Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies最新文献

There is an ongoing academic debate on whether geopolitical aspirations are reshaping the paradigm of the EU's neoliberal industrial and trade policy. The scrutiny has intensified with China's new economic power, the Trump and Biden administrations, Covid-19 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. However, the theory of paradigm changes expects that the institutionalisation of a new paradigm requires an evolution, based on a series of mechanisms slowly eroding the legitimacy of the existing paradigm. This article investigates this process by formulating four causal chains, representing different scenarios for a new strategic paradigm in the EU's industrial and trade policy. Through the method of process tracing, it finds that the foundations for a new strategic paradigm were made under the Juncker Commission. Here, France formulated a new policy agenda, which was successfully pushed into EU economic policy-making. Since then, the EU has moved towards a ‘Homeland Economics’ paradigm, though with important reservations.

This article examines the role of external actors in shaping trilogue practices, using the Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) directive adopted in 2019 as a case study. Building on Roederer-Rynning and Greenwood's conceptualisation of trilogues as ‘politicised diplomacy’, it identifies two distinct categories of external actors: French and German heads of state and digital activists. Whilst state leaders reinforced a diplomatic logic through closed-door negotiations, digital activists introduced a democratic logic, employing protest actions to demand transparency and inclusivity. These dynamics disrupted the usual functioning of the Eurocratic space. The article contributes to the practice-theory framework by foregrounding a democratic logic alongside the established parliamentary and diplomatic logics. It offers a nuanced perspective on trilogues as socially constructed spaces and highlights the evolving role of external actors in European legislative processes.

By conducting Bakhtinian dialogic discourse analysis, this article shows how the EU (re)constructs its sense of the Self vis-à-vis two constitutive Others – Russia and Ukraine – since the Russian full-scale invasion in February 2022. It argues that the EU has been able to renew its Self-image as a ‘peace project’ and a ‘normative power’, whilst also embracing more fully the idea of a ‘geopolitical’ EU. Its relations with Ukraine continue to be characterised by the ‘politics of ambiguity’, whereby Ukraine is kept in a liminal state despite its new role of a ‘frontier’ that contributes to EU security. The EU may be said to be facing a dilemma between solidarity and inclusion versus securitisation and re-bordering. In terms of identity construction, this denotes a tension between a Self that depends on securitised binaries and a Self that transcends this dialectic via a dialogic celebration of alterity.

This article interrogates the EU's ‘geopolitical turn’ by examining its external engagement in Armenia after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and in the shadow of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on feminist approaches to geopolitics and post-socialist coloniality, it asks whose security is served by a ‘geopolitical’ EU in Armenia and how this is received by differently situated populations on the ground. Through fieldwork conducted in Armenia's Syunik province and beyond, the article unravels dominant notions of security, resilience and geopolitics in the EU's external action by showing how these are enacted and rewritten across multiple scales. The article finds that the EU's security and resilience-building engagement in Syunik serves to reproduce its own ‘geopolitical’ identity whilst simultaneously co-producing insecurities in and around Armenia. It foregrounds everyday practices, embodied experiences and intimate spaces as key sites where hegemonic security paradigms and neo-imperial rivalries are made and contested from the bottom-up.

Research on democratic backsliding and on EU counter-actions is growing rapidly, but we have only begun to understand how EU actions are taken up in domestic political debates in backsliding member states. Our research builds on the assumption that the framing of these debates contributes to the (de-)legitimation of EU actions and thus has indirect effects on the EU's ability to intervene in processes of democratic backsliding. Conceptually, we distinguish three types of frames political parties use to support or oppose EU actions against democratic backsliding: crisis diagnosis frames, polity frames and value frames. We deduce hypotheses on the framing strategies of government and opposition parties and their evolution over time from theories of democratic backsliding and ethnopopulism. Our analysis relies on an original dataset of about 1400 news articles on democratic backsliding in Hungary (since 2010), including around 1350 frames parties used during domestic debates.

We examine the dimensionality of the EU external relations space by analysing trade policy votes in the European Parliament (1999–2019). As it contains the EU's full geographical and ideological diversity, the European Parliament is an important laboratory for testing expectations about what predicts divisions over trade policy. We find that Members of the European Parliament's (MEP's)s voting behaviour is most strongly structured along the left/right dimension. In addition, the degree of environmentalism of MEPs' parties structures voting patterns on trade. Even though there has been a lot of attention on the relationship between trade and the rise of the populist radical right, we find no evidence that trade votes divide nationalist from cosmopolitan parties. Moreover, though the political groups in the European Parliament (EP) include members from a wide range of constituencies that differ on macroeconomic indicators, differences between constituencies in terms of employment or education level do not meaningfully structure MEPs' voting.

Unemployment insurance is a major component of European welfare regimes, whereby each EU member state has its own distinctive scheme. Despite falling under national competence, the European Commission has exercised pressure over this policy area since the establishment of the European Employment Strategy. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, it stepped up its involvement through the European Semester, which went hand in hand with heightened domestic reform activity. This article aims to establish links between the two phenomena during 2011–2019, after which the conditionality embodied in the Commission's country-specific recommendations (CSRs) changed significantly. The analysis employs mixed methods. Qualitatively, the article focuses on EU Semester documents, interviews with policy-makers and case studies, including a deeper review of Italian reforms. Quantitatively, it includes frequency analyses of uniformly coded recommendations and reform events present in the Commission's CSR and LabRef databases and mixed linear regressions connecting the two. The findings indicate a marked socialisation pattern in the Semester's prescriptions, moving from labour market flexibility towards balanced social protection. CSRs were often tailored to national contexts, avoiding one-size-fits-all approaches. Moreover, the analysis highlights the Semester's influence on domestic policy, revealing a shift from pro-market to pro-labour reforms during the period.

In times of heightened dissensus over the liberal democratic order, normative theories of the EU need to adapt to be able to capture how the promotion and enforcement of values go hand in hand with their contestation. Research on global LGBT politics has shown that the promotion and enforcement of LGBT equality make possible and shape the anti-LGBT dissent it seeks to combat. Understood as a paradox of sexual integration, this article introduces a normative approach called Global Queer Agonism that utilises agonistic political theory and queer theory in assessments of the legitimacy of the EU's efforts to promote and enforce LGBT equality. Structured by two agonistic concepts, consensus and remainders, and supplemented by the theories of homonationalism, homocolonialism, homocapitalism and the concept of homonormativity, Global Queer Agonism puts into practice a theoretical allyship between agonism and queer theory in the normative assessment of the EU's global role.

This special issue (SI) foregrounds critical perspectives in studying the EU's global role, acknowledging their historical marginalisation within scholarship dominated by mainstream approaches. The project is theoretical with significant normative and practical implications, that is, for activism and policy-making. Our primary goal is to bring critical approaches into conversation, exploring their intersections, complementarities, but also creative tensions. A further goal is to consider prospects and challenges when it comes to engaging mainstream approaches. Towards these ends, in this introduction, we propose a novel prism onto international relations (IR) and its intersection with EU studies – an intervention picked up in rich, trans/inter-disciplinary perspective by the contributors to this SI. This prism is allyship which we theorise as a co-constitutive, multi-directional, relational and ever-unfolding transformative journey. Normatively and practically, our proposal of allyship is motivated by the challenge of persistent exclusion and violence towards diversity, and the growing backlash faced by all critical approaches to international affairs. At the same time, we probe possibilities for listening better across traditions, critical and mainstream alike, rather than succumbing to the roars of our respective echo chambers. Our perhaps modest but timely goal is to ‘fail better’ when it comes to understanding the multitude of ways that global politics, and the EU's role therein, can be read, studied and pursued.