European Polity Research Articles

The imperceptible financial (r)evolution of the censo

Like other European polities during the medieval and early modern period, the Crown of Aragon experienced a financial revolution in the 14th century. The censo, a credit instrument recognised as non-usurious by successive popes, was one of the central elements of that revolution. In the following centuries, after the diffusion of this financial mechanism to other Hispanic kingdoms, the revolution became an evolution thanks to the flexibility that censos offered. The hypernymy of the term “censo” permitted to modify the clauses of the contract without losing its licit character and the recognition of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The characterisation of the censo as a revolution and evolution has been hindered by its features of polyonymy and polysemy; they made the (r)evolution imperceptible. Several examples demonstrate that the financial evolution continued until the emergence of modern credit. Due to confusion and ambiguity, deliberated or unintended, the preindustrial and modern credit regimes overlapped. Thus, the sustained evolution of the censosand other similar formulae continued until the early decades of the 19th century.

Livonian Mercenary Warfare and Fiscal Responses to the Military Crisis of 1558–1561

AbstractIvan the Terrible's 1558 invasion of Livonia plunged the eastern Baltic into military crisis. The ensuing conflict has most often been examined in terms of competition between the burgeoning powers that, by 1561, had occupied and partitioned the territories of the Livonian Confederation. The present study instead explores the fiscal and military responses of the Livonians themselves. An institutional approach to the dissolution of Old Livonia is eschewed in favor of one that foregrounds shifting networks of regional power holders endeavoring to defend their interests against a messy backdrop of mercenary warfare, military enterprise, factional rivalry, personal ambition, ad hoc negotiation, and desperate expediency. The Livonian experience reveals much about the struggles of small European polities and regional elites faced with the escalating financial demands of warfare in an age of emerging states.

(Un)faithful Subjects of (Un)faithful Rulers

This article focuses on the role loyalty played in the relationship between rulers and their subjects in the earliest Central European chronicles, written at the beginning of the twelfth century: Gesta principum Polonorum by Gallus Anonymous, Chronica Boemorum by Cosmas of Prague, and the twelfth-century historiographical tradition of Hungarian Royal court, which survived as a part of the fourteenth-century century compilation called The Illuminated Chronicle. In the comparative study of those works article aims to analyze how authors of those works, closely connected to the ruling elites of recently Christianized Central European polities, imagined bonds of loyalty between rulers and their subjects, by analyzing the questions about its unilateral or mutual nature, accompanying responsibilities and consequences of breaking it. Answering those questions reveals common ideological underpinnings of the concepts of loyalty used in Central European narrative sources, which present a vision of loyalty as primarily a reciprocal bond characterized by its negative content. This highlights the ideological message of consensual lordship, which coexists in those narratives next to the strong ideas about divine origins of dynastic authority, constituting important common feature in the political and cultural development of Central Europe as a historical region.

Responding to Socioeconomic Diversity in the European Union (and to Steven Klein’s Essay) with Democracy-Enhancing Conflicts Law

Responding to Socioeconomic Diversity in the European Union (and to Steven Klein’s Essay) with Democracy-Enhancing Conflicts Law

Political justice, political obligation and the European Union: Lessons from Habermas

What principles of political justice ought to apply to the European Union? This question is particularly relevant considering the deepening integration process that resulted from the crises of the past decade. Habermas’s conception of a transnational democracy allows identification of the methodological components of transnational political justice: to unite in a transnational polity, people belonging to different national communities need a common purpose ( finalité), principles governing the distribution of constitutional and legislative power and a common political infrastructure that allows them to form democratic will as free and equal citizens. This article attempts to further expand these points through a public goods approach. European policies generate European public goods. These must be produced and accessed based on a fair cooperation scheme. Identifying these specific fairness conditions allows further clarification on how legislative and constitutional power ought to be distributed within the European polity.

Quo Vadis, Europa? Five Paths, their Plausibility and Impact

The article discusses the plausibility of five different paths of institutional development of the European Union: deepening integration towards a federal state, a differentiated and flexible union, covert integration, a segmented political order and disintegration/dissolution Systematically varying either the preferences of the main actors or the macro conditions, i.e. decision-making rules, and external shocks, it discusses the plausibility of these paths and their overall effects on the European polity.

