Texte remanié de: Ph.D. thesis, 1992. / Notes bibliogr. Index.

Texte remanié de: PhD thesis. / Bibliogr. p. 331-354. Index.

Zugl.: Münster (Westfalen), Univ., Diss., 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Conventional wisdom holds that ethnic nationalism is incompatible with politics of compromise and reconciliation in conflict-ridden societies. This dissertation provides empirical evidence to the contrary by examining the revision of Greek unionist nationalism in Cyprus, under the transformative leadership of former Cypriot president Glafkos Clerides. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the development of various manifestations of nationalism in the Greek Cypriot community, highlighting particularly the limitations hindering the development of a civic form of nationalism in the island. The second part of the dissertation focuses on Clerides’ liberal brand of ethnic nationalism and argues that the former Cypriot leader provides an insightful example of how liberal nationalism can be combined with policies of compromise and peace building, informing relevant literature, which has provided considerable theoretical insight but lacks sufficient empirical evidence. Based on the work of Yack (2012) and others (Beissinger 2008; Kymlicka 1996), this dissertation argues that while several myths and certain significant limitations hindered the development of Cypriotism, Clerides’ liberal brand of ethnic nationalism was able to facilitate reconciliation and accommodate federalism in Cyprus. To support this argument, the dissertation relies on the hitherto unpublished archive of Democratic Rally and personal interviews with Clerides and several of his associates and critics. Specifically, it demonstrates how Clerides’ transformative leadership led to the revision of Greek unionist nationalism in the post-1974 era. Coming to terms with the intransigent ethnic ‘unionist’ legacy of the Right, historically associated with the goal of union with Greece, Clerides led the way to the revision of Greek nationalism and was the first to endorse federalism in the Greek Cypriot community. Yet Clerides’ political transformation did not aim at abandoning nationalist sentiments and symbols. His perception of a federal state as a multinational entity, allowed him not to undermine the two national communities of the island in its effort to promote a single Cypriot polity. In this context, the linkage of a federal solution with the accession of Cyprus to a federal Europe became a key component of his policy for the solution of the Cyprus problem. In view of current negotiations, the political legacy of Clerides can be informative for stakeholders, both inside and outside the island.

This thesis examines the European Union’s Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the field of cultural policy. The OMC, a method of intergovernmental policy coordination that is centrally coordinated by the European Commission, was introduced in the cultural field in 2008. Using a case study of Policy Priority A in the 2011-2014 Work Plan for Culture, this thesis examines how the OMC operates as well as what outcomes it produces. It does so using a sociological institutionalism theoretical framework, supplemented with insights from the literatures on multi-level governance and policy learning. It uses a combination of research methods including document analysis, interviews with key actors, and participant observation, ultimately leading to new insights into the processes and practices of EU policy coordination. Findings on the processes of coordination reveal insights into the EU’s inter-institutional dynamics and demonstrate that the European Commission is a key player in the culture OMC. They also indicate considerable heterogeneity in how Member States ‘approach’ participation in the OMC and indicate that ultimately there is a weak connection between the OMC and national-level politics. Findings also show that the outcomes of coordination are multifaceted; while few examples of direct political and programmatic change were found, there is a complex set of other outcomes, including increased vertical coordination, socialisation and networking, and heuristic learning and concept usage. The thesis’ findings make contributions to several multi-disciplinary areas of academic research. They add most directly to the literatures on EU cultural policy, specifically on the processes and outcomes of policy coordination in the field, and contribute a new sectoral case study to the existing literature on the Open Method of Coordination as well. They also make broader contributions to the study of cultural policy (in particular cultural policy approached from a political science/public policy perspective), policy learning, and European governance and integration.

