The Brexit referendum provokes speculation about the likelihood of European disintegration. This article discusses how scholarship might deal with the issue of disintegration and argues that it ...should be thought of as an indeterminate process rather than an identifiable outcome. Within the EU system, Brexit is likely to unleash disintegrative dynamics, which could see the EU stagnate into a suboptimal institutional equilibrium. At the same time, EU studies needs to lift its gaze beyond the internal dynamics of the EU system to consider the disintegration of the democratic capitalist compact within which European integration has been embedded historically.
Research Highlights and Abstract
A sympathetic critique of the literature on ‘Normative Power Europe’ that incorporates economic liberalism into the repertoire of the EU's constitutive principles.
...The derivation of three ideal type liberal modes of justification for external action and a discussion of their potential complementarities and contradictions.
An application of the three modes to the case of EU external action.
This article—a sympathetic critique of the literature on ‘Normative Power Europe’—observes that the rationales for EU external action, while understandable in terms of the concept of ‘normative power’, emerge from a variety of overlapping and potentially contradictory liberal arguments. For the purposes of the argument, these liberalisms are organised into three ideal types: market liberalism, the pursuit of peace through liberal means and the ethic of cosmopolitan duty. The article suggests that while it is possible to associate different domains of EU external action with different varieties of liberal discourse, it is often more appropriate to see these policy domains as sites of struggle, negotiation and (perhaps) reconciliation between competing liberal projects.
Debates about the economy are central to political exchange and political choice is typically presented as a matter of selecting among rival economic competence claims. The capacity to speak with ...authority about the economy or to draw upon accredited economic expertise is an important source of political advantage. However, the Brexit process is a form of politicized market contestation that has taken place against the backdrop of significant challenges to expert authority. This article shows how key parts of the Leave campaign developed three strategies within the discursive politics of Brexit: setting aside the economy as a central issue in Brexit; advancing alternative economic knowledge to that of institutionally advantaged professionals; and creating a cadre of alternative economic experts. The article suggests that attempts to use the inherently depoliticizing logic of causal ideas derived from authorized economic knowledge has not prevailed over the central normative beliefs that drive ‘Brexitism’.
This article offers a reading of Normative power Europe' (NPE) suggesting that the concept has been used for two distinct purposes: as a distinctive ontological characterisation of the EU, on the one ...hand, and as a critical approach to the study of the EU and its external projection, on the other. These positions are labelled *NPE ontological reality' (NPE-OR) and 'NPE critical ontology' (NPECO), respectively, and this article sets out to show how they might work together in practice, even if they are incommensurable in theory. It is argued that NPE's ethico-political value resides in the extent that it embodies an ontologically plural reality, never entirely defined. By drawing attention to a blind-spot in the NPE position - the constitutive importance of economic liberalism ('market cosmopolitanism') to the EU's post-Westphalian character - attention is drawn to the normative basis of market cosmopolitanism and its connections to NPE-OR are described. It is argued that, from an NPE-CO perspective, we should exercise caution in celebrating NPE-OR as post-Westphalian reality to the extent that it is rooted in a market cosmopolitics.
Brexit has reopened and repoliticised the debate about future growth models for the UK economy. This contribution argues that this debate is built around historically specific path dependencies that ...reflect the particular character of public debate about British political economy, while also suggesting that the debate around Brexit takes place at a very distinctive moment in the history of democratic capitalism in Europe. This combination gives the renewed politicisation a specific and perhaps perverse character. The paper considers how we should approach debates about growth models, paying particular attention to the importance of the politics of support. It suggests that recent debate about growth models has been largely subsumed within the politics of Brexit, which has politicised that debate, albeit through the emergent political economy frames that Brexit has provoked. The paper explores the ways in which the demise of three key props of European democratic capitalism - a sustained period of economic growth, a governing philosophy that subordinated the market to wider social purposes and strong political parties - play out in the context of Brexit and the search for a new politics of support.
The debates on regionalism have been polarized between European Union (EU) scholars and non-EU scholars, with the assumption being that regionalism within the EU and other regions of the world are ...quite distinct, with little to be learnt from dialogue with each other. This book challenges such assumptions and calls for a genuine debate between scholars of regionalism.
This book demonstrates that more can and needs to be learned about regional integration all over the world through comparison and reflection on specific regional trends. Beginning with a theoretically driven introduction, leading experts in the field are brought together to offer a series of case studies on regional integration within Latin America, Africa, Asia, North America and Europe. In Part III the authors investigate the links between the EU and selected other regional organisations and processes, exploring the dynamics through which these interregional relations are developing and the implications they have for the study of contemporary regionalism/regionalisation both inside and beyond the continent of Europe. The conclusions set out a challenging research agenda for comparative studies in the field.
Addressing one of the under-explored aspects of EU studies, the EU's coexistence with other pan-continental/regional organisations in the European continent, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of regionalism, IPE, European Studies and international politics.
Debates about economic policy in Britain have been dominated by claims that sovereign debt problems are due to loose fiscal policy and excessive spending rather than volatile capital flows and flawed ...monetary policy. There are strong grounds for believing that these stories are largely nonsense, yet they inform policy and are widely believed among mass publics, and have proved almost impossible to refute in everyday political discourse. The answer to this puzzle, we suggest, is that such claims are better thought of as bullshit (as conceptualised by Harry Frankfurt 2005) rather than outright falsehoods: in other words, as speech acts that are indifferent to the truth and proceed without effective concern for the veracity of the claim in question. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of political bullshit applied to economic policy debates since the financial crisis, and seek to explain its hold on the popular imagination. We assess what makes some particular brands of bullshit more successful than others, and argue that in a world of competing realities as well as competing theories, the power of rhetoric is more likely to settle an argument than evidence and logic.
The European Union (EU) poses quite profound questions for scholars and students of the social and political sciences. This benchmark Handbook is designed to provide an authoritative state-of-the art ...guide to the scope of the field suitable for both established scholars and students of the EU; reflect and contribute to the debates about the nature of the field of EU studies and EU politics in particular; and explore in detail the development of the many approaches to the study of EU politics. Divided into four sections, the Handbook focuses on theorizing European integration; the EU as polity; politics and policy making in the EU; and the EU and the international system.
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