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How can we explain an international agreement that appears to run counter to the declared objectives of one of the key players? This article examines the US–EU Open Skies agreement signed in 2007 and asks why Europeans accepted the agreement after having rejected a comparable version three years earlier. Theoretical approaches that explain time inconsistency in international negotiations tend to focus on reasons why states can be constrained to accept suboptimal solutions. In multi-level bargaining, principal–agent and bureaucratization theories focus on loss of control and constructivists suggest that governments can become trapped in rhetoric. This article shows that paradoxical agreements can be voluntary and explains them by showing the rationale behind multi-games that include ambiguity about the future. In particular, increasing the flexibility of the agreement allowed negotiators to escape present-day constituent pressures by remaining ambiguous and betting on shifting coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates a number of conceptual and empirical issues relating to the ambiguity of the concept 'civility'. By asking what kind of problems 'civility' was a response to, it highlights the ambiguity of the concept in a long-term historical context and demonstrates this in a number of key areas for twentieth-century European history: the relationship between civility and violence, civility and the un-making of death, civility and recognition, civility and subjectivity, as well as the dynamic relationship between inclusion and exclusion that characterises the practice of civility particularly in colonial and post-colonial contexts. It then develops a number of themes highlighted by the use of 'civility' as a historical concept, arguing that contemporary meanings of the concept has to be incorporated in empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]