The airline industry has undergone an unprecedented crisis in the aftermath of the events of September 11th, 2001 in the United States. At that time, the U.S. federal government rapidly moved to create and implement an important rescue package to ensure the sustainability of the U.S. airlines. Contrarily, the European Commission decided to keep the existing legislations and policies regarding state aid, allowing limited support from the Member States to their national carriers. For the Commission, the U.S. state-involvement in the air industry, as well as similar developments in other countries, was bound to create distortions of competition. This situation led the EU to submit a proposal to the Council and the European Parliament for a Regulation with aims to protect the Community airlines from the unfair pricing practices of state-aided non-Community air carriers. The text, modeled after the legislation applicable in the field of trade of goods, would fill a "legal void" and be a new efficient legislative tool for the Commission. Questions did arise, however, about its political legitimacy as well as its legal basis.

This thesis investigates antifascism and resistance to Nazi occupation in Luxembourg, France, Belgium and Germany. This analysis is done from a transnational perspective. Luxembourg is at the centre of the study, but the adjoining regions of its neighbouring countries which, together with the Grand Duchy, form the ‘Grande Région’, will be analysed in detail as well. Moreover, the post-war years are included in this study to examine the impact of the resistance after the war. While comparative and transnational studies of this subject have been attempted before, this will be the first time Luxembourg has been not only included in such a study but is at the centre of one. Moreover, the inclusion of the pre- and post-war eras will add to the understanding of the continuity of the resistance, which has been depicted as an isolated movement which suddenly occurred in 1940 and disappeared in 1945. The thesis is divided into three major parts. The first part covers the formation of nationhood in Luxembourg, and the transnational connections between the Grand Duchy and its neighbours until 1918. It looks at the importance of antifascism in Luxembourg from 1922 until 1939, by focusing on the Communist Party of Luxembourg, and on Italian immigrant communities. The second part deals with national experiences of occupation in Luxembourg, Belgium and France and with regional commonalities, and focuses on transnational connections within the resistance. The third part of the thesis contains the analysis of the postwar era, and of the resistance’s impact on it. It investigates the political inheritance of the resistance as well as the post-war malaise in the countries in questions, to then zoom in on Luxembourg for a detailed analysis of the depiction of transnational and national resistance in the media in the post-war years.

The enforcement of EC procurement law relies heavily on legal action brought by aggrieved bidders for public contracts before the national courts. National remedies for bidders have been harmonised by two EC directives. The study considers the extent to which a system of bidder remedies is an effective mechanism for enforcing the procurement rules, through text-based research of the public sector procurement remedies and an empirical study in the construction sector, based on interviews with bidders, awarding authorities and procurement lawyers, in two Member States, Greece and the United Kingdom. The findings of the research indicate that remedies are not in principle incapable of assisting enforcement but that the use that is made of them and their capacity to enforce the law depend on their features, in terms, particularly, of legal costs as well as of the likelihood of a case being won at trial. Before this project was undertaken, there was no empirical research work on procurement remedies. It is hoped that this study will interest everyone involved in contracts awards (namely, firms, public bodies and lawyers) as well as scholars of EC law studying the national enforcement of EC rules, either in the area of procurement or in other areas regulated by EC law. It is also hoped that the findings of the studywill be of some use to policy and law makers, at European and national level.

