Wade Jacoby

Inspiration, Coalition, and Substitution: External Influences on Postcommunist Transformations

There has been a recent explosion of interest in the external influences on the political and economic transformations of postcommunist states. This article consolidates several analytical advances in this literature and distills three main functions of external actors, namely, to lengthen the time horizons of postcommunist politicians, to expand the circle of interested reformers, and to deter opponents of reform. The article argues that a focus on external influences is a growth area for good conceptual work only if it addresses the union of foreign and domestic influences, rather than treating them as stylized alternative explanations. The central point is that outside actors should be considered as striving to influence the choices of existing domestic actors with whom they can be seen to form a kind of informal coalition. At bottom, outsiders do best through a combination of strategies: strengthening domestic actors already committed to their approach, winning over new domestic actors to their priorities, and preventing the unconvinced from obstructing reforms.

Tutors and Pupils: International Organizations, Central European Elites, and Western Models

In the past decade, political elites in Central and Eastern Europe have often sought to imitate Western organizational and institutional models, while organizations like the EU and NATO have often acted as “institutional tutors” in the region. Using evidence from Hungary and the Czech Republic, this paper demonstrates why imitating Western structures has been both administratively expedient and useful in building political coalitions. It also stresses that the short-term benefits of doing so are followed by longer-term costs. The paper answers four questions: How have certain models been held up to CEE elites? Why might some such models be targets for elites to imitate? How does such imitation occur? And what results from imitation? Contrary to expectations that institutional modeling would be merely technocratic and used only yearly in the transformation, the papers threefold heuristic of templates, thresholds, and adjustments shows that the process is both politically contentious and sustained.

Europe and the management of globalization

European policy-makers often speak of their efforts to ‘manage globalization’. We argue that the advocacy of managed globalization is more than a rhetorical device and indeed has been a primary driver of major European Union (EU) policies over the past 25 years. We sketch the outlines of the concept of managed globalization, raise broad questions about its extent, and describe five major mechanisms through which it has been pursued: (1) expanding policy scope; (2) exercising regulatory influence; (3) empowering international institutions; (4) enlarging the territorial sphere of EU influence; and (5) redistributing the costs of globalization. These mechanisms are neither entirely novel, nor are they necessarily effective, but they provide the contours of an approach to globalization that is neither ad hoc deregulation nor old-style economic protectionism.

Managing globalization by managing Central and Eastern Europe: the EU's backyard as threat and opportunity

As European voters and politicians increasingly demanded in the 1990s that the European Union (EU) ‘manage’ globalization, managing the new member states of Central and Eastern Europe (CE) emerged as an important precursor. To richer areas like the old EU-15, poor areas next door often appear as both threat and opportunity. Some EU-15 actors – mostly corporations, but also many European liberals – saw in CE a chance for new markets, new workers and new investment opportunities for the core EU-15 economies. They tried to codify new conditions of production and sale that they thought beneficial, but other EU-15 actors worried about competition from CE on capital, labor and product markets. The fearful – mostly EU-15 states and the EU itself but sometimes firms headquartered in the EU-15 – acted to try to minimize these potential threats. I show that, as a broad proposition, actors motivated by the threats seem to have shaped conditions more than those motivated by opportunity. Data from financial flows, trade in goods and services, and labor migration illustrate this central point. I conclude with speculations on how this pattern is affected by the economic downturn after 2008.

Patch-work solidarity: describing and explaining US and European labour internationalism

This paper describes and explains the broad patterns of union internationalism championed by Europe and US labour unions. Descriptively, historical evidence reveals that cross-national organizing and cooperation among US and European unions vary most significantly on three dimensions: (1) despite being modest and taking a back-seat to national priorities, both US and European unions have meaningfully increased their cross-border ties since the 1970s; (2) these unions have prioritized intra-regional ties over developing-country or transatlantic coordination; and (3) US unions are more interested in labour rights policies and basic organizing, including somewhat more attention to developing-country and transatlantic initiatives, while their European counterparts focus on broader welfare policy and collective bargaining in their regional setting. Analytically, the argument is that such patch-work internationalism reflects not only patterns of economic‘globalization’, but also historical-institutional features of domestic and international politics: Since transnationalism is difficult and costly for unions, unions invest scarce resources (organizers, money, political capital) on transnational activities to the degree that national opportunity structures limit policy, bargaining, and organizing benefits,and/orthat one or another international setting promises significant new opportunities for achieving such benefits.

