Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies最新文献

This submission examines the impact of the European Union (EU) policy efforts to construct a European Heritage and a sense of belonging within the wider European population on Heritage policy. The article explores how the EU has selected and wielded instruments that frame particular values that (1) respond to specific policy problems and impact European heritage(s) and (2) build political myths articulating particular visions of what the EU represents and how the population should engage with European integration. Through analysis of four case studies (European Heritage Label, the EU Horizon 2020, European Cultural Routes and the EU Energy Efficiency Directive) in a policy instrument typology, we reveal that the frames embedded in the EU policy instruments carry a range of different values and priorities that often compete, leading to policy outcomes that are fragmented in their effect.

This study examines who the media holds responsible for economic issues in a multi-level setting, particularly during the 2009 economic crisis. Despite the burgeoning research on responsibility attribution and the likely effect of the media in giving credit and blame, little attention has been paid to this role of the media. To address this gap, our objectives are to assess (1) the extent to which the media attributes responsibility to national governments and the EU for the economy, (2) how responsibility was assigned during the 2009 crisis and (3) underlying differences across political actors and countries. We examine media coverage of economic issues in Ireland, Portugal and Spain between 2002 and 2016, corresponding to a total of 672 news stories. Results show a pattern of greater responsibility attributed to the European level compared to the domestic level, which decreases with the crisis and is more accentuated in Ireland.

In response to a more contentious and geopolitically fractious international environment, the European Union's (EU) approach to international economic policies has in recent years undergone a significant shift, often referred to as the EU's ‘geoeconomic turn’. Whilst valuable academic and policy work has explored this ongoing shift, there is a general tendency to see geoeconomics as either required and beneficial or a sad imposition on a reluctant EU in a changing global economic landscape. However, as geoeconomics is likely here to stay, we argue that it is high time for EU studies to engage more critically with this geoeconomic turn. This entails a deeper examination of the geoeconomic turn's broader implications for social inequalities, exploitation, power disparities and changing hierarchies within the EU and internationally. More concretely, we put forward four perspectives that could inform future critical research on the geoeconomic turn. Drawing on work in other disciplines and at the EU studies' fringes, we first argue for critically historicising the geoeconomic turn's supposed newness and for recentring human development in thinking about the EU's geoeconomic turn. We then explore the changing modalities of business power entailed by the geoeconomic turn and the importance of studying its social purpose. By addressing these underexplored questions, we aim to provide a first, non-exhaustive step for future research towards a more critical understanding of the complexities and potential power consequences of the EU's evolving economic strategy.

The article engages the European Union's (EU) implementation of counterterrorism clauses as part of its development aid regulations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). The point of departure for the research is the shift in the EU's policy for aid regulations in the OPT in 2019, when the EU began to gradually implement counterterrorism clauses in its grant contracts, a measure that sparked widespread protests amongst Palestinian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), who critiqued the clauses as an explicit attempt to further pacify civil society. Situated within the realms of postcolonial theory and critical security studies, the article draws on semi-structured interviews with staff and representatives of Palestinian NGOs in the OPT in order to unpack perspectives of civil society actors who interpret the policy as an illegitimate interference with their political self-determination, in particular the internationally recognised right to resist colonial subjugation. The conceptual framework of pacification – as an inconspicuous, diffuse form of violence within liberal governance aimed at suppressing resistance to the prevailing order – aligns closely with both perspectives on the ground and postcolonial thought. As such, the article elucidates tensions between an expanding European counterterrorism regime, increasingly permeating the sphere of development aid, and perspectives of Palestinian civil society actors who discern these policies as deeply rooted in colonial paradigms. Whilst exploring these tensions, the intricate relationship between postcolonial research and allyship lingers as an underlying notion. This premise assumes heightened relevance within the contemporary academic landscape in Europe, wherein scholarly investigations, which refuse simplistic vilifications of Palestinian resistance and instead seek a deeper engagement with local perspectives, are increasingly marginalised.

This article reflects on the EU's thought and practice of democracy promotion in its Southern neighbourhood through a critical approach to allyship. This approach centres the demos', or Arab publics', yearnings for emancipation and their aspirations to dignified lives. The article proposes the notion of ‘liminal allyship’, neither taken for granted nor stable, but shaped by inequalities of power and resources within (post)colonial settings such as Tunisia. (Mis)matches between values and practices impact allyship even vis-à-vis a shared, declared goal like democratisation. To illustrate the argument empirically, the article will draw on interviews with Tunisian civil society activists and primary data from online and social media. The exploratory case study gauges Tunisian assessments of EU democracy promotion in times of a ‘democratic degeneration’ in Tunisia and of a geopolitical crisis between Europe and the Arab world triggered by the war in Gaza. Findings point to a possible turning point in this relationship of ‘liminal allyship’, which faces scepticism that is unprecedented since Tunisian democratisation took off in 2011.

