This special issue explores to what extent policies and institutions of the European Union spread across different contexts. Are the EU's attempts to transfer its policies and institutions to ...accession and neighbourhood countries sustainable and effective? To what degree do other regions of the world emulate the EU's institutional features; what are the mechanisms of, and scope conditions for, their diffusion? This introduction provides the conceptual framework of the special issue. First, it specifies EU-related institutional change as the 'dependent variable'. Second, it discusses how Europeanisation research and diffusion studies relate to each other and can be fruitfully combined to identify processes and mechanisms by which ideas and institutions of the EU spread. Third, we introduce scope conditions which are likely to affect domestic (or regional) change in response to the promotion or emulation of EU ideas and institutions.
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The 1990s saw a systemic shift from the liberal post–World War II international order of liberal multilateralism (LIO I) to a post–Cold War international order of postnational liberalism (LIO II). ...LIO II has not been only rule-based but has openly pursued a liberal social purpose with a significant amount of authority beyond the nation-state. While postnational liberal institutions helped increase overall well-being globally, they were criticized for using double standards and institutionalizing state inequality. We argue that these institutional features of the postnational LIO II led to legitimation problems, which explain both the current wave of contestations and the strategies chosen by different contestants. We develop our argument first by mapping the growing liberal intrusiveness of international institutions. Second, we demonstrate the increased level and variety of contestations in international security and international refugee law. We show that increased liberal intrusiveness has led to a variety of contestation strategies, the choice of which is affected by the preference of a contestant regarding postnational liberalism and its power within the contested institution.
Financial crisis, euro crisis, Greek crisis, Crimean crisis, Ukraine crisis, Syria crisis, migration crisis – even the greatest optimist cannot deny that Europe has been suffering through a whole ...series of crises ever since the Lehman Brothers bank collapsed in 2008. EU scholars and pundits agree that Europe has failed to govern the multiple crises because the European Union has been too weak to prevent the breakdown of banks, contain sovereign debt, generate economic growth, create new jobs, promote stability and democracy in its Southern and Eastern neighbourhood, stop transnational terrorism, and fight climate change. Some even argue that the EU has not only failed to provide solutions but that is actually part of the problem undermining the capacity of its Member States to effectively and democratically govern their markets and societies in the 21stcentury (Majone, 2014; Scharpf, 2015). Although some Eastern European governments may have been most outspoken in claiming that not more but less Europe is the only way to get out of the various crises and avert catastrophe in the future, Dutch, Danish and British politicians, however, have voiced similar arguments supporting David Cameron’s symbolic request to exempt the UK from the goal of ‘an ever closer union’ in the preamble of the Treaties to avoid Brexit.
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This contribution argues that the three dominant approaches to European integration cannot fully explain why the two most recent crises of the European Union (EU) resulted in very different outcomes. ...Liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism can account for why the euro crisis resulted in more integration, but fail to explain why the EU has been stuck in a stalemate in the Schengen crisis. With regard to postfunctionalism, it is the other way around. To solve the puzzle, we have to consider that depoliticization through supranational delegation during the euro crisis has ultimately led to more, not less politicization. Moreover, both crises were about identity politics. Political controversies over the euro crisis have centred predominantly on questions of order, i.e., what constitutes Europe as a community and how much solidarity members of the community owe to each other under which conditions. The mass influx of migrants and refugees changed identity politics, since Eurosceptic populist parties framed the Schengen crisis in terms of borders, advocating for an exclusionary 'fortress Europe.' In contrary of a more inclusionary discourse, the dominance of exclusionary positions in the politicization of EU affairs has impaired an upgrading of the common European interest in the Schengen crisis.
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Unpacking the major debates, leading authors of the field provide a state-of-the-art guide to governance in areas of limited statehood (ALS) where state authorities lack the capacity to implement and ...enforce central decision and/or to uphold the monopoly over the means of violence. While ALS can be found everywhere—not just in the global South—they are neither ungoverned nor ungovernable. Rather, a variety of actors maintain public order and safety, as well as provide public goods and services. While external state ‘governors’ and their interventions in the global South have received special scholarly attention, various non-state actors—from non-governmental organizations to business to violent armed groups—have emerged that also engage in governance. This evidence holds for diverse policy fields and historical cases. The handbook gives a comprehensive picture of the varieties of governance in ALS from interdisciplinary perspectives including political science, geography, history, law, and economics. Twenty-nine chapters review the academic scholarship and explore the conditions of effective and legitimate governance in ALS, as well as its implications for world politics in the twenty-first century. The authors examine theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as the historical and spatial dimensions of ALS. The chapters deal with the various governors as well as their modes of governance. They cover a variety of issue areas and explore the implications for the international legal order, for normative theory, and for policies toward ALS.
