Abstract The European Union (EU) is undergoing a geoeconomic shift driven by concerns over its global position, geopolitical tensions and the need for strategic autonomy. Scholars have studied various parts of this ‘geoeconomic turn’ aiming to secure Europe's position in the world. Whilst research has not reached a consensus on the timing of this geoeconomic shift, it is largely depicted as a novel phenomenon through analysis of emerging strategies and policy instruments. This article departs from the analytical perspective of geoeconomic practices and how lower level bureaucrats engage in what we label ‘everyday geoeconomics’: the routinized practices through which agents such as civil servants and industry actors enact, reproduce and negotiate geoeconomic agency in ordinary activities. Through studying the evolving interplay of a complex set of ideas, actors and preferences, we find that these geoeconomic practices have longer roots and have been present throughout the 2000s. We illustrate this through an in‐depth case study of EllaLink, a 5900‐km‐long optical submarine cable between Portugal and Brazil. We provide three contributions to the study of geoeconomics. First, we introduce and illustrate the saliency of a ‘bottom‐up’ approach to the geoeconomic turn in the EU that we call everyday geoeconomics. Second, we show how actualizing geoeconomic ambitions depend on complex processes of marshalling broad coalitions of actors for strategic purposes. Third, we offer a detailed historical case study of a key infrastructure that only recently has begun to receive sustained scrutiny for its strategic implications, namely, subsea communications infrastructure.
Abstract European industrial policy relies on two major programmes operating under different logics: the place‐based Cohesion Policy, which directs investment towards less developed regions to reduce territorial disparities, and the mission‐led Horizon 2020, which allocates funding competitively to promote research and innovation. Using the RHOMOLO spatial dynamic computable general equilibrium model calibrated for all 235 European Union (EU) Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics‐2 regions, we first examine the macroeconomic impact of each policy as actually implemented and then compare place‐based and mission‐led approaches under a normalised framework that holds total funds constant, isolating the role of policy design from that of fund volumes. Mission‐led allocations generate higher long‐run GDP returns but increase regional inequality and yield lower employment gains, whilst place‐based allocations reduce disparities and support substantially more employment. These results are driven primarily by the territorial distribution of funds, with direct implications for the design of EU industrial policy amid the ongoing reform of Cohesion Policy.
Farm animal welfare has emerged as a growing policy subsystem within the European Union's (EU) Common Agricultural Policy. However, despite a harmonized EU framework, member states differ substantially in how they implement EU directives on farm animal welfare. Building on the concept of differentiated policy implementation (DPI), we examine how institutional fit, domestic politics and problem pressure shape national implementation patterns in three EU member states with large animal production: Denmark, France and Spain. Our findings reveal that whilst economic imperatives create tensions across all cases, national policy-making styles and actor constellations drive divergent outcomes. We argue that the relevance of DPI factors is shaped in part by the characteristics of the policy subsystem, particularly its political salience and economic salience. Moreover, our article advances the understanding of how national contexts influence EU implementation in an understudied policy domain and provides practical insights for current challenges and potentials in animal welfare policy-making.
Abstract This research note analyses the European Commission's Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 as a manifestation of a new spatial and technological logic of European defence: the vertical territorialisation of security. Moving beyond traditional perimeter‐based understandings of territorial defence, the Roadmap constructs a multi‐layered continuum extending from drones and counter‐drones, through air and missile defence, to outer space. Drawing on Stuart Elden's use of the concept of ‘vertical geopolitics’, the analysis situates the EU's emerging ‘drone wall’ and the European Space Shield as components of an effort to ‘secure the volume’ of Europe's sovereignty. This vertical logic reflects a shift towards electronic rather than physical control, where radars, sensors and jammers constitute an infrastructural reterritorialisation of airspace. At the same time, it reveals the European Commission's growing role as industrial convenor within what Marsh et al. term Europe's iron network. The article argues that vertical territorialisation operates simultaneously as a spatial strategy, a techno‐industrial project and a political compromise, integrating divergent national interests under the Commission's evolving defence governance framework.
This article adopts a political ethnographic approach to follow narrative practices enacted by diplomats and bureaucrats during the trilogue negotiations of the European Union's (EU) Artificial Intelligence Act where inter-institutional dynamics were at stake. I argue that when diplomats and bureaucrats negotiate AI, they also negotiate their desired position in a struggle over status in EU's diplomatic structures while constructing competing identities of the EU. The narrative analysis shows that three narrative positions endure, ethical and moral; national and economic; supranational and global, which interact through negotiation practices of brokerage and improvisation (re)negotiating social positions and (re)constructing three faces of a European AI identity. These narratives are not performed by a specific diplomat or bureaucrat but remain transversal, competing within and across national, ideological and institutional boundaries. The competing meanings are comprised into the AI Act constituting AI, its governance structure and the EU with ambiguous meanings.
