Under the veneer of decentralisation. Ukraine's modernisation efforts stall due to lack of local government reform. OSW Commentary No. 102, 2013-02-12

President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions have been repeating the pledge to decentralise power in Ukraine and to give local government a greater decision-making role ever since the party appeared on the Ukrainian political scene. The implementation of this reform is crucial both for the economic recovery of Ukraine’s regions and the overall modernisation efforts of the Ukrainian state. At present relations between central government and the regions are regulated by Soviet-era legislation that fails to address the modern-day challenges facing Ukraine. The political elite in the country, including the opposition, appear to have reached consensus on the importance of the decentralisation reform. The first attempts to implement changes in this area were made in the late 1990s, followed by a comprehensive reform programme developed between 2007 and 2009 by Yulia Tymoshenko’s government. In 2012, the Constitutional Assembly under the President of Ukraine appointed a team of experts who drafted a document detailing the reform of local government and the territorial organisation of power1. The document envisages the implementation of what effectively are two major reforms: (1) an administrative-territorial reform, which would help consolidate the fragmented administrative structure, creating larger and more economically self-sufficient administrative units, and (2) local government reform, focusing on creating clearly defined powers for local authorities with a view to securing government funding for specific tasks delegated from central government. Nonetheless, despite these measures, and in spite of the rhetoric coming from President Yanukovych and other members of the Party of Regions, it seems unlikely that the reform will be implemented in the foreseeable future. A series of concrete political decisions taken by the president over the past three years indicate that Yanukovych has not abandoned his plan to build a highly centralised political system. This in turn limits the capacity to govern of local authorities and further restricts the sources of funding for Ukraine’s regions. This apparent resistance to change stems from the fact that by implementing the proposed reforms, the president and his political allies would be forced to relinquish much of their control over the political processes taking place in the country and would have to free up the distribution of budgetary resources between Kyiv and the regions. The implementation of the reform within the specified timeframe (i.e. by 2015) is also unlikely due to the upcoming presidential election and the deteriorating economic situation in Ukraine. Without a comprehensive reform of local government, however, Ukraine will be unable to undertake effective modernisation measures, which are key for the socio-economic development of the country’s regions.

The macroeconomic imbalance procedure and Germany: when is a current account surplus an 'imbalance'? CEPS Policy Brief No. 301, 13 November 2013

In this new Policy Brief, CEPS Director Daniel Gros argues that the 13 November announcement of the European Commission that Germany is running an excessive current account surplus appears to be much ado about little. All the Commission can, and will, do is to start an ‘in depth analysis’. This might lead to strong political reactions and an enormous echo in the media. But nothing of concrete substance is likely to follow.

Can Europe deliver growth? The SAPIR report and beyond. Bruges European Economic Policy (BEEP) Briefing 6/2004

In this critical appraisal of the SAPIR report of July 2003, we choose not to focus on the economic analysis provided in the Sapir Report - where we largely agree - or the analysis of governance questions and design at the EU level. Rather, we concentrate on the assignment, orientation and policy recommendations of the Report with the following question in mind: to what extent does the Report help to revitalize the growth debate in Europe? Unfortunately, the focus of the Report’s recommendations is entirely on the EU level of policy and governance, whereas the motor of growth is very clearly being hindered at the Member State level. The present authors suggest that a number of coordination processes at the EU level are best regarded as ‘dangerous liaisons’which are not really goal-oriented but instead ingeniously seem to serve to protect the actors’ autonomously-decided positions. The Union is trapped in a low-growth equilibrium due to this deceptive construction and because in many policy areas relevant for growth, the EU cannot act without the explicit consent of the Member States, or it simply cannot act at all. Indeed, given the single market and EMU, Europe can only deliver growth at the Member States' level. We exemplify this point in a number of concrete policy areas.

Repurposing Globalization: Discourse and Political Strategy in New Labour Britain. ACES Working Papers, 2012

As elsewhere in Europe and around the world, the discourse of globalization in the United Kingdom—the particular representation of the world as undergoing an epochal shift away from the traditional autonomy of the nation-state—has powerfully reshaped political debate. And this has had important distributional effects on the balance of power in the political party system, most notably in the return to power of the Labour Party as “New Labour” under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But while it is known that articulations of globalization are embedded in the political system, a systematic analysis linking such discourse with party competition is lacking. In this paper, I propose that many features of the globalist language invoked by New Labour can be explained in terms of concrete strategic aims. Working with concepts of “heresthetics” and “bricolage” drawn from a synthesis of literatures, I illustrate this approach through several representative texts. These findings are then used to make predictions about the kind of globalization discourse to expect in the communications of two nationalist parties in the UK—“least likely” cases for globalism—which can be explored further as part of a larger research program.