Civil-military relations have long been an important topic for political science scholars. In spite of its long tradition, however, the field has been repeatedly criticised as being too detached from the greater domain of political science and being too conservative in its conceptual, theoretical and methodological foundations. In recent years, however, a new generation of civil-military research has emerged which has considerably promoted the development of the field beyond the confines of the classical texts. This symposium comprises four articles by European scholars who share a conviction to furthering the study of civil-military relations and developing closer links between the mother discipline of political science and its more specific subfields of comparative and theoretical military studies.

In addition to introducing and contextualizing the four other contributions to this symposium, this article makes three arguments. Firstly, the Icelandic case has shown up severe weaknesses in the internal market for financial services, including liquidity risk regulation and intergovernmental conflict resolution mechanisms. Echoing Scharpf's analysis of EU decision making, a deep asymmetry has been revealed: It was much easier to grant actors access to each other's domestic markets than to create a pan-European financial regulation creating a clear division of responsibilities and the ability to pool resources and share burdens. The second argument is that political economy has developed a supply-side bias. This has decreased attention to the mechanisms that inject instability into economic performance at the macro level and distribute risk and instability at the level of households and firms. The third point made is that while spectacular boom and bust cycles (reasonably) strengthen the case for less rationalistic micro foundations in the study of economic behaviour, this also entails the risk of losing sight of how perfectly rational (but immoral) financial actors take advantage of their less savvy counterparties – be they creditors, shareholders or taxpayers. The article concludes that financial stability is ultimately about governance and therefore about power.

Iceland's boom and bust replicate in miniature the causes, development and trajectory of the absolutely larger but proportionately smaller American boom and bust, except for Iceland's costly lack of a reserve currency and its banks’ preference not just for speculating in but also overpaying for shaky assets. In the aggregate, both the US and Icelandic economies sold short-term, passive, and liquid assets to the world, consumed part of that borrowing, and reinvested outward in fixed, long-term and active investments. The key differences between Icelandic and US banks are that Iceland's banks made their titanic gambles without the benefit of an international reserve currency. The United States survived its catastrophe and continues to have access to global credit markets without much penalty because the dollar is the international reserve currency. By contrast, Iceland has mortgaged its economy and economic independence for decades to bail out banks that had overpaid for dodgy assets.

The transatlantic crisis of 2003 was not only about the Iraq War. It concerned a range of foreign policy issues, as well as commitments to multilateralism and security institutions more broadly. The dispute over the International Criminal Court (ICC), for example, was frequently cited as evidence of a transatlantic rupture or a growing gap between Europe and America. The US proved deeply ambivalent about the idea of a permanent court with independent powers and weary about limiting its own foreign policy maneuverability. The European debate, while internally fragmented, generally supported a Court that mirrored its own structures, cut across power politics and extended a legal regime internationally. Barack Obama's election brought a new wave of optimism in transatlantic relations as many expected his foreign policies would be more aligned with European priorities. The tone improved decidedly in 2009, and because of political and humanitarian crises in Sudan the US prepared itself to engage constructively with the ICC. Nevertheless, as this article demonstrates, the US and Europe are still worlds apart on the ICC and the international legal order that it represents.

Establishing civilian control of the military is an important challenge for new democracies. Surprisingly, however, there is no established conceptual framework for understanding what civilian control entails and how exactly weak or absent civilian control impinges upon democratic quality. This article addresses these lacunae, developing a new concept of civilian control for emerging democracies. It proposes to understand civilian control as the situation in which civilians have decision-making power in all relevant political matters. Differentiating civilian control as consisting of five decision-making areas, this new concept allows for a nuanced analysis of civilian control and comparative analysis. It also provides a comprehensive framework for systematically assessing the impact of incomplete civilian control on the various dimensions of liberal democracy.

This article seeks to understand the 2008 economic crisis in Iceland in light of the ‘animal spirits’ framework as pioneered in the 2009 book by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. Rooted in a Keynesian perspective it analyses the micro-foundations of a boom and bust sequence. It demonstrates how human attributes such as confidence, reliance on stories and bad faith can help explain the decisions taken in Iceland in the time leading up to the crisis. The combination of high levels of confidence and a new era story spurred a development that morphed into a mania. Actions based on bad faith also contributed as they gave the impression of success even though, in the long run, they undermined the whole system.

