From Austerity to Mutual Spending? The Frugal Four and the Fiscal Policy Regime of the EU

From Austerity to Mutual Spending? The Frugal Four and the Fiscal Policy Regime of the EU

Completed 2020. This research was financially supported by the Institute for European Studies.

Project Name

From Austerity to Mutual Spending? The Frugal Four and the Fiscal Policy Regime of the EU

Researchers

Dr. Kurt Huebner (Professor of Political Science, Jean Monnet for European Integration and Global Political Economy) (PI)

Research Assistant

Henrik Jacobsen (PhD Student of Political Science)

This project looks at the fiscal implications of the coronacrisis and the political dynamics evolving around the distribution of financial recovery funds in the EU. Twelve years after the global financial crisis and ten years after the start of the eurozone crisis, governments around the world again are in crisis-fighting mode. Covid-19 led to various levels of economic lockdowns, eventually resulting in historical reductions of economic output as well as jumps in unemployment numbers. The OECD (June 2020) stated that the ensuing recession would cause damages as no other recession in the last 100 years. The Spring 2020 Forecast of the European Commission suggested that 2020 will see the most severe EU-wide recession in recent history, which will further widen and deepen the gaps between member states. Governments and central banks, as well as international organizations, quickly started to mobilize enormous financial resources to inject liquidity into economies.

Following a joint political initiative by France and Germany, the Commission of the EU quickly proposed a Recovery Plan that foresaw a volume of overall Euro 750 bn to move member economies on a sustainable growth path. Rather than following the design of rescue packages of the Eurozone crises, France and Germany suggested grant-based programs. These plans immediately met political resistance in some European capitals, which only could be overcome in lengthy negotiations that resulted in a scaled-down version of the initial plan. However, even these scaled-down versions have recently been vetoed by member states such as Hungary and Poland. Why the political opposition in a situation of profound misery? How to interpret the policy changes of the Commission and countries like Germany? And, will the outcome of negotiations avoid a policy turn towards austerity in the next round?

The first part of this ongoing research was presented to the European Studies Community Association Canada in August 2020 as a policy brief. Thanks to the generous support of a grant from the IES, we have the opportunity to revise and extend our ideas from the policy brief into an eventual journal article.

Data and method

This project uses a mixed-methods approach, drawing upon various sources of evidence ranging from EU-wide fiscal data and econometric analysis to comparative case studies of individual member states.

Research output

  • Huebner, K. & Jacobsen, H. (2020). Frugal Four and the Fiscal Policy Regime of the EU. From austerity to mutual spending? Policy Memo for the European Studies Community Association Canada.

Material Culture between Italy and China: Food, Fashion, and Architecture

Completed 2020. This research was financially supported by the Institute for European Studies.

Project Name

“Material Culture between Italy and China: Food, Fashion, and Architecture”

Researchers

Gaoheng Zhang, (Assistant Professor of Italian Studies, FHIS) (PI)

Research Assistant

Han Fei, (PhD candidate in French Studies, FHIS)

Funding

$2,000 IES Research Support

This project will be the base of four chapters in a larger book project that Dr. Zhang has undertaken, tentatively titled “Migration and Culture: Mobility Between Contemporary China and Italy via USA.” In these chapters, Dr. Zhang will examine three case studies of material culture that circulate between Italy and China, which represent significant examples of how migration interacts with culture. These examples will then provide the basis to refine current theoretical and methodological approaches of studying migration and culture more generally.

While Chinese food in Italy was brought by migrants and became the country’s first widely-available non-Italian cuisine, Italian food was the first non-Asian food that gained a distinctive identity in China, first through Italian American chain restaurants and, later on, Italian migrant-managed restaurants. The Chinese migrant-managed garment sector in Prato has been Italy’s and Europe’s foremost manufacturing site for fast fashion, and it has provoked acute social anxiety and politically-driven media debates. Since the 2000s, China has been the largest buyer of higher-end “Made in Italy” fashion outside of the West, the advertising of which at times evokes a quasi-colonial and Orientalist fantasy that asserts superior Italian fashion taste over “Made in China” garments.

