By Rachel Sleiman and Jenik Radon

With the new administration of President Biden, the United States will have no alternative but to re-assess its relationships with the world. To be frank, the United States has unfortunately lost credibility and stature during the last four years. And re-envisioning, and even reinventing, the Obama initiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would be a good start. While former President Trump withdrew from the original TPP, its potential rejuvenation, welcomed by Australia and Japan, calls for a fresh perspective. [. . .]

By Michalis Polygiannis and Jenik Radon.

The monumental European Union–Mercosur free trade agreement was announced in 2019 after twenty years, literally a generation, of negotiations. This trade agreement will create the largest free-trade zone in the world, cut tariffs, and simplify the customs procedures between the EU states and the Mercosur countries of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Uruguay. For the EU, this means more exports of high-value products like machinery, automobiles, and pharmaceuticals. In contrast, for the Mercosur countries, it would mean more exports in commodity agricultural products, including meat, poultry and sugar for which quantity is the name of the game, to the European single market,. However, despite the almost endless ongoing global discussions and negotiations for a transition to a low-carbon economy to mitigate climate change, trade and environment are like two ships passing in the night. But President Macron of France is ready to change that and is willing to have a “collision” of these two spheres. [. . .]

By José M. de Areilza

Los europeos no temenos major aliado que Estados Unidos en un mundo de incertidumbres y tambien de oportunidades. Hay grandes expectativas de recuperar y poner al dia una relación transatlántica maltrecha.

La victoria de Joe Biden puede tener consecuencias muy positivas para la política exterior de su país. Es más difícil aventurar, sin embargo, lo que ocurrirá en el ámbito doméstico. La escisión de los votantes en dos mundos paralelos, que consideran a la otra mitad fuente de todos los males, es un problema político mayúsculo. El nuevo presidente acertará si ignora a la izquierda de su partido y se enfrenta a la pandemia y a la crisis económica tendiendo puentes y dialogando con aquellos republicanos dispuestos a olvidarse de Donald Trump. [. . .]

By Chad Vickery and Bailey Dinman.

As Louis Brandeis noted in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, in the United States’ federal system,individual states are intended to “serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” This innovation at the state level – for example in education, infrastructure, and public health – is enabled by the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which provides that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” When this decentralized system works well, innovation is supported and successful policies and approaches are replicated throughout the country. However, when this system does not work well – for example, when minimum standards for government service provision are not defined or respected – citizens experience stark differences in public administration and the quality of services they receive. This holds true for the decentralized U.S. electoral system, which is rooted in this constitutional deference to each state’s autonomy. [. . .]

Sanford Levinson and The Comparative Jurist.

What makes it worth looking at other constitutions compared to say, the US Constitution? “One answer to that comes in a Rudyard Kipling poem. ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ It’s an embarrassing truth that one reason to look at other constitutions, whether next door in Canada or in Tanzania, India, really anywhere, is that you end up learning a lot about the US Constitution that hadn’t occurred to you. You learn what deeply embedded assumptions we have.” [. . .]

By Augusto Lopez-Claros.

The single greatest antidote to poverty and social stagnation is the emancipation of women. Failed economies have been critically analyzed since the early twentieth century, with dedicated researchers analyzing problems ranging from the role of education in poverty alleviation, to the benefits of macroeconomic stability, to the advantages of an open trade system, to the consequences of corruption. The role of women, however, has been relegated to the periphery when assessing the effectiveness of economic policy. […]

By Bernard Freamon.

Slavery and slave trading are both universally abolished, statutorily and very often constitutionally, in all the world’s jurisdictions. . . . Scholars, government officials, diplomats, journalists, and many others were therefore shocked to see that partisans of ISIS, Boko Haram, and, later, Abu Sayyaf, actively employed purported Islamic ideology permitting the enslavement of captives and prisoners of war based on interpretations of core Islamic texts and opinions of medieval and early modern Islamic jurists. . . . The issue of the abolition of slavery in Islamic law is thus a matter of some urgency for observant Muslims, for governments that look to the Sharīʿa for guidance in the formulation of their juridical policies and legal norms, and for scholars and practitioners of Islamic law […]

By Richard Kraemer.

The question, “Where is Turkey headed?” is one that’s been asked with greater frequency in recent years. What began as this NATO member’s flirtations with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization morphed into President Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s embrace of Vladimir Putin. Many factors led to this geopolitical marriage of convenience between erstwhile enemies: Syria’s civil war, a deep mistrust of the West, and some common economic interests among others. Increasingly coming to the fore of these drivers is the role of energy politics – specifically, the transit and sale of natural gas through and to Turkey. […]

By Andrei Dragan.

The French historical predilection for centralization and a unitary state is not a new phenomenon. It is even older than the French Revolution, older than the modern French state itself. Even compared with the Ancien Régime, with its patchwork of feudal and ecclesiastical estates and mosaic of customs and laws, post-Revolutionary France did not represent a break in the process of centralization, but a mere speeding-up of a process that had already started before it was even born. But what made the French understanding of l’état and la nation distinct from its neighbors was its fundamentally assimilationist philosophy which, in the name of egalitarianism, was particularly hostile to differential treatment and dividing France into groups. […]

By Simon Blumenstock.

Modern-day Germany is – for good reasons – not a country known for celebrations of its own successes. In major public perception, anything resembling patriotism evokes memories of the crowds following Adolf Hitler in the horrible so-called Drittes Reich (1933-1945) – some with blinded, most with open eyes. An assumed “ban of patriotism” is one cause for the conflict constantly growing within German society, with left- and right-wing parties and citizens hardly finding common ground anymore. However, the 23rd of May 2019 was one of the rare occasions on which literally every German party and their supporters did agree upon a cause to celebrate German history. That date in 1949, thus 70 years earlier, the Grundgesetz (“basic law”), modern Germany’s constitution, had been proclaimed, coming into effect with the start of the following day. […]

By Kimana Zulueta-Fülscher.

Since independence from Great Britain, Myanmar/Burma has had three different constitutions. The first was signed immediately after independence in 1947, following the “Panglong Agreement” between the Burmese government and three different ethnic groups, the Shan, the Kachin and the Chin. It also aimed to enhance the autonomy of the so-called frontier or ethnic areas vis-à-vis the central government. After the 1962 military coup, two other constitutions entered into force in 1974 and in 2008, respectively. Both of these constitutions were decreed by the Myanmar armed forces, though affirmed in nationwide referendums. The 1974 Constitution was based on the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” and the 2008 Constitution was based on the armed forces’ 2003 “Seven Step Roadmap to Disciplined Democracy.” […]

By Augusto Lopez-Claros.

In October of 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a Special Report on Global Warming in which it stated that “limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” It noted that we are well on our way to breach that threshold, something that has not happened in over a million years (perhaps longer), taking us into uncharted territory. But climate change is not by any means the only global catastrophic risk that we confront. We, in fact, face a range of unresolved global problems. […]