Associate Paolo Graziano

Halpern Charlotte

Charlotte Halpern

Beyond the softening narrative

Introduction

The study of EU governing, how it operates and whom contributes to it, is essential to our understanding of the functioning of this political system. This is particularly true in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which deeply challenged existing forms of decisionmaking and redistribution mechanisms (Streeck and Schäfer, 2013). Possibly, the EU has never been so effective in imposing decisions on member states and societies. And in this critical context, the long-term structuring impact of the policy tools and modes of governance that had been introduced in order to define a new approach to governance were made visible.

By exploring this initial assumption both theoretically and empirically, this special issue sheds new light on current debates regarding the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on EU governing. Following the 2001 White book on governance, a series of new modes of governance and policy tools have been designed and implemented across EU policy domains in order to address simultaneously the problem-solving capacity of EU institutions and the need to strengthen the participation of civil society (Heritier and Rhodes, 2011). Managerial reforms within the EU Commission and policies justified the need for softer modes of governance such as regulatory networks, benchmarking and tools through which policy and state performance could be measured and compared. By providing more participative and negotiated ways of decision-making, these softer modes of governance increased the political and administrative governability of the EU (Radaelli and Coletti, 2013), yet which actors and organizations benefited most from this new governance approach as well as its contribution to increasing the system's political accountability and democratic legitimacy remains a contested issue [START_REF] Bellamy | Symposium on democracy and New modes of governance[END_REF]. The supposed superiority of new modes of governancein terms of both inclusiveness and effectivenesshas been hotly debated in the EU literature.

Following the changes brought since the 2008 crisis to the socio-economic and the fiscal governance regimes, these softer modes of governance have developed into harder, more coercive forms of decision-making, thus justifying the need to re-examine the 'softening narrative', which dominated academic and practitioners' debates about the EU governing over the past fifteen years.

Far from reopening classic debates on EU modes of governance, this proposed special issue uses the governance notion as an organizing concept in order to examine the governing of the EU in times of crisis. More specifically, we argue that focusing on modes of governance contributes to the understanding of "where the power lies in the EU system" especially when an external shocksuch as the crisishits the EU governance system. In our analysis, looking at "power" implies looking at influence, i.e. the capacity of actors to obtain decisions which are in line with their specific preferences. This introductory article highlights some of the aspects that we consider have been at the heart of the new political challenges to the EU in terms of governance. But before we turn to the discussion of such traits, we will briefly situate our analysis in the broader (and 'classic') spectrum of the studies on European integration.

The debate on EU integration: New challenges

Scholars of European integration have always been interested in how the European political organisation was governed. Since the early debates between neofunctionalists and intergovernmentalists, one of the main key research questions wasto put it simplywho was governing what today has become the European Union. Was decision-making primarily in the hands of a supranational body (the European Commission alone first, in combination with the European Parliament later) or in the governmental representatives formally in command European decision making? Although decades have passed since the first studies were conducted, the research question remains crucial in order to assess power relations within the EU.

More recently, this question has been explored through different perspectives [START_REF] Saurugger | Theoretical Approaches to European Integration[END_REF]. This large body of literature progressively shifted from a research question on the nature of the European Union (What is the EU?) to questions regarding the way through which integration occurred (How does EU integration evolves?), thus increasingly focusing on the functioning and the governing of the EU understood as a hybrid political system (Benz and Dose, 2010;[START_REF] Kohler-Koch | The 'Governance Turn' in EU Studies[END_REF]. Drawing on extensive theoretical and empirical findings, the existing work has supported the need for new conceptualization or the relevance of traditional political analysis tools (political science, comparative politics). By looking more closely at the dynamics of EU integration, these studies hoped to deepen their understanding of the EU as a political system, seen primarily as an outcome that needed further characterization. In other words, exploring EU integration process was and still is another way to ask whether or not EU institutions, as a governing body and rule-making authority, have benefited or not from the accumulation of resources vis-à-vis Member States.

Following the work done by a first generation of EU scholars that focused on the role of law and EJC rulings as a main integration factor, a second generation of EU scholars became increasingly interested in softer integration modes, understood here as less hierarchical in nature but with potential of effectiveness and democratization [START_REF] Cini | New modes of governance in the EU: Common objectives versus national preferences[END_REF]. Indeed, and in connection with the evolution and expansion of the European Union, a new wave of studies focussing on 'new modes of governance' has tried to look even more deeply into such topic by examining alternative and innovative ways of decision-making in the European Union. For example, one of the most explored 'new modes of governance' has focused on sectoral governance where a limited space ('the shadow of hierarchy') has been left for public institutions, be they intergovernmental settings or supranational ones (Héritier and Lehmkuhl, 2008). More in general, the 'new modes of governance' literature has highlightedto some degree following the neoinstitutionalist turn in European studies (Pierson, 1998) the fact that governance settings are much more relevant than discussed both in the intergovernmentalist and in the neofunctionalist perspective in understanding who are the major actors in EU decision-making. We could also add that understanding the 'new modes of governance' requires to take into consideration the changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty ( 2009), especially with reference to the increased co-decision powers for the European Parliament (for a critical assessment, see [START_REF] Hosli | Introduction: Decision-Making in the European Union before and after the Lisbon Treaty[END_REF][START_REF] Burns | Legislative codecision and its impact on the political system of the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Lord | No representation without justification? Appraising standards of justification in European Parliament debates[END_REF].

Beyond the assessment of the institutional balances, the new modes of governance literature has also tried to focus on the analysis of emerging forms of self-regulation [START_REF] Heritier | Special issue: The shadow of hierarchy and new modes of governance[END_REF]2011) and greater involvement of citizens in EU decision-making, often however not reaching conclusive findings, focusing therefore more on the notion on innovativeness rather than inclusiveness [START_REF] Kröger | The effectiveness of soft governance in the field of European anti-poverty policy: Operationalisation and empirical evidence[END_REF]. Furthermore, the 'new modes of governance' literature focused on specific policy tools and instruments. They mapped out the way in which, since the early 1990s, the governing of the EU had been characterised by a growing diversity in forms of policy-making. More specifically, after a decade of innovations and new policy developments, from a political perspective the introduction of new types of 'modes of governance' aimed at both rationalising public policies and democratising forms of policy-making has become a central issue in EU policy-making [START_REF] Jordan | The coordination of the European Union. Exploring the capacities of networked governance[END_REF].

Extensive work was done on a series of meta-instruments of coordination, in the sense given by [START_REF] Hood | Intellectual Obsolescence and Intellectual Makeovers: Reflections on the Tools of Government after Two Decades[END_REF], whose introduction aimed at increasing coordination when other mechanisms had failed. Such tools (e.g., organization charts, framework agreements, Open Method of Coordination, the Bologna process, sectoral governance instruments, etc.), which are characterised by their non-hierarchical nature, seek direct involvement from a large variety of social groups and provideat least in principlenew political opportunities for EU institutions.

Summing up, the main focus of the literature on the 'new modes of governance' (Dehousse, 2004;[START_REF] Eberlein | New Governance in the European Union: A Theoretical Perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Caporaso | The new modes of governance and political authority in Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Treib | Modes of governance: towards a conceptual clarification[END_REF][START_REF] Cini | New modes of governance in the EU: Common objectives versus national preferences[END_REF][START_REF] Kröger | The effectiveness of soft governance in the field of European anti-poverty policy: Operationalisation and empirical evidence[END_REF][START_REF] Héritier | New Modes of Governance and Democratic Accountability[END_REF][START_REF] Heritier | Special issue: The shadow of hierarchy and new modes of governance[END_REF]2011) has been threefold: a) providing a conceptual and theoretical clarification; b) setting the links between the 'new modes of governance' and political authority; c) assessing the operational and delegation features of the 'new modes of governance'.

Nevertheless, although increasing, the 'new modes of governance' literature has recently shown signs of 'fatigue', due to the difficulty to grasp analytically the ever changing nature of processes such as the OMC and (post-)Lisbon Strategy (such as Europe 2020) and to the persistence of key features of the 'old' Community Method in current EU forms of governance. Furthermore, scholarly work also showed how such political opportunities have not always increased the coordination capacity of European institutions (again, in primis the European Commission), nor has the decision-making process been effectively more open with respect to civil society [START_REF] Saurugger | Theoretical Approaches to European Integration[END_REF].