Abstract Is the European Union's (EU's) Digital Services Act (DSA) a bold reform of platform governance that needs to be scaled back? The EU's reputation for prioritising citizens' rights over companies' and market freedoms seems to suggest so. Recent criticism of EU digital policy from the United States is further fuelling this perception. However, an in‐depth study of the political debates preceding the DSA now suggests otherwise. It reveals that many options that would have enabled much more effective regulation of internet platforms, with a focus on protecting citizens and democracy, were discarded. When faced with choices involving the regulation of the digital economy, the EU has consistently opted for market freedom over more far‐reaching regulation in areas such as user tracking and profiling, platform exemption from publisher liability and tackling illegal and harmful content online. A realistic perception of the DSA suggests that this Act is merely the first step towards safeguarding democracy in the digital age and that further action is essential.
Despite a rich research literature addressing the rise of a genuine multilevel administration (MLA) in the European Union (EU), impacts on municipal bureaucracies remain understudied. This article maps how the MLA affects local bureaucracies, based on a multi-sited qualitative study of public procurement and environmental departments in 20 Norwegian and Swedish municipalities. We find that the studied municipal bureaucrats interact routinely and closely outside their home institutions through inter-municipal coordination arenas, shared work processes and peer learning, revealing a decentralised, horizontal pattern of integration. The analysis further identifies indirect forms of horizontal co-optation operating through leading cities and networked arrangements, beyond direct European Commission influence and control. These findings refine existing MLA research by demonstrating how compatible territorial problem-solving operates as a horizontal mechanism of administrative integration within the EU MLA.
In the context of the European Union's (EU's) geoeconomic shift, the governance of Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) has become a central yet contested pillar of its external trade policy. Accusations of green colonialism highlight the stakes around how partner countries interpret the EU's normative agenda. This article maintains that understanding partner-country perspectives is essential for grasping the dynamics of the EU's TSD governance, focusing on how political elites in Vietnam and Indonesia, both major EU trade partners with distinct postcolonial backgrounds, interpret and frame these policies. This analysis argues that these interpretations rely less on policy details or material interests and more on national identity narratives. These narratives shape how the EU's claims are understood. Drawing on interviews and official documents, and using Goffman's frontstage and backstage concepts, the article examines how interpretations appear in both public and elite settings. The findings show that partner countries do not see the EU's geopolitical shift the same way. Instead, national identity in Indonesia and Vietnam leads to different views on the same policy tools. Focusing on how these policies are received, the article highlights how EU trade power is relationally constituted, depending on how its claims are interpreted and rearticulated by partner-country actors.
Why has the United Kingdom repeatedly restored substantive compatibility with European Union (EU) regulatory norms despite formal withdrawal? This article introduces the concept of asymmetric regulatory embeddedness (ARE) to explain post-membership governance in highly integrated sectors. ARE captures the structural condition in which a former member state remains economically, institutionally and infrastructurally embedded within a dominant regulatory ecosystem, resulting in bounded autonomy after legal exit. The article theorises adaptive convergence as the mechanism through which divergence initiatives confront embeddedness-induced constraints and are incrementally recalibrated. Drawing on process tracing and discourse analysis of UK Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) and sanitary and phytosanitary/pesticide governance (2019-2025), the study shows how market interdependence, epistemic infrastructure dependence, institutional path dependence and legitimacy pressures produce functional compatibility without formal obligation. The findings extend Europeanisation beyond hierarchical membership, conceptualising EU influence as structural and relational rather than coercive. It provides a dynamic framework for analysing regulatory governance under conditions of post-membership interdependence.
This article develops a comprehensive typology of policy frame trajectories and proposes a research agenda to explain the complex, evolving dynamics of framing in European and global public policy-making. Challenging static and instrumentalist views, frames are conceptualised as malleable, relational and contingent, unfolding through processes such as emergence, diffusion, contestation, co-optation, drain and disappearance. The typology distinguishes between single and multiple frame trajectories, revealing how shifting power relations, advocacy coalitions, institutional contexts and crises interact to influence framing over time. The proposed agenda identifies a broad spectrum of explanatory factors, both endogenous and exogenous, including strategic actor behaviour and structural transformations within policy fields. This nuanced framework emphasises the interplay between agency and structure in shaping frame trajectories within the multi-level governance structures characteristic of the European Union and global policy networks. Methodologically, the article advocates combining discourse network analysis with qualitative approaches to capture the multifaceted nature of framing in complex and fragmented governance environments. The conceptualisation provides valuable insights into how frames gain prominence, become contested or are strategically appropriated, offering practical implications for policy-makers and advocacy groups navigating evolving European and international policy debates. Ultimately, this work calls for a dynamic, long-term perspective on framing processes that accounts for their relational and temporal complexity across global and European public policy-making.
