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This monograph seeks to examine the motivations for the European Union’s (EU) policy towards the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), the EU’s most important relationship with another regional economic integration organisation. This monograph argues that the dominant explanations in the literature -- balancing the US, global aspirations, being an external federator, long-standing economic and cultural ties, economic interdependence, and the Europeanization of Spanish and Portuguese national foreign policies – fail to adequately explain the EU’s policy. In particular, these accounts tend to infer the EU’s motives from its activity. Drawing extensive primary documents, this monograph argues that the major developments in the relationship -- the 1992 Inter-institutional Agreement and the 1995 Europe Mercosur Inter-regional Framework Cooperation Agreement – were initiated by Mercosur and supported mainly by Spain. This means that rather than the EU pursuing a strategy, as implied by most of the existing literature, the EU was largely responsive.
Mercosur. In this study, each of these factors are considered at each of the three stages of EU policy development in order to understand to what extent they could offer a satisfactory explanation for the development of EU–Mercosur policy. Beyond providing a distinctive and empirically rich account of the EU’s relationship with Mercosur, this monograph contributes to the literature on the EU as a global player, particularly the extent to which it is a strategic actor, and to the literature on the Europeanization of national foreign policies of member states from a bottom
Moratinos. This monograph finds considerable evidence of how the EU has been a responsive actor to Mercosur demands at the different stages of the relations instead of being a strategic actor that has initiated EU–Mercosur relations. This argument also corresponds with the work of Jorg Monar (1997), who suggests that third parties are the actors who have sought to upgrade EU–Mercosur policies. It also shows how the Iberian membership created a crucial juncture in the development of EU relations towards the region. Finally, this analysis also implies that the EU is far
explanation can hope to account for every possible variable to the exact degree. Indeed, the value of different research projects is often situated in the particular angle or emphasis that they take. The focus of this book is the leadership of the Conservative Party between 1997 and 2010, and how the key strategic actors (namely the successive leaders of the party and other senior politicians) understood, and sought to address, the party’s electoral failure. Through documentary analysis and elite interviews, it looks to expose competing interpretations of this problem, and
as an influential strategic actor. Turning to anti-monopoly regulation, developments after 2012 can be characterised by the continuous governing framework and a low profile. Although the Seimu sanyaku has had the capacity to engage in anti-monopoly regulation, no evidence indicates that it has explicitly exercised this power; a key policy-making event, the 2013 AMA amendment, was drawn from the consensus shared by both the LDP and DPJ governments. Indeed, no clue reveals explicit political change in anti-monopoly regulation after 2012. In conclusion, developments
are committed to. In short, if they are prepared to pick and choose the way they deal with the taboo, then they cannot truly believe in it (otherwise they would not be able to be selective; they would adhere to it). Yet it is wrong to assume that the strategic actor does not accept the taboo. As the joint model of context and convention identified in the previous paragraph demonstrates, the strategic actor can both
images may reinforce mental images, but could also challenge them. In which case, we must ask how. Do new visual, mediated images come about through routine or exceptional moments of media usage? This matters because if the contention is true that the practice of international relations is the enactment and realisation of a few images, then strategic actors will try to shape which images are in play and how these images are realised. This idea is not new. Nietzsche wrote, ‘Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human
since it depends on German and French domestic politics, which are both in flux. But deregulation in labor law, in particular, is likely to come to a halt, and the push for services deregulation as well (there are many constituencies in Europe for services and labor deregulation, but whether they can gain the commanding heights in Berlin and Paris is less clear). The more interesting questions arise when we recall that policymakers, politicians, and policy entrepreneurs are strategic actors embedded in complex and particular networks and information environments
security agendas. Specifically, this refers to the dual processes of containment and engagement, whereby elements of civil society become the subjects of surveillance, control and prohibition, and/or strategic actors to nurture, engage with and support. Civil society thus becomes a strategic battlefield in the pursuit of national and global security
strategic actors attempting to best respond their political and institutional environments, have, by contrast, received much less attention.2 The prevalence of demand-side explanations for the rise of right-wing extremism has also meant that while the social and economic reasons for the growth of this phenomenon have been well discussed and documented, the influence of political factors on the fortunes of the parties of the extreme right has attracted less coverage. Political explanations have remained rather under-researched, especially in the comparative perspective