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The paper analyzes the institutions and regulations that govern the transnational movement of dead bodies in contemporary Europe. With the extension of free movement across the European Union and the subsequent expansion of transnational employment, tourism, and retirement, the repatriation of corpses from one member state to another lies in an ambiguous regulatory space. In exploring how dead bodies move between EU member states, and how their movements are regulated within transnational and national systems, the paper pays particular attention to the legacies and continued relevance of mid-century international agreements. Section 1 contextualises the issue of the transportation of mortal remains, discusses our broader theoretical background, and explains our research methods. Section 2 provides an historical overview of the foundational international regulations governing the repatriation of corpses: the 1937 Berlin Agreement and the 1973 Strasbourg Agreement. In Section 3, we present a comprehensive review of the discussion of repatriation of EU citizens between EU countries that occurred in the European Parliament and Commission between 2000 and 2018. In so doing, we focus on the ways in which understanding institutional action and inaction provides a lens on the operation of supranational competency development and its limits, and on the complex ways in which institutional arrangements are interwound within national, international, and transnational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union defence sector is not only crucial for the EU's security, but it is also a major industrial asset for EU member states, as it may foster innovation and greater integration among member states, as well as facilitate technology transfer. The understanding of and inferences about the sector, however, are laborious since data on the defence industry in Europe is often contradictory and confused and it is mostly compared at the national not at the European level. As a contribution to address such shortcomings and as opening piece for this Special Issue, this article focuses on the finding, collecting, cleaning, and organizing data on the geographical concentration/location of EU defence industries. This is a fully original descriptive analysis of the current situation, and it provides a reliable basis on the concentration/location of defence companies. This paper represents a firm basis from which to explore (in future research) how defence companies contribute to the technological integration of the EU and it should help the reader to better understand the following articles in this Special Issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper serves as the introduction for a special issue investigating the current status of the new EU mobility regime close to 20 years after the first eastward enlargement. Our main claim is that EU labour mobility is shaped by and has created multiple hierarchies across the EU and within EU countries, as is evident in the unequal labour market outcomes of different groups of mobile EU workers. The EU migration regime has grown more complex and diversified over the years, but underneath this complexity remain strong hierarchies that structure the patterns and consequences of mobility. We therefore propose the concept of 'hierarchized mobility' to grasp the complex yet unequal mobility opportunities of workers within the EU. Moreover, we argue that to understand this hierarchised mobility, both socio-economic factors and regulation should be studied. On the one hand, enduring hierarchies between national labour markets shape EU labour mobility and transform these hierarchies into hierarchies within national labour markets. On the other hand, both national and EU policies regulate and shape mobility and the hierarchies it creates. The interaction between EU rules that shape different categories of mobile workers and national social and labour market regulation can counteract or reinforce the trend towards hierarchised mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the debate on domestic politicisation of EU issues by suggesting hitherto overlooked explanation of (non)politicisation. This paper uses Czechia as an intriguing case in which the mainstream explanations of a low level of domestic politicisation of EU issues do not apply. The Czech case illustrates that, first, even in the context of high public Euroscepticism, EU issues do not necessarily become politicised, particularly so when the public does not consider them to be important. Second, high politicisation does not occur when there is a path dependency of a mismatch between positions of political parties and significant parts of their electorates on EU issues. Finally, the rise of catch-all populist parties prevents a high level of politicisation of EU issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2014, several European Union (EU) member states have adopted their own versions of "Feminist Foreign Policy" (FFP). Increasingly, feminist bureaucrats, politicians, activists and scholars are calling for the EU to do the same. This article scrutinises claims to the feminist actorsness of the EU by introducing the analytical concept of Feminist Power Europe (FPE). In employing FPE the article examines whether the EU can adopt a FFP that upholds transformative potential of feminism. Undertaking critical content analysis of key documents, we identify three overarching feminist frames that emerge in the EU's external policies: (1) Liberal; (2) Intersectional; (3) Postcolonial. We demonstrate that the EU's propensity for a transformative feminist foreign policy is limited by the setup of global politics and the main drivers of European integration, which continue to be situated in a traditionally masculine environment and are defined by prevailing hierarchies. In undertaking this work, we highlight the constraints of advocating for the EU to adopt a FFP. This paper concludes by cautioning against the uncritical deployment of "feminism" in foreign policy articulation within an FPE configuration that excludes reflexivity about the EU's external relations vision and indeed, its practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than six decades, the European Union (EU) has promoted, one way or the other, systematic European territorial integration, understood as the process of reducing many kinds of cross-border barriers. This article debates the role of the EU b-solutions initiative in facilitating cross-border commuting in Europe via its contribution to a body of knowledge, which, in its practical application, has the potential to act as a resource to be drawn on in the mitigation of a wide range of legal-administrative barriers. A theoretical framework for relating cross-border commuting