Kant and the critique of the ethics-first approach to politics

Abstract

Contemporary ‘realists’ attack the Kantian influence on political philosophy. A main charge is that Kantians fail to understand the specificity of politics and neglect to develop a ‘distinctively political thought’ that differs from moral philosophy. Instead, the critics say, Kantians are guilty of an ‘ethics-first approach to politics,’ in which political theory is a mere application of moral principles. But what does this ethics-first approach have to do with Kant himself? Very little. This article shows how Kant’s approach to political theory at a fundamental level includes political institutions, power, and coercion as well as disagreement, security, and coordination problems. In contrast to realists, Kant has a fundamental principle, which can explain why and guide how we ought to approach the political question, namely the norm of equal freedom. Yet, Kant’s theory does not take the form of a moralistic ought addressed to the isolated individual, but concerns a problem that we share as interdependent beings and that requires common institutions. The fruitfulness of the Kantian approach, then, is that it can take the political question seriously without being uncritical of actual politics and power, and that it can be normative without being moralistic.     

Government Selection and Executive Powers: Constitutional Design in Parliamentary Democracies

Provisions for a parliamentary investiture vote have become increasingly common in parliamentary democracies. This article shows that investiture provisions were largely introduced when new constitutions were written or old ones fundamentally redesigned. It also shows that the constitutions that endowed executives with strong legislative agenda powers also endowed parliaments with strong mechanisms to select the executive. It is argued that constitution makers’ decisions can be seen in principal–agent terms: strong investiture rules constitute an ex ante mechanism of parliamentary control – that is, a mechanism to minimise adverse selection and reduce the risk of agency loss by parliament. The findings have two broad implications: from a constitutional point of view, parliamentary systems do not rely exclusively on ex post control mechanisms such as the no confidence vote to minimise agency loss; parliamentarism, at least today and as much as presidentialism, is the product of conscious constitutional design and not evolutionary adaptation.     

Managerial incentives and access price regulation

Policy makers have identified the non-discrimination principle as a key instrument to regulate vertically integrated firms in control of upstream bottlenecks. It has been argued that the non-discrimination principle may create a level playing field, but at the expense of higher consumer prices. However, this rests on the assumption that the firms do not respond strategically to the regulation. We show that a non-discrimination requirement makes the vertically integrated firm behave more aggressively. Consequently, non-discrimination regulation rarely creates a level playing field. Neither does it necessarily increase end-user prices. Indeed, we show that end-user prices may fall.      

The impact of EU-Enlargement on relations between Europe and East Asia

On 1 May 2004 the European Union’s biggest Enlargement ever materialised when ten countries joined the EU. The new member states—Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia—brought 75 million new citizens into the Union which now comprises a population of 455 million. In spite of the historical importance of EU enlargement, it seems to have raised relatively little interest beyond Europe. This paper tries to narrow the research gap by discussing the most significant implications of EU enlargement for Europe–Asia relations in the areas of general inter-regional (political) links, trade and investment.     

Sectoral Opposition to Carbon Taxes in the EU – a Myopic Economic Approach

Over 10 years ago the EU Commission proposed a directive on carbon taxes, but faced so much domestic resistance that agreement was not reached until last year – and after it had been considerably watered down. The aim of this paper is to look into economic reasons for the political infeasibility of extensive carbon taxes. Since opposition is believed to arise prior to the policy implementation, the cost estimates have a myopic character compared with market estimates, in the sense that sectors are presumed to take into account their own substitution opportunities, but disregard changes in other sectors as well as the macroeconomic welfare gains from a tax regime. With this myopic approach, we estimate and compare costs of emissions cuts across sectors and across countries in the EU, showing how different sectors might have anticipated the impacts from an expected carbon tax. This focus illustrates that what seems to be cost-effective and to the best for the region on paper turned out too controversial to be politically feasible.     

Norway and Emissions Trading: From Global Front-Runner to EU Follower

A striking convergence has taken place in the design of the Norwegian and EU greenhouse gas emissions trading systems from 1998 to 2004. This article argues that the Norwegian adaptation to the EU did not take place as a consequence of perceived legal obligations under the European Economic Area agreement. Nor did it take place due to Norwegian actors being persuaded about the merits of the EU design. The main explanation has to do with interests. The EU market and politics are of course generally very important for Norway. However, before the US pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, the Norwegian outlook in climate politics was global. The US pull-out accelerated the development and hence the attractiveness of the EU trading system and resulted in EU emissions trading as the most probable and possibly only international market for Norway to link up to. Hence, this analysis provides further support to the importance of being sensitive to the global context and institutional interaction when analyzing the relationship between the EU and its neighboring countries.