Governments and regulatory agencies make policy through a range of instruments from soft-law guidelines and executive orders to executive rules with the force of law. Based on her book, Democracy and Executive Power, Susan Rose-Ackerman’s essay highlights the link between cross-country differences in rulemaking practices and underlying constitutional frameworks. Based on the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the chapter illustrates how these countries’ disparate constitutional structures help to explain their divergent rulemaking practices. She stresses the existence of policymaking accountability under the rulemaking provisions of the US APA and its absence from the other cases. Nevertheless, whatever the legal framework, the author argues that bureaucrats should take account of outside input as they implement statutory language to make policy choices. The organization of the executive branch should encourage public input and promote bureaucratic competence. Contemporary pressures may indeed be moving all of these countries toward more accountable procedures – not just to protect individual rights but also to enhance the democratic legitimacy of executive rulemaking.

When British troops entered Germany, they found ‘well dressed and well fed’ Germans, showing how much the Nazi state had plundered from occupied nations and camp inmates. Soon, however, prominent British opinion-shapers arrived at a new appreciation of German victimhood. Millions of ethnic German ‘expellees’ created a constituency of displaced persons whose basic needs had to be met. Central to this story is British publisher, humanitarian and activist Victor Gollancz, the force behind ‘Save Europe Now’ (SEN). Gollancz’s polemical interventions used ‘kaput’ shoes as emblems of German immiseration, evoking the footwear stripped from victims of Nazi genocide. While SEN encouraged Britons to send clothing and food parcels to Germans, British occupation authorities revised their understandings of former enemies and allies. The chapter concludes with the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremberg to try leading Nazi war criminals in 1945–6. Noting the ‘deflation’ of Nazi leaders stripped of uniforms and insignia, British and US observers also remarked on poor Soviet apparel. Western attempts to kindle consumerist aspirations behind the Iron Curtain soon became prominent.

The First World War marked a shift from liberalism and internationalism to a period characterised by nationalisation, ethnicisation of citizenship, and economic protectionism. The art market’s history aligns with these narratives, highlighting the fragmentation of a European trade zone and the disruption of a transnational trade equilibrium. The war prompted significant structural transformations in these markets, with Germany seeing a surge in art investment as a hedge against inflation. In Britain, art sales were driven by tax obligations and national service investments. Conversely, the French market struggled, facing stagnation and a focus on preserving existing collections due to the threat of destruction. Neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland maintained stable art markets, fostering avant-garde movements and serving as hubs for buyers and sellers. The year 1914 catalysed structural transformations in these markets, highlighting how modern warfare altered art’s perception, value, and trade.

Chapter 2 covers the period from 1960 to 1980 and analyses how teachers’ unions emerged as the most powerful force in education policy, often at the expense of other interest groups – most notably the private school associations and parental groups. The chapter investigates how this shift in influence shaped major education reforms of that era. It explains how governments found it relatively easy to expand secondary education to an entirely new generation, as teachers’ unions stood to gain substantial material benefits. In contrast, governments faced extraordinary difficulties in integrating the selective education systems into comprehensive school types aimed at promoting social inclusion, largely due to strong union opposition. Additionally, the chapter analyses how teachers’ unions, in fierce competition with other interest groups, consolidated and extended their influence at local levels across the case countries and the European Union.

In Chapter 6, we turn to the difficulty of studying sensitive data. In studying politically relevant issues, one may unavoidably encounter phenomena which are sensitive to talk about because they are painful for many. We point out that such data can best be studied if we distance ourselves from the object of our inquiry, by taking a contrastive look at our data. As a case study, we examine political apologies realised after the Second World War by representatives of the Japanese and German states, following war crimes perpetrated by their respective countries. Japanese and German war apologies are highly controversial and have often been described with sweeping overgeneralisations. We believe that it is important to venture beyond such overgeneralisations and examine in a bottom-up and contrastive way – relying on both qualitative and quantitative evidence – exactly how representatives of these countries realised their apologies.