Notwithstanding the existing important contributions on the 'new modes of governance', what seems to be still lacking in the academic debates is a comprehensive analysis regarding broad political dimension, more specifically the inclusiveness and effectiveness dimensions, of such modes of governance. We understand the notion of political dimension as the ability of EU institutions to act as legitimate authorities in effectively regulating activities and groups that is, to resolve conflicts, allocate resources and organize larger debates on purposes and coercion (Kooiman 1993;Benz and Dose, 2010). In other words, we argue that focusing on modes of governance, as a meso level of analysis, contributes to the understanding of "where the power lies in the EU system". However, this requires a shift from a highly contextualized understanding of modes of governance that was grounded in the somewhat normative and academic debates regarding the innovative dimension of modes of governance [START_REF] Bellamy | Legitimising the Euro-"polity" and its "regime": The Normative Turn in European studies[END_REF][START_REF] Blyth | Austerity: the history of a dangerous idea[END_REF][START_REF] Papadopoulos | Are innovative, participatory, and deliberative procedures in policy-making democratic and effective[END_REF][START_REF] Bellamy | Symposium on democracy and New modes of governance[END_REF], towards a more analytic understanding of the notion, which needs to be grounded into specific subdimensions such as inclusiveness and effectiveness. In other words and following Treib et al (2007, 2) we suggest abandoning the novelty dimension in order to focus on the more narrow political dimensions of new modes of governance. Indeed, the debate between 'old' and 'new' has little analytic value. Similarly, we reject the narrative according to which there is a growing tendency to introduce soft modes of governance that is, non hierarchical rules and norms, as opposed to classic modes of governance. Rather, we assume the continuous blurring between hard and soft, in which imposition and direct decision-making softens increasingly, while soft modes of governance, such as persuasion, naming shaming, incentives etc. become harder and prove more or less innovative and effective under specific circumstances. To be sure, this does not lead us to discard completely the question of how different 'hard' and 'soft' modes of governance may be, but simply we focus rather on the everlasting coexistence of these modes and focus on the political dimension of governance in terms of inclusiveness and effectiveness. While we share the idea raised by Sabel and Zeitlin (2010) that innovation in EU governance lays the combination of existing policy tools and instruments, we do however, question their pragmatist approach to power as diffuse and dynamic. Exploring the political dimension of governance in terms of both inclusiveness and exclusiveness contributes to the understanding of where the power lies in the EU system. To be sure, conceptually effectiveness and inclusiveness can be strongly related (depending on the definitions, see below), but empirically the two notions may be decoupled or very loosely coupled. In other words, we posit thatalthough often coupled also in the political discourses of EU institutionsinclusiveness and effectiveness may be quite different in reality. And for this reason, we leave the question of their relationship open and asked the authors of the various contributions to this special issue to answer it.

Finally, we are less interested in the design of such tools than in their implementation and long-term effects in terms of both democratization and rationalization. More specifically, we believe that a greater understanding of the impact of the new forms of governance on democratization (specifically in terms of inclusiveness) and rationalization (in terms of effectiveness). Indeed, we assume that a shift in the way power is exerted at EU level may have a specific impact on EU integration process and EU governing in terms of providing legitimation, inclusiveness and effectiveness.

The Crisis and Its Challenges to EU Governance

Our main hypothesis is that the 2008 crisis has offered a new opportunity for the intergovernmental mode of decision-making to prevail, left marginal space for further including citizens in decision-making processes and has provided a very narrow definition of effectiveness (Streeck and Schäfer, 2013). This has been made possible by the increasing predominance of economic multi-level governance, which has increasingly shaped the relationship of almost all other European policies and measures. Additional support in favour of such policy and instrumentation choices was justified in the name of austerity understood as both a set of policies and an ideology [START_REF] Blyth | Austerity: the history of a dangerous idea[END_REF]see also CEP symposium, 2013). To begin with, from a legal perspective, in analysing reforms to EU law and institutional structuresuch as the establishment of the ESM, the growing influence of the European Council and the creation of a stand-alone Fiscal Compactit can be argued that such reforms "are likely to have a lasting impact on the ability of the EU to mediate conflicting interests in all three areas. By undermining its constitutional balance, the response to the crisis is likely to dampen the long-term stability and legitimacy of the EU project" [START_REF] Dawson | Constitutional Balance in the EU after the Euro-Crisis[END_REF]. Clearly, legal analysis must be also tested by empirical research, but we argue that as a starting point there is legalistic evidence concerning a broad reorientation of EU decisionmaking more in line with an accentuation of the powers of (some) Member States on European supranational institutions such as the European Commission and the European Parliament. As a result, we believe this change of context calls for a re-examination of forms of governing in the EU, and more specifically the so-called "softening narrative", in order to go beyond a mere distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' law and focus more on the governing processes which are in place in various institutional and policy areas.

For such purpose, we suggest to introduce an analytic distinction between three following notions: policy tools or instruments, modes of governance, and regimes of governance. This will help us deepen our ability to highlight the typical properties of governing modes at EU level rather than refer to their first introduction in a specific empirical context and therefore understand broader regularities of such governing modes beyond the their empirical specification (Howlett, 2011, 54). More specifically, we define the three notions as follow:

1. Policy tools or instruments can be defined as a set of governing techniques (budgets, practices, norms and standards) that are often dissociated from the political game. Yet, the rationales at work in the choice and selection of the concrete modalities through which policy objectives are made operational, like other processes of implementation or evaluation, are deeply political both in their elaboration and in their effects [START_REF] Lascoumes | Understanding public policy through its instruments[END_REF]. In this special issue we focus on the effects of policy tools understood in terms of both inclusiveness and effectiveness.

2. Modes of governance refer to the way through which different types of policy instrumentsoften pertaining to both binding, sanctioning tools and persuasive, informative toolsare combined with one another at EU level in order to both constraint and enable collective action and the setting of common goals. By narrowing the definition of modes of governance to the interplay of policy instruments, we go beyond the static view of hard versus soft law and try to test whether there has been convergence (or not) through policy areas in terms of instrument combination and/or their outcome in terms of inclusiveness and effectiveness.

3. Regime of governance, understood as a set of arrangements that ensures power allocation among EU institutions and Member States. This notion helps us characterizing the EU political ability to produce a basic form of social order [START_REF] Mayntz | New challenges to governance theory[END_REF], by effectively regulating activities and groups according to evolving relationships between EU institutions and member states on the one hand, and between public and private actors on the other hand (Kohler-Koch and Eising, 1999;Benz and Papadopoulos, 2006). In other words, we ask where the power lies in the EU system, by focusing on the way through which groups and activities are politically regulated (or not). More specifically, by focusing on the inclusiveness and effectiveness dimensions, we are interested in both the governing and the governability of the EU [START_REF] Kassim | Symposium on Exploring Governance in a Multi-Level Polity[END_REF].

We believe that this special issue provides a comprehensive analysis of why and how the continuous blurring between hard and soft shapes the inclusiveness and the effectiveness of EU forms of governance. Indeed, the context of the crisis has further put under pressure the existing modes of governance by requiring more tight supranational control over EU policy implementation (Schmidt and Thatcher 2013; Crespy and Ravinet, forthcoming). Policy tools aiming at rationalizing public policies, investments and programmes (i.e., impact assessment, better governance, etc.) have been systematically introduced (Coletti and Radaelli, 2013).

They contribute over time to reorganizing the functioning of the EU both substantially and procedurally. Recent negotiations on the next programming period (2014-2020), and the setting of policy priorities in preparation of Europe 2020, show how such rationalizing policy instruments shape evolving relationships in the EU, both vertically and horizontally. Indeed, the papers gathered in this special issue illustrate the constant interplay between hard and soft, rather than opposition between two clearly demarcated approaches to exerting power and constraint. In a large number of policy areas, new modes of governance are increasingly used in close combination with traditional "harder" modes of governance. The recourse to sanctioning and disciplining takes over another major priority, namely to further democratize the EU policy. This process does not rely on the introduction of new policy instruments as such, but rather it shows how the systematic combination between old and new modes of governance creates additional opportunities for intergovernmentalist tendencies.

