Power delegation and the European Central Bank's democratic deficit

Delegation involves both costs and benefits. That is to say that delegation is problematic as the principal and agent may have conflicting interests in any act of delegation. Related to this puzzle, I focus on the issue of democratic deficit in the European Central Bank (ECB) as a consequence of power delegation by the European Union (EU) member states in the euro area. Critics claim that the ECB suffers from a democratic deficit as the Bank is seen immune from the people of the euro area, although it profoundly affects their everyday life. The fact that the ECB is a supranational non-majoritarian institution and distances itself from national political arenas further intensifies the issue. Hence, this article aims to evaluate the alleged democratic deficit of the ECB.

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V for Vendetta: Government Mass Killing and Domestic Terrorism

Scholarship explores the impact of human rights abuse and state repression on terrorism. Heretofore, scholarship has ignored the impact of government-sponsored killings on domestic terrorism. This article proposes that mass killings create a focal point for terrorist mobilization. The vendetta agenda fuels violence by animating retributory violence. Additionally, mass atrocities create a permissive environment for violent nonstate activity. A spiral of violence ensues whereby groups resort to terrorism. Utilizing data from the Global Terrorism Database, 1971–2011, the study shows that mass killings significantly increase domestic terrorism. It contributes to emerging scholarship examining how state policies influence terrorist activity.     

The ‘European Turks’: identities of high-skilled Turkish migrants in Europe

Using exceptionally rich qualitative data coming from the FP7 EUCROSS project on the ‘Europeanization of the Everyday Life’, this paper focuses on high-skilled and highly transnational Turkish migrants who reside in the UK, Romania and Italy. The article analyses participants’ discursive constructions of Europe and Europeanness and shows how specific images and symbols of Europe and Turkey influence their own relationship to Europe. We argue that understanding Turkish migrants’ identification with Europe requires a comprehensive analysis of the development of a Westernization discourse in Turkey that has framed people’s identities. This discourse symbolizes the desire for being part of the Western world, and especially Western Europe, but, at the same time, the fear of being dominated by the very same world. We show that we need to grasp the values, images, symbols and discourses that underline transnational practices to understand the making of European identity among migrants.