I. Maarten Vink was granted an ERC Consolidators Grant for his project ‘Migrant Life Course and Legal Status Transition’
When does citizenship provide a boost to migrant integration? A fast-track to citizenship can maximize the potential for settlement success of migrants, though too short a pathway can disincentivise integration. This project investigates why, how and for whom legal status transition matters, and especially how variation in policies between countries impacts on this relation. The goal is to investigate the relevance of citizenship within the individual life course of an immigrant.
More information about the project here.
II. Article in Journal of Banking Regulation by Aneta Spenzharova, Esther Versluis and Elissaveta Radulova and Linda Flöthe (research master European Studies student)
More robust regulation of the financial industry has been an important policy priority in both the US and the EU after the 2008 crisis. While important advances have been made, such as the Dodd-Frank Act in the US and the Banking Union in the EU, efforts to re-regulate finance have generated significant push-back from the industry. FASoS researchers Elissaveta Radulova, Aneta Spendzharova, Esther Versluis and Research Master European Studies student, Linda Flöthe, have examined the dynamics and sources of banks’ opposition to a recent EU reform package – the 2014 proposal for EU banking structural reforms.
Centralisation of authority in banking regulation and supervision has been a legislative priority in the EU since 2008 in order to address regulatory shortcomings in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. European decision-makers have introduced more stringent capital adequacy requirements and transferred greater powers to the European Supervisory Authorities. In 2014, the European Commission put forward a proposal for banking structural reforms comprised of two elements: a ban on proprietary trading and mandatory separation of some trading activities from the deposit-taking entity. We refer to ‘regulatory cascading’ in order to conceptualise the rapid successive introduction of legislative packages designed to fix problems and gaps in the EU banking regulatory framework. Our analysis shows that most European banks and financial services associations were opposed to further banking structural reforms at EU level. We find evidence that banks domiciled in member states that had already passed reforms preferred the domestic level measures over the EU-wide ones and large internationalised banks were most opposed to further EU banking structural reforms. Overall, EU banking structural reforms signal the ability of the financial industry to ‘water down’ financial regulation. This trend is boosted by the incoming Trump administration in the US, which is rather sceptical toward the value of regulation.
Spendzharova, A., E. Versluis, E. Radulova and L. Flöthe (2016). Too much, too fast? The sources of banks’ opposition to European banking structural reforms. Journal of Banking Regulation, 17(1/2): 133-145.
III. Book published by Ferenc Laczó ‘Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide. An Intellectual History, 1929-1948‘
Hungarian Jews, the last major Jewish community in the Nazi sphere of influence by 1944, constituted the single largest group of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Hungarian Jews in the Age of Catastrophe Ferenc Laczó draws on hundreds of scholarly articles, historical monographs, witness accounts and published memoirs to offer a pioneering exploration of how this prolific Jewish community responded to its exceptional drama and unprecedented tragedy.
The first half of the book maps the major themes, internal plurality, and gradual transformation of representative Hungarian Jewish intellectual publications until 1944. They analyze Hungarian Jewish intellectuals’ negotiation of subjects such as Jewish identity, cultural traditions, historical memory, political ideologies and last but certainly not least, Nazi Germany and its genocidal policies.
The second half of the book provides in-depth intellectual historical case studies of the exceptionally rich and varied Hungarian Jewish corpuses of witness accounts, memoirs and historical narratives produced in the immediate aftermath of the genocide.
Research for the book was triggered by the realization that, even though both Jewish themes and intellectual historical methods have been revived since the fall of the communist regime, the two trends have developed practically independently of each other.Whereas much previous scholarship tended to overemphasize the Hungarian identification of Hungarian Jews and treat its subject largely in isolation from other Jewish communities, Hungarian Jews in the Age of Catastrophe suggests several ways of placing Hungarian Jewish intellectual history in comparative and transnational frames. It highlights the connections to German and German Jewish history in particular and analyzes some of their implications in the age of Nazi Germany.
In its conclusion, the book also discusses the remembrance of the Holocaust in Hungary and suggests reasons for its relative marginalization in an all-European frame. Analysing identity options, political discourses, historical narratives and cultural agendas during the local years of persecution as well as the varied interpretations of persecution and annihilation in their immediate aftermath, this monograph studies Hungarian Jewish history in the age of genocide in an innovative way and places this devastating story at the dark heart of the European Jewish experience in the 20th century.
