Diss.--Juristische Fakultät--Göttingen--Georg-August-Universität, 1997. / Bibliogr. p. 487-515. Notes bibliogr. Index.

Akademisk avhandling--Filosofie doktorsexamen--Umeå, 1994. / Résumé en anglais.

With the development of cyberspace, mankind’s ability to exchange tremendous amounts of information reached astonishing and praise-worthy levels. Unfortunately, such information also includes digital content infringing a variety of legitimate interests, such as copyright, trademarks, privacy, and reputation. Despite the increased regulatory activity of governments from all over the world, aimed at developing adequate legal frameworks governing the removal of access to such content, there are still significant concerns over the performance of this particular branch of online enforcement policy; concerns such as lack of effectiveness, or the impact of the endorsed solutions on the human rights framework. The following thesis is aimed at responding to those concerns, from the perspective of the European Union’s law. The work’s overarching aim is to devise the most adequate, pan-European legal framework governing the removal of access to online content which infringes copyright, trademarks, privacy or is defamatory in nature. While those four content types differ from one another, this project delivers additional value by discovering such differences (as well as similarities) in the enforcement context, and taking them into account in its analysis and recommendations. The path towards attaining the thesis’ research objective is drawn through the following five chapters. The first chapter begins by gathering and organising the legal provisions which, if broken, can mark a piece of digital content as one infringing copyright, trademarks, privacy or reputation. The said provisions are then applied to a wide array of factual scenarios in which the described types of infringing content appear in cyberspace. It should be noted that the thesis draws in this context primarily on the EU law; where this is not possible, the UK law is relied on. This is justifiable by the project’s focus on the enforcement schemes, not on the definitions of infringing content. The second chapter lays out the vast landscape of enforcement schemes endorsed within the EU for the purpose of removing access to the four chosen types of infringing content, both directly and indirectly. Such schemes are divided on those focused on the infringers themselves, and those focused on the intermediaries whose services are used for facilitating the transfer of infringing content. The chapter can be seen as laying out all the tools from the (regulatory) toolbox before deciding which ones to use - or alterate - for the task at hand. The third chapter is the first of the two key, critically analytical chapters; it seeks to uncover and analyse the main challenges tied to the enforcement schemes’ effectiveness. To this end, it begins by analysing three primary concerns of this kind; the renewal of access to infringing content (on a single platform), movements towards the alternative sources of infringing content, and circumvention of the enforcement schemes’ technological aspects. This is followed by the analysis of the deeper effectiveness-related concerns (which often underlie the primary ones). They include the lack of deterrence, the notion of diminishing returns and the issue of social acceptance of infringing activities. The fourth chapter explores the human rights implications of the enforcement schemes, with attention given to the balance struck within the EU law between the human rights protected by the said schemes, and those impaired by them. This is attained through two subchapters; the first one introduces the human rights involved and defines their scope, while the second discusses the enforcement schemes’ impact on the three most affected human rights – the right to privacy, the freedom of expression and the freedom to conduct a business. The conclusive, fifth chapter builds on its predecessors and proposes a fundamental upheaval of the approach to intermediary liability within the EU law, an upheaval aimed at responding to the concerns identified in chapters three and four and improving the degree of legal certainty within this branch of online enforcement. The chapter contains a corresponding proposal for a major reform of the EU legal framework.

