European University Institute

This article examines what the VOC (Dutch East India Company) thought of Mauritius and Madagascar during the first half of the seventeenth century. Long depicted as backwaters of the overseas empire of the VOC, this article argues through the correspondence between the board of directors of the VOC in the Dutch Republic and the office of the governor-general in Batavia, and between them and senior Company personnel, that the Company engaged with Madagascar and Mauritius on a serious note and that both were considered important assets.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine came on the heels of a series of crises that tested the resilience of the EU as a compound polity and arguably reshaped European policymaking at all levels. This Element investigates the effects of the invasion on public support for European polity building across four key policy domains: refugee policy, energy policy, foreign policy, and defence. It shows how support varies across four polity types (centralized, decentralized, pooled, reinsurance) stemming from a distinction between policy and polity support. In terms of the drivers of support and its evolution over time, performance evaluations and ideational factors appear as strong predictors, while perceived threat and economic vulnerability appear to matter less. Results show strong support for further resource pooling at the EU level in all domains that can lead to novel and differentiated forms of polity-building. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, with its implications for European security, has intensified the need to understand European public opinion on potential conflict strategies. This study delves into the formation of these opinions, focusing on utilitarian factors like economic interests and threat perception, and ideological elements such as political orientation, national identity and perceptions of Russia and Ukraine. Utilising a two-wave panel survey from five European Union (EU) countries, our findings underscore that ideological factors, especially trust in Russia and Ukraine are paramount in shaping support for escalation or de-escalation. Economic concerns, threat perceptions, right-wing ideologies and strong national identities also play significant roles. This research not only illuminates European sentiment on the war in Ukraine but also enriches broader discussions on the determinants of public opinion in international conflicts.

In this article, we explore the normative foundations of the social investment welfare state. Social investment welfare enhances ex ante individuals’ opportunities and capabilities to resolve the social risks typical of post-industrial societies – via early childhood education and care, vocational training over the life course, active-labour-market capacity-building and policies for work-life balance, such as paid parental leave, lifelong learning and long-term care. Social investment transcends, while not replacing, the compensatory rationale of mid-20th-century social security. We begin by lamenting the prolonged disconnect between social policy research and normative political theory since the 1990s, which is worrisome against the background of significant welfare state change. We address the shortcomings of a purely Rawlsian-distributive reconstruction of the social investment policy turn, while rejecting the ‘luck egalitarian’ interpretation and its tacit conflation with Third Way welfare reform. Our normative framework for social investment takes heed of Elizabeth Anderson's relational understanding of justice and work by Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit on ‘secure’ capabilities and ‘fertile’ functionings, which builds on Amartya Sen's critique of John Rawls. Finally, we delineate our concept of stepping-stone solidarity as the normative anchor of social investment welfare.

The Ukrainian crisis has significantly shifted public opinion against Russia and Putin, placing politicians with prior Russian ties in a precarious situation. This paper tracks how parties that had some affinity to Putin have pivoted after the outbreak of war. Through computational text analysis of a decade of Facebook posts from 11 European radical right parties, we investigate their stance evolution towards Russia and their strategic management of public sentiment and Russian relationships. The results show that most radical right parties, after the invasion, neither tried to remain pro-Russia nor focussed their attention on shifting their prior position. Instead, they engaged in blurring the issue, diverting attention away from the war and using the events in Ukraine to assert their anti-EU positions.

Qualitative work highlights the significance of students' interactional cultural capital in educational settings—that is, cultural resources that help to navigate/interact with educational institutions and gatekeepers. We make a first attempt to measure expressions of students' interactional cultural capital quantitatively, and examine their relationship with academic performance. Using data on over 1200 Dutch students in their final year of primary school, we find positive associations between several expressions of students' interactional cultural capital (knowledge about the educational system; perceived cultural match between home and school) and academic performance. These positive relationships are equally strong for teacher- and test-based assessments of performance, suggesting that these forms of cultural capital help students in their learning rather than providing educational benefits via teacher biases. We find little support for positive relations between students' help-seeking strategies and academic performance. Different help-seeking behaviors do not form a unified cultural “strategy” and are not stratified by socio-economic status (SES) as anticipated. For educational knowledge, we find some support for the cultural mobility hypothesis: SES-based performance gaps, particularly in teacher assessments, are smaller among students with greater knowledge of the educational system.

