Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies最新文献

Europe is confronted with a multiple crisis while coming to grips with its colonial legacy. Given the lack of empirical evidence for sufficient absolute decoupling of gross domestic product (GDP) growth from environmental resource use to stay within planetary limits and meet the Paris climate goals, this article argues that it is unavoidable for the European Union (EU) to enter the postgrowth era and outlines the contours of a ‘sustainable welfare deal’. It first reviews critical issues of the European Green Deal and related EU initiatives. With focus on degrowth and sustainable welfare, the article subsequently zooms in on approaches that substitute GDP growth as overall policy target with environmental and social goals, operationalized as planetary boundaries and social floors. It also introduces relevant current debates within the growth-critical academic community: complexity and democratic planning, decoupling economic growth and welfare, and the roles of economic elites and democratic governance in social-ecological transformations. The discussion sketches and encourages further debate on a ‘sustainable welfare deal’ as meaningful response to the social-ecological crisis and how it could be integrated in European policy making.

In recent years, theoretical models which seek to capture the dynamics of European integration and Europeanisation have turned their attention to new processes of disintegration and de-Europeanisation, presenting new understandings of where politics, policy-makers and public opinion have moved to roll back integration. In this article, looking at the process of de-Europeanisation in Scotland and Wales since 2016, we take forward this scholarship by providing a nuanced assessment of the multilevel effects of these processes and their implications. We find that despite their governments' ambitions to retain agency over the speed and direction of de-Europeanisation in Scotland and Wales, their resistance to the overall UK-led direction of travel has thus far produced few results due to the continued constitutional dominance of the UK Government. We argue that this expands current understandings of de-Europeanisation in practice as we draw attention to the prevalence of ‘forced de-Europeanisation’, which has prevented these devolved governments of the UK from substantiating their particular re-engagement preferences. Consequently, the extent of differentiation in the processes of de-Europeanisation across the territories of the United Kingdom because of Brexit has been limited, contrasting sharply with the differentiated model of Europeanisation, which existed during British EU membership.

‘Organized hypocrisy’ has been mainly explained in IR by the logic of consequentiality operating against the logic of appropriateness. The literature has largely ignored the role of a third logic, the logic of coloniality, which highlights that organized hypocrisy appears persistently in international relations due to omissions in the field of knowledge: It features a double absence of the ‘other’ on their own normative terms and as a rights-bearing subject. Pursuing a comparative analysis of EU policies to ensure accountability in the face of grave violations of international law in Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, this research finds patterned discrepancies, particularly towards Palestine which are explained by imaginations in official EU discourse where Russia, Ukraine and Israel figure in a Eurocentric temporal–spatial relation to Europe, while Palestine is dispossessed of its history, not set into any relationship to Europe and figures as a partially rights-less subject in official EU discourse.

The paper offers a hitherto-lacking comprehensive appraisal of solidaristic transfers by European Union Member States (EUMS) during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. These transfers include bilateral assistance, collective burden-sharing on the EU level and even external EU aid. The article uses data on inter-EUMS solidarity actions collected by the European Solidarity Tracker (EST), a widely referenced dataset on pandemic-related actions of solidarity. It cleans these data to address its deficiencies, including by filtering out symbolic and tokenistic actions, to focus on instances of truly meaningful assistance between EUMS. The EST is complemented by two further sets of data: an overview of EU-level measures, as examples of institutionalized and institutionally enabled forms of solidarity; and, given the global connectedness of the EU, data on pandemic assistance to developing countries. Based on this broad understanding of solidaristic transfers, the EU's response is found to have been significant but insufficient overall to fill the gaps in pandemic response. The gaps identified have inevitably fed into the pandemic, contributing to permissive conditions for its resurgence. EU-level measures mattered, but practical manifestations of bilateral solidarity between EUMS have been haphazard. Furthermore, although the EU increased its external health and other development aid considerably during 2020, this by no means made for a well-allocated or adequately resourced pandemic response globally.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led the European Union (EU) to take several measures to support Ukraine and sanction Russia. Still further measures have been discussed, including the question of whether Russians, and especially Russian tourists, should be banned from travelling in the Schengen area. Such a ban is supported by several member states but opposed by the majority, as well as the European Commission. Nevertheless, beginning in September 2022, the EU member states bordering Russia and Belarus—that is, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Finland—have unilaterally imposed visa and entry restrictions on Russians. This article discusses the legality of those measures and assesses the Commission's response to them. It suggests that the unilateral Schengen restrictions contravene EU law and, further, that it would be legally and politically challenging to introduce a nationality-based ban mechanism into the Schengen acquis. However, despite the apparent incompatibility with EU law, the Commission has tacitly tolerated member state unilateralism. The article suggests reasons why the Commission may prefer tacit toleration to either legal accommodation or enforcement, while also sounding a note of caution about the risks to legal integrity that tacit toleration may entail.

