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Party system change during crises
No full textDefence date: 18 April 2024Examinig Board: Prof. Hanspeter Kriesi (European University Institute); Prof. Simon Hix (European University Institute); Prof. Evelyne Hübscher (Central European University); Prof. Swen Hutter (Freie Universität Berlin and WZB)This thesis argues that party system change during crises depends primarily on the actions of government and challenger parties. This stands in contrast to established theories of (long-term) party system change, which mostly emphasize structural factors. I find that stability or change depends on two major conditions. First, the parties habitually in government need to be discredited by their inability to solve the crisis at hand. Specifically, government parties disappoint when they implement policies which large parts of the electorate perceive as failing in terms of performance and representation. Second, it needs a challenger party which credibly challenges the mainstream (in message and style) and succeeds in communicating this to the electorate. If both conditions are fulfilled, a challenger party will make massive electoral gains, changing the party system’s degree of fragmentation significantly. Some of the European countries which were especially hard hit by the Great Recession experienced party system change, but some others did not. This puzzle serves to motivate this thesis empirically. It uses in-depth case studies and statistical analysis to explain why Italy, Spain and Greece saw the rise of challenger parties while Portugal and Ireland did not. The first part of the thesis examines the drivers of government party popularity. I track the influence of the economy, protests, policies and events on vote intentions for government parties, both with detailed case studies and statistical time series analysis. I find that popularity is primarily a function of austerity policies, specifically of those which directly curtail people’s disposable income. The second part of the thesis investigates challenger party supply, that is, it explains challenger party success as a function of challenger parties’ characteristics. Using a case study and cross-sectional statistical analysis of 74 challenger parties in five countries, I find that a challenger party must tout a straightforward solution to the crisis, employ anti-establishment rhetoric, and must dispose of a communication channel to contact voters repeatedly and on a large scale.Chapter 8 'Publicize or perish' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as chapter 'Publicize or perish : challenger party success through megaphones and locomotives' (2023) in the 'European journal of political research'
Sowing the seed to reap the harvest of unity : nationalization, fascism, and imperial legacies in authoritarian Latvia (1934-1938)
No full textDefence date: 11 December 2024Examining Board: Prof. Pieter M. Judson (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Lucy Riall (European University Institute, Second Reader); Prof. Robert Gerwarth (University College Dublin); Prof. David Smith (University of Glasgow)The new Republic of Latvia that emerged from the ruins of the Romanov and Hohenzollern dynastic empires faced twofold challenges. Like most states in interwar Europe, Latvia had a heterogeneous ethnoreligious population. Class divisions added an additional layer of internal disparities. The fact that Latvia was a new state with limited resources and its inhabitants had previously been a part of an empire with limited political enfranchisement meant that there was very little in terms of shared civic identity binding this diverse population together. What further amplified the many divisions was the peculiar imperial context in which national and class identities had been constructed during the late imperial period (1860s-1914) and the violence that had accompanied the First World War and the collapse of the empire. Finding a resolution to 7this challenge of forming a coherent citizen body was one of the key political issues facing Latvia’s rulers throughout the interwar period. This dissertation focuses on how various actors in the circles around Kārlis Ulmanis sought solutions to this problem after Ulmanis established an authoritarian regime with a coup d’état in May 1934. The central subject of this dissertation is the ongoing unification project attempted and advanced from above by Ulmanis. This unification project serves as a lens through which to explore how imperial legacies still affected Latvian society in the 1930s and the tensions these legacies created with the assertion that Latvia was a nation-state. This investigation examines four aspects of this unification project: 1) Ulmanis’ unifying ambitions; 2) actual policies aimed at ethnic minorities and the working class; 3) ideological explanations for these unification efforts and the influence of fascism; 4) misalignments between these unifying ambitions coming from above and similar efforts undertaken by actors at lower levels
Reconciliation on the banks of the Danube : the Congress of Carlowitz (1698-1699) and the supracultural diplomatic practices of peace-making at the end of the seventeenth century
