Asserting EU cohesion: Common foreign and security policy and the relaunch of Europe

The end of the Cold War and its fall‐out throughout the 1990s have created an atmosphere of pessimism about the prospects for the continued development of the integrative structures and processes of the European Union. Exclusionary criteria for monetary union and insufficient democratic institutional structures coupled with a neo‐realist critique of the integrationist project seem to have taken their toll. However, in the historical context of European integration, trade‐offs between the imperatives of deepening cooperation among the member‐states, and widening the community by including new members is, in fact, the norm. Thus, the problems inherent in the drive towards monetary union contain the seeds of cooperation in other areas. Specifically, the European Union will come to emphasize second‐pillar issues of foreign and defense policy both as a method to extend the integrative process in a functional manner, but also to attend to the vital supernational interests of community members.     

Do generic gTLDs require their own ex ante regulation?

This article reviews ICANN's treatment of applications to create new Top Level Domains based on generic terms (e.g. .book, .motorcycles), reserved for exclusive use by the applicant. It finds little evidence in past domain name history that such registrations represented a risk to competition. Had applicants made abusive use of their domains then existing law would have provided appropriate remedies in any case. Theory suggests that such a novel market was unsuitable for prospective regulatory action and that, by converting potential monopolies into potential cartels, ICANN's action may even have made the competition risk worse.     

Reflections on Environmentalism and the River Diversion Projects

In a companion paper to “Environmentalism in the USSR: The Opposition to the River Diversion Projects,” two geographers survey the current status of water transfer research after cancellation of the European and Siberian diversion projects and offer a different perspective on the debates leading to that cancellation. Implications of a demand-side approach to Centra! Asian water management problems are then assessed in light of (a) contradictory objectives of expanding irrigated hectarage and mitigating environmental deterioration in the Aral basin and (b) the problematic nature of projected water savings and costs involved in their realization. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 124, 720.     

THE CRITICAL CLIMATE AGENDA

The world set a goal in the Paris Agreement: to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius of preindustrial levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has explained why this is a valid goal. If global warming were to go higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius, this would jeopardize life on the planet with a potential multi-meter sea-level rise, the collapse of critical ecosystems, and the release of methane from thawing permafrost, possibly triggering runaway warming. Yet the world's current trajectory implies a catastrophic 2.7-degree- Celsius increase in global temperature.