Best Selling Books by David Howarth

The Valley of Gold A Tale of the Saskatchewan BY DAVID HOWARTH

This book, the first biography in fifty years of the man Horace Walpole described as ''the Father of vertu in England'', will be fascinating reading to those interested in the arts and to political and social historians.

Now in its second edition, Tort Law makes this difficult area of the law easy to understand and master. Written in a lively, clear and friendly style, Tort Law tells students all they need to know in order to approach their exams in this subject with confidence. Students studying tort law at degree level or for the CPE/Graduate Diploma in Law will regard Tort Law as essential reading; as will students doing more advanced work on the law of obligations at undergraduate or graduate level. Academics, practitioners and judges working in the field of tort law will also find Tort Law an indispensable source of ideas, arguments and advice.

Specifically written for social science students at all levels, this book looks at the origins and developments of structuralist, post-structuralist and postmodern theory. Exploring issues of structure, agency and power, and questions around relativism and analytic method, this is a comprehensive account of a key area in social theory.

David Howarth, Francesca Musiani, Julia Pohle and Dwayne Winseck were invited to discuss the main topic of this special issue, “The internet and the EU market.” This conversation at the crossroads of several research areas (communication studies, sociology, science and technology studies and political science) brought together leading experts who shared their experience, research and expertise on the internet, European integration, governance issues, etc. They referred to several topics that are addressed in the papers in this issue, such as the taxation of digital services, net neutrality and the openness of networks, as they discussed questions related to the realities and limits of the notion of “Digital Europe”, changing discourses on the EU''s digital economy, the concept of European governance and the turning points and key events in the relationship between the internet and the EU market since the 1990s.

Established at the height of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the intergovernmental European Stability Mechanism (ESM) has, potentially, considerable influence over decisions on the provision of loans to Eurozone member state governments and on the recapitalization of banks. Legally and organizationally, the ESM is an international financial institution and thus its accountability can be compared to that of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international financial institutions. However, the ESM''s governance structure and decision-making procedures show that it is deeply embedded in the Eurozone governance architecture, resulting in a dual institutional embeddedness. Focusing on vertical and horizontal accountability combined with a learning perspective on accountability, this article presents an assessment of the accountability mechanisms applicable to the idiosyncratic ESM and how these mechanisms work in practice.

Abstract: This paper argues that, on the development of European Union (EU)/Eurozone fiscal capacity German governments have consistently engaged in foot-dragging. Few German state elites have ever supported European fiscal capacity building beyond the EC budget. Following the outbreak of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, German governments agreed to the creation of financial support mechanisms only with reluctance. We see a case of continuity in German policy preferences driven by consistent ordoliberal and, specifically, moral hazard concerns. The important long-term change that we can observe relates to the growing importance for successive governments of avoiding audience costs driven by sceptical public opinion and the rise of a challenger party in German politics. German government support for a massive EU fiscal response to the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates an exceptional policy position in favour of temporary financial mechanisms involving no fisca

Our study seeks to prove that German Stability Culture is a myth. The concept is a core legitimizing element of economic policy discourse in Germany and used regularly to juxtapose Germany and northern Europe and the euro area periphery. Using Eurobarometer surveys we construct a measurement for Stability Culture which is based on the priority assigned to the fight against inflation. Our empirical analysis covers the 2002 to 2010 timespan and includes 27 European Union Member States. Our results show that the distinction between northern states with an allegedly strong and southern states with an allegedly weak Stability Culture is a myth. Controlling for actual inflation, we find that the northern Member States with an allegedly high Stability Culture are less concerned with price stability than the rest of the EU.