Brexit and workers' rights

The labour law of the UK and of other Member States is, and will become, more truly European than appears from the formal imprint of EC labour law. It is European rather by reflecting the cumulative experience of national labour laws, filtered through the prism of the EC institutions and refined in the crucible of the developing European polity. The tendency towards convergence of UK labour law with the labour laws of other Member States of the EC is driven in the main by the institutional pressures of EC membership, and, to a lesser extent, is the consequence of the workings of the international economy and, though less significant, a single European labour market. The dynamic of this convergence process is complex and its results are far from complete.

The Research Agenda of POLITSOLID: The Ties that Bind - Experimental Analyses of Political Solidarities in Modern European Democracies

POLITSOLID (ERC funded Consolidator Grant 2021-5) investigates the micro-foundations of political solidarities in fast-changing European polities. It analyses why some ordinary citizens show a high overall willingness to shoulder costs of public redistribution to other people in a polity, while others do not; and why ordinary citizens have multiple levels of willingness to shoulder costs depending on who receives the benefit. Relevance: Having high levels of political solidarities is important for modern democracies to deal with exogenous shocks and long-term structural changes in their societies, which create pressures on the political system. Recent exogenous shocks in Europe that brought the necessity of political solidarities to light were the financial crisis (2007/8) with its extensive transnational bail-out policies across the European Union and the large refugee intake (2015/16). Relevant long-term structural changes are population ageing, rising income inequality and mass immigration. This project answers the overarching research question: What drives political solidarities in modern European democracies? Objectives • To create a novel theoretical and empirical framework that allows simultaneous modelling of multiple political solidarities and that includes the individual as well as the macro levels to enable better predictions about how people behave. • To test causal mechanisms with a range of mostly experimental methods to get a better understanding of causality where observational studies have so far dominated. • To isolate effective levers that political actors can pull to create political solidarities. Data: POLITSOLID collects and analyses new data from (1) lab experiments & online surveys, (2) a simulated artificial state ‘Novaland’ in which volunteers from Austria, Germany & Switzerland act as citizens in an online environment, with experimental treatments applied, (3) an international panel survey in six countries and (4) field experiments in collaboration with real political actors.

The need for Shelter Laugier, Ledoux, and Enlightenment’s shadows

The scope of this text is to think about how the human need for shelter began to appear as a foundational allegory for the discipline of architecture in the early modern age (XVIII - XIX), particularly in Laugier’s “Primitive Hut” of 1753 and Ledoux’s “L’Abri du Pauvre” of 1804.
 At roughly the same periods as these architects were investing the discipline with a new existential calling, new European visions of society, its organization and constraints were exploding the imaginary and concrete limits of the European polity which, at the time, was a planetary polity. Between Rousseau’s social contract, Kant’s Republic, Hegel’s “state,” among many other visions spanning from 1753 to 1804, Europe’s subjects, government and power, and their respective relationships, were structurally changed.
 Assembled in the same picture, these allegories and visions give us many possibilities of reflection about architecture’s new position and role within the political in the modern age. On the other hand, it may help us reflect on what architecture articulates in the outbreak of new social contexts. Heeding Walter Benjamin, we propose to take control of these memories, disparate and synchronic as they might “really have been,” to ask in a moment of danger: why doesn’t architecture shelter today? How can we read that foundational calling today?

The European Trade Union Federations within the European polity: ETUFs and international trade union activity

This article examines the European Trade Union Federations’ (ETUFs) role within the European polity in representing the interests of their affiliates vis-à-vis decision-makers at European level. In order to influence processes at European level, however, ETUFs need to aggregate and coordinate the often heterogeneous interests of their affiliates. This dual focus of the ETUFs’ activities is captured in the article by using the concept of the ‘logic of membership’ and ‘logic of influence’ to investigate how changes in their internal and external environment have affected the ETUFs’ capacity to act within the institutional structures and decision-making processes that constitute the European polity. A key finding of the article is that the European Commission’s renewed focus on strengthening the social dimension in principle opens up new opportunities for ETUFs to increase their influence at European level. The analysis, however, also shows that this is only possible if the ETUFs manage to mobilise the support of their affiliates for joint European strategies. This in turn requires national trade unions to overcome their tendency to retreat to the national level to cope with transnational challenges.

