Social Policy by Other Means from a Comparative Historical Perspective Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Belgium (1800 ‒1920)

ABSTRACT

While social policies in the past are “by other means” if compared to traditional welfare states, historians have successfully established that they were much more conventional in their own time. Moreover, welfare states are historically grown constructs often still containing many pre-existing elements of precisely such social policies by other means, for example non-state provision. Belgium is an excellent example. Historically both nineteenth-century poor relief and early twentieth-century social insurance were mixed private/public forms of provision and funding. Today the Belgian welfare state still retains fundamental aspects of non-state provision not usually associated with “conventional” welfare states in the core OECD.     

Die Selbstbehauptung und Selbstgefährdung des Friedens als Herrschaft des Rechts

Peace is conceivable only as a legal order. According to Hans Kelsen, a legal order is by its very nature a ‘coercive order’. Thus, peace and coercion are not mutually exclusive, but refer to each other in the concept of law. In this contribution, we elaborate and problematize the paradoxical relationship between coercion and peace in theoretical and historical perspective. For this, we differentiate between arbitrary force and legal enforcement in the context of world-order politics. While we argue in favor of peace through law enforcement, we also emphasize the element of arbitrariness in the concept and historical formation of law. This is to say that the stabilization of peace through legal coercion goes hand in hand with its simultaneous destabilization. The text unfolds this dilemma with reference to the evolution of the theory and practice of legitimizing the use of force from past to present. We argue that the dilemma cannot be overcome, but it can be mitigated through the creation of a rule of law, which allows for a reflexive treatment of the tension between peace and coercion.     

German Arms Exports: Between Normative Aspirations and Political Reality

Deciding on arms exports is a delicate matter in western democracies. Potential economic and security gains have to be weighed against normative and security concerns. This article explores how this tension is solved in Germany, a country that holds strong moral aspirations but at the same time lists among the top arms exporting nations worldwide. Using a newly compiled dataset, we quantitatively analyse German exports of major conventional weapons (MCWs) from 1992 to 2013. Our statistical findings do not support the claim that the human rights situation in recipient countries plays an important role for German arms export decisions. Our two-stage model therefore supports a trading state rather than civilian power reading of Germany, at least when it comes to arms export practices.     

Introduction to Symposium on “Critical Legal Histories”: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125

This introduction to a symposium on Robert Gordon's classic article “Critical Legal Histories” (1984) suggests that the article should be read in the first instance as a response to the distinctive historical and jurisprudential currents of the 1980s, even as it also remains a work that continues to challenge legal historians working today, a generation later.     

"Knowing" the Rules: Administrative Work as Practice

This article presents a theory of administrative work as practice. Building on a rich narrative of a mid-level administrator in the Dutch Immigration Office, four core elements of administrative practice are identified: contextuality, acting, knowing, and interacting. Taking cues from practice theory and ethnomethodology, the author argues that the visible aspects of administrative work (decisions, reports, negotiations, standard operating procedures, and—on a higher level of institutional abstraction—structures, legal rules, lines of authority, and accountability) are effectuations, enactments of the hidden, taken-for-granted routines: the almost unthinking actions, tacit knowledge, fleeting interactions, practical judgments, self-evident understandings and background knowledge, shared meanings, and personal feelings that constitute the core of administrative work. Taken together, contextuality, acting, knowing, and interacting make up a unified account of practical judgment in an administrative environment that is characterized by complexity, indeterminacy, and the necessity to act on the situation at hand.     

Politicising European security: from technocratic to contentious politics?

Security provision in and by the EU has become an issue of increasing public interest and controversy. There are diverse and growing demands and critiques from different political camps towards the EU while EU institutions, in turn, utilise their security function as a resource for authority construction and self-legitimation. More recently, European security has also become intertwined with contemporary “crises” that turned it into an arena for the negotiation of fundamental conflicts, often revolving around questions of identity and sovereignty. This paper argues that these developments represent a significant change of European security and its politics that existing approaches linking the field to depoliticisation cannot adequately capture. To fill this gap, this paper suggests applying a politicisation perspective that, so far, has focused on the European integration project as such or the “Eurozone crisis” to the purportedly special security field.     

Expert witness in international war crimes tribunals

Abstract

The author has served as an expert witness in eight different cases tried before war crimes tribunals, involving twelve accused. Only three of the twelve accused were convicted. Seven were acquitted and two cases are still pending. The general defense strategy in such cases is to admit the crimes, but to challenge the involvement or responsibility of the accused. Identity then becomes the main issue to be proven by the prosecution. From the verdicts it appears that problems of identification were a major reason for acquittal. A closer look at the cases demonstrates that these problems were entirely due to an astounding naivety of the various prosecutors with respect to identification issues. The identification procedures used by the investigators were violating even the basic principles developed in many years of research in the area of psychology and law. This is even more shocking when it is realized how important these trials are, not only for the accused, but also for the witnesses, the victims, their relatives, their communities, and for international justice.

Since 1987 I have been asked eight times to testify in war crimes trials. The venues were, in chronological order:

• The Special Court in Jerusalem for the trial of suspects accused of crimes in the Second World War – the case against John Demjanjuk.

• The Special Dutch Court for the trial of suspects accused of crimes against humanity in the Second World War – the case against Marinus De Rijke.

• The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY); five cases: against Du?ko Tadi? (IT-94-1), Vlatko Kupreskic (IT-95-16), Fatmir Limaj et al. (IT-03-66-T), Ramush Haradinaj et al. (IT-04-84), and Ljubisa Beara (IT-05-88-T).

• The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) – the case against Jérôme–Clement Bicamumpaka (ICTR 99-5-T).

In this paper I will describe some of my experiences, and try to formulate some lessons that I have learned.