No more ‘Dear Donald’: what we can glean from Theresa May’s Brexit letter

While not exactly warm, the tone of Theresa May’s letter to Donald Tusk triggering Brexit was somewhat more conciliatory than it might have been, writes Daniel Schade. In particular, it did not rule out the continuing jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. But there was a veiled threat in the emphasis on security co-operation – and the UK is still insisting on parallel negotiations, something that the Commission has ruled out

Advanced Conducting Project

Contents include: Part I. The Renaissance Era Weep O Mine Eyes by John Bennet Sicut Cervus by Giovanni Pierluigi da PalestrinaPart II. The Baroque Era Cum Sancto Spiritu (from Gloria ) by Antonio VivaldiPart III. The Classical Era Lacrymosa (from Requiem ) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Lebenslust by Franz SchubertPart IV. The Romantic Era Bogoroditse Devo (from All Night Vespers ) by Sergei Rachmaninoff Trois Chansons by Maurice RavelPart V. The Contemporary Era Daemon Irrepit Callidus by György Orbán Dirait-on (from Les Chansons des Roses ) by Morten Lauridsen Five Hebrew Love Songs by Eric Whitacre Even When He Is Silent by Kim Andre Arnesen

Whither European diplomacy? Long-term trends and the impact of the Lisbon Treaty

The article analyses the evolution of European diplomacy over two decades, to assess the impact of the European External Action Service (EEAS) creation alongside consecutive waves of enlargement. Data is drawn from two original datasets about European Union (EU) member states’ diplomatic representations within the EU and across the globe. It shows that member states have maintained and strengthened their substantial diplomatic footprint across the EU’s territory, expanding it to include new members and making Brussels a diplomatic hub also for non-member countries. In parallel, and despite the establishment of the EEAS, member states have maintained and even increased their networks of diplomatic representations across the globe, alongside more numerous and more politically active EU Delegations (EUDs). At the same time, member states have been reducing their diplomats’ numbers, as the cases of Austria, France, Germany and Italy show. This delicate balancing act has been made possible not only by contemporary technological developments, but also by European cooperation, as in the case of EUDs hosting member states’ representations in non-member countries, a development referred to as co-location. Therefore, whereas the continued presence of national embassies on the ground could be interpreted as detracting from the EEAS, the existence of EUDs contributes also to other, more indirect but certainly novel, forms of diplomatic cooperation under a single European roof

Buying into myths: free movement of people and immigration

The way in which free movement of people has become the central issue of the British government’s renegotiation and referendum campaign on the UK’s relationship with the EU risks obfuscating at least three central issues: why immigrants are coming to the UK; what impact EU migrants are having on the UK; and what can be done to effectively regulate such inflows. It is, however, not just the Eurosceptics and the British government but also ‘in campaigners’ and other EU member states who risk perpetuating a number of widely-held misconceptions about free movement and immigration for political reasons. Buying into such myths risks to undermine attempts to have a more honest and more evidence-based debate about immigration and migrant integration

Emergency brakes on migration: neither novel nor effective

The ’emergency brake’ is not the first time member states have tried to restrict freedom of movement within the EU. Indeed, after the enlargements in 2004 and 2007, most countries – though not Britain – did not give eastern European workers free access to their labour markets. But ultimately, write Eiko Thielemann (left) and Daniel Schade, the only reliable way to deter labour migrants is to ensure the economy is too weak to offer them worthwhile job opportunities

Jobs are good ones: addressing the factors that attract EU migrants to the UK

As one of the founding principles of the EU’s single market, the right to freedom of movement allows EU citizens to travel freely across the 28 Member States and to take up work in a place of their choosing. With very high numbers of EU citizens arriving in the UK in recent years, advocates of a Brexit often argue that this right has led to higher immigration than the UK can readily absorb, and one of the aims of David Cameron’s renegotiation was to curb the incentives for EU migrants to come to Britain. The purpose of the LSE Commission on the Future of Britain in Europe hearing was to discuss the overall costs and benefits of this fundamental principle of the European Union. It took into account a wide range of expert opinions, while considering different policy options in the context of the forthcoming referendum.The chair Eiko Thielemann (left) and Daniel Schade report.

Quo vadis IR: method, methodology and innovation

This introduction to the special conference issue for the 2014 Millennium Conference on Method, Methodology and Innovation aims to provide a background to the conference theme, as well as the articles included in this issue. It hence serves to outline the reasoning for holding a conference on method and methodology in International Relations, it situates the present debate within a broader context, elaborates on why Millennium is a journal that is well suited to host such a debate, and offers an overview over the different contributions made in this issue

The European Union’s Latin America policy: a study of foreign policy change and coordination

This thesis explores the evolution of the European Union’s (EU) Latin America policy through an analysis of factors internal to the EU’s foreign policy decision-making system. Its policy towards the region has changed in important ways over time and appears to have come to be more and more incoherent. Adapting existing Foreign Policy Analysis frameworks to the specific context of the EU’s foreign policy, this thesis seeks to understand how factors of bureaucratic politics shape the EU’s foreign policy towards third actors. It is hypothesized that where an analytical perspective which evaluates the EU’s increased policy incoherence towards Latin America as the result of rational decision-making is not satisfactory, bureaucratic politics need to be considered instead. Under this perspective, the EU’s policy incoherence is influenced by policy inertia arising out of previous commitments, the divergence of views between different internal EU actors, the autonomy of these to take decisions without prior consultation or coordination with others, and lastly the complexity and duration of EU foreign policy decision-making processes themselves. This research framework is then applied empirically by analysing the EU’s negotiations for international agreements with partners in the Latin American region, and particularly those with regional organizations since the 1990s. This thesis finds that despite attempts to strengthen foreign policy coordination and coherence in the EU over time, the coherence of its Latin America policy has indeed been affected by bureaucratic politics arising out of factors such as changes to the internal organization of the European Commission or the disruption of established coordination mechanisms through the Treaty of Lisbon. The findings contribute to our understanding of the evolution of EU-Latin American relations, on-going debates on the study of interregionalism, as well as more generally to the literature on EU foreign policy-making

Impact of multivalent charge presentation on peptide-nanoparticle aggregation

Strategies to achieve controlled nanoparticle aggregation have gained much interest, due to the versatility of such systems and their applications in materials science and medicine. In this article we demonstrate that coiled- coil peptide-induced aggregation based on electrostatic interactions is highly sensitive to the length of the peptide as well as the number of presented charges. The quaternary structure of the peptide was found to play an important role in aggregation kinetics. Furthermore, we show that the presence of peptide fibers leads to well-defined nanoparticle assembly on the surface of these macrostructures

Which service interfaces fit the model web?

Ponència presentada a The Fourth International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems, Applications, and Services, GEOProcessing 2012, celebrat a València del 30 de gener al 4 de febrer de 2012The Model Web has been proposed as a concept for integrating scientific models in an interoperable and collaborative manner. However, four years after the initial idea was formulated, there is still no stable long term solution. Multiple authors propose Web Service based approaches to model publication and chaining, but current implementations are highly case specific and lack flexibility. This paper discusses the Web Service interfaces, which are required for supporting integrated environmental modeling in a sustainable manner. We explore ways to expose environmental models and their components using Web Service interfaces. Our discussions present work in progress for establishing the Web Services technological grounds for simp lifying information publication and exchange within the Model We b. As a main outcome, this contribution identifies challenges in respect to the required geo- processing and relates them to currently available Web Service standards