António Manuel Hespanha (1945–2019)

António Manuel Hespanha (1945–2019)

The European Seaborne Empires: From the Thirty Years' War to the Age of Revolutions

The European Seaborne Empires: From the Thirty Years' War to the Age of Revolutions

Institutionalization of Ethnocultural Diversity and the Representation of European Muslims

We seek to explain variation in the descriptive representation of Muslim minorities in national legislatures, relying on an original data set that includes 635 seats filled by Muslim-origin MPs in the lower chambers of national parliaments of twenty-six European polities in three legislative cycles between 2007 and 2018. We argue that the image of a polity as a union of multiple ethnocultural groups, reflected in concrete state policies and institutional arrangements, may be conducive to better descriptive representation of Muslim minorities, who were not originally envisioned as one of the communities constituting the nation. The results of multivariate regression analysis provide support for our hypothesis that the extent to which ethnocultural diversity is recognized and institutionalized helps explain variation in the levels of descriptive representation of European Muslims. We supplement our findings with congruence testing in four brief case studies: Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria.

Sovereign Spaces: Mise‐en‐page and the Politics of English Royal Correspondence in the Sixteenth Century*

AbstractThe layout of inter‐princely correspondence is an important, but overlooked, aspect of how early modern princes communicated and contested their relative status. While recent scholarship on material letters has illuminated social relations within European polities, the ways in which the mise‐en‐page of royal letters can be used to explore the relationships between rulers has been neglected. Focusing primarily on letters written to or by English monarchs of the sixteenth century, this article analyses the space on the page in order to demonstrate the way in which epistolary etiquette expressed hierarchies and could be used to claim status.

The Relationship between “Europeanization” and “Politicization”

The concept of “politicization” has become a keyword to describe the EU since the crises in the 2010s. However, several issues exist among previous studies. Firstly, they tend to omit mentioning the concept of general politicization. One will face great difficulty in illustrating the uniqueness of the politicization of the EU without making a comparison to general politicization. Secondly, due to the current crises and politicization, scholars have emphasized a dysfunctional aspect of the EU. Yet, in order to understand the current situation of the EU, we need to take into account the continuity from the past. Thus, it is crucial to examine the pre-crises period of the EU. In contrast to this academic background, this paper considers another concept of “Europeanization,” which received attention by academia in the early 2000s. This paper seeks to expose the EU in a changing era through a comprehensive analysis of Europeanization in the 2000s and the politicization in the 2010s. This paper argues that the politicization of the EU is characterized by three aspects: multi-levels, linkage, and pluralism. These features are strengthened by Europeanization. Further, this paper demonstrates the limitation of Europeanization of EU citizens. Previous studies suggested that European identity has not declined, and politicization embraces the possibility to strengthen the European polity. Conversely, this paper indicates the importance of the reexamination of the validity of such results. Although the majority of EU citizens recognize that they are European, perception gaps very well exist. Unless there is a reduction in disparity within the economy and education, Europeanization among the citizens will otherwise be constrained and the social divide will maintain. Moreover, according to Eurobarometer, EU citizens lack sufficient knowledge about the EU. Therefore, the progress of debates within the EU are hardly expected under these circumstances. In short, the EU as a polity has changed through Europeanization and politicization in the last two decades. The relationship among various actors has deepened through the process of Europeanization. On the one hand, the EU has been under political dynamics because of the politicization, while this does not mean that the EU has managed to create a connection with EU citizens. On the other hand, the EU is still a depoliticized institution. Therefore, the EU currently holds the aspects of both “the awaken giant” and “the sedated/sleeping giant.”

The Changing Cleavage Politics of Western Europe

How are the contours of Western European politics shifting? To what extent do these shifts reflect changes in the underlying social and economic structure of European polities? In this article, we reflect on insights from the classic literature on how cleavages structure party systems and consider how the emergence and persistence of new parties and new ideological conflicts are leading to both shifts of dividing lines of party competition and the fragmentation of party systems. While increasing attention has been given to the so-called second dimension of European electoral politics, we highlight the relatively limited focus on structural changes that are helping to drive this transformation. We identify some socio-demographic developments that are potentially generating new cleavages in Western European democracies: the expansion of higher education; mass migration and the growing ethnic diversity of electorates; the aging of societies and sharpening of generational divides; and increased geographical segregation of populations between prospering, globalized major cities and declining hinterlands.

Reimagining EUrope through the Governance of Migration

AbstractIn its own narrative, EUrope conceives of itself as a postnational and transborder project, often through tropes of movement and the transgression of borders. In light of this imaginary, recent mass migrations provoked a serious conundrum. How would the EUropean polity reconcile the dominant idea of itself with its desire to erect barriers to cross-border movements from the “Global South”? This article inquires into tensions between, first, Hungary and, second, Italy vis-à-vis the European Commission and other EU member states over the control and regulation of unauthorized migrations in 2015 and 2018. Both examples allude to divergent and conflictual ways of governing migration, often associated with different levels of governance, particularly the supranational and the national, and different values, particularly those of tolerance and intolerance vis-à-vis the “migrant other.” While the illusion of “EUropean” and “un-EUropean” ways of governing migration is meant to be kept intact, not least through a recoding of antimigrant violence, a closer look reveals the deep entanglement of forms of migration governance that has given rise to a thoroughly EUropean border regime. This article points to the need to develop a new conceptual vocabulary in order to capture the EUropeanness of the border.

Succession, power‐sharing and the development of representative institutions in medieval Europe

AbstractHistorians have documented that in medieval Europe, bargaining over the loyalty of lay magnates and high clergy was most intense during successions and that this often forced monarchs to give political concessions. We argue that matters related to succession predict short‐term power‐sharing concessions by rulers but that – because they do not permanently alter the balance of power between ruler and elite – they only trigger lasting changes of political institutions if these changes are in the mutual interest of the ruler and the elite groups. It follows that successions are unlikely to have long‐term effects on representative institutions but that they may consolidate the rules regulating succession (the succession order). Using the natural deaths of monarchs as an instrument for successions, we confirm these claims with a new dataset that includes fine‐grained data on succession and parliament‐like assemblies in 16 European polities between 1000 and 1600. These findings shed new light on the development of representative institutions in medieval Europe, on the changes in succession orders that brought about clear rules about primogeniture and on the political leeway of legislatures in authoritarian regimes more generally.

The Peculiarities of Nations

In the evolving relationship between the European Union and its member states, the evolution of a democratic deficit at the European level has become increasingly manifest and problematic. EU remains a polity in which the nation-state remains the repository of democratic legitimacy, while EU-wide rule-making and decision-making are vested with institutions lacking democratic accountability. At the core of the problem are the persistent peculiarities of European nation-states, in this case, the reluctance of successful nation-states like Sweden and Denmark to concede democratic power and legitimacy to a common European polity. Remembering a conversation with Peter Kemp.

THE NEED FOR SHELTER: LAUGIER, LEDOUX, AND ENLIGHTENMENT’S SHADOWS

The scope of this text is to think about how the human need for shelter began to appear as a foundational allegory for the discipline of architecture in the early modern age (XVIII - XIX), particularly in Laugier’s “Primitive Hut” of 1753 and Ledoux’s “L’Abri du Pauvre” of 1804. At roughly the same periods as these architects were investing the discipline with a new existential calling, new European visions of society, its organization and constraints were exploding the imaginary and concrete limits of the European polity which, at the time, was a planetary polity. Between Rousseau’s social contract, Kant’s Republic, Hegel’s “state,” among many other visions spanning from 1753 to 1804, Europe’s subjects, government and power, and their respective relationships, were structurally changed. Assembled in the same picture, these allegories and visions give us many possibilities of reflection about architecture’s new position and role within the political in the modern age. On the other hand, it may help us reflect on what architecture articulates in the outbreak of new social contexts. Heeding Walter Benjamin, we propose to take control of these memories, disparate and synchronic as they might “really have been,” to ask in a moment of danger: why doesn’t architecture shelter today? How can we read that foundational calling today?