and cross-border barriers is set out, and existing cases from the b-solutions initiative are mapped against it. The authors demonstrate the framework's value as a tool for determining the relevance of cross-border obstacles and solution factors for the issue of cross-border commuting. The paper concludes that the EU b-solutions contributed with concrete policy actions as well as a body of knowledge and solution-orientated planning towards reducing a range of legal-administrative cross-border barriers in Europe, and therefore represents a set of lebenswelt interventions contributing to the potential for increasing cross-border commuting flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A seemingly continuous stream of crises in Europe has turned scholarly agendas towards assessment of the EU's management of crises. Those assessments vary widely, depending on the analytical focus and criteria used. This paper introduces three assessment criteria drawn from crisis research that pertain to the detection of a crisis, the mobilization of necessary resources, and the nature of the public debate about critical choices made in times of crisis. We relate these crisis management insights to long-standing debates in European integration theory to help link traditional crisis management assessments with EU-focused theorizing. The article offers a framework for assessment of the EU's performance as a crisis manager. We illustrate the utility of the framework with a brief application to the EU's response to Covid-19. We assess the EU's performance in positive terms: the Union acted quickly after a somewhat slow start and was very effective in mobilizing a variety of resources. At the same time, we note that major policy choices were made without a significant public debate about potential effects on the future character of the Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public attitudes towards the free movement of workers in the European Union vary substantially between countries and individuals. This paper adds to the small but growing research literature on this issue by analysing the role of national welfare institutions. We investigate the relationship between the degree of 'institutional reciprocity' in national systems of social protection and attitudes to EU labour immigration across 12 European countries. We do not find evidence of an effect of institutional reciprocity on opposition to EU labour immigration among the public at large. However, institutional reciprocity appears to matter for economically vulnerable groups. We identify an interaction effect indicating that higher degrees of institutional reciprocity in national social protection systems, and in unemployment insurance systems specifically, are associated with lower levels of opposition to EU labour immigration among unemployed people. Hence, reciprocity in welfare state institutions appears to shield free movement from opposition, at least among vulnerable groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the politicization of European integration is channeled through the media, it fundamentally implies a discursive power distribution between actors and institutions based on who and what type of argument is promoted. Scholars have started to hypothesize who will benefit from this expansion of debates to wider publics, predominantly using media logics to conclude with the notion of 'discursive intergovernmentalism': where media spotlights enter, executives benefit. In this paper, we contribute to these nascent studies into the discursive empowerment of actors and institutions, by adding a critical notion. Taking our cue from Critical Discourse Analysis, we argue that media output should not only be theorized based on news values, but equally by accounting for existing institutional power (im)balances. To evaluate this argument, we draw on new intergovernmentalist theory, and empirically delve into the Spanish and Dutch media coverage of the (run-up to the) July 2020 NextGenerationEU recovery package. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have applied theories of European integration to interpret crisis-led policymaking processes and integration outcomes in the EU. However, there has been little attempt to appraise the analytical leverage offered by major integration theories as a function of different crisis pressures. We theorize that diverse combinations of crisis pressures generate four decision-making scenarios in the EU, each of which can be ascribed to different combinations of analytical insights from neofunctionalism, intergovernmentalism, postfunctionalism, and federalism. We illustrate the value of our framework in relation to four EU crises concerning the euro area, refugees, Brexit and Covid-19. Overall, the paper makes a theoretical contribution to advance the debate on crisis-led integration in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The forthcoming Customs Union (CU) upgrade negotiations have the potential to stabilize and deepen the ties between the European Union (EU) and Turkey and bring them to a stronger form of external differentiated integration. This article examines the viability of an EU–Turkey Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA), similar to that between Ukraine and the EU, as an alternative to the CU. The paper contends that a DCFTA would benefit both the EU and Turkey while it would de facto shift the contractual relations from accession conditionality to market access conditionality with potential political repercussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU faces an existential crisis. The 'liberal core', which played an important role in transforming the illiberal regimes in much of the post-war period, suffers from a series of setbacks. This paper argues that the possibility of reverse transformation – that is, the power of the emergent illiberal bloc to influence the liberal core, has become a real possibility for the first time in the history of European integration. The paper contributes to the growing debate on the sources of the EU's existential crisis and its future from a global political economy perspective. We suggest that a push-and-pull framework provides a coherent analytical toolkit to explain the properties and nature of the illiberal turn in the EU with its potential implications for the future of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first time, this paper investigates the influence of ordoliberalism (OL) at both the ideational and regulative levels of European integration processes regarding agricultural policy (i.e. CAP), competition policy, and economic and monetary policy (i.e. EMU) in comparison. The analytical key is an operationalisation of OL into five elements. The paper generally confirms the hypotheses proposed that OL was and remains an ideational