Such phenomenon has wider implications for the understanding of EU integration, as suggested by the intertwining of three mechanisms through which power is exerted: first the recourse to hard mechanisms, such as sanction and norms, that are imposed through direct decision-making; second the use of softer mechanisms that prove more effective in some cases in order to persuade and convince actors to comply with given rules and norms; and third, learning as a major mechanism of power that shapes evolving relationships between EU institutions and member states. In the following sections of this article, we situate the special issue by focussing on the challenges on the ongoing relevanceeven more so in the wake of the economic and financial crisis -of the neglected dimensions of the 'new modes of governance' literature: inclusiveness and effectiveness.

Inclusiveness

Together with the effectiveness dimension, inclusiveness has traditionally been a concern for both EU policy-makers and scholars [START_REF] Metz | EU Commission expert groups. Between inclusive and effective policymaking[END_REF]. More specifically, due to the specific and quite unique setting of the EU multilevel political system, the aim of an inclusive EU has been on the political agenda at least since the introduction of direct election of the European Parliament (1979) and even more relevant after Maastricht [START_REF] Kröger | Introduction: the representative turn in EU studies[END_REF].

Together with the European Parliament, the European Commission has increasingly been concerned with inclusiveness issues, as the White Paper on European Governance (2001) clearly stated: "Today, political leaders throughout Europe are facing a real paradox. On the one hand, Europeans want them to find solutions to the major problems confronting our societies. On the other hand, people increasingly distrust institutions and politics or are simply not interested in them. The problem is acknowledged by national parliaments and governments alike. It is particularly acute at the level of the European Union. Many people are losing confidence in a poorly understood and complex system to deliver the policies that they want. The Union is often seen as remote and at the same time too intrusive." (European Commission, 2001: 3). The European Commission identified five key areas (of principles of 'good governance'), which would have contributed to solving the 'loss of confidence' in EU institutions: openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence. In policy terms, the following decade has been a period which has been labeled as a 'participatory turn' [START_REF] Saurugger | The social construction of the participatory turn: The emergence of a norm in the European Union[END_REF] which was characterized by the fact that EU decision-making had to be more accessible to civil society and be only secluded to institutional relationships (Saurugger, 2010: 483).

Even prior to the empirical analysis of inclusiveness, what seems to be lacking to the overall debate regarding the inclusiveness of EU decision making, however, is a clear distinction between types of inclusion. For example, scholars like Koenig and Bräuninger (1999) have been primarily interested in the inclusion of institutional actors such as the European Parliament, whereas others have focused on the inclusion of non-institutional actors such as civil society representatives [START_REF] Saurugger | The social construction of the participatory turn: The emergence of a norm in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Quittkat | The European Commission's Online Consultations: A Success Story?[END_REF]. Overall, the empirical evidence shows thatalthough increasing inclusiveness has occurred formallyin more substantial terms the picture is more much nuanced.

In order to better focus on the inclusiveness dimensions, we suggest that a clear distinction among types of inclusion must be made. Such a distinction would allow us to better understand differences between formal (in its two variants, institutional and non-institutional) and substantive inclusiveness. Institutional formal inclusiveness regards the openness of institutional decision-making. The key actors are EU decision-making institutions that is, the Council of European Ministers, the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Beyond neofunctionalist or intergovernmentalist accounts of European integration, there is sufficient shared consensus that EU decision-making has increasingly been open via the transformation of the European Parliament as a full co-legislator: in the words of Rittberger, "[b]estowed with only a few nominal powers at the outset, the EP has undergone a remarkable process of institutional empowerment" (Rittberger, 2012: 18). This empowerment may not make the European Parliament fully equal to the Council of European Ministers [START_REF] Costello | The Distribution of Power among EU institutions: Who wins under codecision and why?[END_REF] but still it signals a changing power balance within the institutional functioning of the EU. Put differently, in institutional terms the inclusiveness of the EU has clearly gone a long way in the development of European integrationeven though the crisis seems to have boosted intergovernmental power within most recent patterns of EU decisionmaking. From the civil society (i.e. formal non-institutional), inclusiveness has also increased significantly over the past decade although we should be aware of the fact that "discursive agreement [on the inclusion of civil society] does not entail that there exists a homogenous entity that one could label 'civil society', or that the principle of the participative standard is universally applied" (Saurugger, 2010: 489). For these and other caveats which will be derived from the empirical findings presented in this special issue, we would claim that formal (or procedural) inclusiveness has been granted over the past decade to civil society organizations that is, to well-organized and -established organizations that claim to act in the name and in the interest of society as opposed to citizen themselves (Kohler-Koch, 2008; see also Boussaguet in this special issue).

This feature seems to be even more true due in the light of the European governance of the crisis which has offered greater opportunities for intergovernmentalist decision-making [START_REF] Dawson | Constitutional Balance in the EU after the Euro-Crisis[END_REF] and, consequently, limited the space of intervention for both supranational institutions and civil society actors. Less evidence can be found of a substantive (and generalized) empowerment of civil societyalthough some recent data has cast some doubts on the more conventional interpretation that business interests are stronger than collective interests (Dür and others, 2013). Also the case studies presented in this special issue provide interesting evidence that substantive inclusiveness has been particularly limited since as in the case of the OMCprocedural participation has expanded the most. Put differently, the 'participatory turn' of EU governance seems to be better applied to formal inclusiveness rather than to substantive inclusiveness. And, as the articles in this special issue show, the responses to the crisis further limited the reach of inclusionreducing also formal (both institutional and non-institutional) inclusiveness.

Effectiveness

Since the White Paper on Governance, also effectiveness has been a key word within the redefinition of the European institutions' role in the EU multilevel political system. More specifically, the effectiveness dimension represented a key feature of the so-called 'output legitimacy' or 'output democracy' model which, according to some authors [START_REF] Scharpf | Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic?[END_REF], characterizes the European Union. But where lies the effectiveness problem within the EU? In principle, we should distinguish between two types of effectiveness: policy effectiveness and political effectiveness. The first type of effectiveness is linked to the need that the policies designed, adopted and implemented at the EU level are effective in the sense that they are (at least) producing the expected results; the second, broader type of effectiveness is linked to the legitimacy needs of the EU multilevel political system, following the understanding that EU institutions will be politically effective when the overall support ('legitimacy') within the affected political community is favourable. More specifically, with respect to policy effectiveness, the European institutions, and the European Commission in particular, have the task to cover 28 member states and oversee policy formulation and implementation, which is applied to over 500 million EU citizens. As Metz rightly notices, "[o]ften policy makers do not possess sufficient in-house expertise to formulate adequate problem solutions (...). [T]his (...) is particularly pronounced in the European Union, where governing institutions are both highly understaffed and geographically detached from domestic settings to which EU regulation applies" (Metz, 2014: 263). EU institutions tried to mobilize external expertise in order to fill knowledge gaps, and this resulted in the so called 'committee system' (with over 1,000 expert groups assembling more than 30,000 experts, advising especially the less-than-23,000 staff of the European Commission (Metz, 2014: 264). However, the role of experts is ambiguous in terms of potential power unbalances since they mayat least in theorybe strategically used by the Commission [START_REF] Rimkuté | How does the European Commission use scientific expertise? Results from a survey of scientific members of the Commission's expert committees[END_REF] or some experts may systematically prevail over others [START_REF] Metz | EU Commission expert groups. Between inclusive and effective policymaking[END_REF]. To be sure, this ambiguity regards rather the nature of inclusiveness and openness of EU decision-making and not the capacity to reach the fixed policy goals.

Therefore, we shall focus on the latter, knowing that a general analysis of EU policy-making is out of the reach of this contribution. For our purposes, it should suffice to say that policy effectiveness depends heavily on the policy sectorand both horizontal and vertical power relations within that sectorand over the past years policy effectiveness concerns have been particularly relevant in terms of responding to the economic crisis via the tightening of domestic budgetary constraints rather than fixing more ambitious goals in other policy areassuch as social policy. Put differently, policy effectiveness has overridden the search for political effectiveness, especially in a context of austerity during which the increased shrinking of public authorities' discretionary power further restrain their redistributive capacity (Streeck and Schäfer, 2013).

Although we shall see in the various contributions to this special issue how policy effectiveness has varied, we consider political effectiveness more relevant since it regards the political system as such and does not merely pertain to specific policy sectors. With this respect, the systemic attempt to obtain 'output legitimacy' in an overall context characterized by limited 'input legitimacy' [START_REF] Scharpf | Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic?[END_REF] seems to be even more salient since it can tell us something about how European integration is perceived by the potential beneficiaries of its overall functioningthe members of the EU political community -, beyond specific policy sectors of which large parts of the populations may not even be aware of. Furthermore, 'system effectiveness' has been a greater concern for scholars of democracy beyond the EU (Dahl, 1994), providing stronger scientific legitimacy to our selective choice. It allows linking the debate on spaces of modes of governance together with a larger debate on the EU integration process.

