Problems of North-South Economic Integration and Politics in Ireland: Southern Perspectives

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Anderson ◽  
James Goodman

North-South economic integration across the border in Ireland is being stimulated by wider transnational processes and European Union integration. But its meanings and extent, as elsewhere in the EU, are defined by state-centred structures and political ideologies. In Ireland, economic integration, and the lack of it, has been shaped by political Partition and the national conflict over Northern Ireland. This article discusses economic integration and politics from a Southern perspective, drawing on interviews with Dublin-based representatives of business organisations, professional associations and semi-state bodies. It mirrors earlier research in Belfast on the motivations and problems of cross-border integration, its institutional forms and future potential. Private firms, associations and other bodies have generally tried to circumvent rather than supersede North-South and national divisions. But the end result of trying to keep ‘economics’ separate from ‘politics’ is a very uneven and stunted form of integration which is sorely lacking in coherence, coordination, and accountability. It is concluded that overcoming these problems requires North-South political institutions and democratic involvement.

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (Vol 18, No 4 (2019)) ◽  
pp. 439-453
Author(s):  
Ihor LISHCHYNSKYY

The article is devoted to the study of the implementation of territorial cohesion policy in the European Union in order to achieve a secure regional coexistence. In particular, the regulatory and institutional origins of territorial cohesion policy in the EU are considered. The evolution of ontological models of cohesion policy has been outlined. Specifically, the emphasis is placed on the key objective of political geography – effectively combining the need for "territorialization" and the growing importance of networking. The role of urbanization processes in the context of cohesion policy is highlighted. Cross-border dimensions of cohesion policy in the context of interregional cooperation are explored. Particular emphasis is placed on the features of integrated sustainable development strategies.


Author(s):  
Tracey Raney

This paper is about the ways that citizens perceive their place in the political world around them, through their political identities. Using a combination of comparative and quantitative methodologies, the study traces the pattern of citizens’ political identifications in the European Union and Canada between 1981 and 2003 and explains the mechanisms that shape these political identifications. The results of the paper show that in the EU and Canada identity formation is a process that involves the participation of both individuals and political institutions yet between the two, individuals play a greater role in identity construction than do political institutions. The paper argues that the main agents of political identification in the EU and Canada are citizens themselves: individuals choose their own political identifications, rather than acquiring identities that are pre-determined by historical or cultural precedence. The paper makes the case that this phenomenon is characteristic of a rise of ‘civic’ identities in the EU and Canada. In the European Union, this overarching ‘civic’ identity is in its infancy compared to Canada, yet, both reveal a new form of political identification when compared to the historical and enduring forms of cultural identities firmly entrenched in Europe. The rise of civic identities in both the EU and Canada is attributed to the active role that citizens play in their own identity constructions as they base their identifications on rational assessments of how well political institutions function, and whether their memberships in the community will benefit them, rather than on emotional factors rooted in religion or race. In the absence of strongly held emotional identifications, in the EU and Canada political institutions play a passive role in identity construction by making the community appear more entitative to its citizens. These findings offer new theoretical scope to the concept of civic communities and the political identities that underpin them. The most important finding presented in the paper is that although civic communities and identities are manufactured by institutions and political elites (politicians and bureaucrats), they require thinking citizens, not feeling ones, to be sustained.   Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v2i4.179


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Eva Eckert ◽  
Oleksandra Kovalevska

In the European Union, the concern for sustainability has been legitimized by its politically and ecologically motivated discourse disseminated through recent policies of the European Commission and the local as well as international media. In the article, we question the very meaning of sustainability and examine the European Green Deal, the major political document issued by the EC in 2019. The main question pursued in the study is whether expectations verbalized in the Green Deal’s plans, programs, strategies, and developments hold up to the scrutiny of critical discourse analysis. We compare the Green Deal’s treatment of sustainability to how sustainability is presented in environmental and social science scholarship and point out that research, on the one hand, and the politically motivated discourse, on the other, do not correlate and often actually contradict each other. We conclude that sustainability discourse and its keywords, lexicon, and phraseology have become a channel through which political institutions in the EU such as the European Commission sideline crucial environmental issues and endorse their own presence. The Green Deal discourse shapes political and institutional power of the Commission and the EU.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-181
Author(s):  
W. James Wolffe QC

In this speech, given in Brussels on 29 January 2018, the Lord Advocate, James Wolffe QC, the head of Scotland’s systems of prosecution and investigation of deaths, discusses, from a Scottish perspective, the challenge of transnational crime and the benefits of current European Union (EU) cooperation regimes in the prosecution of cross-border crime, in the context of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU.


