Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
European Integration (european + integration)
Selected AbstractsFrom European Integration to European Integrity: Should European Law Speak with Just One Voice?EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 3 2004Samantha Besson According to the European integrity principle, all national and European authorities should make sure their decisions cohere with the past decisions of other European and national authorities that create and implement the law of a complex but single European legal order. Only by doing so, it is argued, can the European political and legal community gain true authority and legitimacy in the eyes of the European citizens to whom all these decisions apply. Although European integrity is primarily a product of European integration, it has gradually become one of the requirements of further integration. The article suggests that the principle of European integrity would help dealing with the growing pressure for common European solutions under conditions of increasing diversity. It places disagreement at the centre of European politics, as both an incentive and a means of integration by way of comparison and self-reflectivity. It constitutes therefore the ideal instrument for a pluralist and flexible further constitutionalisation of the European Union. [source] European Integration: Popular Sovereignty and a Politics of BoundariesEUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 3 2000Hans Lindahl The problem raised by popular sovereignty in the framework of the EU is not whether it is relevant to European integration; it is. The problem is another, namely the identity and, thus, the boundary of a democratic polity. The very idea of ,European' integration suggests that integration is only imaginable by reference to the closure provided by an identity, a boundary that is normative rather than merely geographical. In this minimal sense, a European people is the necessary presupposition of integration, not merely its telos. Bluntly, there is no integration without inclusion and, also, no integration without exclusion. This, then, is the real problem raised by popular sovereignty in a European context: if there is no such thing as non-exclusionary integration, how can a reflection on the boundedness of European integration be more than a rationalisation of exclusion? [source] European Integration and Manufactures Import Demand: An Empirical Investigation of Ten European CountriesGERMAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 3 2002Ray Barrell This paper studies import demand in ten European countries over the period 1970,95, and our objective is to investigate whether the process of European integration has affected imports. We provide evidence for parametric change in traditional import demand equations, suggesting that important variables or structural factors are missing from the long-run equations. We present equations based on new trade theory, where effects of technology and foreign direct investment are present. Once we include these there is little evidence that the creation of the Single Market has directly increased aggregated imports in European countries. [source] The EU and the Welfare State are Compatible: Finnish Social Democrats and European IntegrationGOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 2 2010Tapio Raunio This article examines how the Finnish Social Democratic Party has adapted to European integration. The analysis illustrates that the Social Democrats have successfully argued to their electorate that the objectives of integration are compatible with core social democratic values. Considering that Finland was hit by a severe recession in the early 1990s, discourse about economic integration and monetary stability facilitating the economic growth that is essential for job creation and the survival of domestic welfare state policies sounded appealing to SDP voters. Determined party leadership, support from trade unions and the lack of a credible threat from the other leftist parties have also contributed to the relatively smooth adaptation to Europe. However, recent internal debates about the direction of party ideology and poor electoral performances , notably in the European Parliament elections , indicate that not all sections within the party are in favour of the current ideological choices. [source] The Difficulty of Justifying European Integration as a Consequence of Depoliticization: Evidence from the 2005 French ReferendumGOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 3 2009Andrew Glencross This article analyses the 2005 French referendum debate on the EU Constitutional Treaty as an instance of depoliticization. Particular emphasis is placed on the argumentative strategy of President Chirac as, despite the treaty's focus on institutional reform, he eventually chose to justify the document in terms of social policy: an ultimately unconvincing strategy because voters believed it was contradicted by current EU policy priorities. On this evidence, pace Glyn Morgan, prioritizing a justification of EU finality over that of institutions and policies does not seem appropriate. Rather, the priority for integration is to overcome elites' strategies of depoliticization during referendum campaigns. [source] Minority Nationalist Parties and European Integration: A Comparative Study , By A. EliasJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2010MARCUS HOPPE No abstract is available for this article. [source] European Integration and the Transnational Restructuring of Social Relations: The Emergence of Labour as a Regional