No full textDefence date: 15 April 2024Examination Board: Prof. Giancarlo Casale (European University Institute); Prof. Glenda Sluga (European University Institute); Emeritus Prof. Olga Katsiardi-Herring (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens); Associate Prof. Jan Hennings (Central European University)The present thesis explores the inter-polity peace-making norms and practices during the lateseventeenth century through the first comprehensive analysis of the Peace Congress of Carlowitz (1698-1699), which ended the Sixteen Years’ War between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Christian powers, the so-called Holy League. It perceives reconciliation as a process that must pass through various determined phases to achieve completion and as a theatrical play containing specific and particularly choreographed acts. It equally contends that the Carlowitz Congress, the first genuinely multi-religious such diplomatic gathering of the early modern period, reveals the extent to which inter-cultural diplomatic encounters were primarily based on supra-cultural and long-established peace-making procedures and attests that congress diplomacy, far from being the cultural monopoly of a specific geographical area, was quickly supra-culturally appropriated and evolved as a practice across Europe during the second half of the seventeenth century
'Always openly and in public' : the role of judicial punishments in early modern London (c.1630-1720)
No full textDefence date: 05 November 2024Examining Board: Prof. Giorgio Riello (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Ann Thomson (European University Institute); Prof. John Styles (University of Hertfordshire); Prof. Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex)This thesis examines the ‘public’ of judicial punishments in early modern London across a time period in which the capital transformed from a bound ‘towne’ to a metropolis with over half a million people. The efforts to deal with this growing population and the more troublesome members of society often revolved around several ‘public’ punishments in different areas of the capital. Public in the early modern world entailed several facets: the space in which these punishments occurred, the people in these spaces, and the purpose of these punishments to publicise a certain message about order and authority to these people. This thesis explores these facets and their developments across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows that these punishments underwent significant changes: the public execution grew in complexity and interest into a popular event designed for public consumption; book burning transitioned from a private to a public ceremony, and when book burning declined, the pillory developed into a became a punishment that relied heavily on exposing offenders to the public. The great interest in eighteenth-century London, particularly from the 1720s onwards, the ‘modernising age’, has generated a great deal of debate and extensive historiography on the role, purpose, and changing nature of public punishments in the capital and the evolving role of the populace in the process. This thesis, which focuses on the period before 1720, demonstrates that some of the major shifts in judicial policy and attitudes to crime and punishment in this ‘modernising age’ were part of more prolonged phenomena across the early modern period
The embattled sea : the Mediterranean myth in nineteenth-century historical novels
No full textDefence date: 24 October 2024Examining Board: Prof. Lucy Riall (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Pieter M. Judson (European University Institute); Prof. Manuel Borutta (University of Konstanz); Prof. Jerome de Groot (University of Manchester)In The Embattled Sea, Paul Csillag claims that historical novelists promulgated a Mediterranean Myth to support nineteenth-century imperialism in the region. From 1789 to 1914, authors reimagined mythical battles from the Fall of Constantinople (1453) to Lepanto (1571) to legitimize military and colonial expansion in the present. They conceived of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a closed temporal space that allegedly witnessed the emergence of Europe as a global power and a triumph over Ottoman Islam. By availing themselves of literary tropes and mythical figures, such as Byzantine scholars, Moorish princes, orientalized Jewish women, Maltese Knights, and Barbary corsairs, novelists created a pseudo-historical, fictionalized diegesis. This mythological world ought to function as an allegory for the nineteenth century itself. Imperialist authors narrated the Mediterranean Myth to either justify the sovereignty of their respective empires in the basin or to question the rule of others. In the book, the analysis of historical novels written in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish uncovers the imperialist motivation of historical novels which were, beforehand, often comprehended as mere escapism. Singular novels serve as case studies and examples of broader literary trends of the century. The structure of The Embattled Sea includes an analysis of (1) the Constantinopolitan myth during the Greek Revolution, (2) the figure of the Mediterranean Jewess in British imperialism, (3) the story of La Toma during the Spanish War on Tetuan, (4) the myth of Lepanto in Italy during the fin de siècle, (5) the Maltese Order as a contested imperial heritage, and (6) the corsair as an anti-imperial antagonist. The goal of The Embattled Sea is to uncover and better understand the origins of the imperial Mediterranean Myth that still coins popular, as well as academic, history today
After the romance, rails remain : the Cape to Cairo railway as imperial infrastructure in Southern Africa, 1889 - 1967
