Nick Sitter

• PhD
• Professor at BI Norwegian Business School

Energy is primarily a private good but also has public goods characteristics. The EU’s traditional strategy to cater to the strategic goods element – energy security – was the liberal market model. The Ukraine crisis has fundamentally put the liberal model in question. The present EU measures are deeply interventionist. Renewables are elevated to m...

This chapter reviews the International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship in energy over the last few decades. It shows that there is a deep divide between two dominant schools of thought in IPE energy research: the liberal school and the realist school. While there is relatively little interaction between the two schools, and very few ontological...

It is often said that we live in a time of crisis for social democracy. Many of the West European centre-left parties that seemed the natural parties of government in the second half of the twentieth century, are in decline. The most common long-term explanations centre on a shrinking working class, a widening gap between the party elite and their...

Although IPE and GPP overlap conceptionally and empirically, there is a case for keeping GPP and IPE analytically distinct. To simplify: GPP tells us why we need international regimes for energy, while IPE tells us why we only have incomplete ones. Although many scholars draw on both sets of literatures, the two approaches to the study of energy ma...

In the academic literature, Hungary and Poland are often cited as paradigmatic cases of democratic backsliding. However, as the backsliding narrative gained traction, the term has been applied to the rest of the post-communist region, including the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We suggest that this diagnosis is in part based on conceptual stretching...

This paper investigates contestation of authority in EU energy policy, with a focus on natural gas. It argues that the main challenge centers on the EU’s goals and means of energy security policy, not the location and scope of authority. The contested choice is between an across-the-board approach to regulation (Regulatory Power)- and a strategy th...

Democratic backsliding in European Union (EU) member states is not only a policy challenge for the EU, but also a potential existential crisis. If the EU does too little to deal with member state regimes that go back on their commitments to democracy and the rule of law, this risks undermining the EU from within. On the other hand, if the EU takes...

The EU has a range of policy tools for dealing with the challenges it faces in the regional and international gas trade: when 1) integrating Norway into the Single European Market (SEM), 2) coping with Russia, 3) securing supply of Algerian gas and 4) taking advantage of the rising global trade in LNG. Norway as a major gas exporter to the EU share...

With the second decade of the new millennium came a series of shocks to global politics that forced the EU to reconsider its liberal approach to international political economy. The increasingly assertive use of economic power by Russia and China, combined with the new US president’s challenge to international trading regimes and the British decisi...

Exploring the intersections between International Political Economy (IPE) and global public policy (GPP) in energy scholarship, this chapter argues that contemporary dynamics pertaining to global energy trade and security present a challenge for GPP and IPE. On the one hand, the GPP analysis of energy will need to take account of the IPE debates ab...

The point of departure for this book was the role in EU external policy that the Commission has gradually acquired as the manager of the EU’s regulatory state. In this capacity, the Commission’s mandate is narrow, and its toolbox is limited. However, within the parameters that the single market rules constitute, the EU can and does act in a unified...

The European Union (EU) energy market is fragmented in terms of resources, policies and institutions. The North-Western market, centered on the UK, is liberalized (particularly compared to the Mediterranean and Eastern markets), and its gas-to-gas competition increasingly shapes the German and Central European market. This chapter examines the opti...

The European Parliament (EP) and its component political groups will play a key role in the creation of the proposed Energy Union. Many of the initiatives put forward by the Commission in its Energy Union package are legislative in nature and will require parliamentary approval. The biggest challenge facing the EP may well be internal. Following th...

In February 2015, the Commission of the European Union put forward a proposal for an EU Energy Union that signaled a shift in the EU’s use of economic power in external relations. Some of the new policies would amount to the EU’s using market might in the shape of a $17.5 trillion economy and a 400 bcm gas market, not only for setting market standa...

This chapter defines and explores the European Union (EU)’s ‘regulatory power’ and ‘economic power’, with a view to assessing the dynamics and potential of both forms of power in the EU’s external energy strategy. Overall, the chapter finds that the EU’s regulatory power, based on regulation and legislation, proves suitable to address some of the c...