The 2013–2014 Russia–Ukraine crisis that started the Russian war against Ukraine is usually conceptualised as a geopolitical or international security crisis and analysed according to spatial logics. This article focuses on the underresearched chronopolitics of the crisis, arguing that in addition to a security crisis, events presented European leaders with a temporal identity crisis. The very fact that something like this could happen ‘in Europe in the 21st century’ was deemed extraordinary, challenging the EU's core legitimating narrative of Europe as a peaceful and advanced space. Drawing on timing theory from International Relations, the article analyses the frequent use of temporal language in political discourse during the crisis, such as the oft-repeated phrase that Russia's actions were ‘unacceptable (in Europe) in the 21st century’. It casts leaders as timing agents seeking to fit events into their respective timing projects to legitimise their own actions and discredit those of others.

The introduction of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009 marked the first time that regional parliaments could (formally) participate in the European Union (EU) legislative procedure, requiring their consultation ‘where appropriate’ in the Early Warning System (EWS) for subsidiarity scrutiny by national parliaments. Using a comprehensive dataset covering all regional parliaments with legislative power in the EU, this study investigates whether regional activities translate into substantive influence in EU decision-making. The argument put forward asserts that co-ordinated efforts amongst regional parliaments within a country have the potential to amplify their impact on the EWS. Analysing data through penalised maximum likelihood estimation for rare event data reveals negligible probabilities for individual regional parliaments to influence the national position on subsidiarity issues. However, co-ordinated activities, especially when institutionalised, significantly strengthen the position of regional parliaments in the EWS. Findings challenge assumptions about re-legitimised EU decision-making through the EWS but suggest prospects for regional adaptation.

This article explains the occurrence and timing of resolutions adopted by the European Parliament (EP) on international agreements. Such resolutions allow the EP to exert influence, especially when they are adopted early in the negotiation process (i.e., ‘early resolutions’). However, the EP does not systematically adopt (early) resolutions. The article therefore addresses two research questions: (1) under which conditions does the EP adopt resolutions during the negotiation process of international agreements? And (2) under which conditions does the EP adopt early resolutions? Using a comprehensive dataset including the 344 international agreements concluded between 2009 and 2023, we find that resolutions are more likely to be adopted when the Committee on International Trade is the responsible EP committee, when human rights, personal data protection or environmental protection are at stake and when agreements are salient. Moreover, early resolutions are more likely to be adopted for more recent negotiations and when negotiations are salient early.

Although the bilateral deals it has struck with European neighbours are a key element of the United Kingdom's post-Brexit diplomacy, it would be a mistake to view these understandings as evidence that the United Kingdom has escaped the EU's influence or orbit. Since the United Kingdom's co-signatories are bound by their legal and political commitments as EU member states, the deals they can conclude with non-members are limited. Inspired by the work of John Erik Fossum and his collaborators on post-Brexit Norway–UK relations, this article argues that the United Kingdom's interaction with EU member states forms one side of a triangular relationship constrained by both the obligations on the United Kingdom's European partners qua member states and EU–UK agreements. Drawing on a systematic analysis of UK bilaterals signed with EU countries since 2021, it shows how their form, scope and content are thereby limited by these constraints, with important implications for the United Kingdom's strategy of bilateralism post-Brexit.

What is ‘Europe’? The response to this question is not straightforward, as ‘Europe’ is a floating signifier that is in constant renegotiation. In this article, we focus on the imaginary of ‘Europe’ that has been deployed in the most salient international crises of the last years that have heavily shaken European Union (EU) politics: the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the attack of Hamas on 7 October 2023, followed by the ensuing offensive of Israel on the Palestinian Gaza Strip. More concretely, we ask: what is the narrative of ‘Europe’ articulated by the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, and the HRVP, Josep Borrell, in response to these events? We argue that, in the context of these two cases, two distinct imaginaries of ‘Europe’ have been mobilised based on differentiated conceptualisations of the relationship of ‘Europe’ to Ukraine and Palestine. Whereas Ukraine is conceived as part of the ‘European family’, there is a process of ‘othering’ Palestine. Our article exposes the racism and double standards of the EU in regard to the defence of international law and human rights, the exclusiveness of who belongs to ‘Europe’ and the continuity of the colonial thinking that permeates the narratives of EU leaders.