With regard to making war, the European Union (EU) is either characterized as being “from Venus” or as having made the transition from “garrison state” to “civilian state.” Drawing on the work from Charles Tilly, this thesis will show that neither characterization provides an accurate depiction of European behavior where the use of coercive force is concerned. To best understand the behavior of the EU it is necessary to conceive of it as a certain kind of state, and to highlight the ways in which peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions serve the same purposes as classical war-making. This thesis will use the examples of interventions in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq as case studies.

States are the traditional focal point of democratic legitimation. In the standard model, the institution of the state is normatively privileged: it is the primary object of democratic legitimation, and the national political community is the primary subject. How, I ask, should the standard, state-centric model of democratic legitimation be transformed in light of the presence of substantive jurisdictional conflict and plural political identity? Substantive jurisdictional conflict describes a challenge to the state’s authority from non-state institutions that represent a territory which overlaps with a part of or extends beyond the state’s territory, make jurisdictional claims that are grounded independently from the state, and do not seek to form states themselves. Plural political identity describes the attachment of individuals to multiple political communities. Under these circumstances, I argue that non-state institutions can be important supplementary objects of democratic legitimation alongside states. The normative rationale for this transformation to the standard model is that adding non-state institutions as additional objects of democratic legitimation will enhance the ability of individuals and political communities to rule themselves. The basic shape of the model I develop is that the strength of competing jurisdictional claims can be assessed by comparing the primary roles of institutions. An account of an institution’s primary role describes its contribution to the production of democratic legitimation on behalf of a particular political community or political communities. The primary role of the state, for example, is to enable a project of democratic constitutionalism on behalf of the national political community. I then develop a criterion to guide state citizenries when considering how to respond to the claims of non-state institutions: they should distribute the jurisdiction necessary for non-state institutions to play their primary roles, subject to the qualification that their state’s primary role of enabling democratic constitutionalism is not negatively impacted. This approach pluralizes the meaning of democratic legitimation away from a strict association with the state towards multiple institutional locations.

This thesis will examine Britain’s role within the European Union through an analysis of the banker bonus cap. British politicians challenged the cap on the grounds that the required fixed ratio between fixed and variable pay would negatively impact the competitiveness and stability of European financial services in the long-run. While Britain’s legal challenge was primarily motivated by concerns about cap’s effects on London specifically, it also correctly predicted the cap’s detrimental consequences. The decision of the European Court of Justice to reject Britain’s challenge despite its legitimacy reflects the gradual marginalization of British interests within the EU’s policymaking process. Since the financial crisis of 2008, Britain’s relationship with the European Union has further deteriorated as the Eurozone struggles to stabilize its currency union. Meanwhile, Euroskepticism has moved from the periphery of Britain’s political arena to the mainstream. The forces driving Britain and Europe apart are particularly apparent in the realm of financial regulation. British politicians display an increasing tendency to challenge the EU’s efforts to regulate financial services within Europe. The central tension which emerges from this dynamic is that, while Euroskepticism may be driving Britain’s politicians away from political integration with the EU, the success of Britain’s financial services sector remains fundamentally dependent on access to the common market. Ultimately, an analysis of Britain’s response to the cap in the larger context of its relationship with Europe demonstrates that Britain’s economic wellbeing relies on Britain’s politicians demonstrating a greater willingness to commit to the political dimension of the EU.

In the midst of the international development agenda, two concepts have recently emerged, transparency and accountability. These concepts represent ideas, which have shaped the current direction in which development has been managed. Recent international agreements and partnerships, including the Paris Declaration for Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action, have mentioned transparency and accountability as principles that may create greater aid effectiveness. In a time of austerity, development aid has come under pressure to create results. Transparency and accountability are concepts that may allow for an efficient use of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA). Large donors of ODA shape the development agenda. Yet, many developed nations face questions from citizens regarding finances. The European Union (EU) has provided an example of integration and coherence within development policies. EU Member States and the EU are large donors of ODA. However, the austerity measures have caused a need to re-examine the way in which development aid is spent. Transparent and accountable policies may create effectiveness and efficiency within the deliverance of ODA. By examining the EU and EU Member States, the relevance of transparency and accountability may be understood. This thesis attempts to divulge the complex relationships between transparency, accountability, co-operation and the EU. Furthermore, primary data has been collected on the levels of transparency and accountability within the EU and EU Member States. The role of co-operation and partnership for these actors provides a greater understanding of the perspectives towards development aid. Transparency and accountability may allow for responsibility and trust to occur within co-operative efforts in implementing development aid. The relevance, purpose, and operationalisation of the concepts are central to this research.

No description available.

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) currently under negotiations between Canada and the European Union is one of the first next generation free trade agreements. In this respect, it seeks to go beyond where other free trade agreements went. CETA will not only reduce tariff barriers but will attempt to tackle issues such as internal barriers to trade, uneasy market access, government procurement. Many scholars have attempted to uncover the special relationship that the policy fields of trade and the environment maintain. As a way to add to this tradition, this study seeks to uncover the dynamics of this relationship when taken in the context of a next generation free trade agreement. Based on interviews with key observers and an analysis of the literature, this thesis suggests that due to the different parties’ current management of environmental protection, CETA could very well be one of the most environmentally friendly free trade agreement to date. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / alenoir@uvic.ca

No description available.

