This paper analyzes the relation between the diplomatic activity of Czech presidents and the economic trend of bilateral trade between the Czech Republic and China during 1993-2019. The investigation is based on a statistical survey of diplomatic steps and economic figures. Although the policy of the first Czech President Václav Havel (1993-2003) was cautious towards China, Czech-Chinese bilateral trade exchange was nevertheless consistent and relatively balanced. In the period of President Václav Klaus (2003-2013), after the accession of the Czech Republic to the EU, the trend of trade balance continued to the detriment of Czech exports despite the trade volume growth. However, the decline of exports to China was similarly observed in other Central European countries. That was also a period when Czech presidential diplomatic acts towards China became more numerous. In the period of President Miloš Zeman (2013-until now), the diplomatic activity of the Czech President increased significantly according to the number of official visits and signed documents. Simultaneously, there has been a significant decline in Czech exports and Chinese reinvested profits in the Czech Republic. The authors substantiate the findings by quantitative analysis and describe the development of Czech presidential diplomacy from the perspective of Czech-Chinese economic relations during 1993-2019 as inconsistent.
Despite the importance of Cohesion Policy in reducing regional disparities and stimulating economic growth across member states, it has been exposed to compliance challenges. These challenges are evidenced by a higher number of errors and irregularities against other areas of the European Union’s budgetary expenditure. Especially fraudulent irregularities may put the EU’s financial interests at risk. The question arises, thus, how to protect this EU’s largest investment area from fraudulent actions. This article addresses the following research question: How did Member States fight fraud in cohesion policy by taking preventive measures during the period 2014-2020? This contribution takes an exploratory, triangulated approach based on documentary analysis, analysis of a statistical dataset and interviews in the case of two countries, Italy and Slovakia. The findings will first show what measures Italy and Slovakia took to prevent fraud and, second, relate these measures to the countries’ performance in the fight against fraud.
This article presents an in-depth qualitative case study on the negotiations underlying the introduction of an Independent Fiscal Institution and a Constitutional Balanced Budget Rule in Italy. The article looks at the interests of the relevant actors in the negotiation process of the Six Pack, Euro Plus Pact, Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, and Two Pack by conducting interviews with the negotiators and analyses of parliamentary records and press declarations. The article demonstrates that functional mechanisms explain the outcome of such negotiations better than the consolidated literature of Liberal Intergovernmentalism, which expects that the preferences of the constellation of national actors are the key drivers of EU grand bargains impacting on member states’ core state powers. As a matter of fact, Italian negotiators decided to accept the introduction of such instruments because they were potentially helpful in reducing macroeconomic risks both domestically and in other EU member states without having particular political costs, and not because domestic actors showcased clear preferences in favour of them. The results contribute to the academic debate on the integration of the Economic and Monetary Union by testing hypotheses deriving from traditional EU integration and International Relations literature and paves the way for future research allowing for a greater generalisation.
Many scholars have debated the role of social policy in the new economic governance after the financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis. While some researchers argue that social policy continues to be subordinated in favour of the economic imperative, others observe a partial but progressive socialisation, both in terms of EU policy outputs (i.e. more focus on social policies) and the governance procedure (i.e. more participation of social actors). This article contributes to this debate by providing a national perspective. Specifically, it investigates whether procedural socialisation at the national level leads to output socialisation at the EU level. Based on two case studies from Denmark during the European Semester, this article finds that despite their active participation, social partners have had no noticeable influence on the Commission’s Country Reports or Country-Specific Recommendations. The results indicate that procedural socialisation may not easily translate into output socialisation. The article argues for more nuanced insights into the socialisation debate.
This article reflects on the responses to global crises in Global South regionalisms and the EU, emphasising the need for disrupting research agendas, strengthening disciplinary and theoretical diversity accounts in the EU and comparative regionalism studies in general. The article collects trends and challenges highlighted by the literature on EU and regionalism in Global South from 2008 onwards, aiming to address as main research question: how EU studies and Global South scholarship developed after multiple global crises to contribute to the theorisation renewal and the disruption of research agendas? Stemming from the concept of global polycrisis, two relevant and multidimensional crises are analysed: the 2008 global financial crisis and the migration influxes derived from humanitarian crises. By studying both the EU and Global South experiences, we aim to contribute to move beyond the Eurocentric foundations of the regionalism studies, emphasising that knowledge production needs to be more empirically sensitive to context and social reality.