This study examines the structural transformation in European Union (EU) migration governance following the adoption of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum of 2024. The negotiation introduced a new layer of decision-making that augmented the existing technocratic co-ordination within the Justice and Home Affairs networks with high-level political bargaining among heads of state. Building on the argument of an 'intergovernmentalist turn', this study explores how political negotiations have been integrated into internal legislative co-ordination in the areas of migration and asylum. This shift represents not merely a procedural adjustment but a deeper recalibration of governance, where political feasibility and strategic compromise take precedence over normative coherence and legalistic frameworks. This transformation can be understood in terms of changes in locus, logic and legitimacy. Locus refers to the relocation of decision-making dynamics, with greater involvement of high-level political forums dominated by heads of state. Logic highlights the growing reliance on package deals and transactional diplomacy, whilst legitimacy points to the increasing importance of political agreement resulting from high-level bargaining among member states.
In recent years, the European Union (EU) expanded its digital regulatory competences. However, it is not clear which political trade-offs occur in decision-making on digital policy issues. This study examines how European parliamentarians and their party groups position themselves on these issues and which conflict lines emerge. Analysing roll call votes and party-group press releases on the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) reveals that the emerging structure of contestation does not neatly align with established political dimensions. Instead, political conflict remains fragmented; different aspects of digital regulation resonate with established dimensions of political contestation. The Left-Right dimension plays a role, albeit to a limited extent. At times, other dimensions, such as EU integration, come to the fore. Notably, however, digital policy occasionally brings progressive parliamentarians to side with the far right in opposition to a centre-right block of the centre-conservative European People's Party (EPP). To better understand this phenomenon, this article builds on a re-conceptualisation of digitalisation-related conflict, arguing for a 'techno-solutionist' versus 'techno-pluralist' issue dimension.
This special issue explores the evolving trajectories of policy frames in European and global public policy, emphasising the non-linear processes through which frames emerge, diffuse and become salient or silenced over time. The contributions focus on how actors in governance, ranging from governments and international organisations to civil society, form discourse coalitions and compete to define policy issues and solutions. Unlike the existing literature that prioritises the study of frame effectiveness or linear models, this issue centres on 'frame trajectories', tracing how frames travel, interact and change within complex political networks. The issue introduces a new research agenda that adopts a long-term, relational perspective, considering both the internal dynamics of policy debates and the broader social structures that shape them. Empirically, the contributions focus on European and global public policy over the last two decades, covering the 'golden age' of liberalism and the liberal international order, along with its recent backlash and contestation. This period has been marked by multiple crises, technological breakthroughs and significant events that have triggered policy debates across diverse issue areas. The European Union (EU) has been central to these shifts. The contributions use discourse network analysis and interviews to analyse policy frames in key global fields, such as migration, climate governance, artificial intelligence regulation, and health data sharing. The findings highlight how frames evolve in response to crises, institutional changes and shifting actor coalitions, providing new insights into the complexities of global policy-making and the EU's role as a key actor in these evolving debates.
European Union (EU) agencies have increasingly been tasked with supporting the implementation of EU legislation, yet their impact on how such implementation unfolds remains understudied. Whilst existing research suggests that EU agencies can generally improve implementation outcomes, it offers limited insight into the impact that EU agencies have on how EU rules are implemented at the national level. This article examines how the work of an EU agency can shape the implementation of a specific EU rule. Focusing on the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) and the 70% rule under EU electricity market regulation, we explore how ACER used its tasks to promote more uniform implementation across member states. Drawing on a qualitative case study, we show that ACER acted entrepreneurially - leveraging both formal and informal authority - to influence national implementation. Although it could not fully overcome national resistance, ACER contributed to greater convergence in implementation practices. The findings highlight how EU agencies can play an active role in shaping national implementation of EU rules, entailing more 'multi-level implementation' in the EU. The article offers an analytical framework that may be applied to assess similar dynamics in other policy areas and agency contexts.