This thesis develops a range of prediction models for the purpose of predicting the acquisition of commercial banks in the European Union using publicly available data. Over the last thirty years, there have been approximately 30 studies that have attempted to identify potential acquisition targets, all of them focusing on non-bank sectors. We consider that prediction models developed specifically for the banking industry are essential due to the unusual structure of banks' financial statements, differences in the environment in which banks operate and other specific characteristics of banks that in general distinguish them from non-financial firms. We focus specifically on the EU banking sector, where M&As activity has been considerable in recent years, yet academic research relating to the EU has been rather limited compared to the case of the US. The methodology for developing prediction models involved identifying past cases of acquired banks and combining these with non-acquired banks in order to evaluate the prediction accuracy of various quantitative classification techniques. In this study, we construct a base sample of commercial banks covering 15 EU countries, and financial variables measuring capital strength, profit and cost efficiency, liquidity, growth, size and market power, with data in both raw and country-adjusted (i.e. raw variables divided by the average of the banking sector for the corresponding country) form. In order to allow for a proper comparative evaluation of classification methods, we select common subsets of the base sample and variables with high discriminatory power, dividing the sample period (1998-2002) into training sub-sample for model development (1998-2000), and holdout sub-sample for model evaluation (2001-2002). Although the results tend to support the findings of studies on non-financial firms, highlighting the difficulties in predicting acquisition targets, the prediction models we develop show classification accuracies generally higher than chance assignment based on prior probabilities. We also consider the use of equal and unequal matched holdout samples for evaluation, and find that overall classification accuracy tends to increase in the unequal matched samples, implying that equal matched samples do not necessarily overstate the prediction ability of models. The main goal of this study has been to compare and evaluate a variety of classification methods including statistical, econometric, machine learning and operational research techniques, as well as integrated techniques combining the predictions of individual classification methods. We found that some methods achieved very high accuracies in classifying non-acquired banks, but at the cost of relatively poor accuracy performance in classifying acquired banks. This suggests a trade-off in achieving high classification accuracy, although some methods (e.g. Discriminant) performed reasonably well in terms of achieving balanced overall classification accuracies of above chance predictions. Integrated prediction models offer the advantage of counterbalancing relatively poor performance of some classification methods with good performance of others, but in doing so could not out-perform all individual classification methods considered. In general, we found that the outcome of which method performed best depended largely on the group classification accuracy considered, as well as to some extent on the choice of the discriminatory variables. Concerning the use of raw or country-adjusted data, we found no clear effect on the prediction ability of the classification methods.

The marketing literature deals inadequately with markets which show characteristics of both consumer and industrial markets. In this work such markets are called hybrid markets. The research attempts to find an appropriate research approach for the short haul business related air travel market, which has hybrid market characteristics. Recent studies of the business travel market (Stephenson and Fox, 1987, Toh and Hu. 1988 and 1990) have investigated corporate and traveller attitude towards frequent flier programmes (see Glossary). However, as yet the airline marketing literature has not investigated the role the purchasing organisation (the employer of the traveller) has to play in a decision to purchase business related air travel. Market segmentation is selected as a suitable tool to investigate the business travel market. However, a review of the literature on segmentation for both consumer and industrial products reveals that an approach suited to the characteristics of this market is not available. Consequently a two stage research approach for hybrid markets is developed. A case study of nine companies in the first stage of the research is used to develop an understanding of corporate involvement in the purchase of business air travel, and identifies three key stakeholder groups in the purchase. They are the traveller, the travel organiser, and the 'organisation'. The second stage of the research collects data on the stakeholders. Traveller data on the importance of product elements in the purchase are used in a benefit segmentation of the market. The attitude data from 827 business travellers is analysed by factor analysis to identify six principal purchase benefits. These six benefits account for 60.6% of the variance in the data. Six factor scores for each respondent are calculated and then investigated by ak means iterative partitioning cluster analysis. A robust three cluster solution is discovered; i. e. three benefit segments are present in the short haul business travel market, based on traveller attitude. Cross-validation tests are carried out to test the stability of this solution. The three segments are investigated to evaluate the influence in the purchase decision of other organisational stakeholders. Differences between segments are found in the travel policy of the employing organisation, class of travel allowed to travellers, and purchase behaviour. The research indicates that for hybrid markets such as business travel, the role of the employing organisation may be important in purchase decisions. Consequently, it is recommended that future reserach should assess corporate involvement in purchases of products that have both consumer and industrial elements. The evaluation of the influences of various stakeholder groups in purchase decisions in hybrid markets may reveal previously overlooked marketing opportunities.

The opening of telecommunications to competition since the beginning of the 1980's has several explanations. Governments have acknowledged that the regulatory preservation of national monopolies had become impossible as well as economically inefficient, notably because of certain technological revolutions. Liberalization of telecommunications must also be seen in the context of a global opening of markets, of which the most obvious manifestation is the creation of the WTO. At the European level, liberalization is the logical consequence of the Treaty of Rome principles and objectives. / Introducing competition to the telecommunication sector proves to be extremely difficult in practice, especially in a context where telecommunication, media an information technologies industries converge. The new regulation must find, through the definition of interconnection conditions between operators and the preservation of universal service, an equilibrium between the conflicting interests of incumbent and new operators, and those of professional and residential customers.