Professor Pepper D. Culpepper recently accepted a job in Oxford at the Blavatnik School of Government. This means he will leave the European University Institute, where he has been teaching since 2010. A group of his current and former PhD students decided to organize half-day event to celebrate Professor Culpepper’s time at the EUI. As part of that celebration, I offered to do a profile of Professor Culpepper’s research contribution. What follows is the text that I presented.
Tag / Italy
The Decline of the West?
Some countries fall from greatness. For them, decline is absolute. Others face increasing competition from rising powers. Their decline is relative. However there is a third kind of decline that has more to do with degeneration than with failure, and less to do with competition than diminishing potential. This is a kind of morbid decline. It echoes the ‘decadence’ of the late 19th Century but without the implied culture of excess. The countries of the West might be accused of falling prey to this morbidity, so Benjamin Rowland and his contributors argue. Hence it is worth asking why that should be happening and what is to be done about it.
Britain’s New Relationship with Europe
The European Council has delivered an agreement on Britain’s new relationship with the European Union. The agreement acknowledges that the British government has no obligation to engage in further political integration, it recognizes that not every country will adopt the euro as a common currency, it strikes a balance between the need for common rules and the desire for national autonomy in the area of financial market supervision, it stresses the importance of effective regulation for competitiveness, and it introduces a mechanism to phase in the benefits that accrue to workers who move from one member state to the next. These concessions become effective once the British government informs the European Council of the United Kingdom’s commitment ‘to remain a member of the European Union’. The challenge now is for British Prime Minister David Cameron to win the ‘yes’ campaign. At least, that is what it says in the post-summit script. The agreement may just be enough for the British people to play along.
Austerity and Anti-Politics
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi gave an interview to the Financial Times shortly before Christmas to criticize the impact that successive waves of austerity are having on political stability in southern Europe. The interview had particular resonance in the aftermath of the Spanish national elections. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was in many ways Europe’s ‘best’ student in terms of economic policymaking. Rajoy not only narrowly escaped the doom loop that tied the fate of the Spanish government to the solvency of its banks, but he also avoided the indignity of falling under official European economic tutelage. He has not always does as told by his European counterparts but his government is often held us as a model of successful macroeconomic adjustment and fiscal consolidation in the face of crisis. His ‘reward’ has been a splintering of the Spanish electorate and a hung parliament. For Renzi, the fate of his ‘friend Mariano’ is an inevitable consequence of Europe’s obsession with austerity.
Matteo Renzi’s Liberalism of the Left
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi delivered his ‘Manifesto for 2016’ in a long speech to the parliamentary factions of the Partito Democratico on 3 November 2015. Il Foglio published an editorial on the manifesto some days later alongside a full text version of the speech. The paper also invited a few reactions from outside observers. The English-language version of my comment is below. The Italian-language version was published in Il Foglio this morning (10 November).
Erik Jones 