Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies最新文献

This policy commentary explores the puzzling stalemate over a proposed Youth Mobility Scheme between the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK), offering a deep analysis of its emergence as a site of post-Brexit contestation. Despite appearing as a low-stakes, mutually advantageous initiative, youth mobility became mired in mutual misperceptions, political caution and institutional rigidity. Drawing on the conceptual triad of bounded rationality, path dependence and bilateralism, the policy commentary traces how misaligned expectations, historical baggage and diverging preferences for multilateral versus bilateral approaches have locked both sides into intransigent positions. Rather than reflecting irreconcilable interests, the impasse reveals how these constraints continue to shape – and distort – the initial stages of policy co-operation. As such, understanding this stalemate not only sheds light on missed opportunities for young people on both sides of the Channel but also offers critical lessons for the future architecture of UK–EU engagement.

Research has solidly established that the presidency of the Council of the European Union can significantly influence the Council's activity. However, it has not yet explained whether, why and how Council actors anticipate the different national executives scheduled to lead them. I explore this gap through an extreme case: the Hungarian presidency (second semester 2024) and rule-of-law (RoL) enforcement. Findings reveal that anticipation exists, although it manifests informally, and is triggered by repeated consensus breaches. Trio arrangements, agenda shaping and issue linkage can help address topic exclusion but remain constrained by the presidency's decision-making power and co-ordination limits. Empirically, I trace anticipation using evidence from elite interviews with key actors. This work contributes to the RoL crisis literature by shifting the focus to how EU institutions anticipate, not react to, illiberal challenges, with implications for institutional resilience, mutual trust and the neutrality of the presidency.

The EU's efforts to integrate sustainability into its trade policy have met with mixed reactions, particularly from developing countries. Previously, the EU has sought to promote relevant autonomous measures and the Trade and Sustainable Development chapters in its trade agreements by offering support for implementation and compliance. However, further alignment of trade and development co-operation, known as external policy coherence, faces growing challenges as the second von der Leyen Commission has made Europe's economic security a top priority. Although this new agenda has yet to translate into tangible (trade) policy actions beyond recently adopted initial measures, the shift in focus is driving increased investment in competitiveness and securing access to critical raw materials – efforts that, at times, appear fragmented rather than co-ordinated. Whilst the EU acknowledges that partnerships, including those with countries from the Global South, are essential to strengthen its position in the growing geopolitical competition with other major economies, the increasingly complex global and regional context, coupled with shifting internal priorities, challenges the Commission's ability to balance the EU's trade and development ambitions. This commentary explores new directions for a coherent EU trade and development policy in the dynamic geopolitical landscape of 2025 and beyond.

This article critically assesses how the European Union (EU) constructs the identities of ‘EU-Europe’ and ‘the rest of the world’ to legitimise the formation of a ‘geopolitical Europe’. It draws on poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives within the spirit of scholarly allyship, deconstructing texts produced by key EU officials – Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel and Josep Borrell – between 2019 and 2023. The article manifests how civilisational binaries are employed to justify the EU's transition from normative power to power politics. It problematises the ‘EU versus the rest of the world’ framing and, particularly, Borrell's ‘garden–jungle’ analogy, exposing their neocolonial underpinnings. Through an intertextual second reading, it shows how depicting the EU as a peaceful and civilised ‘garden’ and the rest of the world as a conflictual and disorderly ‘jungle’ reinforces civilisational hierarchies. The article argues that these binaries not only legitimise the EU's increasingly securitised foreign policy but also reproduce colonial-era tropes of the mission civilisatrice, perpetuating a Eurocentric worldview.

Scholars who have examined European integration from a neo-Polanyian perspective have long been sceptical about the opportunities for a ‘countermovement’ against the EU's market-making bias. However, as part of a broader ‘social turn’, recent years have seen the adoption of EU legislation to promote fair and decent working conditions. Based on a contextual analysis of four key labour-law directives, I argue that these amount to a meaningful ‘re-embedding’ of liberalised labour markets. Conventional theories of organised interests or public opinion explain little about this move to market-correcting integration. Returning to Polanyi, I argue that this (re-)emergence of EU labour regulation has been the corollary of a ‘double countermovement’, that is, an attempt to restore the Union's social legitimacy in response to (perceived) popular discontent with market-making integration that surfaced during the 2000s and reached its height during the Eurozone crisis in the early 2010s.