Actor?,JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 3 2005ANDREAS BIELER Informed by a neo-Gramscian perspective able to conceptualize transnational class formation, this article assesses whether European trade union organizations have developed into independent supranational actors, or whether they are merely secretariats in charge of organizing the co-operation of their national member associations. The first hypothesis is that those trade unions which organize workers in transnational production sectors, are likely to co-operate at the European level, because they have lost control over capital at the national level. Trade unions, organizing workers in domestic production sectors, may be more reluctant because their sectors still depend on national protection. The second hypothesis is that trade unions are more likely to co-operate at the European level if they perceive such an engagement as furthering their influence on policy-making in comparison with structural possibilities at the national level. Additionally, in line with the critical dimension of neo-Gramscian perspectives, it will be assessed whether European co-operation implies acceptance of neo-liberal economics, or whether unions continue to resist restructuring. [source] The Impact of European Integration on Regional PowerJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 4 2003Angela K. Bourne This article seeks to unravel ambiguity in analysis about the impact of European integration on sub-state regions' political power. In the literature there are arguments that integration empowers, disempowers and has no effect on regional power. In order to address this ambiguity and to contribute to theory-building, I develop a theoretical framework sensitive to multiple means by which integration can affect multiple sources of regional power, and apply it to the study of the Basque Country. The conclusion that European integration undermines Basque political power suggests that integration may, in some cases, be more a danger to, than a liberator of, regions. [source] European Integration, the Problem of Complexity and the Revision of TheoryJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 1 2003Robert Geyer Recently, European integration (EI) and international relations (IR) debates have been locked into two camps: rationalists, modelling themselves on the natural sciences, and reflectivists, opposing themselves to the natural sciences. The division is based on an out-of-date view of the orderly nature of the natural sciences. Since the middle of the twentieth century a new complexity framework in the natural sciences has developed. This framework provides a new and intriguing ontological and epistemological foundation for addressing the problem of complexity and helps to explain and overcome the separation between the two poles of debate in European integration and international relations. [source] Books on European IntegrationJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2002Brian Ardy First page of article [source] Analysing European Integration: Reflecting on the English SchoolJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 1 2002Thomas Diez The English School of international relations has rarely been used to analyse European integration. But, as we argue in this article, there may be considerable value in adding the English School to the canon of approaches to European integration studies in order to contextualize European integration both historically and internationally. The concepts of international society, world society and empire in particular may be used to reconfigure the current debate about the nature of EU governance and to compare the EU to other regional international systems, as well as to reconceptualize the EU's international role, and in particular the EU's power to influence affairs beyond its formal membership borders. Conversely, analysing the EU with the help of these English School concepts may also help to refine the latter in the current attempts to reinvigorate the English School as a research programme. [source] Incrementalism and Path Dependence: European Integration and Institutional Change in National ParliamentsJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 3 2001Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos This article analyses the manner in which the Parliaments of France, the UK and Greece have reacted to the process of European integration. It is argued that their reactions display an incremental logic marked by slow, small and marginal changes based on existing institutional repertoires. In all three cases Parliaments have used familiar mechanisms and procedures which they have modified only marginally. This reaction was path dependent, i.e. it was consistent with long-established patterns reflecting the subordinate position of these Parliaments within national polities. [source] International Relations Theory and European IntegrationJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2001Mark A. Pollack The explicit effort to theorize about the process of European integration began within the field of international relations (IR), where neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism long remained the dominant schools of thought. With the relaunching of the integration process in the 1980s and 1990s, however, IR scholars have begun to approach the study of the European Union using more general, and generalizable, theoretical approaches. This article examines the recent debate among realists, liberals, rational-choice institutionalists, and constructivists regarding the nature of the integration process and the EU as an international organization. Although