Why Noncompliance traces the history of noncompliance within the European Union (EU), focusing on which states continuously do or do not follow EU Law, why, and how that affects the governance in the ...EU and beyond. n exploring the EU's long and varied history of noncompliance, Tanja A. Börzel takes a close look at the diverse groups of noncompliant states throughout the EU's existence. Why do states that are vocally critical of the EU have a better record of compliance than those that support the EU? Why has noncompliance been declining since the 1990s, even though the EU was adding member-states and numerous laws? Börzel debunks conventional wisdoms in EU compliance research, showing that noncompliance in the EU is not caused by the new Central and Eastern European member states, nor by the Eurosceptic member states. So why do these states take the brunt of Europe's misplaced ire? Why Noncompliance introduces politicization as an explanatory factor that has been long overlooked in the literature and scholarship surrounding the European Union. Börzel argues that political controversy combined with voting power and administrative capacity, explains why noncompliance with EU law has been declining since the completion of the Single Market, cannot be blamed on the EU's Central and Easter European member states, and is concentrated in areas where EU seeks to protect citizen rights.
In order to stabilise the post-Soviet region, the European Union seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Newly Independent States. In light of high adaptation costs, the lack of a ...membership perspective, and low levels of democracy, the prospects of Europeanisation appear to be limited. The Southern Caucasus belongs to the most corrupt countries in the world. While being least likely cases, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have responded to the EU's demands for good governance introducing formal institutional changes. Moreover, despite their differences in statehood, democracy, and power (a)symmetries with the EU, domestic institutional changes look very similar. This double puzzle is explained by differential empowerment. Instead of liberal reform coalitions, which are largely absent in the Southern Caucasus, the incumbent regimes have instrumentalised the EU, selectively implementing anti-corruption policies to gain and consolidate political power. As a result, the EU stabilises rather than transforms its neighbourhood.
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The articles in this special issue find ample evidence for the EU's influence on domestic and regional institutions. Its impact is patchy, often shallow but certainly not spurious. This conclusion ...demonstrates that it is worthwhile to integrate the Europeanisation literature and its theoretical arguments into the larger literature on diffusion. But it also shows limits of the diffusion approaches in the social sciences which tend to privilege structure over agency and, as a result, tend to focus on institutional convergence and isomorphism rather than variation in institutional outcomes. Some general impact of the EU on domestic institutional change in its neighbourhood and beyond is found, as well as some diffusion of EU institutional models of regional integration worldwide. The approach is decidedly agency-centred in focusing on diffusion mechanism and on scope conditions.
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The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism—the first of its kind—offers a systematic and wide-ranging survey of the scholarship on regionalism, regionalization, and regional governance. Unpacking ...the major debates, leading authors of the field synthesize the state of the art, provide a guide to the comparative study of regionalism, and identify future avenues of research. Twenty-seven chapters review the theoretical and empirical scholarship with regard to the emergence of regionalism, the institutional design of regional organizations and issue-specific governance, as well as the effects of regionalism and its relationship with processes of regionalization. The authors explore theories of cooperation, integration, and diffusion explaining the rise and the different forms of regionalism. The Handbook also discusses the state of the art on the world regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Eurasia, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Various chapters survey the literature on regional governance in major issue areas such as security and peace, trade and finance, environment, migration, social and gender policies, as well as democracy and human rights. Finally, the Handbook engages in cross-regional comparisons with regard to institutional design, dispute settlement, identities and communities, legitimacy and democracy, as well as inter- and transregionalism.
This article concentrates on the path from the development of collective identities to the integration of core state powers. Firstly, we focus on the European experience. We argue that the identities ...of political, economic, and social elites have been crucial for the evolution of European integration. With regard to mass public opinion, European integration has been made possible by a consensus of EU citizens with inclusive national identities. Most recently, the politicization of EU affairs in many member states has been driven by populist forces mobilizing minorities with exclusive nationalist identities. Secondly, we discuss the extent to which insights from Europe have travelled to other regions of the world. Elites involved in region-building almost always develop identity narratives linking their national experience to the respective regions. Moreover, there is evidence that the difference between inclusive and exclusive nationalist identifications has also travelled beyond Europe.
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