Contemporary European Politics最新文献

This article explores the current challenges posed by the growing significance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and considers potential regulatory changes to better manage this rapidly developing technology through evidence-informed policy-making. Current key challenges for governance discussed consider the ambiguous definition of AI, the assessment of its multifaceted impacts, the handling of inherent uncertainties, the reconciliation of regulation with innovation, and the pursuit of regulatory harmonization. We propose policy recommendations such as the application of Multi-Criteria Analyses, Sensitivity Analyses, and the implementation of Regulatory Sandboxes. Additionally, the paper highlights Europe's potential leadership role in fostering interoperability and harmonization within AI regulation and emphasizes Europe's contribution to promoting international regulatory harmonization.

This article examines the development of party opposition to European integration in Ireland following two major crises in recent years: the eurozone crisis and the Brexit crisis. Ireland's relationship with the European Union (EU) is unusual. In a country which has voted against EU treaties on two occasions in public referendums, there is also very strong political and public opinion support for membership. This article assesses two recent crises that have had important consequences for patterns of EU support and opposition to European integration. The eurozone crisis highlighted the direct intervention of the EU in Irish affairs and Ireland's dependency on support from the EU, and the austerity programme led to extensive protests, suggesting a hardening of party opposition to integration. However, this contrasts with the reaction to Brexit, which led to greater appreciation of the EU and which served to strengthen party support for integration and a soft style of opposition. Overall, we argue that the overall pattern in Ireland shows a spike but then a gradual decline in hard opposition and an increase in soft Euroscepticism.

The links between political parties and civil society organisations (CSOs), initiatives and social movements has been transforming. Cross-fertilizing allies in the past, often interpenetrating ideologically and personally, nowadays have become much more alienated from each other. Nonetheless, political parties still seek to form relations with CSOs and initiatives. Parties with low office aspiration, such as far-right and radical left ones, by offering less binding and informal opportunities for political activity, have a potential to meet citizens' demands for more horizontal engagement. On the empirical level, the paper focuses on two Polish political parties: the progressive Left Together (Lewica Razem) and the far-right Confederation Liberty and Independence (Konfederacja Wolność i Niepodległość), to identify how both parties perceive and incorporate participatory demands. Using a qualitative analysis based on individual in-depth interviews with party politicians, this study aims to compare the diagnoses of the demand for civic engagement formulated by parties from opposite sides of the political spectrum, and their supply to nonpartisan political activists.

What legitimation strategy do populists use once they seize power? This article combines insights from literatures on populism in power, populist legitimation strategies, populist foreign policy and populist usages of memory politics to shed light on victimhood as a powerful legitimation strategy of populism in power. The main objective of this study is to understand the role of victims versus perpetrators dynamics as a legitimating strategy of populists in power, while looking at the single case study of Poland under the right-wing populist government led by the Law and Justice party (2015–2023). The empirical analysis traces how populists in power engage in a double game of self-legitimation as both victims and heroes, as well as in a two-level game of de-legitimation of domestic and international actors as perpetrators. It highlights how victimhood-based narratives allow the underdog illusion to be sustained when populists gain power, while copy-pasting the victim-perpetrator relationship from the traumatic past into the present. Finally, the analysis shows how the de-legitimating narrative imposes a principal-agent relationship between foreign and domestic perpetrators.

The European Parliament (EP) serves as the legislative body where elected representatives from EU member states are organised into political groups, rather than by nationality. Initially established as a consultative assembly, the EP's influence in budgetary politics, legislation and oversight has expanded significantly since the first direct elections in 1979 and the passage of the Single European Act (SEA) in 1987. While it has often been argued that the EP's ability to influence national politics is limited, recent studies show that the active involvement of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in EU legislation and other EP activities can foster stronger ties between European representatives and their national parties. These representatives can leverage their involvement to demonstrate influence on supranational policy outcomes and build consensus both at the bilateral and EU levels. This article uses the developing British-Irish relationship on the Northern Ireland conflict to demonstrate this function. It focuses on the early 1980s and the Northern Ireland hunger strikes. Using a novel network approach, the article draws on a qualitative analysis of original archival sources, triangulated with semi-structured elite interviews, to demonstrate that the EP not only supported this relationship but also played a pivotal role in transforming it before the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) negotiations. In light of Brexit, this analysis highlights how the departure of the UK from the EU may create a deficit in the British-Irish relationship. Furthermore, it provides a foundation for further study of the EP's dynamic role in fostering stronger relationships among EU member states.

EU Structural Funds have played a major part in the Northern Ireland peace process, with over £2.3 billion pounds being channelled through programmes such as the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) and, from 1995, the successive ‘PEACE’ programmes (Special Support Programmes for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland). The impact has been particularly visible in the city of Derry/Londonderry. This paper proposes to look at the impact of ERDF and PEACE on the museum sector in the city, drawing on articles from the local press as well as interviews with key actors (project managers, current museum staff and former staff members). The first part focuses on the Tower Museum, Derry/Londonderry's civic museum inaugurated in 1992. It shows how the awarding of ERDF funding made it possible for the city to finally set up its first museum since 1945—putting an end to a long-standing anomaly, which had been identified as a priority from at least the 1970s. The new museum was explicitly given a role in favouring reconciliation, through an inclusive approach to the city's history. The second part looks at the Siege Museum, which could be called a ‘sectional’ museum, as it is run by the Apprentice Boys of Derry, the main loyalist organisation in the city. Again, we will see that the absence of a museum to represent the loyalist narrative had long been lamented, but successive plans to create one had always run into difficulties. PEACE III funding led to the museum finally being opened in 2016, again with the aim of fostering cross-community understanding. In the third and final part, we will see that the subsequent programme, PEACE IV, then built upon this foundation, providing funds for projects that combined the two ‘sectional’ museums of the city—the Siege Museum and the Museum of Free Derry. The opening of the Siege Museum opened up opportunities to combine both political traditions, in particular within a project known as the ‘Derry Model’ (officially, the Conflict Transformation and Peace Building project), which uses the two museums as a resource for reconciliation work. Overall, this paper shows how successive grants of EU funds have played a key part in helping the city build a very solid, well-rounded offer in the museum sector, allowing the realization of projects that had long been recognised as necessary, yet had been hindered by the difficulty of finding appropriate funding. This capacity-building then allowed more projects to flourish, which showcase the city's expertise in peacebuilding.

