This article offers a conceptual contribution to understanding the evolving political function of collective memory in EU integration. Historically, EU memory politics has served as a symbolic resource to legitimise European integration through reconciliation and symbolic belonging. Recent developments, however, suggest a gradual functional reorientation. Drawing on theories of memory politics, the article traces how EU narratives and policies of remembrance have evolved across successive integration phases, combining existing findings with recent primary evidence of a potential shift toward memory as a strategic resource in EU foreign relations - particularly in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine. Methodologically, it relies on a qualitative, interpretive discourse analysis of EU institutional documents, especially European Parliament resolutions, alongside existing scholarship. The article concludes that, while possibly contextual rather than paradigmatic, this trend signals a meaningful expansion in the functional repertoire of EU memory politics, reorienting collective remembrance toward strategic agency in external affairs.
This article argues that the Global Gateway, rather than marking a paradigm shift, consolidates the retroliberal turn in the EU's external action that began in the early 2010s. Drawing on primary sources and targeted interviews, it delineates the contested genesis of the Global Gateway, which helps explain early ambiguities and delays in implementation, and exposes the shortcomings of geopolitical interpretations that can offer only partial insights into its diverse underlying logics. More specifically, it finds that the geopoliticisation of the Global Gateway, advanced initially by the EEAS and subsequently by the European Commission's political leadership, faced resistance from development community, particularly with regard to the antagonisation of China. Moreover, it unravels fundamental divisions within DG IntPa, between a managerial faction that promoted investment-oriented strategies advancing donor interests under the guise of mutual benefit and an activist constituency advocating development-focused, recipient-driven interventions.
Border regions have long been analysed as microcosms of broader European integration processes, where integration becomes concrete through cross-border interlinkages. The European Commission supports such interlinkages through Interreg. Yet, network analytical studies of cross-border cooperation have not explicitly analysed network evolution. This paper proposes a dynamic framework and asks how cooperative relationships evolve and what shapes their emergence and durability. Using temporal exponential random graph models and a new dataset of small Interreg projects in one Polish-German cross-border region over two Interreg periods, the paper shows that past embeddedness - through community membership and actor centrality - increases the likelihood that new ties emerge. By contrast, persistence is less consistently associated with these mechanisms and appears more sensitive to programme rhythms and organisational capacity. These findings show that integration across borders unfolds through relational dynamics over time, and they demonstrate the value of longitudinal network analysis for European integration research.
This paper examines the European Union's (EU) response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of crisis management, delegation theory, and emergency politics. It focuses on the European Council, the European Commission, and the Council of the EU, analyzing their interplay and the nature of exceptional emergency measures (EEMs) between 2020 and 2023. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study integrates computational text analysis techniques: large language models (LLMs), Structural Topic Models (STMs), and dictionary-based analysis, alongside a case study of the vaccine export transparency and authorization mechanism. Findings show that the Commission played a central operational role in crisis management, while acting within a framework of delegated authority. Although the Council was the main supporter of the EEMs, the Commission often acted as a first mover and the operational actor of these measures. These results contribute to debates on EU crisis governance, highlighting the interaction between delegation and exceptionalism.
