Closing the gap? Military co-operation from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. OSW Report, December 2012

The contracting defence budgets in Europe, the difficulties in developing the EU’s security policy, NATO's transformation, the reorientation of US security policy and the problems experienced by European defence industries – all together have in recent years created an increased interest in political, military and military-technological co-operation in Europe.It has manifested itself in concepts of closer co-operation within NATO and the EU (smart defence and pooling&sharing), bilateral and multilateral initiatives outside the structures of NATO and the EU (such as the Nordic Defence Co-operation or the Franco-British co-operation) and debates about the prerequisites, principles and objectives of bilateral, multilateral and regional security and defence co-operation. The present report aims to analyse the potential for security and defence co-operation among selected countries in the area between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, i.e. the Nordic states (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden), the Baltic states (Lithuania Latvia and Estonia), Poland's partners in the Visegrad Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia) as well as Romania and Bulgaria. The authors were guided by the assumption that those states are Poland's natural partners for closer regional military co-operation. It may complement ‘the Western’ direction of Poland's security and defence policy, i.e. relations with the partners from the Weimar Triangle and the US. Its goal is not to replace the existing security structures but rather to strengthen military capabilities in the region within NATO and the EU.

European Corporate Governance Reform and the German Party Paradox. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 03.1, 2003

This paper addresses the current discussion on links between party politics and production regimes. Why do German Social Democrats opt for more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU although, in terms of the distributional outcomes of such reforms, one would expect the situation to be reversed? I divide my analysis into three stages. First, I use the European Parliament’s crucial vote on the European takeover directive in July 2001 as a test case to show that the left-right dimension does indeed matter in corporate governance reform, beside cross-class and cross-party nation-based interests. In a second step, by analyzing the party positions in the main German corporate governance reforms in the 1990s, I show that the SPD and the CDU behave “paradoxically” in the sense that the SPD favored more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU, which protected the institutions of “Rhenish,” “organized” capitalism. This constellation occurred in the discussions on company disclosure, management accountability, the power of banks, network dissolution, and takeover regulation. Third, I offer two explanations for this paradoxical party behavior. The first explanation concerns the historical conversion of ideas. I show that trade unions and Social Democrats favored a high degree of capital organization in the Weimar Republic, but this ideological position was driven in new directions at two watersheds: one in the late 1940s, the other in the late 1950s. My second explanation lies in the importance of conflicts over managerial control, in which both employees and minority shareholders oppose managers, and in which increased shareholder power strengthens the position of works councils.