The thesis discusses the trajectory of the Belgian socialist thinker and activist Hendrik de Man (1885-1953) between 1914 and 1936 ca, with particular attention to his endeavours to renew Western European social democracy after the Great War. The first half of the thesis deals with de Man’s theoretical evolution. Having become convinced of the inadequacy of orthodox Marxism as a conceptual framework for the Left while serving as soldier and diplomat during WWI, de Man sought to overcome the split between reformism and revolutionary socialism by developing an ethical conception of socialism outlined in the book Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (1926) and, subsequently, by elaborating planism, a democratic socialist ideology supposedly more in tune with the socio-economic conditions of the 1930s. The second half of the thesis focuses on efforts to put de Man’s ideas into practice. Due to his mounting desire to have impact on the social democratic movement, de Man became increasingly involved in politics and, in late 1933, launched the Belgian Labour Plan with the aim of bolstering the Belgian Labour Party and containing the spread of fascism. Planism won support from many young socialists all across Europe but was also met with suspicion and outright hostility by wide segments of the social democratic establishment, including prominent leaders such as Emile Vandervelde and Léon Blum. Eventually, de Man accepted to compromise on the full implementation of the Labour Plan and sought to accomplish the same goals by serving as Minister, without success. By examining his failure as well as the difficulties experienced by his followers in France and Britain, the thesis highlights the limits that Western European social democratic parties set to their own ideological renewal during the interwar period.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Being a politician has become a profession for many. With the development of the European Parliament (EP) into an influential institution at the European level, building a career in the EP has become an interesting option for politicians. This thesis studies the different career paths of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and explores how these career paths and MEPs’ ambitions have an impact on their participation in the legislative process and thereby the way they represent citizens. This thesis is based on three empirical research papers. The first paper identifies two career paths that MEPs might follow, in addition to the three others which are generally used, and links these to the activities of MEPs in parliament. I find that an MEP’s career path and ambitions are relevant in explaining certain legislative behaviour across member states and party groups. The second paper looks at the career ambitions of MEPs and finds that MEPs’ career paths are also the result of expressed ambitions by politicians themselves, despite their dependence on party leadership and the second-order nature of EP elections. MEPs looking to pursue a career in the EP are more actively involved in the parliament’s activities. This higher level of participation and acquired policy influence is rewarded when MEPs stand for re-election. The third paper looks at the group of MEPs who become lobbyists after their time in parliament. Building on what is known from Washington, this paper finds that being on a powerful committee, from a smaller political group and having a longer tenure make it more likely that an MEP becomes a lobbyist. The findings across the three papers support the idea that the career paths and ambitions of politicians provide an important explanation when trying to understand an MEP’s willingness to invest resources in the EP’s legislative process.

This thesis analyses the British official attitudes and the gradual change of British policy towards Hungary and Hungarian revisionism in the period from the Anschluss in March 1938 to December 1941, when the British government declared war on Hungary. The primary focus of this thesis lies in the impact of Hungary`s territorial claims on British policy towards Hungary and Central Europe and upon the criteria Britain judged the territorial gains of Hungary between 1938 and 1941. This work is the result of the author`s research in British, American and Hungarian archives, along with his reflection on numerous documentary editions, diaries, memoirs and secondary sources. It aims to deepen our knowledge of Anglo-Hungarian relationship, British Central European policy and the British view of regional territorial disputes. At the same time, it is keen to dispel the myths and stereotypes of the British and Hungarian historiography, which have so far viewed Hungary as an unimportant factor in British Central European strategy.

When choosing and applying the award criteria in the context of public procurement procedures, contracting authorities exercise their discretionary powers with a view to selecting the most economically advantageous tender. The importance of the use that contracting authorities make of their margin of discretion is directly related to the result of any public procurement procedure: the level of satisfaction of the contracting authorities’ needs provided by the works/supply/service contract concluded with the winning tenderer. Despite the tendency for public procurement regulation to focus on procedural rules (‘how to buy’), rather than the actual outcome of the procurement activity itself (‘what to buy’), there are substantive requirements derived from legislative sources, as well as soft law and jurisprudence, that somehow structure the contracting authorities’ decision making freedom. Although there is no standard unit that allows for the measurement of contracting authorities’ margin of discretion and its variation, this thesis aims to identify factors which contribute either to increase or to reduce the said margin. In other words, it is proposed to highlight the elements which determine the expansion or the limitation of the referred discretionary powers. The thesis concludes that despite the different national regulatory approaches to this topic under the common EU legal framework, the practice in the Member States covered by this thesis seems to indicate that contracting authorities exercise their discretionary powers in a (unknowingly) similar way.

No description available.

‘Entirely oblivious to the events unfolding on the “other shore,” Europe tolerated that the Mediterranean, her sea, would turn into a graveyard,’ (Cacciari 2016: viii) These words from the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari’s 2016 study on Europe and Empire indicate to us how Europe today still suffers from a “historical emphysema.” This thesis addresses the question of how these pulmonary difficulties of Europe are related to the process of a history in which the name of Europe comes to be related to and even identified with what is called “spirit.” As is well known, Europe has been conceived as ‘no more than a geographical accident, the peninsula that Asia shoves into the Atlantic’ (Sartre 1988: 292). However, the thesis argues that another definition of Europe, even if intimately bound up with its geography, comes to the fore as the spirit of Europe. In order to bring to light the “spiritual geography” of Europe, I focus primarily on two strands of the twentieth century philosophical inquiry into the notion of “Europe;” one by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the other by the French poet and thinker Paul Valéry. The argument is that what these two thinkers achieve in their thought testifies to the history of an ambiguous relation between Europe and spirit. For both thinkers Europe appears as such only as it is shaped and reshaped by this spiritual relation, one which Europe today retains in its absence, that is, in its spiritlessness.