Any Nearer to Victory in the Fifty Years War?:Assessing the European Commission’s Leadership, Weapons and Strategies towards combating Cartels

Some 50 years after its creation EU competition policy remains firmly entrenched as one of the most developed examples of supranational governance within the European Union. Although there has been a marked increase in interest among political scientists in competition policy in recent years there are still gaps in terms of overall coverage. One area that has been largely overlooked centres on cartels. Cartel policy has emerged as a highly salient issue and main priority of the Commission's competition policy since the late 1990s. Certainly, the recent restructuring of the EU cartel enforcement regime, the imposition of ever higher fines and a determined EU Competition Commissioner have fuelled growing media attention while new notices and regulations increasingly occupy the interests and minds of practitioners. The European Commission has constantly extended its activities on the competition policy front and its increasingly aggressive strategies to combat cartels provides political scientists with a fascinating case study of governance in action and illustrates the ways – such as leniency programmes, higher fines, enhanced and better equipped resources as well as internal reorganisation in which the European regulator is pursuing such conspiracies. This article traces the evolution and development of EU cartel policy since its inception and assesses the Commission's strategies and considers just to what extent the European Commission is winning its war against business cartelisation.

Irish social thought and the relief of poverty, 1847-1880

This paper investigates the way in which the ‘problem of poverty’ in Ireland was encountered, constructed and debated by members of the Irish intellectual and political elite in the decades between the Great Famine and the outbreak of the land war in the late 1870s. This period witnessed acute social upheavals in Ireland, from the catastrophic nadir of the Famine, through the much-vaunted economic recovery of the 1850s–1860s, to the near-famine panic of the late 1870s (itself prefigured by a lesser agricultural crisis in 1859–63). The paper focuses on how a particular elite group – the ‘Dublin School’ of political economists and their circle, and most prominently William Neilson Hancock and John Kells Ingram – sought to define and investigate the changing ‘problem’, shape public attitudes towards the legitimacy of welfare interventions and lobby state officials in the making of poor law policy in this period. It suggests that the crisis of 1859–63 played a disproportionate role in the reevaluation of Irish poor relief and in promoting a campaign for an ‘anglicisation’ of poor law measures and practice in Ireland.

State power matters: power, the state and political struggle in the post-war American novel

This article is concerned with resituating the state at the centre of the analytical stage and, concomitantly, with drawing attention to the dangers of losing sight of the state as a locus of power. It seeks to uncover the relationship between two related lines of critical inquiry: Marxist and Foucauldian theories of the state; and the attempts by three postwar American novelist (Ken Kesey, William Burroughs and E.L. Doctorow) to determine the nature and extent of this power and to consider under what conditions political struggle might be possible. It argues that such a move is needed because recent critical analysis has been too preoccupied by corporeal micropolitics and global macropolitics, and that the postwar American novel can help us in this move because it is centrally concerned with the repressive potentiality of the US state. It maintains that the resuscitation of Marxist state theories in early 1970s and a debate between Poulantzas and Foucault is intriguingly foreshadowed and even critiqued by these novels. Consequently, it concludes that these novels constitute an unrecognized pre-history of what would become one of the key intellectual debates of the late twentieth century: an engagement between Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of the power and resistance.

Towards An Acoustic Model-Based Poroelastic Imaging Method: I. Theoretical Foundation

The ultrasonic measurement and imaging of tissue elasticity is currently under wide investigation and development as a clinical tool for the assessment of a broad range of diseases, but little account in this field has yet been taken of the fact that soft tissue is porous and contains mobile fluid. The ability to squeeze fluid out of tissue may have implications for conventional elasticity imaging, and may present opportunities for new investigative tools. When a homogeneous, isotropic, fluid-saturated poroelastic material with a linearly elastic solid phase and incompressible solid and fluid constituents is subjected to stress, the behaviour of the induced internal strain field is influenced by three material constants: the Young's modulus (E(s)) and Poisson's ratio (nu(s)) of the solid matrix and the permeability (k) of the solid matrix to the pore fluid. New analytical expressions were derived and used to model the time-dependent behaviour of the strain field inside simulated homogeneous cylindrical samples of such a poroelastic material undergoing sustained unconfined compression. A model-based reconstruction technique was developed to produce images of parameters related to the poroelastic material constants (E(s), nu(s), k) from a comparison of the measured and predicted time-dependent spatially varying radial strain. Tests of the method using simulated noisy strain data showed that it is capable of producing three unique parametric images: an image of the Poisson's ratio of the solid matrix, an image of the axial strain (which was not time-dependent subsequent to the application of the compression) and an image representing the product of the aggregate modulus E(s)(1-nu(s))/(1+nu(s))(1-2nu(s)) of the solid matrix and the permeability of the solid matrix to the pore fluid. The analytical expressions were further used to numerically validate a finite element model and to clarify previous work on poroelastography.

Famine and land in Ireland and India 1845-1880: James Caird and the political economy of hunger

The perception of Ireland and India as ‘zones of famine’ led many nineteenth-century observers to draw analogies between these two troublesome parts of the British empire. This article investigates this parallel through the career of James Caird (1816–92), and specifically his interventions in the latter stages of both the Great Irish Famine of 1845–50, and the Indian famines of 1876–9. Caird is best remembered as the joint author of the controversial dissenting minute in the Indian famine commission report of 1880; this article locates the roots of his stance in his previous engagements with Irish policy. Caird's interventions are used to track the trajectory of an evolving ‘Peelite’ position on famine relief, agricultural reconstruction, and land reform between the 1840s and 1880s. Despite some divergences, strong continuities exist between the two interventions – not least concern for the promotion of agricultural entrepreneurship, for actively assisting economic development in ‘backward’ economies, and an acknowledgement of state responsibility for preserving life as an end in itself. Above all in both cases it involved a critique of a laissez-faire dogmatism – whether manifest in the ‘Trevelyanism’ of 1846–50 or the Lytton–Temple system of 1876–9.