In order to measure the political effectiveness of the EU we consider two indicators as particularly relevant: voter turnout and trust in the EU (as measured by the standard Eurobarometer questionnaire). The first is a crude indicator of how important EU institutions are perceived, the second is a less crude indicator of the levels of trust in EU institutions. We are well aware of the relative inaccuracy of the indicators, but for the moment no valid alternative of 'system' or political effectiveness operationalization seems to be in sight. In terms of voter turnout, the trend has been increasingly negative: from 62% in 1979 to 43% in 2009. Breaking down the data, it is even more striking that with the exception of Latvia and Estonia all the other new Central-Eastern members underperformed with respect to the EU average -and after the crisis exploded voter turnout has diminished also in 'old' member states. If we turn to the level of trust, the past ten years have witnessed a rapid decline in the overall trust -from 42% or EU citizens who 'tend(ed) to trust' EU institutions in 2003 to 29% in 2013, and from 42% who 'tend(ed) not to trust' to 58% in 2013 (See Eurobarometers, 2013). Also in this case, after the crisis exploded trust has further declinesalthough causal links are difficult to pin down in general terms (whereas for more specific policy-based accounts, see the various contribution to this special issue) Clearly, we are not supporting any causal inference nor are we trying to link policy effectiveness and political effectiveness, but for the purposes of our discussion on the missing (or underdeveloped) dimensions of analysis with respect to the governance debate we think that these data are more than evocative. In other terms, we consider that a systematic consideration of the effectiveness dimensionand not primarily the policy dimension but rather the political oneneeds to be assessed when EU governance is scrutinized. In the various articles of the special issue we will deal more specifically with policy effectiveness, but in this introductory article we wanted to devote specific attention to the importance of 'system' or 'political' effectiveness as a crucial yardstick which allows us to better understand how the past decade has changed the relationship between the governance actors (especially EU institutions) and the potential beneficiaries of their activity (the members of the EU political community). Notwithstanding the 'new modes of governance', 'system effectiveness' has significantly declined over the past decade.

The governance mix: overview of the findings presented in the special issue.

By bringing together scholars currently conducting research on different dimensions of EU governance, this special issue examines the evolving role of modes of governance in shaping the governing of the EU and the mechanism through which power is exerted at EU level. We focus more specifically on the challenges that the crisis has posed to both the neglected dimensions of the 'new modes of governance' literature: inclusiveness and effectiveness. The findings of the case studies are considered in the following section in relation to the sets of questions outlined above. Although it is not possible to pursue all the lines of inquiry suggested, the cases offer many important insights.

Going beyond the softening narrative offers new understandings of the EU and the way through which mixed, multi-faceted forms of governance have emerged over time and more particularly following the crisis. In several instances, the contributors assembled here challenge accepted wisdoms in the existing literature. Dehousse and Falkner, demonstrate the weak explanatory role of the softening narrative in order to highlight shifts of power in the EU. Not only do they empirically demonstrate the continued blurring between "hard" and "soft", but they also suggest to focus more on existing governing processes in order to map out their restructuring in a context of crisis. In its discussion of recent evidence from EU legislative activity, Dehousse critically re-examines the shift to "new governance". He shows that in strategic areas such as economic policy coordination or banking regulation, the severity of the financial crisis has resulted in a tightening of European rules and in stronger control mechanisms. Similarly, Falkner shows how the recent introduction of fines as a new policy tool of EU law enforcement against member States results in weakening the softening and the 'innovativeness' narratives.

Going beyond an understanding of resistances as forms of non-compliance, Saurugger and Terpan provide further evidence on the continued blurring between hard and soft law. They argue that resistances to soft law is as frequent as that to hard laweven if less empirically observablethus confirming the policy effectiveness of soft law and the profound changes in governance structures and power allocation it may lead to over time. Interestingly, they make the case that increasing resistances to EU law should not be understood in terms of ungovernability but rather as a proof of its growing normalization and acceptance as an effective rule-making authority.

Another finding shared by many of the contributors is that shifts of power in the EU are by no means unidirectional. This has major implications for the literature on the effectiveness of EU governance. It also contributes to current debates about if and how the EU Commission has been a beneficiary of the crisis (Bickerton, Puetter and Hodson, 2014). In spite of growing anti-European sentiments in the EU and of increasingly assertive governments, the strengthening of European rulessometimes based on the strategic usages of the "soft" instruments at its disposal -has enhanced its authority across policy domains (see Dehousse's contribution). This is done by adding hierarchy and increasing the sanctions attached with cross-sectoral and cross-national policy performances. In this sense, the systematic use of collaborative, non-coercive and informal modes of governance does not just result in the weakening of EU institutions and governing capacity. Indeed, standardized measurement procedures, detailed surveillance mechanisms and systematic assessment of national / sectoral performance strengthenin theorythe steering capacity of EU institutions over member states and societies. This process is most certainly detrimental to the European and member states Parliaments, but whether or not it benefits the European Commission largely varies from one case to the other as argued by Falkner. She shows that "the Commission considers the opportunity to combine quite different instruments of great importance in its efforts to ensure compliance with EU law" (Falkner, in this special issue). Taking a different view on non-compliance to EU law, Saurugger and Terpan argue that the effectiveness of soft law is best understood in relationship with social -as opposed to legalsanctions, but proves no less effective in terms of the EU's governing capacity. In the case of financial markets, Kudrna examines how evolving forms of governance in the financial market regulation domain led to hardening soft modes of governance. Following the 2008 crisis, successive reforms strengthened the role played by the EU level, through the continued reinforcing of independent agencies and specialized committees. Yet, the process through which "the governance of the financial market regulation in general and of banking in particular, evolved from the most generic community method to a multi-level process centred around independent agencies" does not automatically benefit to EU institutionsthe Commission, the Council and the Parliamentsince these newly created bodies are "better positioned to balance disparate interests than either the Commission or national authorities by virtue of combining both national and supranational points of view." (Kudrna, in this special issue).

These results highlight the structuring effect of new modes of governance on the EU governance regime, both in terms of its inclusiveness and its effectiveness. By favouring increased institutional inclusiveness, these processes contribute to enhancing the complexity of EU decision-making. They contribute to multiplying the number of veto points and players, policy-making arenas and opportunities to resist and circumvent EU norms and rules. Over time, the sedimentation of new modes of governance and policy instruments also result in shifting policy priorities to the detriment of inclusiveness. This is particularly true in times of crisis, during which the functioning of existing modes of governance enhanced the EU's policy effectiveness. This is less true however, with regards to political effectiveness, as these findings also confirm the political dimension of instrumentation choices. Indeed, specific combinations of policy tools and the ability to seizeor notthe opportunities expected from a given mode of governance does not result from an automatic process but it is also shaped by politics. As shown by Falkner, in some cases of large-scale and visible non-compliance, soft pressurizing maybe more effective than penalization and public shaming.

The findings also hold some implications for the EU governance and democracy. They empirically challenge the contribution of new modes of governance, such as impact assessments, to redefining the EU governance regime and enhancing the EU's democratic credentials. Some contributions do so by focusing on specific policy instruments and their implementation over time, thus confirming the widening gap between increased forms of formal (especially institutional) inclusiveness and substantial inclusiveness. Focusing on impact assessments as one of the concrete devices through which inclusiveness has been made operational at EU level, Bozzini and Smismans explore the usages made by the European Commission's DGs of this mode of governance over time. They highlight different patterns of participation, and why and how it was primarily understood by DGs as an opportunity to enhance coordination by building intra-institutional relationships as opposed to ensuring neutral expertise and increasing input-legitimacy. They first show that DGs tend to include a limited amount of actors in impact assessments and the variations observed depend less from the density of interest groups in a given policy field than from processes of learning within each DG. A related point, made by Boussaguet, concerns the usages that were developed of the participatory instruments that were introduced at EU level in order to enhance the inclusiveness of the decision-making system. Since the early 2000s, a series of specific policy instruments such as citizens conferences, deliberative polls, regular consultations and, last but not least, the European Citizens' Initiative where introduced in order to include ordinary citizen as opposed to the organized civil society. Her findings confirm the little use made of such policy instruments by ordinary citizen. Yet she also argues that the impact of such a symbolic reform should less be assessed in terms of policy outputs or levels of inclusiveness, but rather in terms of their political effectiveness since they demonstrate the EU's continued attempts to engage in a structured dialogue with citizens. Nevertheless, the evidence presented by Boussaguet confirms that political effectiveness is still lacking notwithstanding the symbolic relevance of the new initiatives aimed at increasing the inclusiveness dimensions.