A growing body of research has examined the relationship between social media algorithms and public opinion-related issues in digital environments, focusing on specific phenomena such as disinformation, fake news, and ‘filter bubbles’. However, a comprehensive theoretical framework that captures the complex interplay of factors through which social media algorithms shape, facilitate, or obstruct public opinion formation in Western digital societies is still lacking. To address this gap, this article introduces the concept of ‘algorithmic public opinion’ to capture the role of social media algorithms in shaping public opinion both as a process and as a product . While inherently open-ended, we argue that this framework offers scholars a valuable tool for understanding the centrality of automated decision-making processes in the circulation of informational content, and its interaction with diverse actors who play a decisive role in determining which issues of public interest gain salience and which news sources and interpretations are selected and amplified.

Existing research on the transnational mobility of individuals tends to rely on limited and possibly misleading indicators. Arguing that mobility experiences are in fact multidimensional and cumulative over the course of a lifetime, this paper proposes a novel concept called ‘space-set’ and applies it to representative samples of the population in France, Germany and Italy (ELIPSS, GP.pop and Doxa surveys). A space-set is defined as the collection of each person’s geographical places known through first-hand experience. In a transnational perspective, its key dimensions are Size (the number of countries visited), Width (the farthest distance traveled), and Focus (being emotionally attached or not to more than one country). This new indicator measures individual-level inequalities of geographical mobility. As a proof of concept, the empirical part of the paper uses space-sets to address two research questions that loom large in different strands of the literature on social transnationalism: on the one hand, the social stratification of cross-border travel, on the other the association between transnational mobility and supranational orientations (i.e., cosmopolitan and pro-EU attitudes). Results confirm that space-sets are socially stratified by both class and education, and that larger, wider, and more transnationally oriented space-sets are associated with supranational orientations. Comparatively, all dimensions of space-sets are stronger in the German population than in their French and Italian counterparts.

In eighteenth-century south-western Europe, actors involved in local conflicts reshaped both their views of corrupt behaviours and their political practices. While these historical phenomena occurred simultaneously, their relationship is far more complex than a straightforward cause-and-effect dynamic. Through four local case-studies, this article examines the multiple connections between changing perceptions of corrupt practices and political reform. New evaluations of abuses and frauds spurred reforms in some cases; in others, corruption was redefined once the reforms had been implemented, to justify those reforms (or their failure, if they did not succeed). Some case-studies show that there was no link between the two processes, while others reveal that the logics of the political changes prevented tackling practices which had started to be seen as corrupt. The article demonstrates that there was a transformation in the evaluation of certain practices that began to be classified as corrupt, and establishes links between these changes and the reforms implemented from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Additionally, by placing south-western European regions within a broader framework, it challenges deeply rooted assumptions about the backwardness of these polities and their former colonies as a consequence of failed transitions to modern notions of corruption.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reshaped European politics, prompting the European Union (EU) to take indirect actions such as aiding Ukraine, accepting refugees, and imposing sanctions on Russia. This special section explores the implications of these events on European unity. Will the war highlight divisions among countries and ideological groups, as “post-functionalists” would predict? Or will the external threat, in line with the “bellicist logic,” and EU solidarity, in line with the “polity formation” literature, foster increased EU policy coordination and centralization? The contributions assess the war’s impact on the supply (political parties) and demand (public opinion) sides of the politics of European integration. The articles show moderate support for the “bellicist” mechanisms of threat and consensus. They also find solidarity and unity for refugee and energy policy, with greater ideological and country divisions over economic policy, defence policy, and appeasement strategies toward Russia.

Although it has been subject to change with the transformation both of Ireland and of the EU, Ireland’s national EU narrative has continued to portray membership of the European Union as a source of strength and stability. This chapter examines the emergence and key stages in the development of Ireland’s national narrative, including the impact of a series of challenges, including referendums, economic crisis, and Brexit.

While the European Union was recently affected by four major and multifaceted crises which gave rise to litigation, the response of the European Court of Justice to these events has remained understudied. From a close reading of the procedural features, the legal reasoning and timing of four key judgments concerning measures adopted in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic, this article sketches a broader narrative about the Court’s response to crises which transcends the specificities of the legal issues and the context of each case. The findings suggest that the Court is likely to adjudicate a crisis case by applying the expedited procedure depending on political developments, assign a larger chamber, carefully justify its reasoning with references to settled case-law, conduct a context-sensitive balancing exercise, and deliver a decision at a politically relevant time.

