The transformation and future prospects of Europe's defence industry

Europe's defence industry has evolved by transforming itself from a collection of nationally oriented firms to one dominated by two giants. Stimuli external and internal to the European Union (EU) are responsible for this development. After describing the evolution of this sector since the end of the Cold War, the authors present four factors that played key roles: developments within the United States' defence industry; the impact of technology and defence economics; general economic restructuring within the EU together with nascent defence industrial policy; and progress towards the creation of a European Security and Defence Policy. While the evolution required all four factors, the EU played a critical and under–appreciated economic and political role in the changes that have transformed the European defence industry, and is now positioned to continue to shape this process.     

France and European macroeconomic policy coordination: from the Treaty of Rome to the euro area sovereign debt crisis

Abstract

French support for European (EC/EU)-level macroeconomic policy coordination has been driven by remarkably consistent preferences since the 1950s. With the exception of the de Gaulle decade (1958–1968), French governments have sought European-level mechanisms for balance of payments support. This article sets out to explain these remarkably stable French preferences on European-level macroeconomic policy coordination over time through a combination of an interest-based analysis referring to structural and competitive weaknesses of the French economy and an ideational explanatory analysis focused upon French Keynesian thinking on symmetrical adjustment of both deficit and surplus countries. French preferences align largely with the concept of ‘embedded liberalism’. This article also interprets a number of developments in EU-level economic governance in response to the banking and sovereign debt crises that provided a policy window for France to move European-level mechanisms and institutions towards long-held French preferences.     

Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this article we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and ‘real’ politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined.