APEC,globalization, and 9/11

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC) has, in the main, been based on attempts to advance neoliberal ideas about economic governance, although this has stimulated a great deal of controversy and resistance. Having failed—despite much effort—to entrench neoliberalism within APEC the United States and other “Western” members of APEC are now “securitizing” economic policy in an effort to reconfigure the Asia Pacific along lines favored by major capitalist players in the region. Critics argue that this securitization of economics is simply a tactical effort to bring in through the back door policies that APEC members have resisted in the past. Faced with the prospect of not getting its own way through straight trade negotiations within APEC, Washington appears to be promoting measures — “urgently needed in the name of security”—that might never have been accepted otherwise. At the same time, a twin strategy of pursuing bilateral trade negotiations with key APEC states is threatening the multilateral nature of the body, further emasculating APEC's position as a serious trade body.     

Legal Fictions and Fictional Entites in Renaissance Jurisprudence

This article charts the history of England's laws and customs regarding the oaths and declarations required of those appointed or elected to public office, and in particular parliamentary office and offices under the Crown. It provides a brief account of medieval law and practice from the mid-thirteenth century and a fuller account of changes effected by statute over the centuries which followed England's break with the Church of Rome during the reign of Henry VIII. The article shows that well into the nineteenth century the statutes were effective to exclude from many important public offices persons who were not communicants of the Church of England, and that the reforms achieved in that century were achieved in a piecemeal fashion. The article concludes with an account of changes made in the twentieth century in the law and practice regarding oaths to be sworn and declarations to be made by the monarch on accession to the throne.     

English marriages and Scottish divorces in the early nineteenth century

Law printing changed dramatically in the reign of Charles I. This article shows that the legally imposed monopoly on printing books of the common law (the law patent) was breached regularly and seemingly with impunity. Piracy, false attributions of authorship and concerns about quality all appear from the late-1620s onwards. The article explains these changes by stressing a number of factors: changes related to the holder of the patent and those printing under it; difficulties and tensions in the enforcement of the patent; and unauthorized printing creating a more competitive (and therefore challenging) market for law printers.     

The Social Market After the Crash

Markets are powerful tools for reform in both the public and private realms. But those markets need careful design and stewardship if they are to work to create value rather than simply becoming a mechanism for distributing rents to private investors. SMF Director Ian Mulheirn examines how the social market framework offers the most cogent analysis of recent events and how it can be a vital guide for future policy.     

Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government: Tough at the Top?

The Treaty of Lisbon introduces an early warning mechanism (EWM) which empowers national parliaments to intervene directly at the EU level; they may now raise objections to – and even play a role in blocking – EU legislation. The EWM represents a new model of parliamentary involvement in international relations: national parliaments now constitute a virtual third chamber for the EU. Though they do not meet together in the same physical space, national parliaments collectively form a body that can, at least to some degree, perform three key parliamentary functions – legislation, representation, and deliberation. First, it gives national parliaments the power to influence legislative outcomes at the EU level. Second, it provides a new channel of representation linking the citizen with the EU. Third, it creates a new forum for debating the substantive merits of proposed EU legislation, particularly regarding its compliance with the principle of subsidiarity.     

The recovery of natural law: Hochstrasser's history of morality

This book is discussed in the context of the ongoing recovery of a distinctively 'modern' or post-scholastic form of natural law thought. Hochstrasser's contribution to this recovery is to stress the linguistic-conventionalist character of post-metaphysical natural law in the German early Enlightenment. On this basis, he is able to show how Samuel Pufendorf and his followers largely escape the charges of moral arbitrariness and political tyranny levelled at them by such metaphysical rivals as Leibniz. The article concludes by briefly indicating one of the major alternatives to Hochstrasser's interpretation, giving a sense of the ongoing debate surrounding the construction of political legitimacy in post-scholastic natural law.     

‘Marching from all governorates’: labour lacunae in Mubarak’s Egypt

Abstract

Starting in 1991, Egypt undertook ‘structural adjustment’ reforms at the behest of international financial institutions and the country’s foreign donors. These reforms have often been included in a larger discussion of economic reforms and the withdrawal of the state from the Egyptian market. While certainly market-based, these reforms were interpreted and implemented in a uniquely Egyptian context and moved forward not through a market logic but with a specific understanding of political feasibility. Despite these local peculiarities, Egypt experienced a backlash familiar to researchers of structural adjustment internationally. How did Egypt’s structural adjustment and other ‘liberalizing’ reforms produce spatialized and sectoral backlash and drive workers from quiescence to militancy? Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2011–2013, this paper argues that the choices made by the Egyptian regime from 1991 to 2010 generated ‘labour lacunae’ – spaces in the political-economic structure where methods of interest aggregation were replaced by coercion or neglect – allowing militancy to flourish. I explore how labour entrepreneurs exploited these ‘lacunae’ to redefine ‘local’ protest in the run-up to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.     

Setting the Post War Australian Policy Agenda – Causes and Content

What are the origins of policy agendas and what determines agenda setting? The one robust theory in the literature associates different agendas with different moments in the evolution of the broader party system namely mass, catch‐all and most recently cartel patterns. This article explores Australian evidence for this thesis. It also argues the cartel moment has recently mutated. Agenda setting is now circumscribed by a mismatch between the needs of policy making and the political incentive structure. The media have become primary tissue connecting political elites to their publics. But this traps the system in short term, primarily populist stances. Systemic capacities to mediate agenda setting have thus been corrupted.