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We make the case for a technology-enabled approach to Smart Specialisation policymaking aimed at increasing its effectiveness by assessing the general equilibrium effects of the European Cohesion Policy objectives contained in the regional Operational Programmes prepared by the regional policymakers. We simulate the impact of achieving the research and development personnel targets on gross domestic product and its components in a set of Southern European regions. We discuss the implications and challenges of the proposed methodology for future assessments of Smart Specialisation and for its implementation in the regions of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article suggests that EU governance in Southeastern Europe reproduces a discourse in which the failures and problems which have emerged, especially in relation to the pace of integration and the sustainability of peace in candidate member states such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, have merely reinforced the EU's external governance agenda. On the one hand, the limitations of reform have reinforced the EU's projection of its power as a civilising mission into what is perceived to be a dangerous vacuum in the region. On the other hand, through the discourse of post-liberal governance, the EU seeks to avoid the direct political responsibilities associated with this power. Rather than legitimise policy making on the basis of representative legitimacy, post-liberal frameworks of governance problematise autonomy and self-government, inverting the liberal paradigm through establishing administrative and regulatory frameworks as prior to democratic choices. This process tends to distance policy making from representative accountability, weakening the legitimacy of governing institutions in Southeastern European states which have international legal sovereignty but lack genuine mechanisms for politically integrating society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional cooperation in South East Europe is at a crossroads. Until now, it has been largely ascribed by outside forces, perceived as a condition related to the EU integration process, and approached from a state-based viewpoint as an interstate construct. However, there are emergent trends which reframe regional cooperation as 'open regionalism', more achieved from within, and consisting of multi-actor, multilevel and multi-scalar processes forming a complex geometry of interlocking networks, with variable reach and multiple nodal points. This text critically explores these trends, addressing some of their cross-border, transnational and interregional dimensions, in the context of wider processes of regional integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article thanks people and organizations responsible for organizing a workshop on the effects of Europeanisation on economic policy in Southern Europe, including acknowledgment of the Delegation of the European Union (EU) to Turkey, and authors Kevin Featherstone and George Kazamias.

This article proposes a framework to understand and explain the occurrence of policy reversals. We argue that the occurrence and absence of policy reversals is shaped by the constraints of responsiveness (to voters) and responsibility (vis-à-vis creditors, international institutions and financial markets). We review the literature on reversals and their implications for Southern Europe. We finally summarise the main findings of the contributions in the volume, that address when and why governments prioritise responsiveness or responsibility, as well as the economic consequences of these choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the comparative findings of six case studies of continuity and change in Southern European political economies which make use of the Europeanisation research programme. It summarises the varied European Union (EU) level inputs, frameworks or agendas in the different policy areas that each case study focuses on. It gauges the magnitude and direction of domestic change at the level of policy and governance in each political economy. In order to show how the case studies unpack the relationship between the EU input and domestic change in public policies, the article explains how the prevalent ideas, dominant interests and structuring institutions co-determine the nature of domestic change in political economies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Departing from the idea that the externalisation of the EU's immigration policy has been tacitly accepted and even incorporated in the legal corpus of nations around the Mediterranean basin, this study argues that the southern European boundary has been redrawn, and gradually dislocated southwards to establish a new de facto border in northern and western Africa. The study adopts a comparative analysis evaluating the social effects of this novel geopolitical dynamic in two of Europe's closest neighbours, Morocco and the Cape Verde Islands, and focuses on the quasi-involuntary development of a new migration paradigm in both countries, based on an informal incorporation nexus. This important change in local socio-political contexts primarily derives from a steady inflow of sub-Saharan migrants, and the challenges they pose to civility in two nations where civil society is only nascent. As passage to Europe becomes increasingly difficult, many migrants are transforming what were until recently two eminent migration source countries into 'transit countries', increasingly becoming hosts to permanent states of transience and liminality. Current legal categories used to identify these new migration flows, and the lack of adequate asylum discourses, are also problematised. The study further