influence of some importance, without exaggerating this influence, for European integration processes, both at the constitutive level as well as – but less so – at the practical level. However, there are differences in the degree of influence across the various policy areas. The influence is weakest in CAP and strongest in competition policy, but only since the Internal Market was proposed in the mid-1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematizes European dis/integration from the location of Southeast Europe, particularly social and political struggles of the 2014 protests and plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The European project is understood as a product of multiple assemblages to transgress various binaries that capture the European Union as a unitary entity and define the conceptual work on European integration and disintegration. In its central argument, the paper suggests that the political and everyday practices and claims articulated by the protests and plenums help us rethink the peripherality of Bosnia and Herzegovina vis-à-vis the European project and therefore also the spatio-temporal and institutional boundaries of the European project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) represents an institutionalized attempt by European Union Member States to respond to the security challenges they confront. This paper discusses the evolution of this policy through the lens of political integration and international relations theories. The analysis integrates both the supranational and the national level, and demonstrates that European institutions have extended their privileges and sphere of influence with increasing organizational mandates. At the same time, participation by various levels in the creation of European security policies has evolved, and the inter-governmental level is often recognized as dominant. However, the question remains open whether this evolution of policy might be properly explained by several influential political theories that have shaped the European integration and security architecture in recent decades. Aspects of the CSDP institutional setting (its creation, goals and role) and the explanation of why security and defense policy is a complex dilemma of the integration process are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transboundary river basins are responsible for over half of the global river discharges and accommodate 40% of the global population. Ukraine is part of the four large transboundary rivers that flow through more than ten European countries and experience pollution problems because of human activities in up-and downstream areas. The Ukrainian government calls for actions to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6) and integrate the European Union water legislation. This paper discusses five sustainable development perspectives for Ukraine to reduce pollution in transboundary rivers. These perspectives relate to (1) transitions from administrative river management (before 2017) to river basin management (after 2017) to enhance cooperation between countries, (2) interdisciplinary and (3) transdisciplinary research to better understand the causes and effects of river pollution and explore solutions, (4) innovation and modernization of water-related infrastructures and (5) the societal awareness. Future research could focus on the example of Ukraine and the adoption of these five perspectives to support the formulation of solutions to achieve SDG6 and support the sustainable basin management of transboundary rivers and the integration of European Union water legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the 'failing forward' framework can contribute to explaining developments in EU competition policy, a policy domain where supranational and national forces have interacted over more than sixty years. The concepts of incompleteness of reforms and forward momentum, which are at the core of this framework, have been adapted to reflect the realities of this policy. In this area, the decentralisation of responsibilities to the national level does de facto correspond to a forward momentum towards a more effective competition policy enforcement. The globalisation and the digitalisation of the economy, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, pose new challenges. However, as it can count on strong supranational institutions and on its indispensability for the preservation of the single market, EU competition policy should be able to adapt to the changing environment, without risk of disintegration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Euroscepticism is frequently presented as a key ideological feature of far right parties, however, this definition masks important variations between them. This paper argues that far right positions on Europe are characterized by long-standing ambivalence rather than straightforward opposition. While far right parties frequently oppose the EU, ideological flexibility, the malleability of European integration and the protean nature of Europe also lead them to display support towards certain aspects of it and towards Europe as a civilization. The argument is illustrated through a qualitative analysis of the party literature of the Movimento Sociale Italiano and the Front National. The analysis shows that these parties conceived of Europe as an identity, a space of liberty, an endangered heritage and a construction where national interests must be defended. In each theme, they offered ambivalent readings of Europe, oscillating between opposition and support depending on how Europe and the EU were defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU has long pursued relatively ambitious climate and energy policies, often against the backdrop of what has been termed the EU 'polycrisis'. This paper introduces a special issue which seeks to develop a better understanding of why, how and with which consequences the polycrisis and EU climate and energy governance have influenced each other. It draws on a novel framework of five broad crisis trends underlying the polycrisis. Most of the contributions suggest that EU climate and energy governance have advanced significantly despite, and sometimes even because of, the crisis trends. The countervailing effects of the trends and the effectiveness of actors' strategies to advance EU policy against opponents go a long way to explaining this puzzling finding. As the EU seeks to fully decarbonise itself by 2050, interactions with the crisis trends are likely to intensify in ways which future research could fruitfully investigate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security provision in and by the EU has become an issue of increasing public interest and controversy. There are diverse and growing demands and critiques