By contrast, other contributors chose to focus on a specific policy domain and the extent to which new modes of governance did contributeor notto increasing institutional inclusiveness. Examining the case of financial market regulation, Kudrna provides some insights on the functioning of new modes of governance and policy instruments in the context of the 2008 crisis. He argues that such forms of cooperation prove less effective in these extreme circumstances, thus justifying another governance reform that primarily relies on expert committees and independent agencies. By opening additional space for policy coordination, new modes of governance shaped a continued shift towards a more regulatory approach to financial market regulation and the emergence of a multi-level governance system in which legitimacy is increasingly constrained by the expansion of technocratic policy-making.

Conclusion

The focus on dimensions of inclusiveness and effectiveness brings out dimensions of policymaking that have hitherto remained hidden and highlights characteristics of the ways through which the EU is governed that have been relatively unexplored. The governing of the EU is increasingly complex, that characteristic having been considerably increased through the sedimentation of successive layers of new policy tools and modes of governance. By opening successive space for interests mobilization and representation, they did contribute to enhancing the institutional inclusiveness of the governance regime as a whole, as well as to the policy effectiveness in some specific cases. However, their effects in terms of substantive inclusiveness and political effectiveness appear to be extremely limited. This is particularly true since the 2008 crisis, which appears to have led to the hardening of pre-existing sets of policy tools and modes of governance as a way to increase coordination. From the analytical point of view, the results presented in this special issue clearly show the limits of the narratives that explained new directions in EU governance in terms of their "softening" and of a "new governance" approach. These analytic frameworks fail to explain recent changes in the EU governance regime, inasmuch as they are unable to explain the hardening of existing policy tools and the multiplication of autonomous spaces. Focusing on policy tools, and analysing the way they are combinedsomewhat uneasilywith one another in relation to the notions of inclusiveness and effectiveness properly understood, offers fruitful avenues for the understanding of the EU political system, the way and limitations of how it is governed.


ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Crystal-Clearness: For the Second-Rates M GIREL

In one of his contributions to The Nation, Peirce claims that -Crystal clearness, such as we justly require in mathematics, in law, in economics, is in philosophy the characteristic of the second-rates.‖ The statement might seem paradoxical enough: isn't Peirce the author of How to Make our Ideas Clear (hereafter: HMIC), the seminal paper for the pragmatist tradition, a paper that is sure to be included in each and every anthology of American thought? How can clearness then be -the characteristic of the second-rates‖? I take it that these perplexities arise only in a superficial reading of HMIC and that the present quote tells quite a lot about Peirce's doctrine and style.My first section concerns the method one should adopt in philosophy according to Peirce and explains in part why belief and doubt play such an important role in the Illustrations series. The second one concerns the kind of problems Peirce felt attracted to and how we can make sense of what he says about the -strongest‖ thinkers. KEYWORDS: Clearness, Philosophy, Illustrations, Pragmatism, Style, Obscurity, Method, Doubt, Belief.

Word count: 3000 words

Crystal-Clearness: For the Second-Rates

In one of the numerous contributions by Peirce to The Nation, we find this gem:

-Crystal clearness, such as we justly require in mathematics, in law, in economics, is in philosophy the characteristic of the second-rates. The reason is that the strongest men are able to seize an all-important conception long before the progress of analysis has rendered it possible to free it from obscurities and difficulties.‖ (CN2, 84, 1894). This is part of a review of Spinoza's Ethics written in 1894, when Peirce had already the benefit of hindsight concerning his early papers, when he had been in the process of revising the Illustrations, for his Principles of Philosophy or for Search for a Method. The statement might seem paradoxical enough: isn't Peirce the author of How to Make our Ideas Clear (hereafter: HMIC), the seminal paper for the pragmatist tradition, a paper that is sure to be included in each and every anthology of American thought? How can clearness 1 then be -the characteristic of the second-rates‖? I take it that these perplexities arise only in a superficial reading of HMIC and that the present quote tells quite a lot about Peirce's doctrine and style. The first section concerns the method one should adopt in philosophy and explains in part why belief and doubt play such an important role in the Illustrations series. The second one concerns the kind of problems Peirce felt attracted to and how we can make sense of what he says about the -strongest‖ thinkers.

The Philosophic Difference

First, let's acknowledge that Peirce's claim certainly has a paradoxical sound to it. In HMIC, Peirce insists that we can obscure discussions by using words that are totally devoid of any meaning, by being led astray by mere homonymies and non-obvious synonymies. Peirce's idea, notoriously, is that the -logicians‖, in the wake of Descartes and Leibniz, have often contented themselves with the two first grades of clearness: clearness as (perfect) familiarity with a notion and clearness as distinction -as in a good definition-when nothing remains that we do not understand. Peirce thinks that these two -grades‖ are not enough to dissolve the kind of obscurity in which metaphysicians keep the present state of the debate. He offers thus a third grade of clearness, the pragmatist one: one may make a notion clearer by paying attention to its use, to its role in theories: -Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.‖(W3, 266) In which kind of practices, in which uses, is this conception actually involved? Answering these questions is often indispensable to fully develop the meaning of a conception. Peirce, by offering his -pragmatist‖ maxim and by highlighting the practical bearings of the object of our conception, wants to uproot the cardinal error of lazy thinkers, mistaking 1 Any discussion on the topic of clearness in Peirce should now start with Colapietro 2009.

-the sensation produced by our own unclearness of thought for a character of the object we are thinking‖(W3, 264). Making this subjective obscurity explicit and dismissing it is one of the first and main services of pragmatism, in view of putting a term to unending philosophical disputes, and also of opposing practical and political ways of taking advantage of obscurity 2 . But isn't that kind of conceptual elucidation equivalent to -crystal-clearness‖? Firstly, a higher grade of clearness is not equivalent to perfect and total clearness. After all, what is needed is not a pragmatist equivalent of Cartesian intuitions or sensationalist impressions, as if we were to trade a kind of immediacy for another, but tools preventing us from falling in the grip of systematic fallacies. When James offered his 1898 gloss of How to Make our ideas clear in Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results, he also provided some details about his own understanding of the pragmatist maxim: -To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical kind the object may involve: what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.‖ (James 1978, 124) This sentence involved -perhapsa different account of practice, understood in terms of particulars, whether of -acts‖ or of -sensations‖; but it also introduced a change in the description of the effects of the pragmatist maxim. James claimed that we could reach perfect clearness where Peirce used the comparative register rather than the superlative one: he provided a method for attaining to -a more perfect clearness of thought‖ or -a method of reaching a clearness of thought of a far higher grade than the ‗distinctness' of the logicians.‖(W3, 261) Our quote is thus paradoxical only in James's reading. There might be other grades of clearness (Kent 1987, 236), and grasping clearly a key notion does not mean that all the notions involved in the theory are themselves crystal-clear, even though they would certainly have to be so for a nominalist, prone to think of 2 -Instead of perceiving that the obscurity is purely subjective, we fancy that we contemplate a quality of the object which is essentially mysterious; and if our conception be afterward presented to us in a clear form we do not recognize it as the same, owing to the absence of the feeling of unintelligibility. So long as this deception lasts, it obviously puts an impassable barrier in the way of perspicuous thinking; so that it equally interests the opponents of rational thought to perpetuate it, and its adherents to guard against it.‖ (W3, 261) everything in terms of particulars.

Secondly, Peirce's point is not about such and such notion, but about philosophy. Well before 1894, Peirce thought that total clearness might be attained in economy and in law but was not reachable everywhere and certainly not in philosophy, for the time being, which does mean that he would have the slightest indulgence towards those who do not try to be as exact and clear as possible in that domain. In 1868-69, Peirce had drawn a difference between sciences where treatises could be made -Dynamics and Astronomy for example (W2, 188)-and other disciplines that had not reached (yet) that very stage.