In 2019, UACES and the European Studies Association of Sub-Saharan Africa (ESA-SSA) launched a project funded by the European Commission’s Erasmus Plus Jean Monnet Projects. The aim of the programme was to encourage and promote diversity within European Studies - broadly defined. The project, ‘Diversity, Inclusion and Multidisciplinarity in European Studies’ (DIMES) sought to explore ways to increase diversity within the field of European Studies, in particular with regards to the ethnicity, disciplinary focus, geographical location of its participants and eventually knowledge production within European Studies itself. The outlined aims of the project were threefold: 1) to improve the representation of BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of colour) academics within UACES and European studies more generally; 2) to move away from the emphasis on Western European and North American academics towards greater inclusion for scholars from under-represented, even marginalised geographies; 3) to broaden the disciplinary focus of contemporary European Studies to include adjacent/related disciplines such as anthropology, human geography, cultural studies and sociology.
Coalition governments have prompted a stream of prominent research since the birth of modern political science. Several studies have been performed on the lifecycles of cabinets, focusing particularly on their formation and duration. The first investigations into such issues were carried out using game theoretic approaches. In their ground-breaking works, William Riker and Lawrence Dodd argued that office-seeking outcomes, i.e. minimal winning coalitions, are more frequent and stable than other cabinet types. However, more recent research suggests that this proposition is disputable. By relying on an original multilevel dataset on West European cabinets, this study examines the actual rationality of minimal winning coalitions by asking whether they have been more recurrent than different government formulae, as predicted by game theory. The analysis finds that such coalitions have not been formed more frequently than non-rational cabinet solutions, i.e., oversized majority cabinets. In addition, the article showcases that minimal winning coalitions may occur in both polarised and less polarised West European political systems. By shedding light on office-based game theoretic propositions and their observable empirical records, this study contributes to the scientific examination of a fundamental stage of democratic governance in Western Europe.
The condition of EU democracy is hotly debated and European Parliament’s political groups and Europarties play an important role in continuing power struggles between European Union institutions. To harness the increased power of both the European Parliament and European citizens, the formal and informal relationships between the political groups and Europarties matter, with the Spitzenkandidatur process as a crucial aspect. Using a dataset of 135 semi-structured interviews, this article looks beneath the formal rules that structure European Parliament’s political groups and Europarties. Exploring how MEPs construct these relationships, it discusses leadership, institutionalisation and stances toward European integration as core elements of the relationship between Europarties and political groups in the European Parliament.
Research Handbook on the Politics of EU Law edited by Paul James Cardwell and Marie-Pierre Granger is a significant contribution to the literature on the European Integration. The book covers many topics ranging from the institutional order to system of governance and the EU’s substantive areas such as free movements, human rights, social policies and international relations where law and politics meet, complement and, sometimes, challenge each other. It is a multi-dimensional book and a useful reference guide for both legal academics and scholars from other disciplines who have strong interest in the EU’s political integration through law.
This article proposes a decentring approach for EU External Action Studies as a debate that is ‘disrupting’ the mainstream in European Studies. It theoretically contributes to the decentring debate in three ways. First, by identifying decentring as a meta-theoretical current of thinking, the article helps define the decentring debate as an area of theorising which can accommodate scholars from various backgrounds and bring them together around a common commitment to overcome Euro- and Western centrism in scholarship (and practice). Second, the article states the wider relevance of taking a decentring approach, which entails normative and instrumental benefits for scholarship, teaching and practice. By doing so, the article underscores the ethical imperative of disrupting a field of study on the one hand, but also the usefulness and even the necessity of disruption as a problem-solving approach to the benefit of a field’s mainstream centre on the other. Third, the article shows how the decentring debate accommodates both critical and problem-solving theorising, and proposes potential theoretical anchors in existing bodies of work. Finally, it discusses the inherent paradox that follows from critical and problem-solving approaches to decentring specifically and disruptive theorising more broadly.