This book contributes to an ongoing debate about the EU as a global actor, the organization’s ability to speak with one voice in energy affairs, and the external dimension of the regulatory state. Investigating whether the Energy Union amounts to a fundamental shift towards Europe's new 'Liberal Mercantilism', it gathers high-level contributors fro...

David Rapoport's concept of Four Waves of terrorism, from Anarchist terrorism in the 1880s, through Nationalist and Marxist waves in the early and mid-twentieth century, to the present Religious Wave, is one of the most influential concepts in terrorism studies. However, this article argues that thinking about different types of terrorism as strain...

The present chapter explores the EU’s reaction to such challenges, investigating its role as a foreign policy actor in the gas sector. This chapter first discusses the EU as an actor in global energy, and shows that the EU – short of a strong set of policy tools – relies more than other players on exporting its own rules. It then explores the areas...

Since 1992, the European Union has put liberalisation at the core of its energy policy agenda. This aspiration was very much in line with an international political economy driven by the neo-liberal (Washington) consensus. The central challenge for the EU is that the energy world has changed, while the EU has not. The rise of Asian energy consumers...

International security debates surrounding the European Union (EU) energy supply challenge commonly invoke the need for more EU hard power - e.g. getting tough on Russia or engaging directly with other exporters. This article investigates whether what might be labelled ‘soft power with a hard edge’ instead amounts to a consistent policy strategy fo...

Since the Single European Act the EU has brought many ‘public’ policy sectors characterised by heterogeneity under the umbrella of the Single Market. Consequently, some of the tools employed to shelter these sectors from supranational governance — unanimous decision-making, limited Commission competence and ‘ring fenced’ national regimes — are no l...

This article investigates the European Commission's external energy policy through the lens of the regulatory state. It argues that because of the nature of its institutions, policy tools and resources, the Commission remains a liberal actor even as the world leaves the benign pro-market environment of the 1990s and becomes more mercantilist – or ‘...

Thirty-nine parties have crossed the electoral threshold in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary since the collapse of communism. Twenty-three of them subsequently failed. Of these, only two parties managed to return on their own. Another survives in an electoral alliance. The rest have merged, ceased to exist, or maintain a ‘zombie-like’ exist...

EEN is a global collaborative research project (16 institutions) engaged in academic research that impacts upon EU Policy and practice, seeking to define the role of the EU in the emerging global order. Terrorism, as Walter Laqueur observed in his 1997 book Terrorism – tends to come in waves. So does counter-terrorism. Each of the four waves of ter...

The policy tools of counterterrorism reflect both the nature of the terrorist group in question and the strategies of the actors that engage in counterterrorism. Historically governments have perceived terrorism primarily as a crime, a threat to the state's security or part of a broader political campaign. Accordingly, states have adopted counterte...

The policy tools of counterterrorism reflect both the nature of the terrorist group in question and the strategies of the actors that engage in counterterrorism. Historically governments have perceived terrorism primarily as a crime, a threat to the state's security or part of a broader political campaign. Accordingly, states have adopted counterte...

During the first two decades after the collapse of communism, 37 political parties won representation in the Czech, Slovak, or Hungarian Parliaments. By 2012, 22 of these parties had failed in the sense that they have fallen below the 5% electoral threshold at least once. This set of failed parties includes a wide range of parties, from the far rig...

The comparative study of civil war has recently gone through a “structural turn,” towards large-n quantitative studies that explain the variation in the incidence of civil wars in terms of structural factors. The alternatives have been a return to case studies and a constructivist critique that emphasizes the role of ideas in conflict. While there...

The Nordic states all participate in European integration, but to different degrees and through somewhat different institutional arrangements. Finland has been a full European Union (EU) member since 1995, and it is the only one of the four states discussed in this chapter that has adopted the EU’s single currency. Sweden has been a full EU member...

The European Union faces a number of challenges that are the direct consequences of dramatic changes in the global energy market. In order to decrease its dependence on other countries for its energy supply and be at the forefront of efforts to combat climate change, the EU has embarked on an ambitious energy transition. But even as it does so, eac...

