Vicki L. Birchfield

The impact of constitutional structures and collective and competitive veto points on income inequality in industrialized democracies

This paper presents the first systematic, empirical examination of the impact of constitutional structures on income inequality among eighteen OECD countries. Our pooled time series/cross-sectional panel analysis (n = 18, t = 2) reveals that consensual political institutions are systematically related to lower income inequalities while the reverse is true for majoritarian political institutions. We also make a crucial distinction between ‘collective’ and ‘competitive’ veto points. Our multiple regression results provide strong evidence that collective veto points depress income inequalities while competitive veto points tend to widen the inequality of incomes. Thus, some institutional veto points have constraining effects on policy while others have ‘enabling’ effects.

Constructing opposition in the age of globalization: the potential of ATTAC

This article examines the movement ATTAC and assesses its potential to function as a vital part of the emerging global opposition to neoliberal globalization. We analyze the agenda of the movement and assess its coherence, both in terms of policy evaluations and prescriptions and in terms of the fit of the movements organizational structure with its substantive mission and official aims. To this end, we explain the emergence and stellar rise of the movement, compare the particularly successful nation-wide organizations of ATTAC in France and Germany, and examine the movements transnational activities. We find ATTAC to be coherent in terms of agenda as well as organizational practices and to make a laudable effort to reflect its agenda of democratic empowerment in its political praxis. Acknowledging the enormous challenges faced by transnational civic opposition, we nonetheless conclude optimistically that ATTAC has the potential of serving as a core movement around which such opposition might usefully rally. As a subordinate contribution, our investigation poses the question of how to most usefully conceptualize the nature and role of the movement. We invite scholarly dialogue by locating ATTAC in the context of the study of social movements and transnational civil society and by enriching the theoretical debate on the nature of the emerging global opposition with our empirical observations on one of its main protagonists. Annette Freyberg-Inan is assistant professor at the Political Science Department of the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in the areas of International Relations Theory; International Political Economy and Globalization; European Integration, Democratization and Enlargement; Romanian Politics; Political Psychology; and Methodology. Her most recent publications includeWhat Moves Man: The Realist Theory of International Relations and Its Judgment of Human Nature(New York: SUNY Press, 2004); ‘Organic intellectuals and counter-hegemonic politics in the age of globalisation: the case of ATTAC’, with Vicki Birchfield, in Catherine Eschle and Bice Maiguashca (eds), Critical Theories, World Politics and the ‘Anti-Globalization Movement’(London: Routledge, forthcoming 2005); ‘Transition economies’, in Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey Underhill (eds), Political Economy and the Changing Global Order(Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., forthcoming 2005); Transition, Civil Society, and the Social Sciences in Romania(Stuttgart/Hannover: Ibidem Verlag, forthcoming 2005); ‘World system theory: how the fate of Kosovo reflects the logic and the grip of the world capitalist order’ in Jennifer Sterling-Folker (ed.), Making Sense of IR Theory(Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner, forthcoming 2005); ‘Which way to progress? The impact of international organizations in Romania’, in Ronald Linden (ed.), Norms and Nannies: The Impact of International Organizations on the Central and East European States(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Vicki Birchfield is an assistant professor in the School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include comparative and international political economy and European politics. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitledInstitutions, Values and Income Inequality in Capitalist Democraciesand has published articles in theReview of International Political Economy, European Journal of Political Researchand theReview of International Studies.This article examines the movement ATTAC and assesses its potential to function as a vital part of the emerging global opposition to neoliberal globalization. We analyze the agenda of the movement and assess its coherence, both in terms of policy evaluations and prescriptions and in terms of the fit of the movements organizational structure with its substantive mission and official aims. To this end, we explain the emergence and stellar rise of the movement, compare the particularly successful nation-wide organizations of ATTAC in France and Germany, and examine the movements transnational activities. We find ATTAC to be coherent in terms of agenda as well as organizational practices and to make a laudable effort to reflect its agenda of democratic empowerment in its political praxis. Acknowledging the enormous challenges faced by transnational civic opposition, we nonetheless conclude optimistically that ATTAC has the potential of serving as a core movement around which such opposition might usefully r...

A normative power Europe framework of transnational policy formation

Since introduced by Ian Manners in 2002, ‘normative power Europe’ (NPE), has emerged as one of the most widely debated approaches in European Studies. While critiques persist, NPE continues to be innovatively applied by scholars exploring the role of the European Union as a global actor. This contribution aims to position NPE scholarship away from ‘essentialist’ theoretical debates and towards its use as an analytical apparatus for examining transnational policy formation. Illustrating why NPE may be recast as a policy framework, it offers an exposition of its key concepts and theoretical underpinnings and presents a set of criteria against which it may be empirically assessed. Turning to how NPE operates as a policy framework, a survey and evaluation of NPE scholarship is provided as well as a comparison with other approaches and an overview of the strengths and limitations of the NPE framework for understanding the EUs policy process.

Coercion with kid gloves? The European Union's role in shaping a global regulatory framework for aviation emissions

ABSTRACT The European Union (EU) is widely assumed to be a global environmental leader, especially in addressing climate change, though this reputation suffered greatly when European leaders were sidelined during the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen. Subsequently, however, the EU has made significant progress in extending its Emission Trading System to the aviation sector, one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and did so not only regionally, but also managed to get it onto the global policy agenda. This contribution investigates the EUs role in shaping the 2013 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) resolution committing 191 government signatories to developing a global market-based measure to cap international aviations carbon pollution. While not exactly setting new environmental standards or achieving definitive regulatory success, the case illustrates the agenda-setting capacity of the EU through leveraging its market power and adopting an explicitly extra-territorial rule to induce potential regulatory co-operation.