Major differences in British Second World War films produced in wartime 1939-45 (idealising the 'People's War') and post-war versions produced between 1945-65 (promoting the return of elite masculinity) suggest a degree of cultural re-conditioning concerning the memory of war, by Britain's middle-class film-makers attuned to national and international concerns. Therefore, the focus and main aim of this thesis is to identify and examine previously ignored or inadequately scrutinized themes within the post-war genre to explain how, and why, film-makers redefined the Second World War and its myths, tapping deeply into the national psyche, stimulating and satisfying a voracious, continuing, British appetite. In examining the genre, and as established by historians such as John O'Connor, Pierre Sorlin and Jeffrey Richards, this thesis employs contextual analysis, using feature film as a primary historical documentary source. This involves close reading of the films in their historical and political context and the social situation which produced them - backed-up by empirical data, analysing what film-makers were saying at textual and sub-textual levels, and exploring structure, meaning and iconography as conveyed by script, image, acting and direction. The production, content and reception of these films have been evaluated and attention directed towards dialogue and language. In support of this, a wide variety of sources have been scrutinized: articles; fan magazines; novels; biographies; autobiographies; memoirs, film histories and wider historical and political works. The BFI Library and Special Collections Archive have been extensively mined with particular emphasis on press and campaign books and cinema ephemera. Newspapers and journals such as the Times, the New Statesman, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Worker have provided a range of perspectives. A sense of British ownership of this war pervades the genre. Accordingly, this thesis identifies four over-arching themes through which to explore it: the fusion of class, masculinity and national identity; women and femininity; reconciliation with the enemy; and the process of personal and national redemption and regeneration through the war experience. The study's fundamental originality rests in its approach. In offering a "political" (in its widest sense) reading of the films and an untried level of detailed analysis, it presents the genre's first full conceptualisation, challenging criticisms and assumptions that the genre was either a nostalgic replay of the Second World War, a recruitment vehicle or a catharsis. Several key findings have emerged from this thesis: Elite masculinity was used, not to devalue the 'People's War', but as exemplar of national identity, regeneration and British leadership. Recognizable through his metamorphosis from literature's well-loved pre-1914 imperialist hero, the officer hero was now a democratised master of the technology provided by Britain's brilliant, unthreatening scientists. Through them, Britain's unrivalled experience as a world leader was promoted at a time of international tensions and challenges to national supremacy. This study offers the first in-depth analysis of the prisoner-of-war sub-genre, and recognizes film-makers' efforts to ensure that serving homosexuals were also credited with fighting the Second World War. Crucially, far from being airbrushed from the genre, women were very definitely present and active in war films post-1945. Previously unsuspected balances, continuities and cross-overs between the 193945 films and of those of 1945-65 have been identified. Received wisdom that, with Cold War political pragmatism, the genie offered only revisionist depictions of Germany is also challenged. Evidence of film-makers' Janus-faced ambivalence towards German brutality and collective guilt has emerged and, whilst the Italians were redeemed, Japanese barbarism was vehemently expressed. Through its exploration of war's dysfunctional residue, this thesis has shown that combat dysfunction acted as 'heroic reinforcement', yet another way to praise, whilst allowing modest fallibility. Further insights into reactions to war were provided by depictions of malingers, revellers and those redeemed by war. British cinema offered a rare level of social comment with the homecoming legacy, as dysfunction embraced disaffected officers, crime and the failure of the 'New Jerusalem'— although it offered little on failed repatriation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, film-makers also showed that middle-class hegemony, always pragmatic, was elastic enough to offer critiques of officer elite heroics with the decline of deference, and to be more open in its depictions of women. These findings demonstrate that as a collection of primary documents, the genre's films reveal much about contemporaneous issues. Significantly, although its target audience was British youth, it reached global audiences.

Most notions of European identity conceptualise <i>one</i> idea what it means to identify with Europe.  In this thesis, I acknowledge the possibility of variation in meaning of <i>European identities.  </i>My conceptual framework of identity portrays Europe as a collectivity (Malesevic & Haugaard 2002).  To operationalise European identities, I refer to Brubaker & Cooper’s (2000) distinction concerning the empirical use of the notion of ‘identity’.  I develop viable models of the contents and the structures of European identities based on political and cultural perceptions of communality in Europe.  Furthermore, I characterise European identities as utilitarian and/or affective across the European Union.  Based on two surveys (EuroBarometer 57.2 and EuroBarometer 60.1), I present evidence of the different understandings of what people consider their European identities.  With confirmatory factor analysis, I first show that people basically distinguish between political and cultural identities.  Although combinations of both types can be found in most countries, people mention different reasons as to why they identify with Europe.  Using proportional ordered logistic regression models, European identities are described as utilitarian and/or affective.  Again, the results show differences.  Identification with Europe is the outcome of both affective and utilitarian perspectives on Europe.  But the varying degree to which people construct their identities as emotional or utilitarian at the national level highlights the need to consider plural European identities.  Accepting this diversity, a comparison of both analyses shows in which ways the contents and the characters of European identities could be combined across Europe.

No description available.

Thesis (M.Sc.). / Written for the Dept. of Biology. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/05/14). Includes bibliographical references.

Habilitationsschrift--Hamburg. / Summary also in English. Bibliography: p. 140-148.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Political Science Department, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Martin Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.