"The Limits of Leadership: Germany and the EMS/Yugoslavian Crises"

Since its 1990 reunification, Germany now more than ever dominated the European Union in terms of population and economic power, making it a prime candidate for leading the European integration project. Yet these resources do not convert directly into political influence. Germany's leadership in the EU is conditioned by political forces at the domestic and the EU level, and the institutional setting of the policy area in question. The exercise of German influence depends on which actors are empowered at different times. This empowerment both enabled and constrained German leadership during two recent episodes, both of which have been cited as reasons to be concerned with the future of Germany's participation in the EU. In both cases Germany was unable to engineer a more effective resolution of a serious difficulty than its power might otherwise indicate. The first incident involves the shift from cooperation to acrimony in the European Monetary System between the compromises of the 1991 Treaty on European Union and the crisis in the EMS from September 1992 to August 1993. Germany asserted effective leadership in bringing about the successful negotiation of the monetary provision of the Treaty, but during the ratification stage the country was unable to avert the EMS crisis by instituting a realignment of exchange rates or a reduction in interest rates. The second case involves the EU's response to the break-up of Yugoslavia. Germany was able to bring about the EU's reluctant recognition of the independent Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991, but after violence escalated in the region the Germans have been unable to intervene in a more substantial way to help resolve the conflict despite the efforts of Kohl and his cabinet. In both of these cases German leadership was transformed depending on the phase of the policy in question, institutional constraints at the domestic and EU levels, and most importantly, on who was acting on the part of Germany. During these events Germany's executive was empowered in the initial phases of policy (primarily Kohl during Maastricht negotiations; Genscher during the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia), but during the crisis phases the country was prevented from acting more decisively thanks to Germany's constitutional provisions, decentralization of power, and the specific EU arrangements for cooperation in monetary and political affairs. The analysis thus highlights the extent to which European integration can proceed only as institutional norms, rules and procedures at the domestic and the EU levels develop in harmony with each other, particularly in policy areas (such as monetary and political cooperation), where mechanisms at the EU level are inadequate or ineffective

Generative deep fields : arbitrarily sized, random synthetic astronomical images through deep learning

© 2019 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a class of artificial neural network that can produce realistic, but artificial, images that resemble those in a training set. In typical GAN architectures these images are small, but a variant known as Spatial-GANs (SGANs) can generate arbitrarily large images, provided training images exhibit some level of periodicity. Deep extragalactic imaging surveys meet this criteria due to the cosmological tenet of isotropy. Here we train an SGAN to generate images resembling the iconic Hubble Space Telescope eXtreme Deep Field (XDF). We show that the properties of 'galaxies' in generated images have a high level of fidelity with galaxies in the real XDF in terms of abundance, morphology, magnitude distributions and colours. As a demonstration we have generated a 7.6-billion pixel 'generative deep field' spanning 1.45 degrees. The technique can be generalised to any appropriate imaging training set, offering a new purely data-driven approach for producing realistic mock surveys and synthetic data at scale, in astrophysics and beyond.Peer reviewe

Implementing the Global Strategy where it matters most : the EU’s credibility deficit and the European neighbourhood

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the European Research Council (grant no. 203613) for supporting the research drawn upon in this article, much of which appears in Michael E. Smith, Europe's Common Security and Defence Policy: Capacity-Building, Experiential Learning, and Institutional Change (Cambridge University Press: forthcoming). I would also like to thank the editor and referees of Contemporary Security Policy for very helpful comments. Disclosure: The author was funded for five years (2008-13) by the European Research Council (grant no. 203613) and is currently funded through a consortium for three years (2015-18) by the Horizon2020 programme of the EU (grant no. 653227). Author biography: Michael E. Smith is Professor of International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. He is a former Fulbright Scholar to the EU, and specializes in international cooperation in security and technology, particularly in the US and Europe. His publications include Europe's Common Security and Defence Policy: Capacity-Building, Experiential Learning, and Institutional Change (Cambridge, forthcoming); International Security: Politics, Policy, Prospects (Palgrave 2010); Governing Europe’s Neighbourhood: Partners or Periphery? (Manchester 2007); and Europe’s Foreign and Security Policy: The Institutionalization of Cooperation (Cambridge 2003). He has also published in the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Common Market Studies, Contemporary Security Policy, the European Journal of International Relations, and the European Foreign Affairs Review (among others), as well as chapters in the State of the European Union, The Institutions of the European Union, International Relations and the European Union, The Institutionalization of Europe, European Integration and Supranational Governance (among others).Peer reviewedPostprin

The New Intergovernmentalism and Experiential Learning in the CSDP

Introduction: This chapter attempts to address these empirical questions by developing a more general theoretical argument regarding the relationship between experiential learning and various methods of European integration. Specifically, I use the expansion of the CSDP to make three general points about the changing nature of intergovernmental cooperation in EU foreign/security policy - or what might be termed the 'new intergovernmentalism'

Transatlantic security relations since the European security strategy : what role for the EU in its pursuit of strategic autonomy?

Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the support of the European Research Council (grant #203613) for funding the research drawn upon in this article. I am also grateful to the editors of this special issue and to the anonymous referees of the Journal of European Integration for their comments on an earlier draft. Finally, I would like to thank the European University Institute for the award of a Robert Schuman Fellowship, which provided a very congenial atmosphere to complete this article.Peer reviewedPostprin

Justice on Appeal—One Way or Many?

After two centuries of our nation\u27s existence, discussions of federalism are certain to sound familiar. The ground of argument has been worked so thoroughly, there is hardly a patch left unturned. Conventional watchwords suggest the competing interests: adaptability to local circumstances contrasted with efficiencies of scale, circumscribed experimentation contrasted with prevention of forum-shopping, local self-government contrasted with the cosmopolitan perspective. The most that can be done now, absent exceptional insight, is to display these choices in a fresh context. What follows is yet another variation on the theme. It concerns the propriety, perhaps the desirability, of diversity among the federal courts of appeals in the procedural means by which they dispose of their caseloads. These internal procedures include, for example, the number of cases calendared for each judge, the extent to which oral argument is granted, nonpublication of opinions, and use of court staff. The problem dealt with here is the extent to which these procedures should be uniform throughout the circuit courts

Learning in European Union peacebuilding : rhetoric and reality

I would like to acknowledge financial support of the European Research Council (grant number 203613) and the EU Horizon2020 programme (grant number 653227) for the financial support of the projects discussed in this paper (EUCONRES and EU-CIVCAP). I am also grateful to the comments of Ana Juncos and Steven Blockmans, as well as to the rest of the EU-CIVCAP research team for producing the deliverables summarized in this paper. Finally, I would like to acknowledge a research fellowship awarded by Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute, where this paper was written as part of a special forum for Global Affairs.Peer reviewedPostprin