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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]

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 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]

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]

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]

Croatian society in general, and the economy in particular, are facing two major challenges: (1) the development of Modern Economic Growth (MEG), and (2) systemic change to Modern Regulated Capitalism (MRC). Neither of these challenges is new; but now, for the first time, they appear in the context of EU membership. The paper does not offer an unconditionally optimistic view. Accelerated economic convergence or MEG are not necessarily imminent, and EU membership may not necessarily lead to immediate Europeanization. To keep the process on track, the paper argues that three short-term goals deserve a central place: (1) consolidating support for market plus democracy types of reforms, (2) defining a proactive growth policy and increased growth rates and (3) Europeanization of the country. While there are many reasons to hope for a favourable outcome, we argue that the 'jury is still out' on both issues; and for Croatia, the biggest danger is the possibility of EU membership without MEG or MRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the Aegean dispute which has been one of the contentious issues between Turkey and Greece for more than three decades has been Europeanized on the Turkish side. This Europeanization process started, in particular, with Turkey's candidacy to the European Union granted at the Helsinki Summit of 1999. In this article, the extent of the Europeanization of the Aegean dispute is measured by making references to the security and foreign policy discourses in Turkey. The change in the Turkish elite's discourses, or more concretely, the shift from the confrontational to cooperative discourses, is identified in the speeches delivered by the political leaders from the Turkish side. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is the European Union (EU) influencing national bureaucracies' implementation of international law? This paper reports findings from interviews with ship inspectors and their superiors about European training aimed at harmonization. The maritime sector's highly institutionalized global regime may constitute an unlikely case for European influence over national bureaucrats for historical, institutional and economic reasons. This examination of ‘sea-level bureaucrats’ shows how European executive capacity is acquired at the national level even in this sector, adding to our insights on implementation and compliance in European governance. We find evidence that inspections seem Europeanized, and together with research on other sectors, this indicates the development of a new, international, multi-level administrative order with stronger traits of direct implementation. In it, the EU may have developed into an interpretative filter for national implementation of global maritime safety rules. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Europeanization literature assumes that European integration affects domestic policies, politics and polities; yet, the impact on domestic corporatist patterns, which characterize policy-making in small European states, has received little attention so far. While contradictory theoretical expectations exist, this paper argues that European market-making policies tend to weaken domestic corporatist policy-making by offering new opportunities to domestic actors, in particular the executive. This allows them to bypass policy concertation. However, the impact depends on the usage domestic actors make of the European policies and is mediated by domestic factors. A comparison across policy sectors in two countries – Belgium and Switzerland – largely confirms these arguments. This means that domestic institutions such as corporatist policy-making are not only mediating factors in the process of Europeanization, but themselves subject to change. This effect even goes beyond the borders of the European Union, affecting policy-making in Switzerland as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the effects of the Lisbon Strategy on the way in which national executives co-ordinate EU policy at the domestic level. Comparing seven countries (Denmark, the United Kingdom [UK], Austria, Slovenia, Spain, France and Poland) it finds evidence that the Lisbon Strategy has been advancing (further) centralization and politicization in national patterns of EU policy co-ordination, empowering core executives. The Lisbon Strategy's ideational elements ('grand' goals and politically visible targets) as well as organizational requirements (Spring Council, national programming and annual reports) are factors behind this phenomenon. These results have implications for the literature on Europeanization, international politics, and governance studies in what is eminently an empirical research agenda about how far and how changes in international governance architectures affect the redistribution of power within national executives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This concluding paper sets the special issue in the broader context of literature on Europeanization. I consider what sort of empirical picture emerges from the issue and other literature, and highlight some puzzles in domestic politics to which that portrayal directs our attention. We see disjunctures between the EU's policy importance and low political mobilization around it, between general demobilization and bursts of activity around referenda, and between variation in citizens' views of the EU and little variation in mainstream political parties' programs. Then I consider the main ways in which Europeanization scholars explain these puzzles. I argue very briefly for an analysis that stresses the cross-cutting nature of pro- and anti-EU views in French (and other countries') politics, which leads to reactions from political parties to muffle internal dissent. To conclude I modestly extend this analysis to hypothesize a little-noticed mechanism of indirect EU effects on national politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses whether EU compliance is still a ‘black hole’, reviewing two decades of research on this topic. It is argued that the first wave of scholarship was rather eclectic in nature, suggesting numerous legal and politico-administrative explanations. The second wave focused on the goodness of fit hypothesis. As the empirical support for this hypothesis has been rather disappointing, the consensus now seems to be that domestic politics needs to enter the equation in a more explicit fashion. The current challenge is to theorize and research the exact role and effects of domestic politics on processes of compliance. In doing so, scholars are advised to pay more attention to methodological issues, such as case selection. Finally, scholarship on compliance should shed more light on the actual size of the implementation deficit, especially when it comes to application and enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]