from different political camps towards the EU while EU institutions, in turn, utilise their security function as a resource for authority construction and self-legitimation. More recently, European security has also become intertwined with contemporary "crises" that turned it into an arena for the negotiation of fundamental conflicts, often revolving around questions of identity and sovereignty. This paper argues that these developments represent a significant change of European security and its politics that existing approaches linking the field to depoliticisation cannot adequately capture. To fill this gap, this paper suggests applying a politicisation perspective that, so far, has focused on the European integration project as such or the "Eurozone crisis" to the purportedly special security field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates individual's perceptions of inequality and the impact this has on mass public opinion support for the European Union (EU) in the Republic of Ireland. This question is posed in the context of the onset of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/8 as the crisis can be regarded as a critical juncture in Ireland's relationship with the EU as a result of the economic downturn and the widening of economic disparities individuals have experienced. Ireland is a critical case in examining EU support as since its accession to the EU in 1973 it is often considered an exemplar of what the EU could offer small member states with a strongly pro-integrationist mass public. Using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) multiple regression analysis on 2009 European Election Study (EES) data, this paper shows that individuals' concerns about inequality lowers support for the EU as it is currently constituted, but increases support for continued European integration. This suggests that individual-levels of support may be in a precarious state, yet they can be salvaged as individuals in Ireland regard the EU as the institutional-driving force to address market-generated inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crises of the European Union and the geopolitical shifts in its international environment have generated a backlash against the post-Cold War 'debordering' of European integration. Whereas integration theories focus almost exclusively on the EU's internal boundaries and developments, this framework paper conceptualizes and theorizes integration as a process of internal debordering and external rebordering. It sketches the history of European integration in a bordering perspective and proposes general assumptions about the EU's bordering process. Accordingly, rebordering pressures result from widening boundary gaps at the EU's external borders, exogenous shocks to cross-border transactions, growing community deficits of debordering, and their politicization. Whether external rebordering succeeds and how it interacts with internal boundary formation, depends on EU-level boundary negotiations and the relative costs and benefits of external vs. internal rebordering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between ideology, the state and the transnational as it bears on European integration. Though typically studied in national contexts, ideologies and their clash have been Europe-wide since their emergence. As I argue, the European Union (EU) can be understood both as the continuation of these long-standing cross-border dynamics, and as the attempt to supersede them. Contemporary developments renew this dialectic. By exploring how ideology and European integration entwine, the paper underlines the value of a research agenda of heightened importance as the ideological hegemony of recent decades breaks down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are some of the lessons learnt from a decade of crises in European integration? EU studies scholars have set themselves the task not only to gain a deeper understanding of the many aspects of the process of European integration, but also to inform the EU policy debate so that lessons can be learnt from the past. This special issue brings together some of the best papers from the European Union Studies Association's 2019 conference in Denver, Colorado. Three themes emerge from the collection: the effect of crises on changing modes of EU governance, the impact of domestic politics and public opinion on EU policies, and the growing influence and relevance of the EU's supranational legal framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the signing of the historic 'Brussels Agreement' on 19 April 2013 on the normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and the Progressive Party have oscillated between competing tensions emanating from seeking membership in the European Union and those stemming from the retention of Kosovo, including the party's uncompromising position on non-recognition. Following two-level game theory, this paper offers a comparative analysis of the Progressive Party's multi-level game strategy vis-à-vis Kosovo and the EU, arguing that while the initial success of the Brussels Agreement can predominantly be attributed to the rise in popular support for EU accession, Serbian policy towards Kosovo appears to be far less clear and often contradictory and therefore, Serbian government strategy cannot have been influenced by public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One consequence of European unification has been the transformation of the Mediterranean Sea into a defensive moat to stop the flow of unwanted migrants. In this techno-political moat, the communication networks of 'Fortress Europe' have established, through monitoring and interception technologies (and their corresponding speech acts), a buffer zone surrounding European Union (EU) territorial waters. In this buffer zone, the EU and its member states impose on refugees and migrants a survival test that stops all but the fittest from entering – a test that often results in serious and irreversible human rights violations. This paper examines the Mediterranean as a transidiomatic environment: a multilingual space shaped by the communicative practices of groups of people, either territorially defined or deterritorialized, who interact using an array of both face-to-face and long-distance media. These interactions are activated by two sets of opposing players: those involved in border reinforcement and those engaged in border crossing. Transidiomatic practices, in the form of either order-words or passwords, provide an effective angle for the analysis of the intense conflicts and struggles that today fill the Mediterranean borderscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets the scene for a JEPP special issue entitled 'Re-engaging Grand Theory: European Integration in the Twenty-first Century.' The