Stefaan De Rynck will base part of his presentation on his recent book ‘Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done’, a frank account of the EU’s side of the Brexit story from 2016 until 2021, the period when the EU and the UK negotiated the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). His talk will dispel some myths in the UK’s perception of those negotiations both by what used to be ‘Remainers’ and ‘Leavers’, and explain how the EU remained patient while the UK changed aims and tactics. De Rynck will talk about the art of negotiations and the relationship between EU negotiators and their principals, which showed a remarkable unity.

The talk will also analyse today’s EU-UK relationship based on the WA, the TCA, and the recent Windsor Framework for Northern Ireland; how Brexit shaped today’s EU; and how the Russian war in Ukraine changed both the EU and its relationship with the UK.

Macro-prudential regulation is a set of economic and policy tools that aim to mitigate risk in the financial and banking systems. It was largely developed in response to the financial crisis of 2007-08, turning central banks into de facto financial policemen. The book ‘Taming the cycles of finance’ traces the post-crisis rise of macro-prudential regulation and argues that, despite its original aims, it typically supports finance in times of crisis but fails to curb it in times of booms. Investigating how different macro-prudential frameworks developed in the UK, the USA and the Eurozone, the book explains how central bank economists went about building early warning systems to identify fragilities in the financial system. It then shows how administrative and political constraints limited the effects of this shift, as central banks were wary of intervening in a discretionary manner and policymakers were opposed to measures to limit credit growth.

Despite the large theoretical literature about institutions and institutionalism over the last thirty years, the specific nature of political institutions has been neglected. There is considerable and unbearable confusion about 1) what phenomena deserve to be labelled ‘institutions’, 2) which institutions merit to be called political, and 3) what distinguishes political institutions from the other types of social and economic institutions. Political institutions have been subsumed into the broader problems of the emergence, persistence, change and functions of all types of institutions, from cultural templates to customs and conventions, from social norms to administrative cultures and role expectations, from property rights to organisational forms, to end with constitutions, political parties, welfare states, etc. Political institutions are defined strictly as norms and rules of ‘conferral’, to be distinguished from norms/rules of ‘conduct’ and of ‘recognition’. These norms and rules empower rulers, set limits to their capacity to ensure behavioural compliance, and define the proper means for achieving such compliance. In this discussion the author draws logical and empirical consequences from this understanding.