The thesis has two overarching objectives. One is to understand monetary policy in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia during 1990s and early 2000s; the other to use these findings to shed light on monetary policy in less developed, but highly open and financially integrated market economies. In order to achieve its aims, it analyses specific factors with significant influence on the conduct or outcomes of monetary policy in these countries; it analyses the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in Central Europe, based on a technique called vector autoregression; and examines use of principal types of constraints on policy discretion, such as central bank independence, exchange rate commitments and domestic targets for monetary policy, in countries of the sample. The thesis finds that strong internal and external pressures, together with frequent bouts of fiscal irresponsibility and sizeable additive and parametric uncertainty regarding the working of the economy, led, in all four countries, to pronounced macroeconomic vulnerability and a need for periodic adjustment to dangerous fiscal and external imbalances. Reaction of policy-makers in countries of the sample to this environment can be characterized as discretion constrained by a strong nominal anchor and real exchange rate considerations. Experience of Central European countries shows that various elements of a commitment by monetary authorities are not duplicatory or contradictory, but interdependent in contributing to the goal of constraining discretion. During the period studied, the two key overall developments in policy were the gradual shift of emphasis from exchange rate targets to domestic targets and (within domestic targets) a shift from monetary targets to inflation targets. This approach has been largely successful.

The European Union has long been argued to suffer from a deficit of democratic legitimacy. One recent innovation introduced with the intention of addressing this deficit is the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), a means by which 1 million EU citizens can ask the European Commission to propose new legislation. In 2015, three years following its introduction, opinions on the performance of the ECI amongst EU politicians, journalists and campaigners are tinged with disappointment and disaffection. This thesis asks to what extent the sceptics are warranted in their frustrations towards the ECI or whether it is able to live up to the high expectations of the EU institutions at the time of its introduction. By drawing analytic criteria directly from the theory of democratic legitimacy and applying them in a systemic manner, I address how the ECI can, in principle, and has thus far, in practice, affected the EU in terms of inclusion in policy making, impacts on policy outcomes, and the pursuit of normatively justifiable and salient issues. Using case studies of the first four ECI campaigns registered by the Commission, I argue that the ECI has the potential to contribute to the inclusion of EU policy making through the activation and formation of multiple, issue-specific demoi in the EU, which can form the basis of democratic legitimacy. I also find the ECI capable of producing tangible impacts on EU, national and local policy, though mostly in ways unintended by the Regulation underpinning the instrument. Effects on inclusion and impacts are, furthermore, affected by the salience of the issues the ECI is used to pursue, and the normative justifiability of the issue in terms of how it upholds the political equality of the people can directly enhance the EU’s democratic legitimacy. Given these findings, it is concluded that the ECI, despite the current disappointment of many commentators, has scope for unanticipated positive, though limited, impact on the EU’s democratic legitimacy.

Since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/8 national-level contextual factors matter in different ways for individuals in EU member states when assessing support for the EU. Individuals hypothesise that EU member states economic affluence and quality of governance creates the salience of issues. This influences the criteria adopted by them when determining attitudinal factors towards the EU. When applied to individuals in less affluent EU member states individuals evaluate the EU on the basis of economic prospects, while in more affluent EU member states individuals rely on political criteria to evaluate the EU. In the least affluent EU member states individuals generalise their perceptions of national and personal economic conditions to the EU level believing that the EU does not represent their economic interests. In the most affluent EU member states individuals are equally critical of the EU but centre their judgements on the comparative quality of national governments and EU institutions. For individuals the assumption remains that further EU expansion implies continued market liberalisation. However since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis what individuals regard as excessive inequality may have little to do with inequality per se but whether the liberal-market economy as a whole provides high living standards and dynamic economic development. Inequality as a macro-political and economic determinant bridges the gap between economic and political systems at the national and EU level. Using data from European Election Study (EES) 2009 and Standard Eurobarometer data from 2009-2013 this inquiry examines individual-level effects on perceptions of inequality and how this plays a significant role when analysing mass public opinion support for the EU. By using a Binary Logit Regression model, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Multiple Regression analysis and Hierarchical Linear Modelling (HLM) the analysis demonstrates two predominant findings. Firstly, individuals believe that the EU has a positive role to play in addressing inequality since the onset of the economic crisis. Secondly, the role to be played by the EU in addressing inequality supersedes that of the EU member states’ governments and reinforces support for the European integration project. Overall, this demonstrates that individuals in the EU believe that the EU is best placed to address market-generated inequality since the onset of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/8 and as a result this produces increased support for the EU. These findings demonstrate a strong case for the inclusion of inequality as a determinant of mass public opinion support for the EU since the economic and financial crisis began in 2007/8.

