Kant’s Project of Perpetual Pacification

Richard Tuck locates a conundrum in the Hobbesian world view. Whereas the nation-state is desired to effect the pacification of the domestic sphere, a world state and the promise of global pacification is feared. Kant’s strong program for perpetual peace is presented as a moral imperative to establish through legal means a world republic based on reason and individual autonomy. Kant emphasizes the empirical impossibility of a world republic and hence advocates the weaker program of a world federation of states. This essay argues not the empirical but the logical impossibility of Kant’s strong program and by extension any program of perpetual peace that claims to be essentially different from ‘mere’ peace as truce. In so doing this essay distinguishes between political theory based on the assumption of the ontological priority of peace and political theory based on the assumption of the ontological priority of violence and argues for the necessity of thinking the latter.

The issue of instability in a simple policy game between the central bank and a representative union

In the recent economic literature the independence of the central bank is often considered to be one of the most effective guarantees to achieve price stability. A strong theoretical basis for this proposition is that the monetary policy delegation given to an independent central bank is an optimal instrument to avoid the time inconsistency problem of monetary policy. This paper investigates the stability properties of this solution in a simple game in which the private sector (i.e. the trade unions) and the public sector (i.e. the central bank) simultaneously interact. A representative monopoly union is considered, and – in line with the recent economic debate – two types of unions are investigated: (i) the standard micro-founded trade union; (ii) the inflation-averse trade union. In both cases, we find that the requirement for the Nash equilibrium to be stable imposes a limit to the conservativeness of the central bank. Instability of the Nash equilibrium reveals a strategic co-ordination failure between the public and the private sector.     

Rethinking central planning: A federal critique of the Planning Commission

ABSTRACT

This article critically assesses the impact of the Planning Commission on center-state relations in India. It argues that the Planning Commission had a centralizing effect due to its role in overseeing five year and annual planning, its contribution to designing and overseeing Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS), and its involvement in discretionary grant-making. Central policy priorities and inter-state disagreements prevented the Planning Commission from acquiring the role of a shared rule institution, capable of offsetting the centralizing implications of the aforementioned policies. The article then speculates on what prompted the recent replacement of the Planning Commission with the NITI Aayog and what this may mean for shared rule and the nature of collaborative federalism in India more in general.     

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.     

Eine realistische Utopie des Liberalismus. Zum Tod des Philosophen John Rawls am 24. November 2002

Ohne Zusammenfassung Der vorliegende Text ist eine stark erweiterte Fassung meines Nachrufes auf John Rawls in der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung vom 27. November 2002.     

Regional Mobilization in the New Europe: Old Wine in a New Bottle?

This conclusion links the various contributions in light of the introductory framework. In line with our framework, scepticism towards the EU has increased since 2004 across most of the EU regions (old and new) and state-centric approaches (regional influence mediated through the central executives) have become the dominant strategy for regional mobilization. Unmediated access through direct regional representation in Brussels remains an important side-strategy though, especially for sub-state nations and regions with the highest level of regional authority, as theoretically expected. Regional authority—more so than the difference between competitive versus cooperative multi-level designs—is an important predictor against centralization pressures resulting from European integration. Overall, changes in the ‘New Europe’ have intensified but not transformed the dominant patterns of regional mobilization, while system-level and regional variables mediate impacts of Europeanization.