Tag / politics

by Erik Jones

Rethinking Europe in an Age of Uncertainty: From Club to Commons

If water started disappearing from the European continent, glaciers melted, rivers ran dry, rain stopped falling, you would think Europeans would come together to do something about it.  They would look closely and compare notes about the sources and uses of water.  They would study why the supply was running down and they would find ways to restrict demand to match.  This would not be an easy task.  It was not an easy task for the communities of the ancient world that lived between the Tigris and the Euphrates either.  Humankind has learned to adapt to these sorts of challenges through bitter experience.  Europeans might fail to pull together, and Europe might be overtaken by the desert.  But they would try very hard to find a solution before they let that happen, and they would work with whomever is necessary to ensure their success.

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by Erik Jones

How Long Will the Dollar Remain the World’s Currency?

To understand the future of dollar dominance, you need to understand its past.  The recent books about the early experiences of the U.S. Federal Reserve System (Mark Carlson), the spread of U.S. banks abroad (Mary Bridges), and the resilience of the dollar as a global currency (Paul Blustein), offer essential insights for any debate about how either other national currencies or new technologies could replace the dollar in world markets. The dollar’s emergence as a global currency came unexpectedly; its disappearance may be unexpected as well.

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by Erik Jones

The European Union as an Innovation in Politics

People look at the European Union and complain that it is not like a nation state. The EU is slow-moving, indecisive, and lacking in conviction. Look at the weakness of the EU’s response to the atrocities in Gaza, its ineffectiveness in standing up to the United States, and its inability to replace American support for Ukraine. Even the EU’s commitment to climate action appears to be wavering.

Such complaints ignore that the EU is not like a nation state for good reason. The European project exists to temper the behaviour of nation states. It is designed to smooth over the contradictions in liberal democracy and, in doing so, make those democracies both more resilient and more legitimate. And the EU is unique. Only Europeans benefit from that political innovation. The United States does not. Neither does Brazil, Russia, India, China, or South Africa.

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by Erik Jones

Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the European Project

Four recent books – by Sergio Fabbrini, Robert L. Nelson, Iryna Vushko, and Isaac Stanley-Becker – challenge any presumptions about the uniqueness of recent European experience.  They also force us to reflect on how the integration of Europe connects with the integration of individual countries (Fabbrini), how the experience of colonization has shaped the European continent (Nelson), how lessons from Europe’s imperial past continue to influence visions of its future (Vushko), and how the effort to promote freedom of movement has revealed a tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that runs across the European project (Stanley-Becker).

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by Erik Jones

Abandoning Institutionalism

The rise of populism and the weakening of democracy have captured attention across advanced industrial societies, particularly among liberal elites on the centre left. How could voters elect politicians who undermine the provision of social services, chip away at the rule of law, coopt or constrain the free media, and at times even threaten to bankrupt the state? How could they reward or even tolerate those leaders for engaging in overt acts of corruption while at the same time preventing any plausible alternative or opposition group from holding them to account through free and fair elections? Sure, people may feel they got a bad deal from globalization, and they may resent the pretensions – both cultural and intellectual – of an overly educated, out-of-touch elite. A little outrage and protest seem appropriate to gain attention. But why are they turning against the institutions that were created to serve advanced industrial societies, from the smallest local authority through the welfare state to the rules-based multilateral system?

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by Erik Jones

Europe and the Choice between Drift and Mastery

The President of the European Commission hosted an event to mark the one-year anniversary of the report on European competitiveness drafted by former Italian Prime Minister and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi last September. The message coming out of that meeting both from the European Commission President and from Draghi was that European policymakers need to do their homework. Too many items from the Draghi agenda remain unimplemented or only partly addressed. Too much more needs to be accomplished. And time is of the essence. The world is only becoming more volatile, more uncertain, and more dangerous. Europeans cannot afford to wait in preparing for this changed geopolitical environment, otherwise they will suffer the consequences. ‘Europe’ may even fail as a political project.

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