Treatises can be made in disciplines where a reasonable consensus about methods and results obtains, and where one does not meet the doubts of other competent inquirers at every corner. In most discussions however, metaphysicians, whether properly trained or not, do not agree 3 , and for this very reason, their main conclusions remain doubtful: -Whatever is doubted by men whom there is reason to think as competent judges, is so far doubtful; and, therefore, a certain shade of doubt will hang over almost all psychological or very general propositions.‖(W2, 189) The first sentence is a permanent component of Peirce's theory of inquiry, the context confirms that the second part is a conclusion pertaining to philosophy, at least to philosophy when it does not stick to the style of the experimental and natural sciences before they are settled. Perfect clearness in that domain would be, for now and for that very reason, specious, fake, clearness. There are significant consequences to this, concerning both the method and the premisses adopted in philosophy.

-As regards its premises, philosophy, as the other sciences, must rest on -those ordinary facts of which (in a general way) we are actually assured and therefore cannot, if we would, mistrust.‖(W2, 189) It is for this reason that cognition will be approached not by starting directly with the concept of truth, where we would be instantly lost in an -sea of metaphysics‖, but with conceptions that we cannot doubt belong to inquiry, belief and doubt (W2, 357). There is a straightforward and often overlooked continuity between 3 -It is to no avail that philosophers adopt strictly demonstrative forms of argument as long as they cannot, after all, come to agreement upon certain conclusions. //What competent men disagree about is not certain.‖ (W2, 187; 1868) the 1868 and the 1878 papers: the former ones provide the starting point of the latter. We have to focus and doubt because in the present state of the debate 4 , the concept of truth itself is rendered doubtful: -that which we seek in an investigation is called truth, but what distinct conception ought to be attached to this word is so difficult to say, that it seems better to describe the object of an investigation by a character which certainly belongs to it alone, and which has nothing mysterious or vague about it.‖(W2, 355) This -character‖ consists in the fact that, when we inquire, we aim at resolving doubts, at switching from doubt to belief (See W3, 35, among many other instances). So, the fact that the theory of inquiry starts with considerations on belief and doubt is itself the after-effect of a general doubt about truth. Belief and doubt are deemed clearer and are used as means to approach the important and strategic concept, that of truth.

-As regards style and method, if philosophy has to mimic something in the sciences, it is not the demonstrative style, not the -rigidness of proof‖, but -those less complicated reasonings upon which Galileo established the laws of motion and Copernicus the order of the solar system‖ (W2, 190), that is to say multilayered arguments, relying on sundry sorts of inductive support, looking like -cable[s]‖(W2, 213) more than like -chains‖. According to Peirce, the principle of inertia, was -more than a shrewd guess‖ when he was first enunciated by Galileo, but -was not supported on all sides‖(W2, 188). Galileo too was able to seize an -all-important conception‖ in a clouded debate and long before other men could make use of it. Philosophy, Peirce ventures, might be in the same state now than dynamics juste before Galileo, when no clear consensus was extent, but when indifference was not considered anymore as the last word of wisdom. We have to trace philosophical theories to their consequences and then, -see how many facts they serve to explain, and which are the ones which require to be retained‖(W2, 188). Finding which conceptions can highlight others, still in the dark, is the flesh and bone of philosophical activity: our quote just drives this point home.

That was a general reason why there is something suspect about crystal-clearness in philosophy and it is 4 See also -Mathematics does not need to take up any hypothesis that is not crystal-clear. Unfortunately, philosophy cannot choose its first principles at will, but has to accept them as they are.‖ (CP4.176) an interesting question, not to be treated here, whether this is only a temporary predicament or whether this is a permanent feature.

A Sense of Legitimate Obscurity

Sometimes, too, obscurity is a price to pay to tell and to see something new.

Peirce's -Ethics of Terminology‖(CP2.222), claiming that a new scientific conception needs a new word or a family of -cognate words‖ but that one must be careful not to use a new word if this conception is another former one in disguise, certainly led his contemporaries to charge him with a certain amount of philosophical obscurity. "Thirdness", "Cenopythagorean", "Praescisive", not to mention -Papyrobite‖(CP2.763), might cause such an impression, while they are in fact introduced to make it clear that they embody new conceptions, with a distinctive conceptual function, and the temporary bewilderment in front of them will always be better than a spurious and unfounded feeling of familiarity 5 . This is why Peirce turned so angry at James when the latter used the term -pragmatism‖ to refer to his own philosophy, -transmogrifying‖ it by the same effect. This terminological creativity can be found in the many lexicographic contributions by Peirce: dozens of entries in Baldwin's Dictionary, thousands of entries for the Century Dictionary, from cocktail names to the most abstract notions of mathematics, which makes this last dictionary seems quite special, since some of the words, we suspect, find in this dictionary their one and only occurrence, which certainly has a Borgesian charm to it.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. In The Basis of Pragmatism in the Normative Sciences, Peirce urges that mastering the normative sciences would be tremendously important to understand the -rationale of Pragmaticism‖, and he adds that instead of providing a full survey, -the reader [will] instead have to traverse this space, so full of marvels and beauties, as in a night train, pent up in this cramped section, obscure and airless‖(EP2, 376). Traveling in the amazing landscapes of metaphysics as in a night train 5 -It is good economy for philosophy to provide itself with a vocabulary so outlandish that loose thinkers shall not be tempted to borrow its words.‖ (CP2.223) launched at full speed is certainly something that more than one has felt reading Peirce. There is a kind of vital urgency in that, which has nothing to do with the -vitally important problems‖ required by James for the 1898 Cambridge Lectures, but everything to do with the fact the fundamental problems are raised, that the most likely ways to attack them are clearly seen, but with little hope that enough time is left to provide a full treatment of all of them. Confining oneself to the most important questions is often a way to leave deliberately all the minor questions in the shadow. There is a strategic choice to make when approaching a new field of inquiry and sometimes obscurity is a price to pay for strategic clearness: -I am, as far as I know, Peirce remarks, a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up what I call semiotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis; and I find the field too vast, the labor too great, for a first-comer. I am, accordingly, obliged to confine myself to the most important questions.‖(EP2, 413) For these all-important questions, clarification is perforce local first. The temporary obscurity, in the remote parts of the -too vast‖ field then opened, is the direct effect of these radical breakthroughs, in the same way that knowledge, by opening new fields of inquiries, fresh "knowledge-to-be", creates it own kind of ignorance. James, at the beginning of Pragmatism, credits Peirce with the method of pragmatism, but insists at once on Peirce's -flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness‖(James 1985, 10). To his credit, James does not claim that everything is obscure in Peirce; just after, he seems to understand that in addition to the subjective obscurity that might be dispelled, there might be a kind of -objective‖ obscurity, of the sort that one feels in front of the immensity of a problem: -There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants understand them.

We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness.‖ There is a name for that feeling in philosophy, even though it might give a pause to strict Kantians: it is an analogon of the sentiment of the sublime, a sublime that would occur not only in front of mathematical and dynamical immensity, as Kant has it, or in front of political power, as Burke has it sometimes, but in front of thought, in front of the monuments we have that give a sense of the immensity of what would remain to be thought and of the immensity of the task. Peirce himself has compared architectural monuments, and in particular

monuments associated with the sublime, to those of thought. To get an idea of what a scholastic reasoning consists in, he suggests, look at a cathedral: -there is nothing in which the scholastic philosophy and the Gothic architecture resemble one another more than in the gradually increasing sense of immensity which impresses the mind of the student as he learns to appreciate the real dimensions and cost of each.‖ (W2, 466) This is no passing reference and is not a mere historical remark, since, concerning his own philosophical bent, Peirce confessed later in strikingly similar terms: -There is [...] nothing more wholesome for us than to find problems that quite transcend our powers, and I must say, too, that it imparts a delicious sense of being cradled in the waters of the deep, -a feeling I always have at sea.‖(CP 8.263) This -oceanic feeling‖, depicted here well before Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud used the phrase, is something Peirce voiced several times. For example, when he understood that the fundamental question in philosophy was not -How is a priori synthetic judgment possible?‖ but -How is synthetic judgment possible?‖, which led him to find, under the apparent simplicity of Kant's table of judgments, the unbound ocean of semiotic relations, he commented upon this discovery in terms that perfectly express the temporary lucid disorientation that is at the core of most important philosophical breakthroughs: -Suffice it to say that I seemed to myself to be blindly groping among a deranged system of conceptions.‖(CP5.163) Understanding a philosopher better than he would have understood himself, feeling that something is wrong at the fundamental level, when the means to explain how and why have to be devised for that purpose, is just another way to -seize an all-important conception long before the progress of analysis has rendered it possible to free it from obscurities and difficulties‖. The -strongest men‖ are not the ones for which everything is clear, but those who can see clearly in the twilight. Colapietro, Vincent (2009). Habit, Competence, and Purpose: How to Make the Grades of Clarity Clearer. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. 45 (3), 348-377. Kent, Beverley (1987). Charles S. Peirce: Logic and the Classification of Sciences. Montreal, McGill-Queens University Press. James, William (1978). Essays in philosophy, The Works of William James. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. James, William (1975[1907]). Pragmatism, The Works of William James. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.


