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Optimum Currency Area theory (OCA) is a body of research that has, since its inception in 1961, been highly influential for the discourse and design of Economic and Monetary Union, exercising a significant hermeneutical force. Nonetheless, there has been little acknowledgement that OCA is the subject of very significant internal disagreement, to the extent that economists writing within the field do not commonly agree upon the ontological foundations of the theory. This entails that the translation of the theory into political reality has been characterised by a series of often mutually contradictory narratives, which build upon schisms in the academic corpus. The political realisation of this can be seen during the negotiations over the 1992 process, where certain aspects of the theory concerning governance (of fiscal policy and preferences for conflict adjudication) have been notably suppressed, capitalising upon the fundamental uncertainty in the theory itself. The final part of the paper goes on to consider the financial crisis, and how OCA theory might aid policy-makers' attempts to induce ex-post convergence, demonstrating the continued relevance of the theory. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractGermany has a long history of institutionalized ordoliberalism. While these ideas may be implemented almost unreflexively within Germany, its status of 'reluctant hegemon' within the European Union has led to purposive uploading of many of these ideas to other Member States. In this article, we first define what these ordoliberal actions consist of, before tracing their evolution within Germany and the EU. Our intention is to detail how acting within ordoliberal tenets has led to some rather messy and unpredictable results for Germany and other EU Member States alike – a state particularly emphasized by the crisis. In so doing, we (re)invoke Robert Merton's treatment of unintended consequences. In particular, we are concerned with Germany's increased role in enforcing fiscal order in the EU, counter to our interviewees' (drawn from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) express intentions to retain Germany's political distance.

AbstractOrdoliberalism has undergone a dramatic resurgence as a characterization of the contemporary EU and its economic dimensions. Commentators have pointed to the 'ordoliberalization' of EU economic policy with Germany at its core, albeit with the latter taking the role of a 'reluctant hegemon'. Perhaps as a result of this pervasive influence, some have claimed that the EU is itself ordoliberal, resting on a particular understanding of the relationship between ordoliberalism and an 'economic constitution'. For this claim to be substantiated, the characterization of ordoliberalism needs to persist across time and the EU's law and policy‐making spaces. In this article, we examine this proposition, and argue that the influence of ordoliberalism can help a richer understanding of the contemporary EU beyond the confines of the economic constitution and into its evolving legal system(s).

This article draws on research commissioned by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and conducted during 2013. It interrogates the ways in which the employability agenda has been fed through to the level of individual politics departments. The project was particularly concerned with establishing whether, and how, colleagues in politics and international relations (IR) had taken ownership of student employability at the level of the curriculum. In the article, the key findings of the research are summarised. There is also discussion of the (sometimes troubling) professional implications of infusing concern for graduate outcomes within a pedagogic framework that emphasises critical engagement with the underpinning political structures of the labour market.

With some of the lowest levels of graduate employability across university campuses, and the non-vocational nature of most Politics/International Relations (IR) undergraduate degree programmes, the discipline faces a huge challenge in responding to the increasingly prevalent employability agenda in higher education. Indeed, as Politics/IR students feel the burden of the £9000 annual student fee now charged by most universities,5 and an ever-more contracting and competitive jobs market, a review of existing employability training and learning in the Politics/IR curriculum in universities has never been so essential. As such, this paper – based on a Higher Education Agency (HEA) funded project, Employability Learning and the Politics/IR Curriculum – explores the employability learning provision in a cross- section of English higher education institutions (HEIs) with a view to identifying examples of good practice in order to generate reflection on how best the discipline can respond to the employability agenda. The original project maps how employability is ingrained in various Politics/IR departments' curriculum. Here we present some of our preliminary findings. The bulk of this paper is formed by a discussion of the results we have gathered to date. Before proceeding to the data, however, we begin this paper by setting out the background to the employability agenda. In particular, we seek to highlight the ways in which the employability agenda has developed and been framed in higher education, as well as detailing the statistics on graduate employability in Politics/IR in order to provide some quantitative context. In so doing we aim to lay out the scale of the practical and pedagogic challenges we face as a discipline. We then go on to discuss the methodology of the project, before finally presenting and analysing our findings.

"There is a mounting body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies that add to this growing trend towards anti-politics by either removing or displacing the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation. This book examines the relationship between these two trends as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. This volume explores these questions from a variety of different perspectives and uses a number of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state as well as from other regional, global, and multi-level arenas. In this context, this volume examines the potential and limits of depoliticization as a concept and its position and contribution in the nexus between the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics."--