In Germany, the utility model is a type of intellectual property right that provides protection for novel and useful inventions. It is governed by the German Utility Model Act (“Gebrauchsmustergesetz” – GebrMG) which was enacted in 1891, making it the oldest still-existing utility model system in the world. Utility models grant the right holder exclusive control over the use and commercialisation of an invention for a period of ten years from the date of filing, subject to the payment of annual renewal fees. In a way, the utility model is the “little sister” of a full-fledged patent (also called a “petty patent”), protecting the same type of subject matter (technical inventions) with a more limited scope.

Soon after the adoption of the new constitution and its own establishment, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the Basic Law had a “radiating effect” on all of German law and life, including private law. The Court reached this decision in the Lüth case amid much debate and a range of alternative understandings. Many legal actors worried that such a move toward horizontal application would blur the line between public and private law to the detriment of the civil law system. Following Lüth, jurists at all levels eventually assumed the Constitutional Court’s rationale that one could not speak of private law divorced from constitutional law. Still, certain elements of the German legal-political culture emphasized autonomy in private spaces. Likewise, constitutional actors largely considered cases relating to equality and antidiscrimination as a limit to horizontal application. As cases relating to such matters have arisen, the Constitutional Court and other constitutional actors have reexamined the reach of horizontal application. Republican discourses only extended so far in early understandings, but new forces, particularly in initiatives of the European Union, have led the Court and Bundestag to reassess how far into private spaces these rights commitments reach.

This chapter details Schopenhauer’s critique of a key modern ideology that grew increasingly strong during his own lifetime: nationalism. First, it notes how Schopenhauer argued that ethnic sameness cannot ground any moral obligations of individuals. Second, it turns to Schopenhauer’s critical dissolution of teleological national history, according to which nations are collective agents with a singular fate. For him, nations were not unified subjects with one shared destiny. Third, it reviews his caustic comments on the increased importance of the vernacular in scholarly communication and the attempt to establish an exclusively German literary canon. To Schopenhauer, nationhood was not even a useful category of cultural appreciation. Through this reconstruction, Schopenhauer emerges as a fierce antinationalist who questioned the importance of the nation as a supposedly cohesive community of mutual care, a unified historical subject, or even a meaningful cultural phenomenon.

In chapter 11, To act now if we are to act at all (June 16 - Jun 27) the relative calm in Austria is followed by increasing concern about Germany which looses foreign exchange. The Bank of England, the New York Fed, the Banque de France and the Bank for International Settlements arranges a $100 million credit to the Reichsbank. Meanwhile,on June 20, US President Herbert Hoover announces his plan for a one year moratorium, which is received positively in most of Europe, but not in France. George Harrison assumes a more active role in trying to defuse the concern about a breakdown in Europe, and he enters into dialogue with the Banque de France, which is more open to a solution than the French government. The chapter ends with some optimism that the Hoover proposal may have changed the situation in Europe.

Chapter 13, Germany will collapse (June 19 - July 10) begins with everyone’s eyes on Germany where the uncertainty about the French position towards the Hoover plan increases every day. More generally, politics comes to play a larger role, as Norman increasingly emphasizes that it’s about politics, and Harrison has to take Hoover’s plan into account. At the same time leadership in the epistemic community of central bankers shifts away from Norman toward Harrison, who enters into a dialogue with French central bankers. Tensions arise between Norman and Harrison, as the begin to subscribe to divergent narratives of the situation and what needs to be done. In Germany, the situation gets more concerning by the hour, and Hans Luther travels to London and Paris in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a giant credit to the Reichsbank.

Chapter 10, A world political problem (June 11 - June 16). This chapter recounts the endgame of the Austrian crisis, while instability spreads to Germany. Norman comes to realize that in reality there is not much the central banks can do, since the real issue is "a world political problem" going all the way back to the Versaille Peace Agreement of 1919, the German war reparations and the allied’s war debts. The International Creditors Committee negotiate in Vienna with the Credit Anstalt and the Austrian government and at the very last minute they succeed in getting guarantee for their deposits, while promising to leave them for at least two years. At the same time, on June 16, negotiations with French bankers over the Austrian bond loans fails, and the Bank of England singlehandedly steps in with a bridge credit to the government. Together, the loan and the standstill agreement stops the Austrian crisis, at least for a while.