2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTONIS ANTONIADIS

Ranging from the denial of direct effect to WTO law by the Court of Justice to a WTO-friendly legislative culture currently booming in the EU's political institutions, different approaches towards WTO law have been adopted within the EU. This article classifies the different approaches into reactive, coactive, and proactive by drawing on their common characteristics. The principal aim is to explore the considerations shaping the development of the different approaches and to argue that these stem from the interaction between the judiciary and the legislature. In doing so, this article purports to provide a comprehensive view of the application of WTO law within the Community legal order.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-43
Author(s):  
Elena Grad-Rusu

Since the beginning, the European Union has believed and promoted the idea that an increase in cross-border cooperation contributes to enhanced European integration. This means that cross-border cooperation supports sustainable development along the EU’s internal and external borders, helps reduce differences in living standards and addresses common challenges across these borders. The aim of this paper is to examine the cross-border initiatives between Romania and Hungary with a special focus on the INTERREG projects, which have provided new sources of funding for cross-border activities and regional development in the RomanianHungarian border area. In this context, the cooperation has intensified in the last two decades, especially since Romania joined the EU in 2007. The research proves that cross-border projects and initiatives represent an important source of funding for this type of intervention, when no similar funding sources are available.


2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (824) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
Alexander Clarkson

European integration based on a supranational form of pooled sovereignty has taken on increasingly state-like qualities. With every move toward absorbing additional members, the European Union system has expanded its geographic reach. The state-like power of the EU is apparent in the impact its integration processes have had in societies just outside its borders. Its growing influence is most notable in misfit border territories, from Kaliningrad to Transnistria, and from Cyprus to Northern Ireland, that are tenuously under the political control of neighboring geopolitical powers.


Author(s):  
Michael Dougan

Following a national referendum on 23 June 2016, the UK announced its intention to end its decades-long membership of the EU. That decision initiated a process of complex negotiations, governed by Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, with a view to making the arrangements required for an ‘orderly Brexit’. This book explores the UK’s departure from the EU from a legal perspective. As well as analysing the various constitutional principles relevant to ‘EU withdrawal law’, and detailing the main issues and problems arising during the Brexit process itself, the book provides a critical analysis of the final EU–UK Withdrawal Agreement—including dedicated chapters on the future protection of citizens’ rights, the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the prospects for future EU–UK relations in fields such as trade and security.


Author(s):  
Thomas Faist

Europe, and the European Union in particular, can be conceived as a transnational social space with a high degree of transactions across borders of member states. The question is how efforts to provide social protection for cross-border migrants in the EU reinforce existing inequalities (e.g. between regions or within households), and lead to new types of inequalities (e.g. stratification of labour markets). Social protection in the EU falls predominantly under the purview of individual member states; hence, frictions between different state-operated protection systems and social protection in small groups are particularly apparent in the case of cross-border flows of people and resources. Chapter 5 examines in detail the general social mechanisms operative in cross-border forms of social protection, in particular, exclusion, opportunity hoarding, hierarchization, and exploitation, and also more concrete mechanisms which need to be constructed bottom-up.


2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (7) ◽  
pp. 1582-1600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier Thomas Kramsch

Notions of immanence provide the implicit theoretical grammar for much work exploring the political terrain of an active transnational or radically cosmopolitan society in our day. In this paper I attempt to problematize such a gesture in the recent ‘turn to cosmopolis’, arguing that its conceptual frame fails to specify adequately the geohistorical preconditions for a politics capable of mediating between nationalizing and cosmopolitanizing tendencies at work in a globalizing world. For the case of Europe, I argue such a legacy may be more productively located in the ‘border work’ of mid-20th-century anti-imperialism and decolonization, whose struggles to redefine the postcolonial couplet of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ haunt current attempts by the European Union to craft a more inclusive and cosmopolitan transboundary future. I explore how such governmentalizing phantasms specifically inform attempts to create viable cross-border regions ( euregios) within the EU, and continue to gnaw at attempts to negotiate boundary disputes at the outer limits of the continent. In conclusion, a cautious rite of exorcism is ventured by engaging with the elusive anti-imperial cosmopolitanism of Frantz Fanon.


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