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June 4th, 2013 marks the formal launch of the third generation of the Equator Principles (EP III) and the tenth anniversary of the EPs – enough reasons for evaluating the EPs initiative from an economic ethics and business ethics perspectives. In particular, this essay deals with the following questions: What are the EPs and where are they going? What has been achieved so far by the EPs? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the EPs? Which necessary reform steps need to be adopted in order to further strengthen the EPs framework? Can the EPs be regarded as a role-model in the field of sustainable finance and CSR? The paper is structured as follows: The first chapter defines the term EPs and introduces the keywords related to the EPs framework. The second chapter gives a brief overview of the history of the EPs. The third chapter discusses the Equator Principles Association, the governing, administering, and managing institution behind the EPs. The fourth chapter summarizes the main features and characteristics of the newly released third generation of the EPs. The fifth chapter critically evaluates the EP III from an economic ethics and business ethics perspectives. The paper concludes with a summary of the main findings.
Noumenal Power
(2014)
In political or social philosophy, we speak about power all the time. Yet the meaning of this important concept is rarely made explicit, especially in the context of normative discussions. But as with many other concepts, once one considers it more closely, fundamental problems arise, such as whether a power relation is necessarily a relation of subordination and domination. In the following, I suggest a novel understanding of what power is and what it means to exercise it.
The article introduces a research project financed by the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz began in 2013 and will extend over an 18-year period. It aims at producing a historical-semantic dictionary elucidating central terms of the School of Salamanca's discourses and their significance for modern political theory and jurisprudence. The project's fundament will be a digital corpus of important texts from the School of Salamanca which will be linked up with the dictionary's online version. By making the source corpus accessible in searchable full text (as well as in high quality digital images), the project is creating a new research tool with exciting possibilities for further investigations. The dictionary will be a valuable source of information for the interdisciplinary research carried out in this field.
Between the 12th and 16th centuries the Hanseatic merchants obtained extremely important privileges from the rulers of the countries with whom they traded. These secured their commercial and legal status and the autonomy of their staples in Flanders, England, Norway, Denmark and Russia. Within these privileges no other subject receives so extensive a treatment as court procedure. Here, the single most important concern of the Hanseatic merchants was their position in front of alien courts. The article analyses the great attention given to court procedure in the twenty main Hanseatic privileges: What did the merchants require? Which procedural rules were necessary to encourage them to submit their disputes to alien public court instead of taking the matter into their own hands and turning to extra-judicial methods to resolve matters, e.g. cancellation of business relations, boycotts or even trade wars? This analysis suggests that the two most important concerns reflected in the procedural rules were to avoid delay to the next trading trip and to ensure a rational law of proof. The former was addressed by pressing for short-term scheduling and swift judgment and by the dispensation from appearing before the court in person. The latter included avoidance of duels and other ordeals and the attempt to obtain parity by appointing half of the jurors from Hanseatic cities.
Power and law in enlightened absolutism : Carl Gottlieb Svarez' theoretical and practical approach
(2012)
The term Enlightened Absolutism reflects a certain tension between its two components. This tension is in a way a continuation of the dichotomy between power on one hand and law on the other. The present paper shall provide an analysis of these two concepts from the perspective of Carl Gottlieb Svarez, who, in his position as a high-ranking Prussian civil servant and legal reformist, has had unparalleled influence on the legislative history of the
Prussian states towards the end of the 18th century. Working side-by-side with Johann Heinrich Casimir von Carmer, who held the post of Prussian minister of justice from 1779 to 1798, Svarez was able to make use of his talent for reforming and legislating. From 1780 to 1794 he was primarily responsible for the elaboration of the codification of the Prussian private law – the “Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten” in 1794. In the present paper, Svarez’ approach to the relation between law and power shall be analysed on two different levels. Firstly, on a theoretical level, the reformist’s thoughts and reflections as laid down in his numerous works, papers and memorandums, shall be discussed. Secondly, on a practical level, the question of the extent to which he implemented his ideas in Prussian legal reality shall be explored.
Based on Foucault’s analysis of German Neoliberalism and his thesis of ambiguity, the following paper draws a two-level distinction between individual and regulatory ethics. The individual ethics level – which has received surprisingly little attention – contains the Christian foundation of values and the liberal-Kantian heritage of so called Ordoliberalism – as one variety of neoliberalism. The regulatory or formal-institutional ethics level on the contrary refers to the ordoliberal framework of a socio-economic order. By differentiating these two levels of ethics incorporated in German Neoliberalism, it is feasible to distinguish dissimilar varieties of neoliberalism and to link Ordoliberalism to modern economic ethics. Furthermore, it allows a revision of the dominant reception of Ordoliberalism which focuses solely on the formal-institutional level while mainly neglecting the individual ethics level.
