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Legal, compliant and suitable: The ECB‘s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP)
Get PDFThe ECB has announced a 750-billion-euro purchase programme to fight the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But like all ECB programmes in recent years, the new Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) will likely be challenged in court. This policy brief assesses whether the PEPP will likely survive a legal challenge. It argues that the PEPP is compatible with EU law because it meets the three criteria the Court of Justice of the EU has established to check the legality of monetary policy measures: First, the PEPP falls within the ECB’s mandate. Second, it respects the principle of proportionality. And third, it does not violate the prohibition of monetary financing. This assessment even holds if the ECB were to relax some of the constraints in the PEPP like the issuer limit currently applicable to other bond-buying programmes
Sharing the fiscal burden of the crisis - A Pandemic Solidarity Instrument for the EU
Get PDFEU member states must share the burden of the fiscal costs of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Pandemic Solidarity Instrument delivers such burden sharing: The EU would borrow 440 billion euros in the market and would give it as grants to member states for specific spending in areas such as health care, short-time works schemes or stimulus packages; it would also give guarantees to the European Investment Bank to provide liquidity to European companies
How the coronavirus pandemic affects the EU’s geopolitical agenda
Get PDFThe coronavirus pandemic accelerates some of the global trends that fueled the EU’s geopolitical ambition while raising the challenges that come with its enactment. This policy paper reviews the implications for the EU while focusing on three key relationships: China, the US and Africa. It argues that the pandemic represents an opportunity for EU global leadership and shows what that could look like
Herausforderungen für den modernen Staat: Krise oder Umbruch? Symposium aus Anlass des 10-jährigen Jubiläums der Zeitschrift
No full textSymposium aus Anlass des 10-jährigen Jubiläums der Zeitschrift „dms – der moderne staat“ und zu Ehren von Prof. Dr. Bernhard Blank
The Artificial Intelligence of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: An Introductory Overview for Law and Regulation
No full textArtificial intelligence (AI) is a technical term often referring to artifacts used to detect contexts for human actions, or sometimes also for machines able to effect actions in response to detected contexts. Our capacity to build such artifacts has been increasing, and with it the impact they have on our society. This does not alter the fundamental roots or motivations of law, regulation, or diplomacy, which rest on persuading humans to behave in a way that provides sustainable security for humans. It does however alter nearly every other aspect of human social behaviour, including making accountability and responsibility potentially easier to trace. This chapter reviews the nature and implications of AI with particular attention to how they impinge on possible applications to and of law
Politische Polarisierung in den USA - zum Verhältnis der Demokraten und Republikaner
No full textDie politische und gesellschaftliche Polarisierung in den USA tritt immer offener zu Tage. Fakten, Beweise und Argumente verlieren an Bedeutung. Worin liegen die Ursachen? Wie hat diese Entwicklung die beiden großen Parteien verändert
Pre-cooking the European Constitution? The Role of Government Representatives in EU Reform
No full textThis paper sheds light on an unexplored phase and a neglected actor in EU constitutional politics: the preparation of Treaty reform by the Group of Government Representatives. Striving to explain whether and under which conditions constitutional decisions in Europe were de facto taken by officials, the paper proceeds in three steps. First, possible functions of preparation in complex negotiations are conceptualized and two conditions for effective preparation are proposed: a preparatory body's issue and process resources as well as consensual pre-agreement. A second section introduces the role of government representatives in preparing EU reform, checks their collective resources against the criteria developed in section 1 and assesses their preparatory agency as strong. Third, I analyse the effectiveness of preparing for Amsterdam, using the negotiations on free movement and flexibility as plausibility probes. The analysis demonstrates that officials play a key role even in the bastion of high politics that is Treaty reform, where the final European Council is only the 'tip' of a long-term negotiation process
Diffusion or Confusion? Clustered Shocks and the Conditional Diffusion of Democracy
No full textScholars, observing clustering in transitions to democracy, argue that democratization diffuses across borders as citizens in autocracies demand the same reforms they witness in neighboring states. We disagree. This article demonstrates that diffusion plays only a highly conditional role in democratization. We advance and test an alternative two-step theory of clustered democratization: (1) economic and international political shocks, which are clustered spatially and temporally, induce the breakdown of authoritarian regimes; then (2) democratic diffusion, in turn, influences whether a fallen dictatorship will be replaced by a democracy or a new autocracy. Diffusion, despite playing an important role, is insufficient to explain the clustering of transitions. Using data on 125 autocracies from 1875 to 2004, we show that economic crises trigger authoritarian breakdowns, while diffusion influences whether the new regime is democratic or authoritarian
The significance of economy in the Russian bi-lateral treaty process
Get PDFIn his recent article Söderlund (2003) tests structural factors that influence the order in which the Russian regions gained a bi-lateral agreement with the federal centre emphasizing the importance of ethnicity, religion and economy. We replicate his results, and provide an extension where we argue instead that the only significant determinants of the bi-lateral process have been economic issues. Our results are substantiated by an improved methodology that addresses several debatable choices made by the author in the original article