Whenever a person intends to cross a border, citizenship de facto determines—more than any other status—whether that person can enter the territory of another state. Yet, despite its ubiquity and centrality within global mobility infrastructures, the exact mechanisms through which citizenship shapes human movement on the planetary scale remain surprisingly ambiguous. This Article examines the multifaceted ways in which citizenship operates as an organizing principle within the complex of rules and norms governing transnational human mobility, including how the increasing acceptance of dual nationality status and the emergence of citizenship-by-investment schemes reverberate throughout the legal infrastructure and create new pathways for elite mobility. Using citizenship as an exploratory lens, the Article thereby seeks to theoretically complement and nuance existing scholarship in migration and mobility studies, arguing that physical space remains the dominant structure for human mobility. As we show, legal infrastructures reconfigure access to human mobility in ways that simultaneously fragment and compress physical space as it pertains to transnational movement.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Agents are often compared to psychopaths in popular news articles. The headlines are ‘eye-catching’, but the questions of what this analogy means or why it matters are hardly answered. The aim of this paper is to take this popular analogy ‘seriously’. By that, I mean two things. First, I aim to explore the scope of this analogy, i.e. to identify and analyse the shared properties of AI agents and psychopaths, namely, their lack of moral emotions and their capacity for instrumental rationality. Second, I aim to examine the impact of the analogy. I argue that both agents, as ‘amoral calculators’, present the perfect candidates to revisit two long-standing debates on moral and criminal responsibility, regarding the necessity of moral emotions for ‘moral-agent-capacity responsibility’ and the necessity of ‘moral-agent-capacity responsibility’ for criminal responsibility. Finally, cross-examining the debates on the moral and criminal responsibility of psychopaths and AI agents is instructive and revealing. Instructive since the moral and legal treatment of psychopaths can be telling about the future treatment of AI agents (and vice versa) and revealing since it makes explicit our often-implicit philosophical commitments on the criteria of moral agency and the overarching purpose of criminal law.

Invocations of solidarity often appear to be merely rhetorical. In contrast, in this essay we seek to show that solidarity can be a potent force for systemic change. We focus on a particular kind of solidarity—experiential solidarity—which is rooted in shared and lived experiences. In doing so, we de-center the role of states as targets and agents of solidarity and foreground the communities that are actively “doing” human rights by fostering bottom-up social change and collective self-actualization. Our approach to solidarity recasts human rights entitlements across spatial, temporal, relational, and intersectional scales and brings different duty-bearing actors to the fore, thereby emphasizing the transformative potential of collective action. Our account bolsters the agency of non-state actors in pursuing rights-based protection of migrants, thereby enabling strategic and forward-looking action in a politically and emotionally charged domain.

The roots of revisionism scholarship back to ancient thinkers like Thucydides, Polybius, and Machiavelli, who identified patterns of rising powers seeking to alter existing power distributions. It then moves to the twentieth century, where realists like Carr, Morgenthau, and Kissinger further developed these ideas, associating revisionism with dissatisfaction and the desire for systemic change. Other schools have contributed to this literature: power transition theory explains how rising powers disrupt the status quo, while neoclassical realism emphasizes the interplay of domestic and international factors in shaping revisionist behaviour. Recent scholarship expands on these theories by examining moderate revisionism, where states pursue change without resorting to extreme measures. However, persistent gaps affect the literature, such as the need for clearer definitions of dissatisfaction and a better understanding of the means by which states pursue revisionist goals.

From 1879 to 1891, US foreign policy evolved as the country emerged as a great power in the Americas, driven by the economic and military growth following the Civil War. During this period, the United States focused on advancing its interests and expanding its influence in the Western Hemisphere. Key issues included territorial expansion as evidenced by acquisitions like Alaska, and strategic concerns such as the construction of an interoceanic canal. US leaders, from President Hayes to Harrison, navigated complex relations with European powers, particularly the United Kingdom, while asserting dominance in regional matters. The era saw a shift towards a more assertive but moderate revisionist policy, balancing expansionist goals with a cautious approach to avoid direct challenge. The United States engaged in limited military interventions and pursued economic and diplomatic strategies to reshape regional power dynamics, aligning with countries in the Americas and negotiating with European powers to protect its growing interests. This period set the stage for America’s ascent as a regional hegemon, reflecting a calculated blend of restraint and assertiveness in its foreign policy.

A comprehensive theory of revisionism in international politics must focus on how states challenge the status quo through various foreign policy strategies. To this purpose, the scholarship needs a typology that differentiates between revolutionary and moderate revisionism, emphasizing the roles of power and dissatisfaction as key factors driving state behaviour. Power Transition Theory and neoclassical realism need then refinement to better capture the complexity of state actions, including the potential for moderate revisionism among both great and middle powers. The notion of status quo also needs a sharper definition of different sub-dimensions—territorial, military, military cooperation, and institutional architecture—so to highlight how states may seek to revise these through less aggressive means. The chapter outlines the objective of a more nuanced understanding of revisionism and presents the research design, centred on qualitative methodology and case studies to test hypotheses about the conditions that lead to different forms of revisionist behaviour.