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The EU may be asui generispolity but it has not escaped the challenge of establishing narratives that help define its territoriality. Political narratives about territoriality, especially political myths, are important instruments for political communities to develop ontological security. The article argues that the European Union faced a dilemma in the refugee crisis in balancing its foundational values with a narrative about a territory with managed external borders. The EU’s territorial myth is not entirely successful in that it lacks some key narrative forms that are essential for widely diffused myths. Territorial myths are not just about establishing borders but also about defining the community; so long as this remains ill-defined, the paper argues, territorial myths will contribute in a limited way to providing the ontological security to address pressing challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Health systems in Europe were hit by the economic crisis to various degrees. Evidence from worst affected countries shows detrimental consequences for health systems and health outcomes. EU member states face an increased risk of cross-border health threats given the growing difficulties to prevent and control infectious disease outbreaks with resources limited by cuts to public spending on health. Although health systems constitute a core national competence, the crisis has triggered the extension of EU economic surveillance over this field. The related debate focuses on the added value of EU action to support health systems in coping with the crisis challenges vs. the constraints imposed by stricter EU fiscal governance on national health policymakers. This paper provides an analysis of the changes triggered by the economic crisis. The analysis focuses on the EU level, exploring the changes in the output of EU institutions and their (possible) implications for health systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper summarises a collaborative international research project comparing the impact of the ongoing conglomerate of crises in nine EU policies. All of them saw significant crisis-induced pressures and challenges. Beyond changes in discourse, the crisis-induced pressures have, in many areas, also triggered a rather sizable amount of policy change. Considering EU competences, no single example of re-nationalisation was found, but many new EU-level tasks. The governments were of prime importance in immediate crisis management but supranational institutions and processes continue to matter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates how to address non-traditional security (NTS) challenges where the principal concern is to safeguard individuals. Since unilateral action cannot effectively deal with piracy, terrorism, cross-border conflicts, etc, there is a need for multilateral responses. Yet, time and again, the insistence on non-interference in the domestic affairs of countries has proven a major obstacle. European Union members, conceptualizing sovereignty in terms of ‘constitutional independence’, have made some progress addressing these challenges. Although, recently, some progress has also been made in Asia Pacific, there sovereignty often is still being used as a semantic weapon. Since states not only have rights but obligations, I argue, there is a need for a careful recalibration of sovereignty-related norms that stand in the way of improved human rights. Focusing on a specific issue area within NTS challenges, the Responsibility to Protect, I illustrate how a recalibration of sovereignty-related norms might take place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social and taxation policies are sensitive fields in which states often have sovereignty concerns. Accordingly, member states hesitate to transfer such competencies to the European Union (EU). Nevertheless, the EU shaped sensitive policies. Do states violate these domaine reserve fields more often than less sensitive European laws? Are those cases more difficult to settle? This paper shows that employment and taxation policies are indeed more frequently violated and that these infringement cases are harder to resolve. Yet, this is not due to sovereignty concerns, as expected by the domaine reserve thesis. Rather, the extent of non-compliance costs, the strength of domestic pro- and contra-compliance constituencies and the fit to governmental programmes are crucial for dynamics of norm violations and settlements. These variables do not systematically vary over policy fields and, in the end, states comply even with inconvenient European laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]