Mihai Dascalu
email: mihai.dascalu@cs.pub.ro

Stefan Trausan-Matu
email: stefan.trausan@cs.pub.ro

Philippe Dessus
email: philippe.dessus@upmf-grenoble.fr

Validating the Automated Assessment of Participation and of Collaboration in Chat Conversations

Keywords: Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Cohesion-based Discourse Analysis, Dialogism, Participation Assessment, Collaboration Evaluation

As Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) gains a broader usage as a viable alternative to classic educational scenarios, the need for automated tools capable of supporting tutors in the time consuming process of analyzing conversations becomes more stringent. Moreover, in order to fully explore the benefits of such scenarios, a clear demarcation must be made between participation or active involvement, and collaboration that presumes the intertwining of ideas or points of view with other participants. Therefore, starting from a cohesion-based model of the discourse, we propose two computational models for assessing collaboration and participation. The first model is based on the cohesion graph and can be perceived as a longitudinal analysis of the ongoing conversation, thus accounting for participation from a social knowledge-building perspective. In the second approach, collaboration is regarded from a dialogical perspective as the intertwining or overlap of voices pertaining to different speakers, therefore enabling a transversal analysis of subsequent discussion slices.

Introduction

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) gains a broader usage in several newest educational settings, like MOOCs or collaborative serious games, as a viable alternative to classic educational scenarios. The need for automated tools capable of supporting all their actors in the time consuming process of analyzing conversations becomes more stringent. Chat conversations or forums became the place where knowledge is collaboratively built and shared [START_REF] Stahl | Group cognition. Computer support for building collaborative knowledge[END_REF] and there is a complex intertwining between collective and individual learning processes that is worth analyzing [START_REF] Cress | Mass collaboration and learning[END_REF]. Shortly put, two complementary analysis approaches compete. The first one is structural, uses Social Network Analyses and stems from group dynamics to unveil relationships between individuals to sketch networks of collaboration [START_REF] Reffay | Basic concepts and techniques in social network analysis[END_REF]. The second approach is dialogical, has roots in discourse theories [START_REF] Bakhtin | The dialogic imagination: Four essays[END_REF] and uses Natural Language Processing techniques to analyze the semantic cohesion of textual utterances (e.g., sentences or paragraphs).

After devising several systems inspired from the dialogical approach [START_REF] Dascalu | PolyCAFe: Collaboration and Utterance Assessment for Online CSCL Conversations[END_REF] and using a cohesion-based model of the discourse as underlying structure [START_REF] Dascalu | Cohesion-based Analysis of CSCL Conversations: Holistic and Individual Perspectives[END_REF], we propose computational models for assessing participation and collaboration. Within our approach, participation is regarded as cumulative qualitative utterance scores and is modeled through the interaction graph presented in the second section. Section three introduces two computational models for assessing collaboration. The first one is based on the cohesion graph [START_REF] Dascalu | ReaderBench, an Environment for Analyzing Text Complexity and Reading Strategies[END_REF] and can be perceived as a longitudinal analysis of the ongoing conversation, thus accounting for participation from a social knowledgebuilding perspective. In the second model, collaboration is regarded from dialogism as the intertwining or overlap of voices pertaining to different speakers, therefore enabling a transversal analysis of subsequent discussion slices. This paper is the occasion to present in the fourth section the results of a large-scale validation by comparing the outputs of our system with human evaluations.

Participation Assessment

Measuring participation in virtual groups and communities on the web communicating through chats, forums or different types of social networking was performed in the structural approach by considering the number of emitted posts or utterances and by using several social networks metrics like centrality (number of links to other nodes), betweenness (nodes that, if eliminated would highly reduce or eliminate communication among other participants) [START_REF] Brandes | A Faster Algorithm for Betweenness Centrality[END_REF] or page-rank derived formulas [START_REF] Dascalu | ASAP -An Advanced System for Assessing Chat Participants[END_REF] in the interaction graph with users as nodes and posts as arcs [START_REF] Dascalu | ASAP -An Advanced System for Assessing Chat Participants[END_REF]. Sometimes arcs have weights computed in different ways, from the simplest number of posts to more complicated metrics, considering the language content of the messages, like in our dialogical approach, which will be presented below.

The assessment of participation of each student in CSCL chats has some differences from the cases of forums or other social networking due to the small number of participants (typical examples are 3 to 7 students) and the large number of exchanged utterances. In this case, due to the fact that for chat conversations we are dealing in most cases with a complete graph, betweenness score for all nodes is 0. Centrality also is not a very significant discriminant: only participants with very low number of emitted utterances are not central.

In our approach, we are taking a perspective based on natural language processing of the content of utterances, considering the topics that were supposed to be discussed (for example, stated by the teacher in a CSCL homework) and focusing on discourse analysis. The latter's defining feature is cohesion and our approach is fundamentally based on it. From a computational point of view, cohesion is computed as a combination of semantic distances in ontologies, semantic similarity from Latent Semantic Analysis vector spaces, and Latent Dirichlet Analysis topic models [START_REF] Dascalu | ReaderBench, an Environment for Analyzing Text Complexity and Reading Strategies[END_REF]. Starting from this aggregated similarity function, a multi-layered cohesion graph is built [START_REF] Dascalu | Analyzing Discourse and Text Complexity for Learning and Collaborating[END_REF] that models through cohesive links the dependencies between the key elements of the analysis: the whole conversation, participants' utterances and sentences for longer posts. The previous links can be either explicit if participants marked the dependencies within the user interface, enforced for hierarchical links and adjacent analysis elements or implicit, if cohesion exceeds a threshold value [START_REF] Dascalu | Analyzing Discourse and Text Complexity for Learning and Collaborating[END_REF].

In terms of participation, we start with the identification of discussion topics for each participant for pinpointing out if the needed concepts were covered. One of the most important metrics is the utterance score that, shortly put, represents the overall topics coverage augmented through cohesion with inter-linked analysis elements [START_REF] Dascalu | Analyzing Discourse and Text Complexity for Learning and Collaborating[END_REF]. In this aim, an interaction graph is built with participants as nodes and the weight of links equal to the sum of utterances scores multiplied by the cohesion with the interlinked analysis elements [START_REF] Dascalu | Analyzing Discourse and Text Complexity for Learning and Collaborating[END_REF].

Collaboration Evaluation

In order to thoroughly assess collaboration, we have proposed two computational models. The first model [START_REF] Dascalu | Cohesion-based Analysis of CSCL Conversations: Holistic and Individual Perspectives[END_REF] represents a refinement of the gain-based collaboration assessment [START_REF] Trausan-Matu | A system for the automatic analysis of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning chats[END_REF] and takes full advantage of the cohesion graph [START_REF] Trausan-Matu | Textual Complexity and Discourse Structure in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning[END_REF]. The second is a novel approach that evaluates collaboration as an intertwining or overlap of voices pertaining to different speakers. The main difference between the two is that the first focuses on the ongoing conversations, therefore on its longitudinal dimension, whereas the later considers subsequent slices of the conversation, the synergy of voices, in other words the transversal dimension.