For architecture and urban planning, the project focuses on two cases of Italian components transported to Chinese milieus. First, it examines the construction and promotion of the Italian concession in Tianjin in the 1930s, as well as its 2000s transformation into an Italian culture and entertainment hub led by both Italian and Chinese architects. Second, it analyzes Chinese imitations of Venice and compares them with similar constructions in the United States. Dr. Zhang hopes to show the symbolic competition between China and the US through consumption of Italian culture.

The analysis of cuisine, fashion, and architecture required, considers a wide range of primary materials (from archives to visual materials) and several types of migration (e.g., human migration and migration of architectural motifs and significances; mass-scale Chinese migrations and elite Italian migrations), laying grounds for further theorizing of the two key words. The Institute for European Studies’ Summer Research Grant supported this research and facilitated the hiring of a graduate research assistant.

The GRA assisted Dr. Zhang in two main tasks throughout July and August 2020. Han built three bibliographies of primary and secondary materials corresponding to cuisine, clothing, and architecture/urban planning. Each of these bibliographies contains around 50 articles/books and other materials (such as websites). They worked under time restraint because Dr. Zhang needed the references in a relatively short time period so that he was able to write right away. She researched mostly in English and in Chinese, but they also capitalized on her French ability to find materials that would constitute a comparative angle to Italian exports in China in all three areas. Most of the RA hours were spent on researching this.

Han was also responsible for re-designing the website: https://mobilitiesitalychina.com/, which is ongoing. Dr. Zhang have been working with three persons on this project, the other two being the writers of the sections. Han has already begun re-organizing the sections on the website, as they wait for the drafts of the writings to be finalized in November 2020.

The Comparative Study of Campaigns

Researchers

Richard Johnston (PI)

Research Assistants

Alexandre Rivard, Sarah Lachance, Aaron Buffie, Spencer McKay

Funding

SSHRC, Humboldt Stiftung (Germany), German Longitudinal Election Study

Project Description

Citizens profess to despise election campaigns, which they see as coarse, expensive, and unnecessarily protracted, and as sites for character assassination if not outright manipulation. The shorter their duration and the less money in play, the better. The view among academic students of campaigns is more benign. More intense campaigns bring out more voters. Negative claims are more truthful than positive ones. Campaigns are on balance, “enlightening,” so much so that they mainly enable the operation of long-term, “fundamental” considerations. Elections without campaigns would be far more random events than are elections with them.

Although most actual research seems to validate the benign view, the research has often been narrowly conceived and willfully myopic. I am building similarly-structured campaign-based survey data files from as many countries and elections as possible. This requires the development of common coding schemes out of what are now quite country-specific ones. The object will be to gauge the extent to which all campaigns activate similar considerations across all countries and from election to election within countries and, alternatively, the extent to electorates can be led to different places, according to how the event is framed.

Project Stage

Data collection, data analysis, writing, building a website.

Recent outputs

  • Campaign Effects. In Kai Arzheimer, Jocelyn Evans, and Michael Lewis-Beck, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Electoral Behaviour. London: Sage, 2017, pp. 709-732.
  • Vote compass in British Columbia: insights from and about published polls. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Policy 8:1 (January 2017): 97-109.
  • Activation of Fundamentals in German Campaigns.In Voters on the Move or on the Run? Information Processing and Vote Choice in a Complex World, eds. Bernard Weßels, Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Hans Rattinger, and Sigrid Roßteutscher. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 217-237. With Julia Partheymüller and Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck.
  • The Predictable Campaign: Theory and Evidence. Version presented at CPSA 2016 (Calgary) and revised version submitted for APSA 2018. 2018 version with Sarah Lachance (UBC).
  • How do campaigns shape candidate images: Dynamics of candidate traits in the 2005 and 2009 German Bundestag elections. Presented at the 2017 MPSA (Chicago) and APSA annual meetings (San Francisco) and at the Hertie School of Governance, November 23, 2017, Berlin. With Mona Krewel (Cornell) and Julia Partheymüller (Vienna, ex Essex).
  • Campaign Activation in German Elections: Evidence from 2005 and 2009. Presented to the 2012 Annual meeting of the European Political Science Association (Berlin) and the 2013 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting (Chicago). With Julia Partheymüller.

