Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies最新文献

We discuss the geoeconomics of the Single Market in financial services in the European Union (EU). We examine three case studies that concern the EU and other major jurisdictions and that range from incipient geoeconomic use to outward weaponisation of the Single Market in finance. These cases are (1) the post-2008 crisis transatlantic tug of war, whereby the EU leveraged its Single Market vis-à-vis the United States, seeking to set the rules for global finance; (2) the Brexit negotiations, when the EU acted as a bloc against the United Kingdom and successfully safeguarded the integrity of the Single Market; and (3) the fulsome war in Ukraine, during which the EU ‘weaponised’ its Single Market through the adoption of financial sanctions against Russia. We argue that a combination of external and internal factors accounts for this pattern: the evolution of the international economic and political system, in particular, the increasing challenges to the liberal international order, and intra-EU developments, namely, the EU's ability to deploy its Single Market geoeconomically.

Technocracy has come to be increasingly regarded as a threat to representative democracy. Significant attention has thus been recently devoted to exploring public preferences towards technocratic institutions. Elected policy-makers' attitudes have instead not been investigated as systematically. This article fills this gap by examining politicians' views on central banks. Based on an original elite survey of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), we gauged elected policy-makers' attitudes towards the mandate and policy conduct of the European Central Bank (ECB). Our findings show that the political orientation of politicians largely drives attitudes towards the ECB's institutional mandate. Interestingly, the findings from two experiments embedded in the survey also show that the attitudes of MEPs are not as static as ideological orientations would lead us to expect. The information set to which politicians are exposed significantly shapes their views on both the ECB's mandate and its policy conduct, but less on ECB independence.

Developing legislation to counter the negative impacts of businesses' transnational activities on human rights and the environment is a recent trend. Supporters of such legislation have campaigned to convince policy-makers to adopt strong law, but this legitimation process has not been theorised. Using Vaara et al.'s theoretical framework, we uncover the six discursive legitimation strategies used by the proponents of the European Union (EU) Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) to legitimise its creation. Based on interviews with proponents, we offer two main findings. First, the directive's supporters seek to reverse the narrative that legislation with extraterritorial implications is neo-colonial by arguing instead that the neoliberal status quo exemplifies neo-colonial exploitation. Second, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can convince businesses of the directive's advantages by using playing down, mimicry and rationalisation as discursive legitimation strategies. These findings have major implications for debates on how to make the CSDDD effective in regulating business operations in the Global South.

We argue that the European Commission, like national governments, is likely to have used the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to bolster its own powers. We focus on the Commission's attempts to insert into legal proposals provisions to adopt delegated or implementing acts, as this is the only possible way to gain lasting rule-making powers. We analyse all the Commission's legal proposals for an equal time span before and after the start of the Covid-19 crisis and study whether the number of proposed delegation provisions has changed after the onset of the crisis. The analysis, to our surprise, does not show any clear evidence of a self-empowerment strategy. In the conclusion, we discuss likely explanations for this non-finding.

Crises, shocks, and perturbations are frequently considered turning points in public policy literature. The Advocacy Coalition Framework has become one of the most employed policy process frameworks, focusing on policy subsystems, belief systems and shocks as one of the drivers of policy change. Relying on a network approach, this article aims at analysing the EU asylum policy by exploring the prioritisation of policy core beliefs before, during and after the so-called refugee crisis. From a methodological perspective, discourse network analysis (DNA) is employed. The results show that the system of policy core beliefs has not stabilised in the aftermath of the crisis, implying a ‘conservative’ crisis response approach and short-term effects on the policy subsystem. The innovation of this article stands on the theoretical–analytical elaborations of some crisis management and public policy literature core concepts and the empirical testing of said concepts through an original dataset with DNA.

There is disagreement amongst political theorists as to whether a European demos based on a culturally grounded identity as a precondition for a stronger integration of the European Union (EU) exists. We study a part of this question from a constructivist perspective by analysing how individuals in Europe perceive European culture and how this perception is related to support for the EU. We focus on the following questions: (a) whether European respondents perceive a shared European culture, (b) whether they consider this culture to be of higher value than other cultures and (c) whether they are proud of European cultures. We study these questions on the basis of a survey conducted in 2021 in nine European countries, including both EU and non-EU countries. Our results show that the perception of a shared European culture and its positive evaluation, both inclusive and exclusive, covary positively with support for the EU.

In the context of increasingly assertive behaviour in international trade policy, various scholars seem to agree on the presence of a ‘geoeconomic turn’ in European Union (EU) trade policy. Whilst various aspects of this turn have been studied, the way in which the EU's trade institution might have adapted to this new context remains unclear. Therefore, this article addresses the following research question: how has the Directorate-General for Trade (DG Trade) adapted to the geoeconomic turn in international trade policy? Using an innovative historical institutionalist framework and directed content analysis, the article analyses EU official documents and 14 interviews with EU officials. We find that, despite apparent continuity, under President von der Leyen, a gradual process of institutional adaptation through different forms of layering and conversion has taken place within DG Trade, increasing the EU's geoeconomic capacities and geoeconomic thinking inside the EU's trade machinery.

This article addresses the puzzle of why the European Union (EU) struggles to learn from ineffective attempts to support democratization in the Arab world but instead continuously (re-)produces democracy support malpractices. To better understand this phenomenon, we draw from practice theory and conceptualize EU democracy support as practices performed by a community of insiders who act within a complex constellation of communities of practice. Due to the way in which communities function, decision-makers do not critically reflect on the background knowledge on which they base their practices and thus do not learn how to improve them. This constellation model offers a unique take on non-learning within the EU and in (policy-making) groups more generally. We illustrate the proposed conceptual framework through an empirical analysis of EU democracy support in Egypt, showing that the EU performs practices similar to those before the 2011 Revolution due to its inability to learn.

In this article, we examine the non-linear relationship between the number of fiscal rules in place and compliance with the European Union's (EU) numerical fiscal targets included in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). Using a sample composed of 27 EU Member States for a period spanning 2000 to 2021, we document that countries' compliance with fiscal rules is positively associated with the number of numerical fiscal targets. However, this association only holds up to a specific threshold. Once this threshold is achieved, the relationship becomes negative, implying that the multiplication of numerical fiscal rules may undermine compliance, thereby reducing their effectiveness. In addition, we find that general elections and frequent changes in government reduce compliance, whereas economic adjustment programmes contribute positively to countries' compliance with fiscal targets. The findings bear critical policy implications against the backdrop of the current review of the European fiscal framework.

The research note explores the role of cohesion policy in the emerging EU industrial agenda with the view to anchor it in the new industrial policy paradigm. The first part discusses the historical evolution of EU industrial policy and presents the main features of the conceptual perspective loosely referred to as ‘new industrial policy’. Then, the note investigates the main tensions between cohesion policy's rationales and instruments and the new industrial policy perspective, for instance in relation to the use of experimentation and directionality, and outlines pathways to address them through different lines of research. In conclusion, the note discusses positive avenues to tackle the identity crisis facing cohesion policy thanks to the new industrial policy perspective.