The past thirty years have seen dramatic changes to the character of state membership regimes in which practices of easing access to membership for resident non-citizens, extending the franchise to expatriate citizens as well as, albeit in typically more limited ways, to resident non-citizens and an increasing toleration of dual nationality have become widespread. These processes of democratic inclusion, while variously motivated, represent an important trend in the contemporary political order in which we can discern two distinct shifts. The first concerns membership as a status and is characterised in terms of the movement from a simple distinction between single-nationality citizens and single-nationality aliens to a more complex structure of state membership in which we also find dual nationals and denizens (Baubock, 2007a:2395-6). The second shift relates to voting rights and is marked by the movement from the requirement that voting rights are grounded in both citizenship and residence to the relaxing of the joint character of this requirement such that citizenship or residence now increasingly serve as a basis for, at least partial, enfranchisement. In the light of these transformations, it is unsurprising that normative engagement with transnational citizenship – conceived in terms of the enjoyment of membership statuses in two (or more) states – has focused on the issues of access to, and maintenance of, national citizenship, on the one hand, and entitlement to voting rights, on the other hand.
The title I have chosen seems to signal a tension, even a contradiction, in a number of respects. Democracy appears to be a form of political organisation and government in which, through general and public participatory procedures, a sufficiently legitimate political will is formed which acquires the force of law. Justice, by contrast, appears to be a value external to this context which is not so much linked to procedures of “input” or “throughput” legitimation but is understood instead as an output- or outcome-oriented concept. At times, justice is even understood as an otherworldly idea which, when transported into the Platonic cave, merely causes trouble and ends up as an undemocratic elite project. In methodological terms, too, this difference is sometimes signalled in terms of a contrast between a form of “worldly” political thought and “abstract” and otherworldly philosophical reflection on justice. In my view, we are bound to talk past the issues to be discussed under the heading “transnational justice and democracy” unless we first root out false dichotomies such as the ones mentioned. My thesis will be that justice must be “secularised” or “grounded” both with regard to how we understand it and to its application to relations beyond the state.
It has become commonplace to say that, in the past, international governance has been legitimated mainly, if not exclusively, by its welfare-enhancing ‘output’. There has been very little research, however, on the history of legitimating international governance by its output to validate this point. In this essay I begin to address this gap by inquiring into the origins of output-oriented strategies for legitimating international organizations. Scrutinizing the programmatic literature on international organizations from the early 20th century, I illustrate how a new and distinctive account of technocratic legitimation emerged and in the 1920s separated from other types of liberal internationalism. My inquiry, centring on the works of James Arthur Salter, David Mitrany, Paul S. Reinsch and Pitman B. Potter, explores their respective conceptions of ‘good functional governance’, executed by a non-political international technocracy. Their account is explicitly pitched against a notion of ‘international politics’, perceived as violent, polarizing, and irrational. The emergence of such a technocratic legitimation of international governance, I submit, needs to be seen in the context of societal modernization and bureaucratization that unfolded in the first half of the 20th century. I also highlight how in this account the material output of governance is intimately linked to the virtues of the organizational form that brings it about.
Ernst Bloch pointed out in a particularly emphatic way that the concept of human dignity featured centrally in historical struggles against different forms of unjustified rule, i.e. domination – to which one must add that it continues to do so to the present day. The “upright gait,” putting an end to humiliation and insult: this is the most powerful demand, in both political and rhetorical terms, that a “human rights-based” claim expresses. It marks the emergence of a radical, context-transcending reference point immanent to social conflicts which raises fundamental questions concerning the customary opposition between immanent and transcendent criticism. For within the idiom of demanding respect for human dignity, a right is invoked “here and now,” in a particular, context-specific form, which at its core is owed to every human being as a person. Thus Bloch is in one respect correct when he asserts that human rights are not a natural “birthright” but must be achieved through struggle; but in another respect this struggle can develop its social power only if it has a firm and in a certain sense “absolute” normative anchor. Properly understood, it becomes apparent that these social conflicts always affect “two worlds”: the social reality, on the one hand, which is criticized in part or radically in the light of an ideal normative dimension, on the other. For those who engage in this criticism there is no doubt that the normative dimension is no less real than the reality to which they refuse to resign themselves. Those who critically transcend reality always also live elsewhere.