Open Access Dostoevsky Scholarship

Ongoing 2020. This research was financially supported by the Institute for European Studies.

Researchers

Dr. Katherine Bowers (Associate Professor, CENES) (PI)

Research Assistant

Dorothee Leesing (PhD Candidate, CENES)

Funding

$3500 (112 hours of RA support from mid-August to mid-October)

A substantial portion of Dr. Bowers recent research has focused on Dostoevsky’s works, and, in particular, in engagement with the broader Dostoevsky studies community through public outreach and open access initiatives. Some of these have included a 2016 SSHRC Connection Grant-supported outreach project and conference marking the sesquicentenary of the novel Crime and Punishment, a 2016 digital library exhibit focused on Dostoevsky’s life and works, a 2018 co-edited volume devoted to Dostoevsky teaching and learning materials, since 2015 the editorship of the scholarly blog The Bloggers Karamazov, and, most recently, the development of a new website for the International and North American Dostoevsky Societies.

The IES’s Summer Research Support paid for a graduate Research Assistant who helped Dr. Bowers finish two specific open access resources related to these initiatives: the technical and editorial tasks related to creating a searchable online Dostoevsky bibliography and the technical and administrative tasks related to depositing and disseminating the SSHRC Connection Grant conference talk video recordings. For the first part of the project, the graduate RA downloaded scanned pdfs of the back issues of the Dostoevsky Bulletin (1973-1978) and Dostoevsky Studies (1980-2017) from Hathi Trust and used an OCR application to create plain text files of the “Current Bibliography” of each from 1973-2017. The RA checked the files, then passed them on to an RA employed by the University of Toronto Library (a partner on the project) who will construct the database. The bibliography will eventually become a valuable resource and record of the field available to Dostoevsky scholars and the public via the International Dostoevsky Society website. For the second part of the project, the graduate RA converted, edited, and prepared 31 raw video files from the Crime and Punishment at 150 conference. These files are now ready to upload to UBC’s institutional repository once the documentation for each is finalized. The video collection will be housed on UBC’s cIRcle repository and available open access, linked via the conference website, the IDS website, and library catalogues worldwide.

While the work completed on these projects seems mundane, in both cases, the progress made thanks to the IES Summer Research Support grant was substantial. Both projects had been inactive for years due to a lack of resources. Jumpstarting them this summer/fall is an important investment in the broader field of Dostoevsky studies. The conference video collection includes a number of talks featuring new directions for considering Dostoevsky’s novel that are shaping the field today. This collection will help disseminate these approaches and make them widely available, enabling scholars who did not attend the conference to also engage with its ideas. While this project focuses on recent developments, the bibliography project looks at the history of our field more broadly as described in the “Current Bibliography” historically and meticulously kept by the late June Pachuta Farris and preserves it in a searchable, easy to access format for generations to come.

Democratic Health Communications during Covid-19: A RAPID Response

NEAR-EU: The Europeanization of Higher Education

UBC Researchers

Prof. Kurt Huebner (Director of Research)
Dr. Conrad King (PI)

Research Assistants

Jana Cleve (March – June 2017)
Lindsey Wong (April – May 2017)

Funding

Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union (80%)
Co-financing by partner institutions (20%)
Sept 2016 – Sept 2019, €373,415

Project Summary

Near-EU is a project to establish a Nexus of European centres Abroad for Research (Near), on the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area. The overall goal of the Near-EU project is to broaden the field of European integration studies by incorporating the domain of higher education into the research and activities of centres for the study of Europe. The project will develop an inter-regional, collaborative academic space to enhance the study of European higher education policy and academic internationalization.

Objectives of the Near-EU project

  • To develop the academic field of European HE policy.
  • To develop research methodologies in the field of EU HE policy.
  • To strengthen the ability of European research centers to study European educational policy and its role in European integration.
  • To create a wide inter-regional network of Bologna Research Centres which will engage in collaborative research, mutual learning and cross-fertilization processes.
  • To assess the internationalization trends in partner countries.
  • To enhance awareness in non-EU partner countries of the Bologna Process and familiarity with its practical tools.
  • To stimulate debate on the implementation of the process and provide a platform for future enhancement of internationalization– being situated in leading and established European study centers, the BRCs are assured of stable and long-term platforms for continued activity and dissemination.
  • To foster exchange of ideas and sharing of best practices among EU and Non-EU European Study Centers.
  • To promote cooperation between the partner countries HE sectors and the EHEA.
  • For more information on the Near-EU project, please click here

Partners in the Near-EU project

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, UBC Institute for European Studies, Technical University of Darmstadt, the Faculty of Education at the University of Ljubljana, the University of Piraeus, Nanyang Technological University, National Centre for Research on Europe at the University of Canterbury (NZ). The project is supported by a grant from the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Research: Internationalization Strategies in HE

Our core research question are: What are the internationalization strategies employed by higher education institutions in Canada, when faced with the burgeoning Europeanization of the global higher education sector?

Output to date

  • ‘The Bologna Process: a View from the Outside’ (BTC Annual International Conference, Bologna around the World – A Comparative Point of View. Tel Aviv, Israel. April 26, 2017)
  • ‘Internationalization of higher education in a Canadian context. Responses to the Bologna Process from Canadian universities’ (University of Ljubljana Education Conference, ‘Looking out’: Comparability and Compatibility in Global Higher Education. Ljubljana, Slovenia. Oct 10, 2017.)
  • ‘The Internationalization of Canadian Higher Education: which direction are we heading?’ (British Columbia Political Studies Association Conference, Kamloops: 3 May 2018)
  • ‘Unity and Diversity in Higher Education: Effects of Europeanization on Canadian Universities’ (European Community Studies Association Conference; Toronto: 10 May 2018).
  • ‘Designing survey instruments for measuring internationalisation: perspectives from Canada, New Zealand and Singapore’ (Internationalisation and Economic Development in the European Higher Education Area and Beyond: strategies, policies and tools. Pireaus, Greece: 14 June 2018)
  • ‘Internationalisation of higher education in a Canadian context: Responses to the Bologna Process from Canadian universities’ in European Journal of Higher Education 9 (1): 58-72 (2019)

Bologna Resource Centre

What is the Bologna Process?

The Bologna Process is a series of intergovernmental agreements made in the Council of Europe between 48 countries (along with the European Commission), to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The EHEA is a means for each country to adapt their higher education systems to make them more compatible with one another, as well as to strengthen quality assurance mechanisms. The primary goal of the Bologna Process has been to facilitate mobility of students and staff across Europe, although this rather ambitious project has adopted several additional goals and objectives. For more information on the Bologna Process and the EHEA, please go to the official website here.

What is the Bologna Resource Centre, at the IES?

The Bologna Resource Centre (BRC) at the IES serves as a hub of information about the Bologna Process and the EHEA, as well as its implications for Canadian universities and policymakers. The BRC will also act as an incubator to draw students and researchers from various policy disciplines into the domain of European integration studies.

Events

Bologna Resource Centre roundtable. SAVE THE DATE: April 20, 2018

The BRC at the Institute for European Studies will be hosting a roundtable in room 120 of the C.K. Choi building, UBC Vancouver, on 20 April 2018. We invite guests to come and learn about the internationalization (and Europeanization) of higher education, and about the Bologna process and its impact in Canada.