special issue engages three theories – neofunctionalism, intergovernmentalism, and postfunctionalism – that have their intellectual roots squarely in the study of European integration. The purpose of this article is to describe the genesis of each school and outline what is distinctive about its approach in relation to four landmark events of the past decade: the Eurocrisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, and illiberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution introduces a selection of the best papers presented at the 2015 European Union Studies Association’s biennial conference. It uses these papers as a jumping off point to consider whether European Union (EU) studies suffers the same ‘gap’ with real-world problems that is seen to afflict some portions of the academy and to ask whether EU studies is at an inflection point. It argues that EU studies are closely linked to the substance of the European project. It identifies how the contributions to this collection speak to different aspects of the EU: closer co-operation; policy-making within a ‘normal’ political system; the implications of European integration for its member states. Given this link between the substance of the European project and the focus of EU studies, this contribution argues that the challenges currently confronting the EU – the lingering eurozone debt crises; the migrant/refugee crisis; the prospect of a British exit; and recent terrorist attacks – may mark an inflection point in EU studies. The reason is that for the first time ‘less Europe’ has emerged as a serious option in response to crisis. This possibility reignites questions of (dis)integration and calls into question the assumption the EU policy only accumulates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The EU has become increasingly politicized not only at the bottom, due to polarized debates, divided electorates, declining mainstream parties, and rising Euroskeptic populism; or from the bottom up, as national politics permeates member-state leaders' positions in the Council. It has also emerged purely at the top, in the increasingly politically charged dynamics of interaction within and among EU actors. Such politicization involves struggles for power and influence that are ideational as much as institutional and coercive. Current theorists of EU integration, because of their tendency to focus on only one or another EU actor have overlooked the EU's politicized dynamics, even though their accounts, taken together, provide ample evidence of it. The article shows that the EU has gone from what was once metaphorically described with the catchphrase of 'politics without policy' at the national level to 'politics against policy' in more contentious areas, whereas at the EU level it has moved from 'policy without politics' to 'politics with policy'. The paper illustrates with the cases of the Council and the Commission in the Eurozone crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Euroscepticism has been a persistent part of the European integration process over the last several decades (Usherwood and Startin [2013]. Euroscepticism as a persistent phenomenon. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 51, 1–16). Scholars have proposed various theories to explain resistance to integration by drawing upon economic, political and cultural theories. In this paper, I ask whether Euroscepticism is a by-product of rural–urban divisions, which influences one's perception of the economy, one's trust of transnational politics and one's cultural identity. However, geographical variables have never been tested in the presence of these more well-established Euroscepticism predictors. Here, I use the European Social Survey to compare the predictive power of economic, political, cultural and geographical variables on two forms of Euroscepticism: trust in European Parliament and the belief that integration has gone too far. Multilevel mixed-effects regression models demonstrate that trust in the European Parliament is indeed higher in big cities, but overall, place of residence is not a strong predictor of Euroscepticism. Among other theories, I find that cultural variables are more meaningful than economics or politics. I finally conclude with a discussion of the EU's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of European integration in affecting voting behaviour in the 2017 German federal election. Building on a theoretical analysis of EU issue voting, it demonstrates that despite a list of issues on the European agenda, EU-related issues did not play a prominent role in the campaign, nor were issues primarily addressed from a European perspective. Relying on survey data collected before and after the election, the analysis demonstrates that voters perceived parties to differ considerably on EU integration, but they did not care much about it. Attitudes towards European integration and financial aid to EU member states were only mildly related to vote choice in the 2017 election. European integration thus has not yet become a powerful political issue in Germany. The paper concludes by discussing implications for EU issue voting in future German elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the policy developments concerning the Single Market in finance in the context of Brexit. Theoretically, we engage with two bodies of work that make contrasting predictions on European financial market integration and the development of European Union (EU) policies on financial regulation: one focused upon a neo-mercantilist 'battle' amongst member states and the other stressing the importance of transnational financial networks (or coalitions). Empirically, we find limited evidence of the formation of cross-national alliances in favour of the United Kingdom (UK) retaining broad access to the EU Single Market in financial services, the presence of which would have aligned with the expectations of analyses focused upon transnational networks. By contrast, the main financial centres in the EU27 and their national authorities competed to lure financial business away from the UK – what we explain in terms of a 'battle' amongst member states and their national financial centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to bring together approaches to sociospatial theorising with debates on the EU’s international role. It points to a general lack of engagement with the spatial underpinnings of EU geopolitical agency, citing the example of four visions for ‘Europe in the world’ from the EU’s key spatial think tank (ESPON). Moreover, this paper illustrates how EU geopolitical agency can be better understood when examined in its historical and sociospatial context. Space is not defined as physical space, but as socially produced spaces of interaction within which different