Avoiding Monocultures in the European Union: The Case for the Mutual Recognition of Difference in Conditions of Uncertainty

The European Union is a unique blend of harmonised practice and mutual recognition of different regimes. In this paper, we conclude that arguments for continued diversity are more significant than the existing literature recognises. We build on the Varieties of Capitalism argument for trading on (rather than effacing) comparative institutional advantages, as well as Sabel and Zeitlin’s for the learning potential of ‘directly deliberative polyarchy’. We link these to the emphasis in non-EU focused literature on the lack of robustness implied by one-size fits all. Diversification of gene pool, model or policy regime is essential insurance against unforeseen threats. We also focus on dangers of epistemic closure implied by analytical monocultures in conditions of uncertainty, and on epistemological justifications for disciplined eclecticism in regulation and analysis. The relevance to banking and fiscal union and other policy areas is briefly considered, as are the dangers posed by an emerging German Consensus.

The EU Battle Groups in Sweden and the Czech Republic: What National Defense Reforms Tell Us about European Rapid Reaction Capabilities

Abstract This article fills an important empirical gap concerning a key building block of the EUs Headline Goal 2010, the EU Battlegroups. It asks whether the Battlegroup concept has been robust enough to drive significant changes in two smaller EU member state militaries. We find that it has, though with important qualifications, in the Swedish case, but much less in the Czech case. We stress the importance of linkages between the Battlegroup concept and the prevailing defense reform ideas in each state. We argue that Battlegroup deployment would lead to even greater transformation but that European leaders currently have not faced powerful incentives to deploy the kinds of precise assets the Battlegroups provide. The article also addresses both the fiscal priorities that hamper military readiness and delay deployments and the substantial and enduring gap between word and deed for which EU military efforts have become known.

Immigration and the Transformation of American Unionism

Does immigration hamper union organizing in the United States? The prevailing literature strongly suggests that it does and for two reasons: first, immigrants increase the labor pool and diminish union influence over the labor market. And second, immigrants may be harder to organize than native workers. In this dominant view, unions are well served to restrict immigration and have always done so. But how, then, to explain the fact that American labor has long been deeply divided over the response to immigration? Drawing on new archival research and interviews, this paper uncovers a neglected side of American labor history in which many union leaders have extended solidarity to immigrants and sought to organize them. Moreover, analysis of time series data on immigration and union density corroborates the implicit theory of this alternate account of labor history: immigration has, in fact, no statistically significant effect – either positive or negative – on union density over time. Depending on specific conditions and strategies, unions can and have been successful in organizing during periods of high immigration.

The Imitation-innovation Trade-off Does “Borrowing Dull the Edge of Husbandry”?

This article examines the proposition that there is a trade-off between imitation and innovation when state elites try to “borrow” institutional designs from other polities. After synthesizing theoretical propositions both for and against a trade-off, the article develops evidence from case studies of two periods in which such institutional borrowing was widely practiced: the post-World War II American occupation of Germany and German reunification after 1989. It concludes that imitation sparked innovation in both periods, although for two very different reasons. The article emphasizes the relation of the research findings to theories of institutional creation and change.

Europe and Globalization

Globalization is a source of endless debate in both popular and scholarly literatures. In the case of Europe, the causes and effects of globalization are difficult to isolate from those of the effects of deeper regional integration, often referred to as ‘Europeanization’. Since globalization has occurred in tandem with regional integration, it leads to questions that are specific to the European case. Has the EU subversively acted as a Trojan Horse that helped bring globalization into the heart of Europe, or instead has the EU been Europe’s best defence against its negative effects? Are regional integration and globalization two facets of the same phenomenon? Do they reinforce each other or contradict each other?