people. Starvation worldwide is at an all-time low, and falling. Literacy and life expectancy are at all-time highs, and rising. How did average income in the world move from $3 to$30 a day? Economics mattered in shaping the pattern but to understand it economists must know the history and historians must know the economics. Material, economic forces were not the original and sustaining causes of the modern rise, 1800 to the present. Ethical talk runs the world. Dignity encourages faith. Liberty encourages hope. The claim is that the dignity to stand in one’s place and the liberty to venture made the modern world. An internal ethical change allowed it, beginning in northwestern Europe after 1700. For the first time on a big scale people looked with favor on the market economy, and even on the creative destruction coming from its profitable innovations. The world began to revalue the bourgeois towns. If envy and local interest and keeping the peace between users of old and new technologies are allowed to call the shots, innovation and the modern world is blocked. If bourgeois dignity and liberty are not on the whole embraced by public opinion, the enrichment of the poor doesn’t happen. The older suppliers win. The poor remain unspeakably poor. By 1800 in northwestern Europe, for the first time in economic history, an important part of public opinion came to accept creative accumulation and destruction in the economy. People were willing to change jobs and allow technology to progress. People stopped attributing riches or poverty to politics or witchcraft. The historians of the world that trade created do not acknowledge the largest economic event in world history since the domestication of plants and animals, happening in the middle of their story. Ordinary Europeans got a dignity and liberty that the proud man’s contumely had long been devoted to suppressing. The material economy followed.economics; innovation; industrial revolution; bourgeoisie; modern world

Incentive-Compatible Critical Values

Statistical hypothesis tests are a cornerstone of scientific research. The tests are informative when their size is properly controlled, so the frequency of rejecting true null hypotheses (type I error) stays below a prespecified nominal level. Publication bias exaggerates test sizes, however. Since scientists can typically only publish results that reject the null hypothesis, they have the incentive to continue conducting studies until attaining rejection. Such $p$-hacking takes many forms: from collecting additional data to examining multiple regression specifications, all in the search of statistical significance. The process inflates test sizes above their nominal levels because the critical values used to determine rejection assume that test statistics are constructed from a single study---abstracting from $p$-hacking. This paper addresses the problem by constructing critical values that are compatible with scientists' behavior given their incentives. We assume that researchers conduct studies until finding a test statistic that exceeds the critical value, or until the benefit from conducting an extra study falls below the cost. We then solve for the incentive-compatible critical value (ICCV). When the ICCV is used to determine rejection, readers can be confident that size is controlled at the desired significance level, and that the researcher's response to the incentives delineated by the critical value is accounted for. Since they allow researchers to search for significance among multiple studies, ICCVs are larger than classical critical values. Yet, for a broad range of researcher behaviors and beliefs, ICCVs lie in a fairly narrow range

The Material-Discursive Border & Territorial-Apparatuses (The Eile Project)

Through our trans-disciplinary practice, a place, of their own , and one specific project based at the UK border with the Irish Republic, we discover, occupy and create (alternate) 'field conditions' of various kinds. Our ongoing art and spatial research in The Eile Project draws together different bodies of knowledge, experience and practice; from art, architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and science, to create new imaginaries and cartographies of the border. This is a particularly apposite time for such an endeavour - as the UK's protracted and contentious manoeuvres to leave the EU create renewed tensions and uncertainties at the Irish Border, and borders and their most brutal and basic spatial manifestation of the wall are increasingly being built around the world, physically and in the collective imagination. We firstly establish the borderlands through a particular reading as material-discursive, to pay attention to its construction through spatial, material and embodied processes, as well as through the concrete work of various discourses. We then explore aspects of our spatial art practice as territorial-apparatuses. We will illustrate how this opens up important complex questions about disciplines, knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, territoriality and the potential of the confluence of art and spatial practice

Domestic Reshufflings, Such as Transport and Coal, Do Not Explain the Modern World

Transportation improvements cannot have caused anything close to the factor of 16 in British economic growth. By Harberger’s (and Fogel’s) Law, an industry that is 10% of national product, improving by 50 percent on the 50% of non-natural routes, results in a mere one-time increase of product of 2.5% (= .1 x .5 x .5), when the thing to be explained is an increase of 1500%. Nor is transport rescued by “dynamic” effects, which are undermined by (1.) the small size of the static gain to start them off and (2.) the instable economic models necessary to make them nonlinear dynamic. The same holds for many other suggested causes of the modern world: enclosure, for example, or the division of labor or the Kuznets-Williamson Hypothesis of reallocation from agriculture to industry, country to town. Wider geographical arguments, such as Diamond’s or Sachs’, turn out to be ill-timed to explain what we wish to explain. And “resources,” such as oil or gold, have both the Harberger Problem and the timing problem. Not even coal---the favorite of Wrigley, Pomeranz, Allen, and Harris---can survive the criticism that it was transportable and substitutable. The factor-bias arguments of Allen have the old problem of the Habbakuk Hypothesis, namely, that all factors are scarce. Even if we add up all the static and quasi-dynamic effects of resources, they do not explain Britain’s lead, or Japan’s or Hong Kong’s catching up.British economic growth, transportation, coal, growth hypotheses, industrial revolution