That the European Union’s common commercial relations with ex-colonies and more broadly the ‘tiers monde’ now rest variously on benevolence, depoliticised practices, equal partnerships and values fuels reigning foundational myths about the EU in global politics. Efforts to disrupt these received presuppositions have come from interpretivist, postcolonial, post-development, post-structuralist and other heterodox research traditions. Yet the academy has been largely impervious to knowledges that genuinely question and subvert, in both theory and praxis, Eurocentric ways of seeing the world and understanding the EU as a ‘benevolent’ trade actor on the world stage. In dialogue with existing heterodox approaches, this article asks how we might puncture the coloniality of dominant knowledge regimes about EU trade relations vis-à-vis the global souths, i.e., peoples and places that the EU deems peripheral and, as such, in need of trade-related interventions in the name of development. To this end, we propose different ‘subject-positions’ with which to unthink and rethink our ways of knowing EU trade policy and the Eurocentrism lurking behind it by turning to decolonial thought. We borrow heavily from the work of Meera Sabaratnam whose ‘decolonising strategies’ in studying world politics we attempt to exemplify through a critical interrogation of the canonical scholarship around three distinct ‘policy worlds’ of EU external trade relations: Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) and Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters in free trade agreements. Finally, we think reflexively about the decolonial option and the ruptures it triggers as to what EU trade policy is and the colonial logics sustaining ‘normative’ and ‘geopolitical’ narratives on/by the EU as a trade power.
Discussion on decolonising European Studies (ES) curriculum has gained traction in academic and activist circles, partly responding to calls to decolonise curricula that have brought attention to the ‘whitewashing’ of history and the critical lack of BIPOC scholarship taught in higher education syllabi. Current efforts to decolonise ES as a field of study have largely relied on these aspects. While this is undoubtedly an important step, many ES scholars have expressed a lack of clarity as to how this rhetoric can be practically adopted in their courses without compromising the central subject matter – Europe. This paper responds to calls to decolonise ES, by introducing different theoretical and practical approaches that educational practitioners within the field can draw from in the building of curricula
African universities rely on teaching traditions and scientific theories based on Western epistemologies and ontologies. Interactions between European and African scholars too tend to focus on the deficits in African experiences, knowledge, research and teaching methodologies and the poor economic environments in which they operate that are characterized by inadequate infrastructure and budgets. This essay discusses an emerging opportunity in science diplomacy within African-European Union (EU) interactions in higher education and argues that a fundamental revision of the imbalances in African-European scholarly relationships is possible. The essay uses the case of the emerging Platform for African–European Studies, which involves 22 universities (including 14 in Africa and eight in Europe) and underscores the importance of science diplomacy, knowledge co-creation and co-production to correct hegemonic knowledge about Africa. It explores the origins of the programme, its attempt to follow a critical global and decolonized approach in addressing the revision of curricula both in Europe and in Africa and the co-design of research. It concludes by highlighting some of the obstacles to disrupting the status-quo.
This article makes the case that attitudes towards the EU should be conceptualised as interpretative 'frames', to then be employed as analytical tools for comparison within and between European countries. As is argued, at present this move is all the more necessary, since multiple asymmetrical crises and the entrenchment of 'differentiated integration' have compounded the contested, open-ended nature of European integration. In parallel, EU studies have already increasingly acknowledged the context dependence, heterogeneity and ambivalence of such attitudes, moving beyond the presumption of stable support or opposition. This article leverages a variety of extant works and the empirical outcomes of a deductive-cum-inductive research endeavour to craft a comprehensive inventory of 16 interpretative frames. Then, it highlights a fundamental prospective application, discussing practices devised to enable the construction of a frame-based approach to mass-elite congruence on European integration. Further avenues for future research, which could be pursued on the back of a relaunch of frame analysis in EU studies, entail the study of Euroscepticism, national 'issue cultures' and 'issue fields', and mass-level attitudes towards the EU.
The European Union’s (EU) mission to promote its idea of European-ness across the continent led to its eastern enlargements and later the Eastern Partnership of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Along the way, this mission encountered competing norms and regional integration efforts shaped by sociocultural and historical ties connecting state, society and territory. These ties inform the barriers to Europeanisation and the backsliding from EU-managed policy reforms. They can illuminate where the EU’s self-image and constructed European identity do not reflect perspectives abroad or those of EU member countries. Such inconsistencies in the EU-constructed identity that shaped related policy mechanisms prevented sustainable regional transformation and integration. Further policy integration and future EU enlargement remain strong possibilities, as does the risk of basing the next generation of policy mechanisms on a distorted image of the EU and its capacity to transform. In this article, I apply a novel critical theory perspective on the entwined processes of de- and reterritorialisation to this context, and argue that this perspective clarifies and informs the EU’s aim to transform and unite Europe.