The 2015 migration crisis produced partial path divergence within the Schengen Area rather than the supranational upgrading predicted by neofunctionalist theory. Instead of deeper communitarization, the crisis generated institutional asymmetries in responsibility allocation that fractured mutual trust and rendered automatic functional integration unsustainable in a policy domain marked by low transnational interdependence and high identity salience. This article argues that these asymmetries positioned solidarity as the indispensable mechanism through which the European Union transitioned from neofunctionalist automaticity to a postfunctionalist equilibrium of negotiated burden-sharing. Employing a hybrid theoretical framework that integrates neofunctionalism, liberal intergovernmentalism and postfunctionalism with historical institutionalism and doctrinal legal analysis, the study demonstrates that the 2024 New Pact on Migration and Asylum reorganized and stabilized the Dublin logic. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative design combining theoretical reconstruction, historical institutionalism and doctrinal legal analysis. Solidarity is reconceptualized under Article 80 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union as a bifurcated constitutional principle operating simultaneously through flexible interstate responsibility-sharing and external migration-management partnerships with third countries. This dual structure transforms solidarity into a systemic governance technology that mitigates politicization, addresses path-dependent asymmetries and preserves the viability of free movement, whilst refining integration theory and advancing a normative understanding of its constitutional role in European Union migration law.
The European Union faces long-term governance challenges in contested domains, such as migration management, health data sharing, and facial recognition technology. Across these fields, political debates are shaped by shifting ways in which actors frame problems and solutions. Understanding how such framing contests evolve over time is crucial for explaining both integration dynamics and the capacity of EU institutions to govern effectively. This article develops the mathematical foundations of a comparative approach to frame evolution by extending discourse network analysis, acknowledging the relational nature of collective action framing. Partitioning trajectories into distinct states and phases reveals key types of frame evolution: progressive versus regressive, entangled versus disentangled, and fast-paced versus slow. This typology provides a basis for linking framing dynamics to EU integration and policymaking processes. The article makes three contributions: operationalising collective framing trajectories; introducing a temporal kernel smoothing approach; and identifying comparative dimensions across policy debates.
The populist radical right (PRR) is often seen as a political family putting forward the need for securitised border control, a return to territorialised sovereignty and the rejection of multilateral international organisations and agreements. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how PRR leaders in office frame sovereignty when addressing international audiences and justifying their positions on global affairs. Based on a comparative analysis of references to borders and the associated antagonisms between 2022 and 2024 by Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orb & aacute;n, this research demonstrates that executive PRR leaders engage in a relativisation of both the scales and the conceptualisation of sovereignty. They adapt their approach to sovereignty according to the situational, institutional and temporal contexts.
Adopting a law-in-context approach, this article suggests that merit-based migrant selection in the European Union (EU) is implicitly shaped by racial dynamics. With a focus on EU law and more specifically on cases from the Netherlands and Germany, it argues that the growing emphasis on merit enables a limited number of 'racialised others' to counterbalance the structural disadvantages associated with their citizenships, whilst simultaneously legitimising the exclusion of those considered insufficiently meritorious within the same group. By bridging two distinct strands of scholarship - critical analyses of the racial dimensions of migration policy and studies of merit-based selection mechanisms - this article advances existing debates on EU migration and asylum governance. It posits that the normative appeal of merit acts to justify existing hierarchies and to obscure the underlying racialisation processes that sustain them.
Recent developments within the European Union (EU) reveal a notable 'citizen turn' marked by initiatives aimed at enhancing citizen engagement with EU institutions through deliberative mechanisms. Whilst existing scholarship has extensively examined political elites' perceptions of these participatory tools at the national level, the policy-makers' attitudes at the transnational level remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by analysing the discursive stances of parliamentarians - both Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and national members of parliament (MPs) - towards increased citizen participation in EU policy-making. Adapting the framework of three ideal-typical discourses originally developed for national-level deliberative mini-publics, we propose a refined typology of consultative, sceptical and power-sharing discourses with specific EU-level subtypes. Our findings reveal a predominance of the consultative discourse across the political spectrum and parliamentary levels. We observe no significant discursive divergence between MEPs and MPs. This not only points to the increasingly transnational character of the EU political system but is also critical for the legitimacy and effectiveness of EU participatory instruments, which hinge on the support of both national and supranational parliamentary tiers, as evidenced by the Conference on the Future of Europe experience. Furthermore, our analysis underscores the EU-specific context as a factor shaping parliamentary attitudes towards increased citizen participation in policy-making.
The European Commission builds relationships with civil society organisations (CSOs) through policy-relevant meetings and funding. Through these relationships, the Commission seeks to obtain expertise, efficient input and legitimacy for its policy initiatives. Despite this, these relationships have become more contested in recent political debates. Studies on funding and access have shown that funding sources - especially public - entail benefits but also dependencies for CSOs and affect access to political institutions. This study analyses how public, private and membership funding sources affect access to the European Commission, thus going beyond the focus on public funding alone. It develops resource exchange theory further through a framework which structurally connects different funding sources with expertise, efficiency and legitimacy. A sample of CSOs from the Transparency register is analysed through regressions. The findings show that CSOs funded by private bodies are more likely to obtain Commission access despite negative associations with legitimacy. The study incentivises consideration of the role of private body funding in EU policy.
