Search results for "Sovereignty"

Spreads of bonds issued by sub-sovereign European governments

2017

[EN] This paper identifies the factors that affect the spread of fixed and variable type bonds in the primary and secondary markets issued by sub-sovereign European governments. The analyses of both markets will be done separately to compare whether the determinants in the primary market coincide with those in the secondary market. The analyses will examine the period between February 2008 and December 2013 using data panel estimations. The conclusions are that both markets are approximately identical behavior and the signs of the variables matched what was expected in nearly every case. Also, we concluded that the most important in determining the spread sub-sovereign variable is the sprea…

European Integration and the Disembedding of Labour Market Regulation: Transnational Labour Relations at theEuropeanCentralBank Construction Site

2013

European integration through mutual recognition has facilitated the growth of a pan-European labour supply system in which transnational subcontractors ‘post’ workers from low-wage areas to higher wage areas. This allows employers to create spaces of exception in which the national industrial relations system of the country where work occurs does not fully apply. Drawing on interviews with managers, workers, unionists and works councillors at the European Central Bank construction site in Frankfurt, Germany, this article shows how transnational subcontracting allows employers to access, and create competition between, sovereign regulatory regimes. It concludes that high-cost, high-collectiv…

Vindicating Pablo Avecilla’s Spanish ‘Imitation’ of Hamlet (1856)

2012

This essay examines Pablo Avecilla’s Hamlet, an ‘imitation’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy of the prince of Denmark published in 1856, both in its own terms and in the historical context of its publication. This Shakespearean adaptation has been negatively judged as preposterous and unworthy of comment, but it deserves to be approached as what it claimed to be, a free handling of the Shakespearean model, and as responding to its own cultural moment. Avecilla turns the Shakespearean sacrificial prince into a righteous sovereign that has kept the love of a lower-ranked lady and, by pursuing revenge, has successfully overthrown a dishonourable and corrupt ruler. This re-focusing of the Shakespearean…

Precarious Sovereignty in a Post-Liberal Europe : the Covid-19 Emergency in Estonia and Finland

2020

The paper addresses a puzzle resulting from the current global state of alert: the coronavirus pandemic brought us back to the world of the allegedly sovereign nation states with borders and national governments in charge, yet in fact, this retrieved sovereignty looks very vulnerable and precarious. We explain this controversy through a triad of concepts—sovereignty, governmentality, and post-liberalism—that we apply to an analysis of a corona-imposed state of emergency in Estonia and Finland. Based on comparative case study research, we posit that sovereignty is precarious in post-liberalism due to its large dependence on the technologies of responsibilization and agency. From a biopolitic…

The Royal Nation in Global Perspective

2017

Adopting transnational and global history methodologies, this book suggests that the relationship between monarchies and nation-state formation has often been a symbiotic one, and that this can only be adequately explained through a global perspective, going beyond the local histories of particular state systems. While the nation-state has been the most influential concept of political community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, royal dynasties have, however, often provided a centralized administrative-juridical-cultural locus around which a national community has crystallized itself. Monarchic rulerships have played a central role in the emergence of modern nation-states, which fo…

Imagined communities against the tide? The questioned political projection of nationalism

2017

This article deals with the validity of Anderson’s definition of imagined communities and the future of imagination typical of nationalism. It is based on bibliographic review and research on the case of Cerdanya. Three questions of Anderson’s definition are revised: the limitation of the nation, its supposedly inherent sovereignty and the sense of community among unknown people. In this last point, the text focuses also on the consequences that imagined community is embodied for known people every day. It concludes that the production of local identities and dynamics in global, local and regional level represents a challenge for the political projection of imagined communities. Nevertheles…

STATE BUILDING, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, AND THE MAKING OF A FRONTIER REGIME IN NORTHEASTERN ETHIOPIA, c. 1944–75

2016

AbstractCombining a set of grey literature and primary sources, this article analyses the rise and fall of the sultanate of Awsa, northeastern Ethiopia, between 1944 and 1975. Ali Mirah exploited the typical repertoires of a frontier regime to consolidate a semi-independent Muslim chiefdom at the fringes of the Christian empire of Ethiopia. Foreign investors in commercial agriculture provided the sultanate and its counterparts within the Ethiopian state with tangible and intangible resources that shaped the quest for statecraft in the Lower Awash Valley.

Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. (The Greater War 1912–1923.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2018

2019

On the duration of sovereign ratings cycle phases

2021

Abstract Using long-term sovereign ratings data for a panel of 130 countries over the last three decades, we investigate the duration and determinants of sovereign rating phases through the lens of discrete-time Weibull models. We find that the likelihood of the end of the ‘speculative-grade’ phase increases as time goes by (i.e. there is positive duration dependence), but the ‘investment-grade’ phase is not duration dependent. Thus, for sovereigns rated as speculative, the build-up of reputation as good borrowers is a gradual process, whereas the reputation of investment-grade sovereigns solidifies and remains unchanged as time passes. However, the length of both phases significantly depen…

Friendship of the enemies: Twentieth century treaties of the United Kingdom and the USSR

2010

This article focuses on the use of the concept of friendship in the treaties of friendship concluded by the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. The range of reference of friendship and its usage by these two political rivals display a number of commonalities, which indicate a key role this concept plays in maintaining the existing order of interstate relations. The concept is conventionally used in the treaties marking the changes in the global or regional political settings. In the texts of these treaties appeals to friendship are made together with the expression of respect for state sovereignty, independence, borders and so on. It also appears as an exclusive an…