In a Europe where contestation over migration and European integration has become increasingly connected, Ireland seems to be an outlier. Whereas European integration has been a politicised issue in Ireland, not least in the context of four consecutive referendums on EU treaties in the early 2000s, politicisation of immigration has traditionally been low in Ireland. But while previous studies suggest that this has also been the case during EU referendums, the debates on the Treaty of Nice seem to be an exception. Ireland's status as an outlier in Western Europe and the variation across referendums makes the Irish referendums an ideal case for exploring the relationship between politicisation of migration and European integration. This article examines and explains to what extent and how migration has been discursively linked to European integration in the four Irish EU referendums in the period 2001–2009. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of political claims in Irish newspapers, I argue that pre-existing national discourses on migration and European integration, which have been predominantly positive in Ireland, have generally hindered the mobilisation of anti-immigration sentiments against the EU. The Nice II referendum is an exception, highlighting how not even Ireland is immune to such politicisation. My analysis shows how domestic radical right actors played an important part in mobilising such linkages, but also how the responses of other actors contributed to making migration a more salient issue. The article offers novel empirical insights into the politicisation of migration in Ireland, and also advances our general understanding of the dynamics behind the politicisation of migration in relation to European integration.

Most explanations of the European Union (EU) have dealt with it as a kind of (con)federation, a multi-level construction, a peculiar blend of supranational and intergovernmental features, or a neo-functional set-up. Some regard the EU as an empire of sorts, but either this perspective is drowned out by approaches privileging a ‘normative power’ reading, or it is applied solely, respectively mainly, to the behaviour of the EU towards its ‘near abroad’. This focus on externaIities is both necessary and important, but it does not capture the full picture. This article argues that the EU generically is best understood as a neo-imperial construct, also in its internal dealings, its requirements on member states to respect its norms and values and accept the limitations of national sovereignty, which EU membership implies. This ‘normative regime’ invariably leads to disagreements and open conflicts between centre and periphery. In one case, that of the UK, these conflicts have led to the British withdrawal from the EU. In others—here represented by Central Europe—to ongoing and bitter recriminations over the rule of law and the very nature of the EU as a collaborative venture. At the centre of all this we find Germany, as the clearest beneficiary of the civilian European empire. This empire, however, is vulnerable. Not just is it internally exposed to the pressure of member states and movements that prefer a union which makes fewer inroads into national sovereignty; it is simultaneously challenged by a global context which calls for the EU to take on a more independent, less subdued and more militant role in world politics. Hence, the EU—faced with external threats of different orders (the USA, Russia, China)—is currently trying to effect a transition from a civilian empire based on peaceful, democratic ideals to a more traditional, old-school empire based on hard power. Whether it has the proper instruments to do this, if the centre is strong enough to hold, only time can tell. What is certain is that these ambitions have added new contradictions and dilemmas to the agenda of a civilian empire with visible growing pains, in which the voices of dissatisfaction and open resistance are on the rise.

Research finds a link between far-right political partisanship and attitudes towards transnational institutions among European citizens—mainly in relation to the European Union (EU). Citizens that support far-right parties tend to view the European Union as unjustly subverting national sovereignty, which leads to a higher level of Euroskepticism when compared to supporters of most mainstream parties. In this study, our contribution is that we explore whether the negative attitudes far-right party supporters have towards the European Union extend towards the United Nations (UN). We utilize the joint Wave 5 European Values Study (EVS)/World Values Survey (WVS) Wave 7 to estimate multiple regression models predicting confidence in the EU and UN across the Nordic countries. The results confirm previous studies showing that confidence in the EU is lower among far-right partisans. In addition, the results demonstrate that although smaller in size, there are many instances where far-right partisans also have less confidence in the UN. The analysis shows that far-right partisans' lack of confidence in supranational organizations also extends to transnational institutions, which is an important area of inquiry given the UN's role in mitigating current global crises.

Resilience is frequently used in EU and NATO policies; policy interventions have been designed to make subjects and objects more resilient. This article critically examines the articulation of resilience as an ‘empty signifier’ in EU and NATO policies, drawing on poststructuralist theory to problematise what resilience is represented to be. A critical methodology to policy analysis allows to question why resilience moved up the EU's and NATO's policy agenda in times of existential crises. This article contends that resilience signifies a controlled loss of control. Seemingly paradoxically, resilience stands for an unfulfilled demand. The EU and NATO frame resilience as the antidote to internal vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities have been publicly disclosed after recent exogenous shocks: the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine. The emptiness of resilience makes it a powerful discursive tool, enabling a wide range of policy interventions to materialise.