actors stand in particular relations to each other. Through the history of European integration, the EU can most effectively exercise influence if such spaces of interaction are regulated and institutionalised, as opposed to disordered and anarchic. Regulated spaces of interaction are therefore a key parameter of EU geopolitical agency and, consequently, the promotion thereof a key objective of EU external relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementation of EU law is vital for European integration. The EU implementation record however up until now shows that there are serious implementation deficits. Although the EU in response to these deficits has piled up strategies and instruments to improve the overall implementation, we still do not know how big the compliance problem of the EU is. The nature and seriousness of compliance deficits are until now the 'known unknowns'. This paper looks into two issues that are important if we want to improve implementation and compliance rates of EU law. First of all it addresses the question of how to gather infomation on implementation and compliance as a basis for enforcement policies and secondly is appraises the EU's enforcement policies, set up to improve the implementation of EU Law currently in place. The paper concludes that present EU strategies and tools to promote compliance broadly follow the enforcement-school approach with some management-school elements. It also concludes that the information basis for these strategies is quite weak and that they are not based on a deep understanding of what motives underlie noncompliant behaviour. The strategies and instruments rely strongly on repression by sanctions as well. A better understanding of the how and the why of non-compliance could improve the effectiveness of the present policies in place - more positive and communicative approaches to non-compliance could well complement present strategies and instruments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is 'European Union Studies'? Answers to this question shape scholarly and public thinking about the European Union, and its member states and citizens. The articles in this special issue, devoted to the best papers presented at the 2017 European Union Studies Association biennial conference in Miami, sketch a perspective, which I call Global European Union Studies. This approach recognizes that European integration is embedded within a larger global story. It suggests that the European project sits in dialogue with events happening in other countries and internationally, affecting and being affected by them. It resituates the European experience as part and parcel of broader transformations taking place across the world. In terms of payoff, European Union Studies can transform its own understanding of the European Union, make connections to those studying other world regions as well as international phenomenon, and focus attention on pressing real-world problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does EU funding to European regions affect sub-national parties’ support for European integration? This paper aims at analysing whether the EU regional development policy contributes to setting up support for EU institutions and European integration and thus strengthens the whole ‘European idea’ among political parties. To answer this research question, the article analyses election manifestos of parties acting on the regional level in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK for two EU programming periods: 2007─2013 and 2014─2020. The results show that sub-national parties are more supportive of European integration if regions receive more EU funding and if the parties represent regions that are dependent on EU funding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Before the crisis, flexicurity was a leading European Union (EU) policy concept, which aimed to balance labor-market flexibility and security. The recent focus on austerity measures to reduce public deficits might be thought to have reduced attention to the 'security' component of flexicurity. Accordingly, a 'farewell to flexicurity' has been claimed to have occurred. This paper challenges that claim and explores the role of flexicurity within the European Semester. It analyses the European Semester's policy goals between 2007 and 2016, as well as the country-specific recommendations (CSRs) to member states between 2009 and 2015. The analysis shows that the EU flexicurity concept has been revitalized, while its definition changed to encompass more social concerns. Even at the peak of the crisis, CSRs continued to devote attention to elements of both flexibility and security, although the precise details differed across countries and have changed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the prospect of the revival of the European integration project in light of current experiences of global financial crisis. It is argued that the crisis has left an uneven mark on the European community of member state publics, a mark which has introduced a new division between the allegedly diligent North and lazy South. Moreover, the experience of public humiliation of the peripheral states in crisis, i.e., Greek, Cyprus, Spain, Slovenia, perceived as coming from the centres of the EU and the North, has made it difficult to continue with the construction of the postnational constitution, as suggested by scholars of the EU. Rather, EU public is witness to the rise of the condition of internal postcoloniality whereby the periphery has become the resource (in economic, financial and cultural-moral sense) for the reproduction of the power regimes of the centre. Therefore, in this paper, it is claimed that leading European intellectuals who are concerned with the future of the EU, and propose scenarios of bottom-up reconstitution, should consider their own location and build an intellectual transversal which will include critical voices with peripheral experience of second-class citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review paper revisits European spatial planning in terms of its EUropeanisation, meaning that planning becomes part of the EU policy-making state, and its Europeanisation which stands for mutual learning. The paper argues that by the mid twentieth century this Europeanisation had reached a point where it was natural for planners to want to be part of the agenda-building for European integration. However, their success in penetrating the decision agenda of the EU continues to be limited. While the EUropeanisation of planning has thus stalled, thanks amongst others to EU programmes, mutual learning and thus its Europeanisation has accelerated. Based on this, the paper constructs “business as usual” and “deep change” scenarios under which, by rethinking categories basic to