Global Europe – Basel Papers on Europe in a Global Perspective

Introduction

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In this issue of the Basel Papers, we are proud to present to you three outstanding examples of research conducted by recent graduates of the Institute as part of their MA theses. Their work showcases the thematic and methodological interdisciplinarity at play in the teaching and research of the Institute, and engages with subjects as diverse as transitional justice, global health policy, and democratic peace theory.

What ties these works together is their engagement with some of the fundamental challenges of the early 21st century. War, border disputes, and epidemics have once again become frightening realities in Europe and cannot be ignored. Any attempt to understand and address them must rely on careful scholarly investigation, bringing together expertise from across disciplinary boundaries. The papers in this issue hope to make a contribution to this endeavor.

The World Health Organization in Crisis

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The paper examines the World Health Organization’s (WHO) response to the COVID 19 pandemic through the lens of securitization theory, specifically the concept of collective securitization. It explores how the WHO, led by Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, framed the pandemic as a global security threat, thereby justifying the need for expanded authority and the development of a new international health law instrument, the ‘pandemic treaty’. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach that combines political science and legal analysis, the study analyzes speeches, policy documents, and the WHO’s evolving role in global health governance. The findings reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a significant driver for institutional reform within the WHO, as evidenced by the proposed ‘pandemic treaty’, which aims to strengthen global health security. The research contributes to the understanding of how international organizations like the WHO adapt and expand their authority in response to global crises.

A Differentiated View on the Interplay Between Democratic and Territorial Peace Theory

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Democratic peace theory has strongly influenced peace research and Western foreign policy but is strongly contested by territorial peace theory. The current literature underestimates the role of civil society when assessing the effects of political systems on conflict behavior. The work presented here claims that the democratic peace holds when the civic component of democracy is taken into account, even when controlling for border settlement. Furthermore, it is argued that the relationship between horizontal checks and balances within the political system and peace is confounded. The hypotheses are tested, applying a quantitative approach assessing data on militarized interstate disputes (MID) from 1816 to 2001. The different models estimated suggest that a well-established democratic civil society has an appeasing impact on the relations between democracies which is not confounded. However, the results do not support the claim that the relationship between horizontal checks and peace is spurious.

Challenging Peace

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Scholarship on how the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union destabilized Northern Ireland’s fragile post-Troubles peace focuses predominantly on the border issue and Protocol negotiations. However, this article explores the possibility that Brexit and its contributing factors – Euroscepticism, English nationalism, sovereignty concerns and empire nostalgia – also impacted Northern Ireland’s transitional justice processes by playing a role in the introduction of the widely criticized Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill in May 2022, which was passed into law in September 2023. That Bill foresaw the elimination of centralized judicial transitional justice mechanisms and concentrated power in the hands of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Results from an analysis of UK parliamentary debates combined with evidence from two stakeholder interviews indicate that the Legacy Bill’s timing, its contents, and the way in which its introduction was handled by the sponsoring Northern Ireland Office in the UK Government were likely impacted by Brexit and the influence of the hard-Brexit Conservative party faction characterized by its Euroscepticism, English nationalism, and commitment to British sovereignty.