No full textDefence date: 28 October 2024Examining Board: Prof. Lucy Riall (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Corinna R. Unger (European University Institute); Prof. Pius S. Nyambara (University of Zimbabwe); Prof. Roland Wenzlhuemer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)The Cape to Cairo Railway, so the romance goes, was a grand British project to conquer, capitalise and ‘civilise’ Africa. Cecil Rhodes’ companies constructed railways into what later became Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The connection to Cairo was never completed, but the extant rail tracks remained when the Cape to Cairo romance vanished after the First World War. This thesis aims to deconstruct the romanticisation of the Cape to Cairo Railway with an ‘on the ground’ history of the railways in Bechuanaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia. The thesis seeks to answer the questions ‘For what purposes was the Cape to Cairo Railway used between 1889 and 1967, and what does this tell us about imperial infrastructure and empire? How did users shape, co-create or possibly appropriate the railways?’ To do so, this thesis studies the railway from the construction until the system’s split during the period of decolonisation. Inspired by infrastructure studies, this thesis places use and users at the centre of the story. It identifies four groups of users – owners, operators, workers, customers – and examines what each group did with the railways. Based primarily on sources of the railway companies and the colonial administrations, the dissertation traces the actions of these groups, how they used the railways and what that tells us about their agency. The thesis uncovers that the role of the railways in the colonisation in Southern Africa was predominantly shaped by their imperial owners, but the process was ambivalent and contingent. Other users constantly negotiated and contested the railways in idiosyncratic ways, conforming, evading or sometimes challenging the planned purposes of the owners. The extent to which users were able to influence railway operations was largely racialised and changed over time. Overall, this thesis is a call for caution from romanticising master narratives. Infrastructure does not by pure existence achieve (political) purposes; it is determined by its users
European trans-imperial corporate cooperation in the French colonies : the Eurafrican illusion in Italy and West Germany, 1950-1960
No full textDefence date: 03 June 2024Examining Board: Prof. Federico Romero (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Corinna R. Unger (European University Institute); Prof. Guia Migani (François-Rabelais University); Prof. Veronique Dimier (Free University of Brussels)When the European Economic Community was established, France, Belgium and the Netherlands still held colonial territories. Italy and West-Germany, for their part, had a recent imperial past, as Italy had lost its colonies after the Second World War and Germany its African possessions in 1919 and its European empire in 1945. With the treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, the Overseas territories of the European countries, as the colonies were now defined, were associated to the Common Market. Starting from the concept of Eurafrica, this thesis examines how Italian and West-German governments, politicians and business circles reconfigured, imagined, and conceptualized borders and interconnections between Africa and Europe. It argues that, during the 1950s, Eurafrica emerged also as a project of European corporate cooperation focused in the economic development of the French empire. A recent strand of literature tends to place Africa at the center of early European integration, which would be distinguished by clear colonial roots. For what concerns Italy and West Germany, it contends that after the loss of their own empires, they would have seen in Eurafrica and the Europeanization of colonialism a better way to access and control African natural resources. This thesis explores concrete projects of mineral resource extraction, infrastructural building and industrialization involving Italian and West German corporations in the transforming French empire. Shifting from the realm of political discourse and intellectual thinking about Eurafrica, it argues that, in order to evaluate the relevance of this project, historians need to look at concrete projects of European economic cooperation in the colonies. If the analysis of geopolitical imagination and discourses seems to place Africa at the center of European Integration, the study of these concrete projects reveals the limit, in terms of practical realization, of the Eurafrican vision. Decolonization, different corporate and national interests, economic outlooks, and internal strategies for economic development hindered, in reality, forms of cooperation in the French empire, diminishing the importance of Africa also for the European project. The Eurafrican practices of development analyzed in this thesis, however, laid the ground for future projects carried out by post-colonial states and formed a basis for the current Chinese engagement with the countries in which a European economic cooperation was imagined at the end of the empires
Structural values in judicial reasoning : consensus analysis in constitutional and supranational contexts