originally posed as competing theories, I argue, realist, liberal and institutionalist approaches show signs of convergence around a single rationalist model, with constructivism remaining as the primary rival, but less developed, approach to the study of European integration. [source] The Governance Approach to European IntegrationJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2001Markus Jachtenfuchs This article argues that the study of European integration is divided into two distinct approaches: classical integration theory for which the shape of the Euro-polity is the dependent variable; and the governance approach for which it is the independent variable. An historical and conceptual overview of the approach focuses on the efficiency side of governance and excludes issues of democracy and legitimacy. From a sociology of knowledge perspective, the first part traces the roots of the present discussion back to three bodies of literature, namely studies on Europeanization, regulatory policy-making and network concepts. The second part presents the achievements of the approach: putting EU studies in a comparative perspective, directing attention towards democratic governance and bypassing old dichotomies on the future of the nation-state. The final section evaluates present shortcomings, most notably a bias toward problem-solving, the proliferation of case studies and the lack of a coherent theoretical perspective. [source] Books on European IntegrationJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2000Brian Ardy The following list includes all books submitted to the Journal of Common Market Studies during 1999, whether these were reviewed or not. Each book is entered only once even though, inevitably, some titles are of relevance to more than one section. [source] European Integration and Migration Policy: Vertical Policy-making as Venue ShoppingJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2000Virginie Guiraudon Since the beginning of the 1980s, migration and asylum policy in Europe has increasingly been elaborated in supranational forums and implemented by transnational actors. I argue that a venue-shopping framework is best suited to account for the timing, form and content of European co-operation in this area. The venues less amenable to restrictive migration control policy are national high courts, other ministries and migrant-aid organizations. Building upon pre-existing policy settings and developing new policy frames, governments have circumvented national constraints on migration control by creating transnational co-operation mechanisms dominated by law and order officials, with EU institutions playing a minor role. European transgovernmental working groups have avoided judicial scrutiny, eliminated other national adversaries and enlisted the help of transnational actors such as transit countries and carriers. [source] Political Symbolism and European Integration by Tobias TheilerNATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 1 2007WILLIAM CROWTHER [source] Die eigentümliche Diskussion um Zentralisierung und Dezentralisierung in der EuropapolitikPERSPEKTIVEN DER WIRTSCHAFTSPOLITIK, Issue 3 2004Thomas Apolte It is argued that large parts of this discussion rest on a flawed analogy of the liberal concept of normative individualism on the one hand and the concept of political decentralization in federal multi-layer systems on the other. Based on this flawed analogy an unusual and partly misleading notion of decentralization has widely been used in the discussion of European Integration. As a result, there are a number of misjudgements in some central topics of European Integration. These topics are the question of institutional competition among governments, the effects of fiscal competition on the tax burden of citizens and a future European constitution. [source] Structuring Europe: Powersharing Institutions and British Preferences on European IntegrationPOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2000Mark Aspinwall Scholars examining British-European relations typically ascribe UK governmental positions firstly to a combination of distinct and incompatible values, attitudes, and beliefs stemming from historical experience; secondly to a distinct and incompatible set of functional imperatives , namely less interaction with European partners than is the case for other EU member states; and third a distinct and incompatible set of domestic interests. This article challenges these views. It presents evidence to suggest that British governments have failed to assimilate social demands, and that the reason is an under-recognized and untheorized intervening variable , namely the structure of decisionmaking institutions in Parliament. It models the influence of this variable, and suggests that historical institutionalist theory captures key elements of the variable in a manner superior to extant approaches. [source] National Political Parties and European Integration: Mapping Functional LossPOLITICS, Issue 1 2000Gijs Berends This article specifically examines the role of national political parties in the light of European integration. It introduces the functions that are normally associated with parties, which allows for a systematic evaluation of the performance of national parties in the European Union. Probing these functions that parties are reputed to implement, it arrives at the conclusion that national parties are fairly unsuccessful in fulfilling their core tasks at the European level. [source] Fiscal Incentives, European Integration and the Location of Foreign Direct InvestmentTHE MANCHESTER SCHOOL, Issue 3 2002Florence