Trade and FDI Related Effects of the Monetary Union and Structural Adjustment in the Central European New Member States of the EU

Author(s):  
Kalman Dezseri
2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 664-684 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Lightfoot ◽  
Balázs Szent-Iványi ◽  
Kataryna Wolczuk

The accession of the East-Central European (ECE) countries carried a promise of enhancing and enriching the EU’s Eastern policy. The new member states had the strongest interests among EU member states to ensure that countries in the East are prosperous, stable, and democratic. Yet, the EU’s Eastern policy has been largely criticised for its ineffectiveness. So why have they not been able to address the shortcomings in the EU’s Eastern policies? The article argues that the ECE countries supported the way the EU’s Eastern policies were conceived and implemented because they saw it as a potent vehicle to promote their own transition experience not only in the region but also within the EU. We argue that the ECE states have experienced three types of challenges when promoting their transition experience. First, uploading to the EU level remained largely at a rhetorical level. Second, there are conceptual and practical difficulties in defining what constitutes transition experience and harnessing it, as well as coordinating its transfer between the ECE states. Finally, while using transition experience as the basis for their development assistance strategies, the ECE countries actually insufficiently conceptualised the “development” aspect in these policies. Being so driven by their own experience, they have not drawn the lessons from enlargement to use in a non-accession context, especially by incorporating the broader lessons with regard to development.


2006 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Sándor Richter

The order and modalities of cross-member state redistribution as well as the net financial position of the member states are one of the most widely discussed aspects of European integration. The paper addresses selected issues in the current debate on the EU budget for the period 2007 to 2013 and introduces four scenarios. The first is identical to the European Commission's proposal; the second is based on reducing the budget to 1% of the EU's GNI, as proposed by the six net-payer countries, while maintaining the expenditure structure of the Commission's proposal. The next two scenarios represent radical reforms: one of them also features a '1% EU GNI'; however, the expenditures for providing 'EU-wide value-added' are left unchanged and it is envisaged that the requisite cuts will be made in the expenditures earmarked for cohesion. The other reform scenario is different from the former one in that the cohesion-related expenditures are left unchanged and the expenditures for providing 'EU-wide value-added' are reduced. After the comparison of the various scenarios, the allocation of transfers to the new member states in terms of the conditions prevailing in the different scenarios is analysed.


Author(s):  
Christian Klesse

The accession of ten new member states has opened up new political and discursive spaces for challenging homo-, bi-, and transphobia in the new member states and the European Union (EU) as a whole. There has been widely felt sense of hope that the accession will ultimately increase the possibilities of political action, result in democratisation, and better the political conditions for sexual minorities to fight discrimination and struggle for equal treatment before the law (ILGA Europe 2001, Vadstrup 2002, Pereira 2002, Neumann 2004, ILGA 2004, Stonewall 2004). Such sentiments were also expressed in the call-for-papers for the Conference ‘Europe without Homophobia. Queer-in(g) Communities’ that took place from May 24 to May 26, 2004 at Wroclaw in Poland, for which I wrote the first draft of this paper. Participants were asked to reflect upon ‘how we can contribute to making sexual minorities in the European Community visible, heard, safe, and equal before the law’ and to ‘investigate the practical ways (including legal actions, information campaigns, political participation, etc.) of achieving the bold vision suggested in the title: Europe without homophobia’ (Organizing Committee 2004). Human rights groups and lesbian and gay organisations both in the (prospective) new and the already existing member states sensed that access to funding by EU bodies and the ability to address political and/or legal institutions of the EU (and/or the Council of Europe) opened up ‘new space’ for political activism and enabled access to a new range of political discourses and strategies (cf. Stychin 2003). Already many years before accession, human rights organisations and lesbian and gay campaigning groups started to utilise the transformative potential of this prospective economic-political and socio-legal change for campaigns against human rights abuse and legal discrimination on the grounds of gender and sexuality in states applying for accession. ILGA Europe, for example, emphasised that accession should be made dependent on the applying states complying to the high human rights standard that the EU is supposed to stand for. Due to the uneven power structure between the institutions of the EU and the states applying for membership, the logic and rhetoric of ‘enlargement’ structured the negotiations about accession. The power imbalances at the heart of the process are further indicated by the fact that accession is frequently discussed in the scientific literature in the terminology of ‘Europeanization’ (cf. Schimmelfenning and Sedelmeier 2005a). In this context, ‘Europeanization’ signifies ‘integration’ into the economic organisations and politico-legal institutions of the EU, a process that, according to Schimmelfenning and Sedelmeier, can be characterised as ‘a massive export of EU rules’ (2005b: 221). Because accession has been such a recent moment in history, research on the effects of the EU enlargement on the national polities of the new or prospective member states is still scarce. In particular, sexual politics has remained an under-researched topic (for an exception, see Stychin 2003). However, there is sufficient reason to speculate that accession will significantly affect the discourses and strategies of social movements struggling around sexuality and gender in the new member states. Even if it cannot be predicted at this stage, how political actors and social movements will respond and position themselves with regard to these newly emerging ‘political opportunity structures’ (Kriesi et al. 1995), the evolving institutional, economic, and discursive context will without any doubt impact on their politics.


2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paweł Borys ◽  
Piotr Ciżkowicz ◽  
Andrzej Rzońca

Author(s):  
Menelaos Markakis

This chapter looks at the crisis-induced legal, institutional, and economic developments within the Economic and Monetary Union. It consists of two parts. First, there will be a brief sketch of the crisis-related developments. These include the setting-up of financial mechanisms, the European Central Bank’s interventions to combat the crisis, the enhanced oversight of national fiscal and economic policy, and the increased supervision over the financial sector. Second, there will be a ‘first assessment’ of their constitutional and structural implications. Two sets of issues will be examined here: issues of legal principle; and the bearing of the enacted measures on European economic integration. Three key arguments will be made in this chapter. First, it will be argued that the measures enacted have led to legislative fragmentation and have exacerbated problems of transparency and complexity which already existed in this area. Second, it will be shown that the chosen form of action has consequences for institutional balance in the EU, democratic control, and judicial review. Third, it will be argued that the enactment of measures which are only applicable to Euro area Member States has served to deepen economic integration within the Euro area and to further differentiate it from economic integration in non-Euro area Member States. Further, certain areas of the single market have integrated more deeply in the Euro area. It will be concluded that the various reforms which have been implemented have strengthened the EU economic governance framework from a legal, institutional, and economic perspective.


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