The article sets out to answer two closely related questions of why western states do outsource and why they display a variance. Hypotheses will be drawn from historical and sociological institutionalism and probed in two cases: Germany and the US. Historical institutionalism argues that the current contractor support is in keeping with the historical trend. Sociological institutionalism instead argues that states organise their militaries according to a globally shared template. However, the extent to which it is implemented is strongly influenced by the ideational foundations the states are built upon. Comparing these explanations, this study argues that patterns of military privatisation result from globally shared standards and the ideational foundations of the state rather than from historical trajectory and material benefits.

This article offers the central argument that universalisms – defined as narratives of identity and role-playing in International Relations (IR) – depict different roles and identities for the United States and the European Union (EU). On the one hand, America's universalism depicts the democratic city upon a hill that leads in the world by example and with power, hard and soft. On the other, Europe's universalism is a utopia (an ideal plan) and a fragile balance between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism, putting forward consensual but ambiguous notions of ‘civilian’ and ‘normative’ power. Despite ample evidence of its international primacy and potential, the EU insists on keeping a low profile in IR. As a result of these trends, the rhetoric of the West and common values on the basis of transatlantic relations are clearly undermined.

This article addresses the development and trend of thinking in terms of ‘civil-military relations’ towards ‘security sector governance’. The first section reviews political-military and civil-military relations theory from its beginnings to present. The next section examines the post-Cold War transformation of the principle of civilian control by taking into account i.e. its new relevance in international affairs. While the subsequent section briefly discusses the so-called ‘constructivist turn’ in civil-military relations theory, the paper concludes with an outlook related to the security-development nexus and its possible impact on civil-military relations.

It is believed in some quarters that the transatlantic relationship has never endured a more trying decade than the last, and yet the ‘Obama effect’ seems to have resurrected it from beyond the ‘tipping point’. Can we conclude then that the crisis was not as damaging as feared? Or are we erroneously subscribing to inflated expectations of America's ability to change in the age of Obama? Without a reliable measure of what constitutes an exceedingly good or bad period in the relationship, any narrative that tells us we have ventured into the extreme seems inconclusive. America and Europe need each other, and contrary to far-reaching theories of demise or rebirth, this vital relationship will evolve not on the fringes but instead in moderation and into something more complete.

This article looks beyond economic explanations of the financial crisis in Iceland, and focuses on the political preconditions for the crisis. The argument is that liberalization of the economy, privatization of the banking sector and lax regulation, together with looting strategies from investors, explain both the rise and fall of the financial sector in Iceland. By examining the historic development of the Icelandic financial sector from 1991 until 2008, I show how fundamental changes, through liberalization and Europeanization, in the economic system made the crisis possible. Data have been collected from official government documents, newspapers, research papers and published reports.

The article, written from a post-financial crisis vantage point, applies Katzenstein's democratic corporatist model to the case of Iceland, and asks if it overlooks an essential message from theory, namely that small states need an external protector in order to survive, economically and politically. The article claims that the model convincingly made the case for how small states can buffer from within but fails to grasp their need for external shelter to cope with risk. In a financialised world economy, small states need economic and political shelter in order to prevent risk from spiralling out of control and they need support in order to clean up after a crisis.

The Obama administration's first year in office has been characterised by the rhetorical rollback of the Bush administration's excesses and an emphasis on inclusiveness and restraint. This article considers the grand strategic response to the end of the Cold War of Obama's Democratic predecessor as President to highlight that the strategic challenges faced by the new President are more fundamental than simply reversing the policies of George W. Bush. So far, Obama has used rhetoric and engagement to buy time; it remains to be seen whether his policy of détente will be better understood in terms of the decline of American power.

The analysis of discursive practices enables us to get a deep understanding of single cases and the characteristics of their particular political context. The case of the military coup in Thailand in 2006 serves here to demonstrate the applicability of discourse analysis to investigations of the relation between civilian control of the military and the process of democratic consolidation.