Search

This paper presents contrasting stories of three pro-EU nations, Germany, Ireland and Slovakia, which have seen their European projects put on a collision course with their political traditions, expectations and material interests. Slovaks can no longer be confident in strengthening their post-communist democracy through its engagement with Europe. In Germany, people are concerned that they can no longer trust their currency, the euro, let alone see it as the bedrock of economic and political stability. Germans are also profoundly worried about the erosion of the rule of law, the Rechtsstaat, through euro rescue measures, which are yet to prove their effectiveness. In Ireland too, people who had experienced European integration as hugely beneficial, both economically and politically, have been forced to question their commitments. To sum up, many German, Slovak and Irish citizens have seen their EU-integration goals severely undermined by the crisis. What is more, the strategies that have been employed to safeguard the single currency have resulted in increased scepticism towards the European project as such. Instead of differentiated integration, the conflicting goals may well be pointing towards Europe's disintegration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Locked in the commitments of previous governments and arrangements negotiated with the Troika back in 2010 and early 2012, the Greek government continues to channel the burden of fiscal adjustment towards the private sector, killing any nascent thoughts of investment and entrepreneurship in Greece. Simultaneously, bold structural reforms are kept hostage to the uncertain balance of the ruling coalition and negligible majority in the Greek parliament. Caught literally between a rock and a hard place, the authorities seek to attain a primary fiscal surplus, hopeful that this will help to bring an end to the essentially faulty economic adjustment programme for Greece in 2014. Surprisingly, the talk of fiscal surplus alone seems to have ignited positive expectations that the crisis might, in fact, be nearing an end. This suggests that in the same way as the crisis in Greece was provoked by irresponsible and inaccurate statements about Greece's fiscal position and Grexit was a viable option through 2011, discourses on Grecovery may prove constitutive of the end of the crisis. This paper explores this issue and by so doing contemplates the evolving nature of the core-periphery relations in the EU and its policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper delineates the changing environment from a benevolent to a conditionality-oriented. It uses the case study of Portugal and the implementation of the austerity programme to show how a semi-peripheral country of the European Union (EU) reacted to this changed environment. The first section shows how the EU has become more divided due to the growing cleavage between rich and poor member states. This is followed by the section on the making of the growing tensions between the European partners and the International Monetary Fund. Subsequently, the semi-peripheral economy of Portugal is analysed, before the policy responses of the Portuguese government are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From autumn 2009 onwards, the euro area has experienced a sustained economic crisis that has mutated into a social and political crisis. In ‘hard times’, existing paradigms come under strain and a high level of contestation concerning policy prescriptions is to be expected. Crises tend to act as focal points for institutional, policy and political change that leave significant legacies. European Union and euro area actors had to engage in a process of collectively decoding the crisis and the problems it engendered given the strong and sustained signals emanating from the financial markets, rating agencies and Europe's international partners. The crisis opened up a deep cleavage within the euro area between creditor and debtor states or Europe's core and periphery. The objective of this paper is to analyse how the crisis was decoded as this had a major impact on the choice of policy instruments and policy responses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The research presented in this article focuses on support and opposition towards Europe in Italy. In particular, it aims to understand and explain the progressive growing opposition towards EU institutions within Italian public opinion. For decades, both Italian media and political parties have depicted Italy as one of the strongest pro-European countries. However, more recently, Italian public opinion started to look at Europe with more critical eyes, while the consensus of Eurosceptic parties grew. Although the downturn in Italian support for Europe appears evident, both its causes and consequences are largely under-investigated. The purpose of this paper is to fill in this analytical gap by looking at the origins of diffuse support for Europe in Italy. The analysis proceeds through a three-stage strategy, aiming to observe: 1) the explanatory factors of diffuse support in Italy, 2) the effects of the economic crisis on the sentiments of support and 3) the European identity of the Italian public. The data have been supplied by the Eurobarometer series since 1990 and analysed through logistic and linear models. Findings reveal the indirect effects of the current economic crisis on diffuse support for Europe in Italy, since trust towards the national government and perceptions of EU utility decrease for the effects of the recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have tried to comprehend and analyse the root causes of the Greek economic crisis. In the majority of these analyses, a series of economic factors were mainly highlighted as the key to understanding the nature of the problem. While these factors are profound aspects of the Greek financial and economic failure, they are only a part of the reality. The root causes for the Greek crisis can be found within the Greek political and institutional model of development and its model of governance. In this paper a series of political factors are highlighted as the key factors of this crisis. The development of statism, the failed Europeanization, the high level of corruption, the impact of syndicates and interest groups on the formation of economic policies, the skewed model of governance, populism and the unstable political and parliamentary regime are the most profound. The Greek crisis has a political element that cannot be overlooked and it is highly different than any other European country. This political element makes us worry about the future of the Greek crisis and the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue, which is published on behalf of the UACES Collaborative Research NetworkThe EU Single Market in the Global Economyand supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, addresses the various aspects of the emerging centre–periphery cleavages in the European Union (EU) which result from unprecedented conditions of the 2008–09 global financial crisis and the subsequent eurozone sovereign debt crisis. The multiple layers of policy coordination which emerged in response to the crisis have initiated a process where the EU is increasingly internally divided in terms of the level of vertical integration between the eurozone core group and differentiated peripheries amongst the outsiders. At the same time the sovereign debt crisis has created a periphery group of predominantly Southern European countries within the eurozone that became dependent on external financial support from the other member states. The contributions in the special issue critically examine various aspects of the emerging internal post-crisis constellation of the EU. The main focus lies on national and supranational governance issues, as well as national perspectives and dynamics in the eurozone-18 core and the outside periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the effect of immigration on attitudes towards Europe in Italy. This question resonates throughout the European Union (EU), but does so particularly in Italy – one of EU's most exposed external borders, especially under recent global challenges such as the economic crisis and the Arab Spring. Over the last two decades, Italy received more than four million migrants and refugees, which has put immigration on top of the political agenda ever since. Using data from the European Values Study (EVS), we find that concerns about immigration, especially in the context of the economic crisis of 2007, is a factor of declining support for European integration and that these effects vary across regions. In particular, we demonstrate the mediating effect of context by showing that the effect of being concerned about immigration is more corrosive for support in regions with higher immigration rates than in regions with lower rates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]