This article makes the case for conceptualisation of attitudes towards the EU as interpretative ‘frames’, to be employed as analytical tools for comparison within and between European countries. At present, this move is all the more necessary. In fact, multiple asymmetrical crises and the entrenchment of ‘differentiated integration’ have compounded the contested, open-ended nature of European integration; in parallel, EU studies have increasingly acknowledged the context dependence, heterogeneity and ambivalence of such attitudes, moving beyond the presumption of stable support or opposition. The article leverages a variety of extant works and the empirical outcomes of a deductive-cum-inductive research endeavour to craft a comprehensive inventory of 16 interpretative frames. Then, it highlights a fundamental application, discussing practices that enable the construction of a frame-based approach to mass-elite congruence on European integration. Further suggested developments entail the study of Euroscepticism, national ‘issue cultures’ and ‘issue fields’, and mass-level attitudes towards the EU.
This contribution to the Special Issue focuses on how we might incorporate 'peripheral thinking' on the EU, with a particular focus on teaching the EU at a 'new periphery': Brexit Britain. First, it considers the limits of 'mainstream' approaches to teaching the EU in the context of what now feels like an almost permanent crisis, pointing to the importance of engaging with a 'cognitive periphery' that includes critical approaches to the EU and integration. Second, it argues in favour of a 'critical-pluralist' approach: that is, an approach that fully engages with that periphery as part of a broader commitment to scholarly pluralism. It suggests - with reference to my work on an EU politics textbook - that a 'question driven pedagogy' might be one pedagogically practical way of presenting such plurality to our students, particularly via independent reading and large-group teaching. Finally, the paper turns to consider how we might use the small-group classroom to deepen student learning in accordance with such an approach, drawing on my experience of developing a 'Brexit role play' in the context of teaching the EU in Brexit Britain.
Despite a growing body of academic literature about the European Union’s public administration, there is a dearth of studies about the most senior managers in the institutions, the Secretaries-General. Consideration of the rich life of the late Sir Julian Priestley, an influential Secretary-General (SG) of the European Parliament, 1997-2007, demonstrates not only how Secretaries-General can be interesting subjects of study in their own right, but also how such SGs can, through the decisions they take and the policies they champion, be consequential for their institutions.
The aim of this article is to discuss how the covid-19 pandemic exacerbates inequalities and social isolation by examining the UK Government approach to providing asylum claimants’ access to safe accommodation and health services on the one hand, and charities support of particularly lesbian, gay, bi- and trans-sexual, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) claimants to gain/sustain access to social spaces and social support on the other. The data used for the writing of this article is based on 14 semi-structured interviews conducted between August 2020 and April 2021 with social/charity workers, asylum claimants and refugees affiliated with NGO help organisations in Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff, Brighton, Belfast, and London. This article argues that that the Home Office’s policies around housing and health during the covid-19 pandemic are closely linked to ‘hostile environment’ policies and amplifying housing and food precarity, isolation, exposure to violence, economic insecurity as well as physical and mental health problems for LGBTQI+ asylum claimants. There is a lack of intersectionality in the governmental approach to refugees and covid-19 and which creates a support gap for particularly LGBTQI+ asylum claimants. This intersectional research on sexuality, gender and asylum in the UK reveals that hostile environment policies render LGBTQI+ persons seeking asylum particularly vulnerable to homelessness, limited support services as well as mental health problems and gender-based and sexual violence.
COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated the health inequalities across and between European Union member states. It has also raised the profile of EU health policy and the highlighted the value of European cooperation in health. Early failures to respond adequately, coupled with this increased salience, have given rise to a series of initiatives designed to strengthen and expand the EU's role in health. This presents an opportunity to address the imbalances in the EU's institutional and legal structure which prevent it from addressing health inequalities more effectively. Drawing on changes underway in the public health, internal market and fiscal governance elements of EU health policy, this paper explores the potential for the post-pandemic EU health policy framework to better support the reduction of health inequalities.