CPSA Conference, Multi-panel Workshop. SAVE THE DATE: June 6, 2019

The Near-EU consortium will be facilitating a multi-panel workshop at the CPSA conference, as part of the UBC Congress of the Humanities. The panels will address two topics: ‘Inclusion and diversity in our universities: how is internationalization changing higher education?’ and ‘The Bologna Process, 20 years on’. Times and locations of panels TBD.

Bologna Resource Centre roundtable. SAVE THE DATE: June 7, 2019

The BRC at the Institute for European Studies will be hosting a round table with Canadian and international experts on Higher Education internationalization. The event will take place in room 351 of the C.K. Choi building (UBC Vancouver) on 7 June 2019, from 10:30-12:00. Lunch will follow.

The Ethics of Immigrant Admission

Project Name

The Ethics of Immigrant Admission: Race, Gender, Class and Disability in Immigrant-receiving Democracies

Researchers

  • Antje Ellermann (PI)

Research Assistants

  • Madeleine Page
  • Camille Desmares
  • Klaudia Wegschaider
  • Agustín Goenaga
  • Salta Zumatova
  • Alberto Alcaraz

Funding

Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Insight Grant #435-2013-1065

Project Summary

How do democratic societies select their prospective members? Given the vast pool of would-be immigrants, liberal states have to decide whom to admit, and whom to exclude, from access to their economies and societies. Prominent scholars have argued that, whereas immigrant selection used to be driven by the ascriptive characteristics of race and religion, contemporary admission policies instead are based on the principles of universalism, liberalism, and non-discrimination. Yet, while the use of ascriptive criteria in immigration policy has indeed been largely discredited, once we examine more closely the characteristics of those actually admitted, we find that even in the most liberal of immigration regimes, immigrant selection reflects systematic group biases that run counter to these principles.

This project pursues three related sets of objectives. First, the study seeks to empirically document the prevalence of race, gender, class, and disability biases in immigrant admissions in the Global North. The study will examine the many ways in which admission outcomes depart from the assumption of a universalism that is neutral on matters of social group membership. Second, adopting an intersectional feminist methodology, the study identifies the mechanisms of differentiation through which nominally liberal immigration policies produce illiberal outcomes. The project’s third objective is the development of a normative theory of immigrant admissions that could moderate, if not fully eliminate, discrimination in immigrant admissions.

Data and Method

The study adopts an intersectional feminist methodology that conceives of categories such as ethnicity and gender as central and mutually intersecting elements of social and political life, created and maintained by the dynamic interaction of individual and institutional factors. Public policy cannot be neutral in its impact but, unless self-consciously designed to address existing biases, will replicate social disparities. The project seeks to identify these group biases and their related mechanisms of differentiation through the analysis of statistical data, government documents, and elite interviews.

Workshop

In May 2017, the project funded a two-day international workshop titled Race, Gender, and Class in the Politics of Migration: Empiricist and Normative Approaches, hosted by the Social Science Research Center in Berlin. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary group of empiricists and political theorists studying the intersection of social group membership with immigration and integration policy. The work resulted in a collection of papers currently under review at the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Research Output

Cartografias in/justas: representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea ed. by Dr. Monica Lopez Lerma

Cartografias in/justas: representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea, edited by Dr. Monica Lopez Lerma, was published by Comares Editorial on May 15, 2024.

¿Cómo se relaciona el espacio con la (in)justicia en la España contemporánea? ¿Cuáles son los límites y posibilidades de esta relación en la era del Antropoceno? Los capítulos de este libro abordan estas preguntas considerando tres problemáticas fundamentales. Por un lado, a pesar de la crisis económica del 2008, las ciudades españolas continúan siendo centros de inversión y especulación inmobiliaria, perpetuando los procesos neoliberales de gentrificación, exclusión y segregación. Por otro lado, estos procesos profundizan la brecha entre el espacio urbano y el rural, exacerbando lo que el periodista Sergio del Molino (2016) ha denominado la “España vacía”, aunque movimientos sociales y activistas prefieren hablar de la “España vaciada” para resaltar su origen político y económico. Finalmente, más allá de la dicotomía entre lo rural y lo urbano, la era actual del “Antropoceno” o el “Capitaloceno”, marcada por el impacto destructivo del ser humano en el planeta, nos insta a reflexionar en una cartografía de la (in)justicia espacial que aborde los efectos del cambio climático y su conexión con el capitalismo.