This article examines the role of ordoliberal ideas in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) reforms adopted during the Euro crisis. Drawing on discursive institutionalism and morphological analysis, the study employs process-tracing and discourse analysis to reconstruct the reform process. The analysis primarily focuses on the public discourses of German leaders and the documents of the Van Rompuy Task Force. The article argues that ordoliberal ideas played a crucial role in the formation of the German government's preferences regarding the EMU reforms. Their impact was more limited in the reform process, where other actors were involved and Germany had to accept compromises. As a result, the reforms were more flexible than Germany would have preferred. However, to the extent that the reforms align with Germany's approach based on fiscal discipline and national responsibility, they reflect an ordoliberal rationality. In this sense, the reforms contributed to the incorporation and strengthening (albeit partial and incomplete) of the ordoliberal principles of fiscal discipline, national responsibility, competitiveness and Ordnungspolitik within the EMU rules during the crisis. These are the constitutive principles of competitive federalism, a model of European integration in which the role of supranational institutions is to enforce a regulatory framework that, by reducing their discretion in fiscal and monetary policy, exposes member states to market pressure and prompts them to adopt neoliberal policies to remain competitive with each other.

This study investigates under what conditions Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) emphasised relevant policy issues—economy, climate/environment and immigration—during the 2019 European Parliament election campaign. Building on research on issue salience in EP elections and based on the content published on X/Twitter by MEPs in the weeks preceding the election, the study identifies key drivers of issue attention. It shows that issue relevance in the domestic public agenda and individual issue expertise increase MEPs' attention to the three policy issues, whereas parties' stance on the sociocultural dimension only affects attention to climate/environment. The study contributes to research on issue salience in EP election campaigns and MEPs' communication on social media, highlighting the importance of adopting a cross-issue approach when studying European elections.

The preservation of origin through the geographical indication (GI) scheme has evolved from an EU policy tool for high-quality agrifood products to an instrument of international governance, green transition and property rights competition. The new 2024 EU Law of GIs aims to strengthen the historical value of such a scheme and support its role in indirectly generating socio-economic spillovers at the territorial level. This article analyses the effects of GI EU policy on innovation in the agrifood technological fields at the municipality level over the 1991–2020 period in Italy. Whilst the EU scheme is preserving the essence of tradition, it may impede the adoption of innovative practices, which, according to the EU Green Deal, are considered crucial for bolstering competitiveness, sustainability and resilience. However, the linkage between products and the region of origin triggers a virtuous circle of informal inter-organisational collaborations and shared values that may spur innovations. Using propensity score matching and difference-in-differences models, we analyse how the acknowledgement of GIs impacts the agrifood innovation performance of Italian municipalities. The results show that GIs, thanks to their territorially sensitive nature, do not limit the innovation performance of territories, though there is no significant positive effect on it either. This helps avoid excessive scaremongering about the impact of tradition-oriented quality schemes on innovation. The place-based nature of policies can create favourable conditions that do not hinder innovation, despite their primary focus, even if more direct policy actions are needed.

This article examines the EU's current geopolitical turn: the push to have the EU embrace power politics and develop a ‘strategic autonomy’, both vis-à-vis global powers and its own ‘neighbourhood’. This turn is significant since it marks a shift away from what is said to be the post-cold war EU's liberal approach to world affairs. By openly embracing ‘hard power’, Brussels is also severing the continuity between the present rhetoric and its founding narrative about the EU as an anti-geopolitical peace project. In the first part, I argue that whilst the geopolitical turn has introduced a different rhetoric, this should not confuse analysts into believing that the post-cold war EU was short of a geopolitical agenda. In the second part, I discuss the EU's current geopolitical turn in the context of the colonial policy it pursued in the 1950s, when large parts of colonial Africa were annexed to the European Economic Community (EEC). Here, I argue that the obliviousness that impedes the knowledge of the EU's colonial origins helps explain why the geopolitical turn today is seen as novel and poles apart from the EU's approach to geopolitics in the 1950s. What appears to be a break with the past, then, is in fact a reunion with the past, in the sense that the current EU leaders' open embrace of geopolitics follows in the footsteps of the EU founders. In the conclusion, I relate this to a theoretical discussion concerning the EU's quest for ‘strategic autonomy’, which, arguably, constitutes the most defining aspect of the geopolitical turn.