This thesis addresses the complicated relationship between sovereign debt and the realisation of economic and social rights (ESR) and applicable international human rights law (IHRL). The central research questions to be addressed by this work include the following: How can sovereign debt threaten the realisation of ESR? What guidance does IHRL provide in relation to the sovereign debt issue? Why have human rights and IHRL been so irrelevant in the design and implementation of responses to the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, as the Greek case has dramatically revealed? This thesis advances two main arguments. Firstly, the ‘marketisation’ of sovereign financing can be problematic for the realisation of ESR for reasons that go beyond the negative social impacts of austerity or other fiscal consolidation measures. Secondly, this thesis will argue that IHRL has been ineffective in preventing or mitigating the negative ESR impacts of responses to the crisis, not only because of the normative shortcomings of the existing legal framework, but also, and more fundamentally, because of the hegemony of neoliberal morality and its influence upon international law. The ascendancy of neoliberal assumptions, also in legal and human rights reasoning—which, as I will argue, appears to have been confirmed and reinforced rather than reversed, by some of the legal developments that have occurred since the crisis—limits the possibility of international law to constitute an instrument for the affirmation and protection of ESR. This thesis has two main theoretical objectives. Firstly, to provide a more holistic picture of the relationship between sovereign debt (and sovereign financing more generally) and ESR, that is not limited to the ESR impacts of austerity. Secondly, to review and critically analyse the existing international law on ESR—particularly relating to the use of State resources—and on sovereign debt and ESR, in order to assess its current status and post-crisis developments, explore the possible reasons of its irrelevance in the context of the Eurozone debt crisis, and speculate on its future directions.

The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) remains one of the most obscure and elusive government agencies. Despite its rich and often tangled past, the SIS withstood various challenges in the twentieth century to become a vital instrument in Britain’s foreign policy, offering both traditional intelligence gathering, and a covert action capability. Despite recent revelations about its Cold War history, knowledge about this organisation is uneven at best, and this is particularly so in Asia. Despite Britain’s imperial history, which anchored informal intelligence gathering networks on a global scale, SIS’s presence in Asia is largely undiscovered. This thesis asks why this lacuna exists in SIS’s history; what was SIS activity in this region during the Cold War? Moreover, what was the value of this activity? Utilising a primarily archival methodology, this thesis sheds light on British intelligence activity in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Hanoi in the late 1960s. The strategic aims are twofold. Firstly, it explores the kinds of intelligence gathered, and the difficulties encountered from operating within the heart of a secure communist state in order to gauge an ‘enemy society’. In doing so, it challenges conventional definitions of intelligence, pointing to the notion of a dual identity diplomat-intelligence officer, that provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within denied areas. In this way, it opens a window into a new dimension of SIS history, and, by extension, GCHQ, both of whom operated from the grey space between diplomacy and intelligence. Secondly, it examines this intelligence through the broader framework of the Anglo-American Special Relationship, given that these three case study countries were areas where the SIS operated, but where the CIA encountered real hindrances due to a lack of diplomatic premises. By tracing the path of British intelligence material, and analysing its reception by its American audience, it ultimately assesses the value of such intelligence. It argues that the granular detail afforded, and the insight on broader strategic relationships it provided, inverted the Special Relationship, rendering Britain a valued partner when it came to intelligence collection in this region and off-setting imbalances elsewhere.