No full textDefence date: 29 May 2024Examining Board: Prof. Urška Šadl (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Gráinne de Búrca (European University Institute); Prof. Daniel Halberstam (University of Michigan Law School); Prof. Joxerramon Bengoetxea (University of the Basque Country)Awarded the Mauro Cappelletti Prize for the best comparative law doctoral thesis, 2025This thesis studies consensus analysis as an argumentative practice. That is, the thesis studies how highest courts in divided-power systems give meaning to legal norms of the higher-level legal order through determining whether a consensus exists on the issue amongst legal orders of the constituent units of that polity, that is the states. Consensus as an argumentative practice is used by different courts, ranging from constitutional to international courts and treaty bodies. This thesis takes stock of the different structural contexts in which these courts operate and explores if courts employ consensus analysis in a way which fits the structure of the dividedpower system in which the courts operate. It conducts this inquiry in two parts. In Part I, it constructs the theoretical and analytical framework, as well as provides a justification for its normative outlook that an argumentative practice should fit its broader structural context. It does so based on coherentist and structuralist theories of justification in law, leaning most heavily on the conception of integrity and fit in legal adjudication as explicated by Dworkin. Building on these theoretical starting points, the thesis constructs the analytical model that consists of two Weberian polar ideal types of consensus analysis based on the conception of structure that is implicit in different types of consensus analysis. In Part II, the thesis uses these two ideal types of consensus as analytical yardsticks to critically evaluate the case law of three courts that lie on a spectrum from a constitutionalist court to an internationalist court. It studies the “national consensus doctrine” of the Supreme Court of the United States, the “constitutional traditions common to the Member States” used by the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the “European consensus” doctrine of the European Court of Human Rights.Chapter 3 'Towards a general typology of consensus analysis' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as chapter 'Towards a general typology of consensus analysis : from entrenching divergence to constituting convergence' (2023) in the book 'Accommodating diversity in multilevel constitutional orders : legal mechanisms of divergence and convergence'.Chapter 5 'Supreme Court of the United States - In search of a national consensus' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as chapter 'National consensus and the eighth amendment : is there something to be learned from the United States Supreme Court' (2019) in the book 'Building consensus on European consensus : judicial interpretation of human rights in Europe and beyond'
The integration of biodiversity into EU free trade agreements
No full textDefence date: 26 June 2024Examining Board: Prof. Joanne Scott (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Sergio Puig de la Parra (European University Institute); Prof. Marise Cremona (Emeritus Prof. European University Institute); Prof. Annalisa Savaresi (University of Eastern Finland); Prof. Estelle Brosset (Aix-Marseille Université, External Supervisor)Biodiversity is crucial to life on Earth, including the survival and well-being of humanity. Human beings use and benefit from biodiversity daily. As such, it is not surprising that biodiversity-derived products are amongst the commodities the most actively traded internationally. International trade, however, causes negative impacts on biodiversity both directly and indirectly. This thesis explores some of the many and yet complex connections between international trade and biological diversity. It concentrates on the European Union (EU) and the way in which it deals with these connections in its free trade agreements with non-EU/third countries. By focusing on biodiversity and drawing from legal, ecological, and social science literature as well as trade agreement’s implementation documents, this thesis provides an innovative contribution to the trade and environment nexus debate. The thesis looks into the way in which biodiversity is integrated into EU free trade agreements. To do so, the thesis investigates why and how biodiversity is integrated into EU trade agreements before considering whether this integration is linked to the objective of biodiversity conservation. The thesis provides two complementary points of view. First, the integration is seen from above. A bird’s eye view offers a systematic analysis of this integration by investigating a relatively large number of agreements simultaneously. On the one hand, through a linguistic method, text mining, and, on the other, by creating a biodiversity-based taxonomy of EU trade agreements. Together, the outcomes of both methods show that biodiversity is only shallowly integrated into EU trade agreements. Second, the integration of biodiversity is seen from close. An ant’s eye view provides a doctrinal analysis of the biodiversity-relevant provisions of two case studies: the EU-Central America and EU-Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru free trade agreements. This in-depth analysis indicates that there are reasons to doubt that biodiversity integration, as currently practised, has the potential to contribute to biodiversity conservation meaningfully.Chapter 7 'Mitigating the direct and indirect negative impacts of trade on biodiversity in the trade and sustainable development chapters of free trade agreements between the EU and neotropical countries' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as chapter 'EU imported biodiversity loss : the gaps and overlaps between trade impact and provisions on biodiversity in EU free trade agreements' (2023) in the book 'International economic law : new approaches and issues'