their trade like space and territory, planners can get involved in reconfiguring European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The territorial and spatial planning impacts of European Union (EU) economic and competition policies have remained under-researched in the field of European spatial planning, in contrast to other EU policy fields. This briefing explores how two elements of the EU competition policy, the regulation of “state aid” and the liberalization of “services of general interest (SGI)”, have significant implications for the pursuit of the objective of territorial cohesion through spatial planning and territorial development policies at different scales. The paper first reviews the development of the concept of territorial cohesion in the EU discourse and policy agenda since the mid-1990s, as well as the contribution of public services (Services of General Interest, or SGI in EU jargon) to it. It, then, reviews how the EU state aid rules and liberalization policies affect the state's ability to intervene (i) in support of sub-national territories which are lagging behind or suffering decline, and (ii) in the provision of public services across the national territory, specifically in peripheral regions or areas where the provision is not catered for by the market. The conclusion of the paper outlines the additional challenges to the pursuit of territorial cohesion in the EU posed by the post-2008 economic crisis and suggests avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses Turkey's legislative reforms on violence against women (VAW) with particular focus on the European Union (EU) role and impact in triggering the reform process. By using a bottom-up Europeanization approach, the paper traces the reform process from the 1980s up until 2005 in terms of the interaction of external and domestic factors. The empirical evidence shows that the impact of external factors (be it the EU accession process or the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)) has been conditioned by the domestic factors and processes and it is hard to grasp the EU impact without considering its interaction with other domestic and external factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Standard accounts assume that representatives are authorised and held accountable through elections in territorially defined constituencies. In contrast, claims-making approaches hold that representation does not always depend on an electoral connection. This paper argues that the claims-making approach addresses some of the difficulties in the standard account, but remains itself theoretically underspecified. This becomes especially clear when applied to systems with exceptional institutional complexity like the EU. As an alternative to both those other approaches, the paper proposes a revised claims-making approach in which rights claims are used to specify representative claims. It then shows how rights claims do, indeed, play an important role in the representative claims that are made in the European Union arena, and how that, in turn, allows the Union to deal with some of the problems of applying standard forms of representation to its decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Considering the current process of horizontal Europeanisation which has resulted from the new opportunity structure created by the EU, this article discusses to what extent the European Member States are economically and socially intertwined. The proposition of this paper is that social interactions go hand in hand with economical interactions between the European Member States. In order to validate this assumption, a horizontal Europeanisation index that measures Europeanisation in contrast to globalisation was developed. The underlying variables of our index cover 25 European countries and were mainly collected from OECD and EUROSTAT. Almost all European countries are economically more Europeanised than globalised. We observed a medium correlation between the economic and social dimension, indicating a rather low systematic pattern between the two dimensions of horizontal Europeanisation in 2011. However, this assumption cannot be upheld when considering the time perspective. When comparing 2007–2011, social cross-border transactions are relatively disconnected from economical cross-border transaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper models the correlates of parties’ positions on the issue of European integration, asking why some parties are in favour of European integration, while others are less favourable or even opposed to it. The paper builds on existing work which has identified three sets of explanatory factors predicting parties’ positions on integration: the electorate, parties and party system characteristics. By employing multilevel modelling using data on over 220 parties in 14 Western EU member states for the years 1984 to 2006, the effects of party- and context-level predictors of parties’ positions on EU integration are assessed. The findings demonstrate that parties’ positions are primarily influenced by EU preferences of the general electorate, parties’ left–right ideological extremes and incumbency status. The results also show that the impact of party characteristics is moderated by the electoral context in which parties operate. Moreover, the interaction between both levels offers further insights as to the nature of these associations. Specifically, party size is a robust predictor of integration position only when accounting for the levels of party system's fractionalisation and polarisation. Additionally, parties oriented towards the centre of the ideological spectrum are even more likely to favour European integration within highly polarised systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines prospects for solidarity, defined as an ethos of collective responsibility that works across a political community's normative values and policy decisions, as a unifying idea that can inspire and promote steps toward regional political community across East Asia. Just as the European Union's (EU) founders and its past and present visionaries have appealed consistently to an inclusive, transnational model of solidarity in framing and pursuing European integration, notions of solidarity also contain important affinities with prospects for building an East Asian community. First, the paper examines how the idea of solidarity has evolved in European political thought and especially how solidarity has emerged repeatedly as one of the important concepts throughout the political development of the EU. Then, the paper turns to East Asia and considers the relevance of solidarity as an important principle in aspirations and endeavors toward the creation of an East Asian community. We base our analysis upon a variety