explores the nexus of inclusion and exclusion, and formal and informal modes of incorporation, of the 'African other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the coming into force of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the European Union (EU) annunciated what one could term an 'inclusionist approach' to security whereby this policy framework was based on supposedly joint commitments by all parties concerned to 'cooperative security'. However, EU actions on the ground in the south have shown that, despite good intentions, such cooperative security endeavours have, thus far, hardly materialised. The result instead is an 'exclusionist' policy, where the reduction of illegal migration from the south takes top priority in EU security discourse. Post-9/11, in the policy area of 'counter-terrorism' measures, the EU likewise demarcates 'liberal zones of civilisation' from 'illiberal' ones, leaving the dirty work of counter terrorism to countries such as Egypt and Morocco. In terms of governmentality, this may be described as a 'surveillance and control' approach to security: therefore, it is argued here that the EU, through its governance model, is actually enabling further in-security and in-stability in the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Region-building has been on the move around the Black Sea since the early 1990s. Several initiatives and projects have been emerging. Yet, to date there is still no blueprint for Black Sea regionalism to deepen cooperation and integrate into the European community. An embryonic form of Black Sea regionalism has emerged with regular meetings of the Organisation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation between leaders, ministers and senior officials in which European Union (EU) officials participate as observers. There also exists a patchwork of cooperation at different levels and in different areas such as in environment, organized crime and energy. But recent tensions in relations between pairs of states, such as Russia and Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russia and Ukraine or even the EU and Russia over various issues, cast doubts as to how fast and how far Black Sea regionalism can go. The future of Black Sea regionalism remains, at best, fuzzy. There are many different initiatives and ideas afloat but there is no clear overarching vision. To understand where Black Sea regionalism is now and where it is heading, this article will first address a conceptual understanding of Black Sea regionalism. It will then chart the development of regionalism in the area from the early 1990s to the present, examining some of the commonly cited reasons for the way Black Sea regionalism has emerged and performed, developed into its current state of play, providing finally a prognosis on the future of Black Sea regionalism along with recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, the EU has shown a preference for the replacement of traditional command-and-control patterns of environmental regulation with more cooperative policy schemes in the expectation of improving compliance in member states. But has the EU performed as a 'governance-shaper' in member states, such as Spain, Portugal and Greece that have little tradition of non-hierarchical styles of environmental policy-making? To what extent has the domestic institutional context modulated the Europeanisation of environmental governance in these three Southern countries? The EU influence on the emergence of new schemes of governance in these Southern member states has been modelled by domestic institutional pathways encompassing territorial structure, policy saliency and trust between state and non-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the implementation of EU social policy in the Southern European member states. When studied by implementation research, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain are often treated as a homogeneous group, and some authors speak of a particular 'Southern Problem' while others contest this. In this article, we will take issue with central explanatory frameworks of this literature - the existence of a high level of policy misfit, inefficient administrative and political systems, and weak non-state actors and civil societies in Southern Europe. We analyse the effects of these factors on the timeliness and correctness of implementation in the area of social policy. In a first step, we show that images of a homogenous 'Southern laggard group' are indeed inappropriate. In a second step, we present a new explanation of why the Southern countries are not as uniform as often supposed: they belong to different 'worlds of compliance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of the uncertainty about the final outcome of the current enlargement process, how effective is the EU's acquis conditionality in South Eastern Europe? By elaborating on the example of justice and home affairs, the article argues that the EU's external leverage has remained strong, as the EU has developed additional ways to render its conditionality approach credible. Although the hurdles for entering the EU have been raised, Croatia's compliance efforts can be considered to be similar to the logic observed in the eastern enlargement. The key to understanding the compliance of Macedonia, whose membership prospect is less certain or even questionable, is to take into account policy conditionality in addition to membership conditionality. The EU managed to compensate for less credible membership rewards by substantially increasing the value of the policy reward of visa-free travel. This strategy was effective but has created tensions with regard to the EU's broader objectives in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]