Leviathans of Scandinavia : a Weberian-Foucauldian study of the politics of COVID-19 in Norway and Sweden
No full textDefence date: 12 June 2024Examining Board: Prof. Jeffrey T. Checkel (European University Institute, External Supervisor); Prof. Stefano Guzzini (European University Institute); Prof. Julie Hassing Nielsen (Lund University); Prof. Ole Jacob Sending (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs)The coronavirus pandemic was an exceptional period in recent history. It represented an extraordinary political and social context, where everyday life around the world was suspended. This produces many possibilities for theory-building and theory-testing, on numerous levels and in numerous sub-topics. This thesis exploits the politics of COVID-19 in Norway and Sweden to explore the manner in which the state governed during this time. The objective of my thesis is to study the issue of state power in these two countries. With the diverse activities of various states, the COVID-19 pandemic offers us an excellent empirical context for testing and building theory in general, but it is an especially potent case for exploring questions related to power and the state, as the state micromanages numerous activities with forceful capacities few would have expected the state to hold, especially in liberal democracies. This way, the crisis reveals state capacities in a manner we are unlikely to observe during our everyday lives. However, its diverse capacities and the complex ways which the state’s powers manifested at local contexts during the pandemic invite us to rethink the state. As such, how can the politics of the pandemic best be understood? In this thesis, I offer a Weberian-Foucauldian theoretical lens, as I synthesize between Weberian and Foucauldian scholarship, and especially between the work of Michael Mann and Michel Foucault. I argue that this synthesis opens potentially new pathways to the study of state power. I find that this ‘marriage allows us to explore the state as an actor while taking the macrophysics (or sources) and microphysics (or mechanisms) of power into account, by examining how power works and how it is made to work. These insights are based on years of empirical study, as well as my engagement with the literature on the politics of COVID-19 in general, and specifically in Norway and Sweden. I will make this clearer in chapter 2, as I cover the literature on COVID-19. I will allude to gaps which I seek to cover, of both an empirical and theoretical nature, related to both my cases and to the overall literature. This invites us to the purpose of chapter 3, which is theory-building, as I seek to make the Weberian and Foucauldian approaches compatible, so as to enable an analytical framework which I then operationalize. Chapter 4 covers my methodological steps, equipping us for the analysis. In chapter 5 and 6, I cover the two cases. I shall analyse Norway and Sweden independently, using the Weberian-Foucauldian theory of the state to make sense of the powers of the state (ideological, coercive and infrastructural power), and how these powers manifest at the micro-level in discipline, self-regulation, juridical-sovereignty and control (over access), in order to better understand these two empirical contexts. This way, I discuss how the agency of the state can be enacted through the sources of power, which allows the state to exercise power, manifesting in mechanisms of power. This combines Weberian and Foucauldian insights on how power works, to illustrate the potency of a pyramidical conception of power, combined with an agential understanding of the state, for the purposes of understanding the workings of the state and, more generally, of power. Chapter 7 handles the governmentalities of the two states, seeking to explain and describe the discursive processes which made the states act as they did. Exploring the reasoning of the two states, we can better understand the reasons behind these choices. Thereafter, I shall end the thesis with conclusions about what my two Scandinavian cases, and my studies of them, unveil regarding state power, and the potential utility of this Weberian-Foucauldian analytical framework.Chapter 2 ' The politics of pandemics' and chapter 3 'The question of the state and state power: a Weberian-Foucauldian theory' of the thesis are publisehd as articles 'Biopolitical Leviathan : understanding state power in the era of COVID-19 through the Weberian-Foucauldian theory of the state' (2024) in the journal 'Theoria' and 'Marrying the sources and mechanisms of power? : understanding the quarantine hotel through Michel Foucault and Michael Mann' (2024) in the 'Journal of political power'Chapter 5 'Norwegian Leviathan lives! : exploring the anatomy of the politics of COVID-19 in Norway' of the PhD thesis draws upon two earlier versions published as articles 'Governing humans and ‘things’ : power and rule in Norway during the Covid-19 pandemic' (2021) in the 'Journal of political power' and 'Den norske regjeringens diskursive muliggjøring av koronapolitikken : et Foucauldiansk perspektiv' (2022) in the journal 'Norsk sosiologisk tidsskrift'Chapter 7 'Seeing like two states? : the political reasoning of Hobbesian Norway and Crypto-Hobbesian Sweden' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'From liberalism to biopolitics : investigating the Norwegian government's two responses to Covid-19' (2021) in the journal 'European societies'