This paper aims to analyze the Europeanization of Albanian public administration in light of opening negotiations. The main research question is whether and to what extent Albanian public ...administration can approximate domestic legislation and ensure effective implementation. The core methodology in this paper is the traditional legal doctrine, which is based on analyses and interpretations of the EU acquis and Albanian legislation with a specific focus on reforming public administration. A reference to secondary sources in the Europeanization of public administration enriches the study. The paper argues that Albania has improved the legal framework for public administration in compliance with the EU acquis. However, it fails to ensure the proper implementation due to the following challenges: i) politicized bureaucracy, ii) the lack of capacity, iii) lack of public consultation with stakeholders, and iv) the inability to put in sound planning mechanisms and to carry out a realistic assessment. The paper concludes that Albania must establish a professional public administration with sufficient knowledge of EU acquis and adequately qualified staff to harmonize the domestic legal system and ensure proper implementation.
The generation of the competence education idea in Ukraine based on the EU benchmarks is studied. It is underlined that the transformation of the national education into the competence base is a ...component of the European integration of Ukraine. The authors made conclusion that the Ukrainian education has gone from proclaiming the idea of the competence education, its conceptual justification to implementation. The research results evidence that the support of the competence idea at the level of educational policy is the most successful in Ukraine. At the same time, at the implementation level the competence idea meets a number of challenges due to the novelty of a clear correlation between strategic, didactic and methodological levels. The authors conclude that the problem of the formation of key competences, firstly of transversal or cross-curricular ones, remains underdeveloped; the aspects of crosscurricular links and integration of the education content requires further development; the level of assessing younger students in competencies is even more underdeveloped. On the other hand, the authors generalise that common globalization challenges, powerful integration processes in Europe, Europeanization affecting the European countries outside the EU borders contribute greatly to the synchronization of the education in Ukraine with EU standards.
Since the Eastern enlargement in 2004, the EU has paid exceptional attention to strengthening civil society organizations (CSOs) in new member and candidate states, including Turkey. While the EU's ...contribution to Turkish CSO empowerment is ambivalent in general, women's organizations have benefitted from the opportunities connected to the accession process. However, since 2007, the AKP government has been hesitating to further the EU-membership project. Distancing at the state level has also resulted in the weakening impact of the EU on civil society. We argue that de-Europeanization can be observed in securing financial and technical assistance, weakening normative power of the EU, and changing perceptions towards internationalization and Europeanization. Moreover, distancing from international donors has resulted in changing nature of the relationship between CSOs and local donors, both state and private.
The European Union’s (EU) mission to promote its idea of European-ness across the continent led to its eastern enlargements and later the Eastern Partnership of the European Neighbourhood Policy. ...Along the way, this mission encountered competing norms and regional integration efforts shaped by sociocultural and historical ties connecting state, society and territory. These ties inform the barriers to Europeanisation and the backsliding from EU-managed policy reforms. They can illuminate where the EU’s self-image and constructed European identity do not reflect perspectives abroad or those of EU member countries. Such inconsistencies in the EU-constructed identity that shaped related policy mechanisms prevented sustainable regional transformation and integration. Further policy integration and future EU enlargement remain strong possibilities, as does the risk of basing the next generation of policy mechanisms on a distorted image of the EU and its capacity to transform. In this article, I apply a novel critical theory perspective on the entwined processes of de- and reterritorialisation to this context, and argue that this perspective clarifies and informs the EU’s aim to transform and unite Europe.
This article focuses on the interaction between local factors and the process of Europeanization as a factor of both residents’ political orientations and public policy in the Kosice and Presov ...border regions of Slovakia and the Zakarpattia region of Ukraine. The study used data collected via the Delphi method along with statistical empirics, contemporary notions of Europeanization, and border and local studies to find answers to the main research questions. Local factors resulting from the historical path of development have a significant influence on residents’ political culture and public policy, as demonstrated by nepotism, a general hostility toward elites, and a difference in activism between urban and rural areas. However, there is already evidence that the political culture in the Slovak- Ukrainian borderland and the relevant policy process have been significantly impacted by Europeanization. Both public participation in local and regional development and the influence of non-governmental organizations serve as examples of this trend. Changes in the political culture of borderland residents under the influence of other factors are not, however, the focus of this article, and will be an issue for future research.
Despite the lack of competence on the matter, through time the European Union (EU) developed a number of spatially relevant concepts, initiatives and sectoral directives. An EU territorial governance ...framework progressively consolidated and the Member States gradually adapted in order to reflect its growing complexity. Building on the results of the ESPON COMPASS project, the article sheds light on this process, often referred to as Europeanization of territorial governance. To do so, it presents and compares the perceived impact that a number of sectoral directives, spatial policies and guidance documents developed at the EU level plays in shaping territorial governance and spatial planning in the 32 countries that participate to the ESPON programme.
Summary In this article, we are assessing the impact of GDPR on the adoption of the Brazilian LGPD regulation. The assessment is done in the context of Europeanization. After the introduction of key ...concepts, the article is providing deeper insight into the LGPD creation, revealing historical and teleological perceptions of the influence: Moreover, a separate chapter is provided on the comparative dimension. Overall, with the adoption of the GDPR EU created a comprehensive regulatory regime, which was reflected by Brazilian lawmakers, who found strong inspiration in the EU regulation and who have decided to converge in order to avoid losses associated with a potential difference between the EU and Brazilian data market. As a result, LGPD is very similar to the GDPR and in many parts is taking the same attitude..
This article investigates whether migration policies in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries have become more liberal or restrictive over the last decades and ...whether or not these policies have converged, especially among European Union (EU) countries. Owing to a lack of data, the few existing studies in this field have mostly focused on policy outcome data. Various and sometimes contradicting statements have therefore largely remained untested. This article analyses data from the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project that includes measures for different policy fields between 1980 and 2010 in all OECD states. We find that the conditions and criteria for entering and staying in a country have become more liberal. At the same time, however, we observe that more restrictive control mechanisms have been put in place. We also find that there is a general convergence trend in the migration policy field that varies in intensity, however, across policy fields. We only partially observe any Europeanization effects.
The External Incentives Model (EIM) was designed to explain the Europeanization of the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) through the EU's accession conditionality. This article asks how ...relevant the model remains beyond its original context. We examine recent data and research on the EU's impact in two additional contexts: post-accession developments in the CEECs and the Southeast European countries currently in the accession process. We find that the model generally accounts well for the variation in Europeanization across domains and countries. More specifically, the credibility of incentives stands out as a crucial condition for the success of EU conditionality. At the same time, we note omissions and limitations of the original model: first, the model works with highly abstract conditions that require contextual specification to render them more meaningful and better testable. Second, the EIM starts from generally favourable, but underspecified, background conditions.
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