The EU’s Development Policy: Empirical Evidence of ‘Normative Power Europe?’

In one of his most recent publications, Ian Manners boldly states: ‘The EU has been, is and always will be a normative power in world politics’ (2008b: 45). Acknowledging the critical theoretical precept that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’ (Cox 1981: 128), Manners enjoins scholars to pursue normative approaches to the study of the European Union (EU) in world politics. Interestingly, in this piece examining the normative ethics of the EU, Manners has arguably come the closest yet to positioning Normative Power Europe (NPE) as a theoretically grounded, empirical framework of analysis, and in the spirit of critical and reflective scholarship, it serves as a useful reminder that normative and empirical approaches are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, it is important to recall that his seminal article of 2002 presented an extensive empirical case study to substantiate his claims about the normative power of the EU – namely, the diffusion of norms opposing the death penalty and its resultant abolition in the EU and candidate countries such as Turkey. Nonetheless, much of the commentary and discussion of NPE has centred on its further conceptual and theoretical articulation as well as critiques and contestation of it rather than its empirical validation. Now, with Manners’ proposal of a tripartite method for assessing the EU’s principles, actions and impact, it is arguably the case that NPE is evolving towards a more rigorous analytical framework and perhaps one of the most innovative and holistic research programmes in EU studies. The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate as much by drawing from Manners (2002, 2006c, 2006e, 2008b), Manners and Whitman (2003) and Whitman (2006a) and then deploying these cumulative analytical insights to empirically investigate the concept of NPE as it applies to a relatively understudied area of the EU’s external relations: development policy.

The Role of EU Institutions in Energy Policy Formation

A basic puzzle underlying any effort to understand energy policy formation within a complex transnational decision making arena like the European Union (EU), where both national and supranational level interests are simultaneously represented and preferences continuously negotiated, is why there is any semblance of a common energy policy in the first place. Such an achievement, albeit limited and fragmented in its current state, is quite remarkable given the sheer complexity of the energy sector, the range of import dependencies, and the varying energy mixes among the 27 Member States. Coupled with these challenges is the multiplicity of crosscutting pressures inherent in the EU’s three-pronged policy objectives of energy security, economic competitiveness, and environmental sustainability. As the preceding chapter highlighted, problems emerging from environmental degradation, rapidly diminishing resources, and the increasing reliance on energy imports have necessitated the development of a more integrated approach to energy and climate change and the move to a more sustainable and secure energy supply. Despite the fact that large majorities of European citizens embrace the goals of environmental sustainability and show strong support for EU and domestic efforts to combat climate change, there nonetheless remains a complex array of core and often competing national interests that would seem to bedevil a more comprehensive, transnational approach to energy policy. How have EU level institutions and supranational processes operated thus far to transform such national and intergovernmental barriers to a common energy policy?

Empirical Scene Setting: The Contours of the Crisis and Response

This chapter sets the stage empirically for the other contributions. It begins by establishing the significance of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine for the transatlantic community before describing the chain of events that led to it. The chapter focuses on how the US and the EU have responded to Russia’s aggression, particularly on efforts aimed at halting the conflict in Ukraine, measures intended to support Ukraine and steps to reassure North Atlantic Treaty Organization members bordering Ukraine. It concludes by identifying three analytically pertinent questions that motivate the rest of the volume: Why are the EU’s policies so similar to those of the US? How has EU-US cooperation affected the policies that they have each pursued? How has that cooperation affected the response to the crisis?

Conclusions: Comparison and Triangulation

The concluding chapter synthesizes the core arguments and insights of the contributing authors and draws out their implications for our understanding of the European Union (EU) as a foreign policy actor. It also discusses how these collective findings shed light on the scholarly debates addressing the nature of the EU as a global actor. Having demonstrated the significant analytical leverage that triangulation and explicit comparison yielded in our analyses of the main actors and core issues surrounding the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the chapter concludes with a consideration of the applicability of the triangular diplomacy framework to other cases of conflict and crisis management.

Introducing Triangular Diplomacy

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine represent the greatest security threat to western Europe since the end of the Cold War and a profound challenge to international norms. This volume is explicitly comparative, considering how the European Union and the United States responded to the same crisis. It also employs a ‘360-degree’ perspective, considering how the US and EU each regard the other in its dealings with Russia, and how Russia and Ukraine perceive them. This chapter sets the stage analytically for the other contributions by making the case for studying the EU’s foreign policy from a comparative perspective and setting out the triangular diplomacy framework. It concludes by introducing the other contributions to the volume.

European integration as a peace project

Using the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s justification for awarding the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union (EU) as a foil, this article examines the EU through the prism of being a peace project. It contends that European integration reflects a Wilsonian liberalism approach to building peace, which emphasizes free trade and democracy, but with a distinctly European twist; an additional emphasis on functional integration and institutionalization, as well as a regional focus. It also identifies three themes that run through the contributions to the special section. First, there has been a strong dialectic between the internal and external dimensions of security in the European integration project from the outset. In some ways, these have been reinforcing, but in others, they have been contradictory. Second, the European peace project has passed though successive, if often overlapping, chronological phases. These phases have been defined by different security challenges that called for different policy approaches. Russian aggression and jihadi terrorism characterize the most recent phase. The third theme is that, despite the changes in terms of threats and policies, there has been a remarkable consistency in two reinforcing respects: the persistent tension among the member states about closer integration with respect to the external security, and the tendency of the EU to emphasize institution building and to neglect strategy. The article concludes with a dialogic introduction to the individual contributions.