Social Knowledge-Building Model

The actual information transfer through cohesive links from the cohesion graph can be split between a personal and a social knowledge-building process [START_REF] Stahl | Group cognition. Computer support for building collaborative knowledge[END_REF][START_REF] Bereiter | Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age[END_REF][START_REF] Scardamalia | Collective cognitive responsibility for the advancement of knowledge[END_REF] at utterance level. Firstly, a personal dimension emerges by considering utterances with the same speaker, therefore modeling a kind of inner voice or continuation of the discourse. Secondly, inter-changed utterances with different speakers define a social perspective that models collaboration as a cumulative effect. Our model is similar to some extent to the gain-based collaboration model [START_REF] Trausan-Matu | A system for the automatic analysis of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning chats[END_REF] and marks a transition towards Stahl's model of collaborative knowledge-building [START_REF] Stahl | Group cognition. Computer support for building collaborative knowledge[END_REF] by representing a conversation thread as a multi-layered cohesion graph. The continuation of ideas or explicitly referencing utterances of the same speaker builds an inner dialogue or personal knowledge, whereas the social perspective measures the interaction with other participants, encourages idea sharing and fosters creativity for working in groups [START_REF] Trausan-Matu | Computer Support for Creativity in Small Groups using chats[END_REF], thus enabling a truly collaborative discussion. Moreover, personal knowledge building addresses individual voices (participant voices or implicit/alien voices covering the same speaker), while social knowledge building, derived from explicit dialog (that by definition is between at least two entities), sustains collaboration and highlights external voices.

Dialogical Voice Inter-Animation Model

In order to achieve genuine collaboration, the conversation must contain threads of utterances integrating key concepts ('voices', in the musical polyphonic sense [START_REF] Trausan-Matu | Polyphonic Inter-Animation of Voices in VMT[END_REF]) that inter-animate in a similar way to counterpoints in polyphonic fugues. Voices are present in utterances from multiple participants of the conversation. In order to obtain an operationalization, a shift of perspective is required from voices, computed as semantic chains of related concepts, towards an individual participant. As collaboration is centered on multiple participants, a split of each voice into multiple viewpoints pertaining to different participants is required. A viewpoint consists of a link between the concepts pertaining to a voice and a participant, through their explicit use within one's interventions in the ongoing conversation. We opted to present this split in terms of implicit (alien) voices [START_REF] Trausan-Matu | Polyphonic inter-animation of voices in chats[END_REF] Moreover, this split presentation of semantic chains per participant is useful for observing each speaker's coverage and distribution of dominant concepts throughout the discussion.

In addition, in order to identify the voice overlaps now pertaining to different participants, we changed from an ongoing longitudinal analysis of the discourse, presented in the previous subsection, to a transversal analysis of a context consisting of several adjacent utterances. We use a cumulated value of Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) obtained from all possible pairs of voices pertaining to different participants (different viewpoints), within subsequent contexts of the analysis (within our implementation we used a sliding window of 5 interventions in order to model the local context of each voice occurrence). From an individual point of view, each participant's overall collaboration can be seen as the cumulated mutual information between his personal viewpoints and all other participant viewpoints. Therefore, by comparing individual voice distributions that span throughout the conversation, collaboration emerges from the overlap of voices pertaining to different participants.

Participation and Collaboration Validation

The validation experiments focused on the assessment of 10 chat conversations that took place in an academic environment in which Computer Science students from the 4 th year undergoing the Human-Computer Interaction course at our university debated on the advantages and disadvantages of CSCL technologies. Each conversation involved 4 or 5 participants who each had to support a given technology (e.g., chat, blog, wiki, forum or Google Wave) in specific use case scenarios during the first phase of the discussion, later on proposing an integrated alternative that would encompass the previously presented advantages. The 10 conversations were manually selected from a 10 times larger corpus of chats. Afterwards, 76 4 th year undergraduate students following the same course, but from a different generation, and 34 1 st year master students attending the Adaptive and Collaborative Systems course were each asked to manually annotate 3 chat conversations. We opted to distribute the evaluation of each conversation due to the high amount of time it takes to manually assess a single discussion (on average, users reported 1.5 to 4 hours for a deep understanding) [START_REF] Trausan-Matu | Automatic Support for the Analysis of Online Collaborative Learning Chat Conversations[END_REF]. In the end, we had on average 33 annotations per conversation and the overall results indicated a reliable automatic evaluation of both participation and collaboration. We validated the machine vs. human agreement by firstly computing intra-class correlations between raters for each chat (avg ICC participation = .97; avg ICC collaboration = .90) and, secondly, as these correlations were all very high indicating very few disagreements between raters, non-parametric correlations (avg Rho participation = .84; avg Rho collaboration = .74) were determined between machine vs. human mean ratings for each chat.

Conclusions and Future Research Directions

Starting from a dialogic model of discourse centered on cohesion, we thoroughly validated our system in terms of analyzing chat participants' involvement and collaboration, the later employing a longitudinal model based on social knowledgebuilding and a different transversal model based on voice inter-animation. Moreover, as the validations proved the accuracy of the models built on dialogism, we can state that the proposed methods emphasize the dialogical perspective of collaboration in CSCL environments. In addition, the analyses performed in this paper have a very broad spectrum of applications, extending from utterance cohesion towards group cohesion rooted in collaboration. Beyond the rather simple visualization of individual and collective involvement, our developed system is also well-suited to enable students to selfregulate their learning.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the students of University "Politehnica" of Bucharest who participated in our experiments. This research was partially supported by the 264207 ERRIC-Empowering Romanian Research on Intelligent Information Technologies/FP7-REGPOT-2010-1 project.


niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Chessboard Optimal chessboard color change

David Dureisseix

This is a preprint of: D. Dureisseix, Chessboard, British Origami Magazine 201:20-24, 2000.

The color change allows the folder to make some patterns appear on a paper with one color on each side. One is used for the foreground, the other one, for the background. It is typically a folding sequence related to an "edge effect": Usually, the color cannot change on a model without crossing one edge of the paper, Figure 1a. There are some exceptions as in Figure 1b, but as an edge of the paper is hidden, it cannot be used anymore for color change; consequently, this situation is close to the previous one.

When folding a chessboard from an initial square of paper, the color changes are numerous. There are several chessboards folded from a strip of paper, or using modular origami; much less models use a unique square of paper. It is not surprising that a large square is needed for folding (without cutting) a quite small chessboard. For instance, Max Hulme folded a 8x8 chessboard from a 64x64 square in 1977, [1, pp. 36-38]. More recently, in 1996, Marc Kirschenbaum succeeded in folding it from a 40x40 square of paper [START_REF] Kirschenbaum | Chessboard[END_REF]. John Montroll produced one in [START_REF] Montroll | Origami Inside-Out[END_REF] from a 36x36 square of paper. Can a similar chessboard be folded from a smaller square of paper? What is the smallest one? There are no mathematical proof that a 32x32 paper is the smallest one, but a quite convincing presumption that it is. All is based upon the previous remark about edge effects: there must be an edge part of the paper between each neighbouring chessboard light and dark squares. The pattern of initial edges mapped onto the folded chessboard must fullfill this property. For instance, Figure 2a shows such an edge pattern. Other patterns can drawn, such as Figures 2b and2c, but none has more symmetries that the first one. Moreover, each uses a 32x32 initial square of paper.

In order to compare the levels of difficulty, the Figure 3 reports the crease patterns, edge patterns and final models for 2x2, 3x3 and the very elegant 4x4 module of Max Hulme [1, p. 32].

Folding sequence

The chessboard proposed herein has the edge pattern of Figure 2a, and so, is probably "optimal," according to maximal usage of the paper.

Step 1. Pre-crease the 1/16th. Waterbomb base related folds to gather the paper at the center.

Step 2. Rotate to lock. Turn over.

Step 3. Bring edges again toward center.

Step 4. Sink.

Step 5. Book fold. Repeat steps 4-5.

Step 6. Petal fold. Repeat.

Steps 7-8. Fold flaps. Here is a 2x2 pattern.

Step 9. Squash and swivel together.

Step 10. Petal fold (notice the dissymmetry of the fold).

Step 11. Open sink on the left. Reverse fold on the bottom.

Step 12. Open sink again on the left. Same fold as in step 9 on the right.

Step 13. Squash-swivel on the left. Same fold as in step 10 on the right.

Step 14. Same fold as in step 9.

Step 15. Same fold as in step 10.

Step 16. Color change. Repeat steps 8-16 following symmetries.

Step 17. Here is now a 4x4 pattern. Re-fold wider. Step 18. Color change. Repeat steps 17-18 everywhere needed.

Step 19. Complete.

Figure 1 :Figure 2 :

 12 Figure 1: Simple color changes

2

 2

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Increasing difficulty of color changes