Microfinance is often hailed both as a tool for fighting poverty and as a tool for post-conflict reconciliation. This paper explores the use of microfinance in post-civil war Bosnia and Herzegovina, assessing its results in terms of both goals. As it combined high unemployment with a highly educated population in an institutionally open context, Bo...

This article maps out the role played by national identity in modern European constitutions. It does this by comparing its impact on constitutions across Gellner's time zones of European nationalism, and shows how the impact of nationalism has increased gradually over time, and is now strongest in Central and Eastern Europe. It concludes with a ref...

Over the last three decades many Western European social democratic parties have been challenged by populist radical right parties. The growth and success of parties on the right flank of the party system represents a triple challenge to the social democrats: they increase the salience of issues traditionally ‘owned’ by the right; they appeal to wo...

The project of European integration now spans Europe, but in becoming bigger and broader the European Union has brought on itself significant criticism. As the EU becomes deeper, wider, and more ambitious, so opposition and scepticism become more prominent for citizens and more problematic for elites. Concerns about a ‘democratic deficit’ and the d...

This book is an introduction and guide to the dramatic changes that have occurred in the provision of public services over the last two decades. The authors combine theoretical perspectives with a global range of case studies from Europe, North America, and other areas to explain why, how, and with what success liberal democracies have reformed the...

How much differentiated integration can the European Union accommodate? Not all member states are equally eager or able to participate in all aspects of integration, and the impact of EU policy on the member states varies across states and policy sectors. Whereas much of the literature on differentiated integration has focused primarily on formal o...

Not all member states are equally eager or able to participate in all aspects of integration, and the impact of EU policy on the member states varies across states and policy sectors. Whereas much of the literature on differentiated integration has focused primarily on formal opt-outs, this article widens the term to capture both the formal and inf...

The present article explores how winners' and losers' strategies for competition influence the possibility of democratization after civil war. Civil wars have been pivotal events in many states, but there has been little analysis of how they affect democratization. Since most have been won by the political right in twentieth century Europe one expe...

  The central argument in this article is that Europeanisation of party politics – the translation of issues related to European integration into domestic party politics – is driven by the dynamics of long- and short-term party strategy. Variations in the patterns of Euroscepticism found in agrarian parties across Europe is therefore explained in t...

The parties that have adopted principled or contingent positions opposed to participation in European integration span most of the political spectrum. Yet even a cursory glance at the European scene reveals that the mainstream center-left and right parties rend not to adopt principled Euro-skepticism, although they may oppose aspects of European in...

The ‘No’ majorities in two referendums on European Community/Union (EC/EU) membership have set clear formal limits to Norway's participation in European integration. However, pro-EU parliamentary majorities have tended to produce governments that seek as close cooperation with the EU as possible. This involves a kind of quasi-membership of the EU,...

This article analyses the development of competitive party politics in post-communist East Central Europe from a comparative perspective. The central concerns are party system stabilisation and change in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and implications for comparative theory. Starting from Lipset and Rokkan's 'cleavage model', the...

Scandinavian party competition has incorporated divisions over European integration to a greater degree than most West European party systems, but with considerable variation in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. From a comparative politics perspective this raises questions about the relatively high salience of Euro‐scepticism in Scandinavian politics, th...

Abstract The last quarter of a century has seen two broad waves of regulatory reform. The first wave, which started in the 1980s, was predicated on the assumption that privatization and liberalization would

The directives on electricity and gas liberalisation adopted in 1996 and 1998 respectively followed more than six years' negotiations and included compromises that one Competition Commissioner had described as incompatible with EU law. The main reason for this outcome, which was interpreted differently by different states, lies in the effort to com...

The central argument in the present paper is that Europeanisation of party politics-the translation of issues related to European integration into domestic party politics-is driven by the dynamics of long- and short-term government-opposition competition. This has generated three broad patterns of Euro-scepticism. First, several catch-all parties,...

[From the introduction] The idea that we are living in the age of the regulatory state has dominated the study of public policy in the European Union and its member states in general, and the study of the utilities sectors in particular.1 The European Commission’s continuous drive to expand the Single Market has therefore been a free-market and rul...