Hubert Foreign direct investment in the European Economic Area (EEA) has grown rapidly in recent years. This paper tests for structural change in the geographical and industrial pattern of foreign direct investment in Europe using a panel data set on outward investment by German companies in the EEA since 1980. There is evidence of significant structural change since 1990, with nearly all locations and industries seeing a higher level of cross,border investment than might have been expected. We also investigate the scope for national governments to affect location choice through the use of fiscal instruments such as corporation taxes, investment in infrastructure and other forms of development grants and subsidies. The findings are mixed. Some measures, such as tax competitiveness, appear important but are sensitive to the specification of the model. However, the level of government fixed investment expenditure relative to that in other economies is found to have a significant positive impact, particularly in locations with less need for EU structural funds. Although the direct marginal impact appears relatively small, an additional finding of significant agglomeration forces suggests that fiscal policies could still have a permanent influence on the location of economic activities. [source] The Fog of Integration: Reassessing the Role of Economic Interests in European IntegrationBRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 1 2008Patrick Leblond The main theories of European economic integration argue that private economic interests provide the impetus and pressures for integration to move forward. Public policy analyses of the European Union's legislative process, however, show that intense lobbying by such interests can prevent legislative proposals from being adopted, even if economic interests were initially in favour of supranational legislation. How do we explain this apparent contradiction? The answer is that economic interests initially face great uncertainty as to the precise costs and benefits of integrating a particular policy area; only once the ,fog of integration' lifts,as a result of concrete legislative proposals being tabled by the Commission,are economic interests able to calculate these costs and benefits and, consequently, decide whether to lobby for or against the proposal. To provide a first-run validation of the argument, the article examines the cases of the Software Patent and Takeover directives. [source] The New Cosmopolitan Monolingualism: On Linguistic Citizenship in Twenty-First Century GermanyDIE UNTERRICHTSPRAXIS/TEACHING GERMAN, Issue 2 2009David Gramling In the early years of the twenty-first century, being German has become a matter of linguistic competence and performance. An acute shift in citizenship statutes at the end of the 1990s brought about a peripatetic departure from Germany's "right of blood" (ius sanguinis) toward a French-inspired "right of territory" (ius soli). Yet in the nine years since the policy's implementation, a paradigm quite removed from territorial citizenship has taken hold,one that I will outline as a ius linguarum, or "right of languages." This article analyzes the civic discourse on German language use as it has evolved from the late 1990s in immigration statutes, press discourse, school reform initiatives, and national service awards. Together, these developments serve as interlocking case studies in the emergence of a new cosmopolitan monolingualism,amid the fluctuating conditions of European integration and economic globalization. The article concludes with some speculations on the impact of a ius linguarum for teachers of literature and language in the German Studies context. [source] Cross-border mergers and acquisitions and European integrationECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 57 2009Nicolas Coeurdacier SUMMARY Cross-border M&A Cross-border mergers and acquisitions activities (M&As) sharply increased over the last two decades, partly as a result of financial liberalization policies, government policies and regional agreements. In this paper, we identify some of the main forces driving M&As, using a unique database on bilateral cross-border M&As at the sectoral level (in manufacturing and services) over the period 1985,2004. The key empirical findings are: (1) EMU helped the restructuring of capital within the same sector of manufacturing activity among euro area firms; (2) joining the EU favoured both horizontal and vertical mergers; (3) policy-makers can help attract capital by reducing the corporate tax rates and the degree of product market regulations and by improving the country's financial systems; (4) the service industry has not yet fully benefited from European integration because the level of protection and barriers to entry in the services sector act as a strong deterrent to cross-border M&As in services. , Nicolas Coeurdacier, Roberto A. De Santis and Antonin Aviat [source] Delocation and European integration: is structural spending justified?ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 35 2002Karen Helene Midelfart-Knarvik SUMMARY How is European integration changing the location of industry? And what part are national and EU aids to industry playing in this process? We show that states and regions are becoming more specialized within the EU, but this process is very slow. While there is no evidence of polarization occurring at the national level, some regions are losing out. National state aids to industry appear to have little effect for either good or ill, since their effectiveness at attracting economic activity and employment is limited. European Structural Funds expenditure, by contrast, does have an effect on the location of industry, notably by attracting industries that are intensive in research and development. However, this effect has mostly been acting counter to states' comparative advantage , R&D-intensive industries have been encouraged by these aids to locate in countries and regions that have low endowments of skilled labour. Only in Ireland, where Structural Funds reinforced rather than offset comparative advantage, have poor regions been enabled systematically to catch up with the EU average. [source] Between East and West: Geographic Metaphors of Identity in PolandETHOS, Issue 1 2004Marysia H. Galbraith As Poland enters the European Union, questions of national identity relative to wider group loyalties become particularly salient. This study considers how individual life stories contribute to the discourse on what constitutes the Polish nation, and contemplates the implications of respondents' views for the achievement of European integration. I focus on Polish youths' use of metaphors of "betweenness," in which Poland fills the conceptual space between East and West, and "nested identities," based on simultaneous attachments to region, nation, and Europe, and consider how they might provide alternatives to models of identity which assume conflict with outside groups. In postcommunist Poland, more protectionist or conflict-based stances are sometimes taken, not so much because of political threats as in the past, but more in response to economic inequalities within Poland, and between Poland and the West. [source] How political parties frame European integrationEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2010MARC HELBLING This article analyses how political parties frame European integration, and gauges the consistency of their argumentation. Over the course of investigation, one can see how actors' positions are justified, and how the European Union is perceived (i.e., what forces give rise to Euroscepticism and Europeanism). It is argued here that the parties' framing of issues depends on the interests they traditionally defend at the national level, their general positions on European integration, and whether or not they belong to the established political actors in their respective countries. The coding approach enables the relation of frames to actors and positions, moving beyond the techniques employed by existing studies that analyse the media presentation of European integration. Sophisticated frame categorisations are provided to capture the complex structure of argumentation, going beyond a simple dichotomy of economic and cultural frames. Relying on a large and original media dataset covering the period 2004,2006, six Western European countries are investigated. [source] How news content influences anti-immigration attitudes: Germany, 1993,2005EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2009HAJO G. BOOMGAARDEN Immigration is an increasingly important political issue in Western democracies and a crucial question relates to the antecedents of public attitudes towards immigrants. It is generally acknowledged that information relayed through the mass media plays a role in the formation of anti-immigration attitudes. This study considers whether news coverage of immigrants and immigration issues relates to macro-level dynamics of anti-immigration attitudes. It further explores whether this relationship depends on variation in relevant real world contexts. The models simultaneously control for the effects of established contextual explanatory variables. Drawing on German monthly time-series data and on ARIMA time-series modeling techniques, it is shown that both the frequency and the tone of coverage of immigrant actors in the news significantly influence dynamics in anti-immigration attitudes. The strength of the effect of the news, however, depends on contextual variation in immigration levels and the number of asylum seekers. Implications of these findings are discussed in the light of the increasing success of extreme right parties and growing opposition to further European integration. [source] National territory in European space: Reconfiguring the island of IrelandEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 6 2006KATY HAYWARD Uncovering such connections in a case study notable for its recent transformation, this article explores the way in which the narratives and models of European integration have been used in the discourse of Irish official nationalism. Its central thesis is that participation in the space of European Union has facilitated the conceptualization of a common Irish space in which borders (specifically the Irish border) are not conceived as barriers to be overcome, but rather as bridges to the fulfilment of interests. Thus, the Irish governmental elite have used the language of European integration to reconfigure traditional ideals of latent anti-partitionism for a context of peaceful settlement. [source] Cleavages, competition and coalition-building: Agrarian parties and the European question in Western and East Central EuropeEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2004AGNES BATORY Variations in the patterns of Euroscepticism found in agrarian parties across Europe is therefore explained in terms of three central variables: the agrarian parties' long-term policy goals linked to identity and interest; their position in the party systems and the mainstream left- and right-wing parties' stance on European integration; and their long- and short-term electoral strategies and office-related incentives. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||