Search results
The development of the European Union as a community-based project of integration with decision-making powers outside the constitutional architecture of the nation-state is the most significant innovation in twentieth-century political organisation. It raises fundamental questions about our understanding of the state, sovereignty, citizenship, democracy, and the relationship between political power and economic forces. Despite its achievements, events at the start of the twenty-first century – including the political, economic, and financial crisis of the Eurozone, as well as Brexit and the rise of populism – pose an existential threat to the EU.
Memory and the future of Europe addresses the crisis of the EU by treating integration as a response to the rupture created by the continent’s experience of total war. It traces Europe’s existing pathologies to the project’s loss of its moral foundations rooted in collective memories of total war. As the generations with personal memories of the two world wars pass away, economic gain has become the EU’s sole raison d’être. If it is to survive its future challenges, the EU will have to create a new historical imaginary that relies not only on the lessons of the past, but also builds on Europe’s ability to protect its citizens by serving as a counterweight against the forces of globalisation. By framing its argument through the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Memory and the future of Europe will attract readers interested in political and social philosophy, collective memory studies, European studies, international relations, and contemporary politics.
factor explaining the transformation of the Great Recession into the Euro-crisis (Lapavitsas et al., 2010; Schmidt, 2013a). Individual people experienced these macroeconomic developments between 2008 and 2012 in contradictory ways. On the one hand there was a widespread relief about the fact that the crisis had been much deeper elsewhere, with some scholars even suggesting that there was a ‘crisis without crisis consciousness’ (Dörre et al., 2009). On the other hand, there were growing fears that contagion would eventually lead to the explosion of unemployment and
Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book is about improving our understanding of political parties as democratic organisations in the context of multi-level governance. It analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The purpose of this book is to investigate who within the three parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists, such as the candidates for European parliamentary elections and EU spokespersons.
The book utilises a principal-agent framework to investigate the delegation of power inside the three parties across multiple levels and faces. It draws on over 65 original interviews with EU experts from the three national parties and the Party of European Socialists (PES) and an e-mail questionnaire. This book reveals that European policy has largely remained in the hands of the party leadership. Its findings suggest that the party grassroots are interested in EU affairs, but that interest rarely translates into influence, as information asymmetry between the grassroots and the party leadership makes it very difficult for local activists to scrutinise elected politicians and to come up with their own policy proposals. As regards the selection of EU specialists, such as candidates for the European parliamentary elections, this book highlights that the parties’ processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.
flows resulting from the preferential trade agreements that the EU has established in the region, with Mexico and Chile at the turn of the millennium (2000 and 2003 respectively) and later on with Central America, Peru and Colombia (2012) and Ecuador (2017). A decline in European demand following the financial crisis (2008) and Eurocrisis, which peaked around 2012, dovetailed in time with increasing demand for primary products from China. Although the EU remains the top source of investment in Latin America (in part due to the historical accumulation of foreign direct
://humanrights.ie/constitution-of-ireland/imf-conditionality-the-irish-constitutionand-the-need-for-a-dail-vote-on-the-bailout-agreement/ (last accessed 28 September 2017) and S. Coutts, Constitutional Mutation in the Shadow of the EuroCrisis: the Case of the Oireachtas, unpublished paper, June 2017, cited with permission of writer, at 7. 12 Ibid. 13 See regarding this and more generally, the Commission website at http://ec.europa.eu/ economy_finance/assistance_eu_ms/ireland/index_en.htm (accessed 12 May 2017). 14 By a 79.7% majority (i.e., 1,393,877 of 1,785,707 votes cast). The formerly straightforward provision of Article 35.5 of the Constitution that “the remuneration of a judge
state of affairs is reinforced by a fierce competition amongst member states regarding corporate taxes and labour laws. In turn, I argue that poor policy choices can only partially explain the levels of indebtedness of the currently distressed member states. I claim that the design of the Eurozone and the “distributive vicious circle” I just mentioned played an important role in the origins of the Eurocrisis. In addition, I argue that freedom of movement generates two types of distributive obligations. First, EU mobile workers should be protected from the social risks
independent power-centres, most notably the Commission and the ECB, which will take every opportunity to advance the ‘Brussels Consensus’. The Euro-crisis has granted the stewards of that consensus unprecedented room for manoeuvre. The strait-jacket imposed by the Maastricht Treaty on economic policy-making has been tightened sharply for all Eurozone members, while ‘peripheral’ EU states – Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus – have been prescribed the same medicine that was formerly doled out to countries like Mexico, Argentina and South Korea when they experienced their
in various ways supports other countries of the Union. This policy – it underlines – is wrong. 19 P. Krugman, ‘A hunt for culprits in Eurocrisis’, IHT, 21 February 2010; IHT, 31 July 2012; IHT, 25–26 August 2012. 20 See M. Monti, ‘Entretien avec P. Krugman’, Le Monde, 18 June 2013. 21 The differences in economic efficiency between the different member states were attributed to the malfunctioning of the single market. Attention was thus placed on ‘a new strategy for the single market’. See Mario Monti, A New Strategy for the Single Market, European Commission, 9
commissioned. It showed that 62 per cent of respondents supported military action against Ghaddafi while 65 per cent militated against German participation in it (source: www.bild.de/politik/2011/libyen-krise/aber-mehrheit-lehnt-beteiligung-ab-16933388.bild.html ). See also J. Bucher et al., ‘ Domestic politics, news media and humanitarian intervention: why France and Germany diverged over Libya ’, European Security , 22 : 4 ( 2013 ), pp. 524 – 39 . 23 C. Sternberg , K. Gartzou-Katsouyanni and K. Nicolaïdis , The Greco-German Affair in the Euro-crisis
-based arguments in support of European integration have also increasingly been called into question. The expansions of the EU east into the postcommunist space, which were economically costly for existing member-states, and the Euro-crisis have both eroded the prosperity argument. 37 Offe notes, ‘The European public needs a normatively convincing defense of the integration project, and that need grows more pressing as the project moves forward.’ 38 Although the goal of ensuring peace in Europe has largely been attained, this does not mean that the totalitarian past – in both