of sources, including statements and speeches from key political actors, scholarly books and articles, and news accounts and commentaries. We illustrate how earlier manifestations of solidarity in East Asia have often been cast in ways that set the region apart from the rest of the world and have framed particular groupings of Asian countries in opposition to the West, and we argue that a redeployment of solidarity is needed in East Asia that instead emphasizes an ethos of collective responsibility among the principal national actors and external stakeholders within the region and beyond. In contrast with interpretations that suggest that the conditions for developing East Asian community are inescapably distinct from the circumstances in Europe during the second half of the twentieth century, we argue that the idea of solidarity has great potential to advance regional collaboration in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent Eurozone crisis and the outbreak of political and populist Euroscepticism pose an unprecedented challenge to advocates of the post-war ‘Idea of Europe’. In the United Kingdom and France, some of the most eloquent and impassioned defences of ‘Europe’ have been penned by Jewish intellectuals. The historian Walter Laqueur, the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and journalists such as David Aaronovich, for example, have all rallied to the cause of ‘Europe’. This article will focus on the responses of Robert Menasse and Henryk Broder, two Jewish intellectuals from Austria and Germany, who have recently published powerful reflections on the European idea. Menasse’s polemic of 2012,Der Europäische Landbote(The European Courier), defends the idea of Europe as a ‘Friedensprojekt’, or ‘peace project’, and the European Union as an institutional antidote to the destructive power of nationalism and the self-interest of the nation-state. Broder’s bestselling book of 2013,Die letzten Tage Europas: Wie wir eine gute Idee versenken(The Last Days of Europe: How we are Scuppering a Good Idea), embraces ‘European values’ but launches a critique of a European Union which stifles pluralism and critical debate. This paper analyses how Menasse and Broder define the idea of ‘Europe’ and argues that, despite their differences, in form and content, the work of Menasse and Broder draws on a common tradition of enlightened cosmopolitanism as well as informs the renewed academic debate in the humanities and social sciences about the place of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in our global world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to apply the relevance of Euroscepticism literature to the study of radical left party outlooks on European integration and by doing so: (1) outlines general patterns of opposition to European integration, by 11 radical left parties that are housed in the European United Left/Nordic Green Left group of the European Parliament, in the 1990s and beyond; (2) assesses the congruence between the outlooks of these parties or the lack thereof; and (3) illuminates the factors conditioning these outlooks by addressing the ideology-strategy debate. To this end, the paper employs two, widely referenced and historically relevant, analytical frameworks of party-based Euroscepticism (by Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, and by Petr Kopecky and Cas Mudde), and applies them to the radical left as a whole and its various sub-sets, as identified by the literature so far. The analysis leads to the following three findings. First, a moderating approach can be observed on average, thus leading to an increase in overall congruence. Second, congruence increases slightly, as we move towards a more specific typology but overall no systematic congruence is to be found in the radical left as a whole or most of its sub-sets, in the period examined. Third, while ideology carries causal weight, strategy appears more prominent as a conditioning factor of outlooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European integration is interpreted in this paper as the route by which (West) Germany, profiting from close ties with the English-speaking West, was able to restore its full sovereignty and economic pre-eminence in Europe. Yet in shaping the actual integration process, it was France which played the key role. Most of the landmark steps towards the current EU were French proposals to pre-empt Anglophone–German collusion; creating European structures in which a resurgence of Germany (politically and economically) was made subject to permanent negotiation. German unification in 1991 removed the one reason why successive governments of the Federal Republic had gone along with this. Paradoxically, sovereign Germany today finds itself bound by the dense networks of consultation and decision-making which make the EU unique in the field of regional integration. The paper shows that between 1992 and 2005, German capital has moved to the centre of the network of corporate interlocks in the North Atlantic area. This helps to explain why in the post-1991, post-Soviet era of neoliberal, finance-driven globalisation, Germany is increasingly ‘speaking for Europe’, as its corporations have become nodal points in the communication structures through which the responses to the challenges facing the EU and the West at large are being shaped. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the relative power of identity and utilitarian explanations of the variation in public support for the European Union (EU) as well as the relationship these have with one another. Using Eurobarometer data from 1990 to 2007, the results in this paper demonstrate that contrary to previous research, national economic and societal utility calculations about the EU have greater explanatory power than identity issues. It is also found that unemployment, crime and exclusive national identity mediate the relationship between immigration and EU support. In the light of these findings, the article draws implications for politics at EU and national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to use the concept of empire for the analysis the European integration process. From a methodological point of view, this concept is an invitation to reintroduce in EU studies the comparative approach as well as long-term history. This paper also leads to a detailed reflection on the concept of empire itself and proposes a modernized definition of it. The use of this concept enables to shed a new light on the EU and some of its policies. If the EU cannot be considered an empire, it can nonetheless be said that it is undergoing a process of imperialization. This raises the question of the transformation of the European project and to the consequences of this transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]