Search Results

The analytical framework sketched in Chapter One is used to review the history of state formation in Europe at a number of critical junctures from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: state formation, capitalist development and market formation, nation formation, generalisation of participation rights (democratization), and development of social sharing institutions (welfare systems). The recasting emphasizes how the processes of boundary control in various spheres contributed to the specific and historically unique constellation of centre-periphery structuring, interest intermediation structuring, and cleavage structuring in the Western experience. This key idea — that domestic political structures are historically grounded in specific configurations of economic, cultural, administrative and coercion confinement of actors and resources — suggests that political developments affecting the boundary configuration of the nation state will also affect the domestic forms of its political structures. This is the starting point for the succeeding chapters devoted to the European integration process.

Examines the difference between the European and American perceptions of the effects and desirability of commandeering (the issue of binding commands by central government that force its component states to take regulatory action with respect to private parties) as a mechanism of central–component system interaction. Whereas the USA constitutional jurisprudence prohibits commandeering, the founding charters of the European Union and Germany permit such action. In successive sections, the chapter explores the relevant political and institutional background against which commandeering takes place in the USA, the EU, and Germany. It discusses (1) commandeering in international law and the apparent paradox in American views; (2) the formal supremacy of central law within component legal systems; (3) the ‘viscosity’ of the central legal system, i.e., the intensity of the obligation to adhere to the central legal system's norms; (4) the specificity of commands issued by central to component units of government (the directive as a limited tool of commandeering); (5) the corporate representation of component state systems within the law‐making bodies of central systems; and (6) the relative completeness and effectiveness of the levels of governance and the prominent alternatives to commandeering in each system, with specific reference to central government dependence (or not) on component state resources.

This chapter presents a general discussion of incorporation and corporate representation. General incorporation requires a formal process that company promoters have to go through, at the end of which the company or corporation emerges as a separate legal entity. Since investors will have access only to the corporate property, a certain degree of publicity is required in order to facilitate a clear attribution of assets and liabilities to a specific corporate entity. Disclosure is therefore an important element of the incorporation process, and remains significant throughout the duration of the company. Once incorporated, the company or corporation conducts its business by contracting and transacting with other market participants. This requires the attribution of the acts of natural persons to the corporation, causing the corporate property to be subject to, or released from, liability, or to be increased or decreased by the receipt or disposal of assets.

This introductory chapter argues that architecture can lend legitimacy to the media industry. Using architecture as a delivery mechanism for notions of patriotism, nation building, individual aspiration, education, and moral uplift, the media sought to establish its own authority among its readers and citizens more generally. Beyond their own buildings, the New York media have authored an explicit account of urban space and city living. They established architecture, real estate, and land values as important elements of the news agenda, from which they also stood to gain. Yet this public presence is not without its own set of anxieties. To express the identity of a business graphically or via architecture necessitates the construction of certain fictions about the solidity and single purpose of an entity even when neither is immediately known.