Desde una perspectiva transdisciplinaria, los objetivos de este libro son: (1) examinar los límites que la justicia, en su sentido más amplio, enfrenta en los procesos de producción capitalista del “espacio” español (2) visibilizar situaciones específicas que desafían estos límites y otorgan a la justicia una manifestación tangible, aunque sea momentánea; y (3) demostrar que los límites, ya sean físicos, espaciales, sociales, políticos, ecológicos, legales, económicos, culturales, estéticos, o teóricos, conceptuales e interpretativos, siempre pueden ser cuestionados, y en consecuencia, redefinidos, abriendo así posibilidades para crear nuevas formas de pensamiento, imaginación y acción.

English Translation:

How does space relate to (in)justice in contemporary Spain? What are the limits and possibilities of this relationship in the era of the Anthropocene? The chapters of this book address these questions by considering three fundamental problems. On the one hand, despite the economic crisis of 2008, Spanish cities continue to be centres of investment and real estate speculation, perpetuating neoliberal processes of gentrification, exclusion and segregation. On the other hand, these processes deepen the gap between urban and rural space, exacerbating what journalist Sergio del Molino (2016) has called the “empty Spain”, although social movements and activists prefer to speak of the “empty Spain” to highlight its political and economic origin. Finally, beyond the dichotomy between the rural and the urban, the current era of the “Anthropocene” or the “Capitalocene”, marked by the destructive impact of human beings on the planet, urges us to reflect on a cartography of spatial (in)justice that addresses the effects of climate change and its connection with capitalism.

From a transdisciplinary perspective, the objectives of this book are: (1) to examine the limits that justice, in its broadest sense, faces in the capitalist production processes of the Spanish “space” (2) to make visible specific situations that challenge these limits and give justice a tangible manifestation, even if momentary; and (3) to demonstrate that limits, whether physical, spatial, social, political, ecological, legal, economic, cultural, aesthetic, or theoretical, conceptual and interpretive, can always be questioned, and consequently, redefined, thus opening up possibilities to create new forms of thought, imagination and action.

*All information copied from publisher’s website

Subject/Object and Beyond: Women in Early Modern France. Essays in Honour of Colette H. Winn ed. by Dr. Nancy Frelick and Dr. Edith Benkov

A collection of essays on early modern women from a collection of leading figures in the field. This edited volume was published by Iter Press in February 2024.

Subject/Object and Beyond brings together essays by established and emerging scholars to honor the exceptionally rich contributions and career of scholar Colette H. Winn. It also celebrates fifty years of sustained scholarship on early modern women, along with the foundation of Women’s Studies as a recognized academic discipline in North America. The collection comprises seventeen articles that explore multiple perspectives on early modern women, including their writings, translations, reception, and contributions to various fields, including literature, music, politics, religion, and science.

Nancy M. Frelick is associate professor of French and Renaissance Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Edith J. Benkov is professor emerita of French and European Studies at San Diego State University.

Reviews

“These essays give a sense of the really broad and incredibly varied swath of studies in early modern literature and culture that Colette Winn has influenced and helped to cultivate. The field of studying early modern women/writers is an incredibly vibrant, rich, and complex one, with really exciting things happening on many fronts.” — Nora Peterson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

“…une contribution substantielle aux études sur les femmes de la première modernité.” — Luc Vaillancourt, Université de Quebec à Chicoutimi 

WL W25 CES Office Worker

The Centre for European Studies (CES) is searching for a student to provide administrative support to the Senior Program Assistant and Director of CES.