28 Shares
Andrew Gunn
reflects on the first few years of the initiative and assesses how it might help shape the future of European higher education.
The idea of a European University is as old as Europe’s political union itself. A supranational university was first mooted in 1948, and various proposals were discussed amongst the founding members in the early years of the European Community. However, none of these proposals came to fruition, owing to a lack of consensus amongst member states over what form it should take.
These discussions identify what would be an enduring fault line running through the European political project: is it about economics and trade or culture and social solidarity, or both? And where does higher education fit into both of these differing rationales?
29 Shares
Could a new financial crisis, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, lead to Italy’s exit from the eurozone?
Lucio Baccaro, Björn Bremer
Erik Neimanns
present evidence from a new survey experiment on Italian attitudes toward a European bailout and exit from the euro. They find that a majority of voters would opt to stay in the euro if a bailout did not involve conditionality, but that there would be a majority for leaving if a bailout were contingent on austerity policies.
Covid-19 has increased the risk of a new financial crisis in the eurozone. This time the epicentre would most likely be Italy, where public debt, already very high before the pandemic, nearly reached 160% of GDP in 2020, and growth has stagnated for the past 25 years. If financial markets started to have doubts about the sustainability of Italian debt, they would push the interest rate spread up, and force the Italian government to either ask for a European bailout or exit from the eu
24 Shares
Adrien Thomas shows how interorganisational bargaining with companies and employers’ organisations strongly influenced European trade unions’ negotiating positions on the latest reform of the EU Emissions Trading System.
Trade unions have a sizeable presence in the high-emission sectors most impacted by decarbonisation such as manufacturing, extractive industries and power generation. In a recent study, I analysed the engagement of steel trade unions with the latest reform of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), a carbon cap-and-trade scheme that sets binding emissions reduction targets for industrial facilities, power plants and intra-EU flights. Steel producers, which account for four to seven per cent of the EU’s CO2 emissions, have been particularly vocal in arguing that tighter regulations would make them less competitive and lead to increased offshore steel production.
illustrate how transnational alliances help facilitate learning and policy emulation between national political parties.
Research on party competition usually focuses on domestic factors driving party behaviour, such as public opinion, rival parties, and economic conditions. More recently, scholars have started to look beyond the domestic level by examining how foreign factors – such as the world economy – impact on the behaviour of political parties.
As part of this development, scholars now examine whether and how political parties respond to foreign parties. This effort is motivated by anecdotal evidence suggesting that domestic political parties learn from and emulate foreign parties. A few examples include Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ drawing inspiration from Bill Clinton’s ‘New Democrat’ campaign, the Danish Conservatives taking cues from the UK Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher, and more recently, the German party Die Linke adopting policies from the Gr
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