Principle Of Tolerance As The Legitimizing Basis Of European Integration Project

Author(s):  
N. A. Medushevsky
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (15) ◽  
pp. 78-94
Author(s):  
Giorgio Oikonomou

The purpose of this study is to explore the evolution of EU administration by focusing and critically examining the role of EU agencies in advancing the European integration project. The research question deals with identifying the factors that account for the formulation of EU agencies and the reasons behind their sharp increase in numbers since the 2000s. The tasks are to analyse critical EU agencies’ parameters such as their typology, the policy area they deal with, origin of their resources and funding, and their output. In addition, transparency and accountability issues accompanying the proliferation of EU agencies are also considered. Emphasis is placed on the evolution of the European administration as expressed by the establishment of various types of agencies since 1975 thereafter. Methodologically, the research utilizes quantitative data based on annual EU budgets as well as official reports and policy papers issued by main EU institutions (European Commission, European Parliament, European Court of Auditors) and agencies, analyzing them from a historical perspective. As a result, it is argued that the proliferation of EU agencies has advanced the process of European integration, namely the EU enlargement and expansion in new policy areas following successive reforms of the Treaties. However, concerns regarding accountability and transparency issues remain in place.


Author(s):  
Alasdair R. Young

This chapter introduces the importance of EU trade policy both to the European integration project and to the EU’s role in the world. It explains how different aspects of trade policy are made. The chapter also charts how the emphasis of EU trade policy has shifted from prioritizing multilateral negotiations to pursuing bilateral agreements. It considers how the EU has responded to the apparent politicization of trade policy within Europe and to the United States’ more protectionist and unilateral trade policy. It also considers Brexit EU trade policy and how trade policy complicated Brexit. It argues that there has been considerable continuity in EU trade policy despite these challenges.


2020 ◽  
pp. 030981681990012
Author(s):  
Stefanie Hürtgen

In current debates on precarization in Europe, a transnational and more class-based perspective is demanded. While fully supporting this request, this article nevertheless notices that, often, when it comes to the economic logic of current Europeanization, scholars have only taken a one-sided look at financial capital and financialization. What is needed is a deeper conceptual understanding of European labour and production processes and how their transnational organization is interwoven with both the European integration project and rising precarization. In an inter-disciplinary approach, combining critical political economy, economic and social geography, and the sociology of work and industry, this article seeks to tackle the problem and develops three main arguments. The first is that, long before the 2008ff. crisis, a mode of Europeanization as multi-scalar competitive integration developed, one that, basically, takes socio-spatial unevenness as a competitive advantage. The second argument is that the backbone of this competitive Europeanization mode is a transnationalized European regime of fragmented and flexible production. This regime particularizes labour and labour processes on all social scales, within and beyond nation-states, by putting them in a competitive relation to each other. The third argument is that due to permanent transnational restructuring and technological (digital) modernization, no stable socio-spatial division of labour within and among the European countries arises. Instead, permanently changing forms of labour’s social polarization occur, a finding that questions classic ideas of social development through economic and technological modernization. Precarization, defined as the detachment of dependent labour working conditions from the means of integrative social participation, hereby describes a specific concentration of a nevertheless wider structural uncertainty that is inherent to both the mode of European integration and the regime of European production.


Author(s):  
Jason Beckfield

The Euro-crisis of 2009–2012 and the UK’s 2016 vote to leave the EU vividly demonstrated that EU policies matter for the distribution of resources within and between European nation-states. Throughout these events, distributive conflicts between the European Union’s winners and losers intensified, and continue today. This book places these events into a broader historical, sociological, and economic perspective by analyzing how European integration has reshaped the distribution of income across the households of Europe. The motivating question is: who wins and who loses from European integration? Using individual- and household-level income survey data, combined with macro-level data on social policies, and case studies of welfare reforms in EU and non-EU states, this book shows how European integration has restratified Europe by simultaneously drawing national economies closer together and increasing inequality among households. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the Single European Act of 1985 had an array of intended and unintended consequences for inequality in Europe. With the Single European Act, EU policymakers revived the integration project by elevating the single market to the top priority of European law and by constitutionalizing the idea that markets solve social and political problems.


2013 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 197-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitry Kochenov

AbstractThis chapter suggests the deployment of the concept of European citizenship as a means of integration alongside the internal market, proposing the citizenship paradigm of European integration to inform the Union’s future. This proposal, based on a combination of the initial promise of European unity and the potential of EU citizenship, is not purely utopian but is directly rooted in the primary law as well as in the purpose of the integration project.


2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-73
Author(s):  
Vladislav Vorotnikov ◽  
◽  
Andrzej Habarta ◽  

The article addresses the process of European integration of 5 Western Balkan states: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. After the demise of the socialism system and the collapse of Yugoslavia, all countries in the region began to more or less associate their future with the participation in the European integration project. The philosophy of "Yugoslavism" was replaced by the idea of European integration. However, achieving this goal was not easy. The region is a complex (from the perspective of ethno-confessional and territorial conflicts) space where the political and economic interests of large non-regional players intersect. These factors predetermined the varying degree of success of the Western Balkan states on their way to the EU. The article analyzes the political and economic factors affecting this process. The subject of the analysis is the evolution of the socio-economic models of the Western Balkan states, their foreign economic ties, participation in the international movement of capital, labor, as well as economic ties with Russia.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veton Latifi

Three decades since the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism, some of the Balkan nations are not following yet the lessons for building sustainable peace and functioning democracies according to their aspirations (at least in a declarative way) for association with the liberal democracies of the European Union (EU). Rather, the Balkans’ history is transforming into a story of importing the habits and principles from the communism period in a paradoxical way of establishing the illiberal democracies followed by controversies and defects in the process of state-building. More than a decade, the Balkans, from one side, is transformed into a zone of periphery with a focus of the European determination for the support of the institutional reform through the process of integration, but in parallel, it is being self-formatted into a zone of self-isolation of the Balkan nations. This article will discuss the transition paradigm of the Balkans through functional analysis of aspects related to the rhetoric of Balkan countries in the discourse of the criteria of the European integration project; the dimension of the Balkan ancient myth with the new additional attribute of self-isolation; the insisting of the Balkan political elites for catapulting to the European project; and as well as the dynamics of the transition, internal and European integration of the Albanians and other nations of the Balkan region in the general


Author(s):  
Krzysztof Sliwinski

This paper looks at the European integration project in its current iteration drawing on Karl Polanyi’s assertion that markets are inseparable from the socio-cultural context. In this regard, all attempts to liberalise the economy (not excluding European integration, which is based on the principle of the single market) have practical and indeed tangible political ramifications. The main hypothesis of the paper lies in the recognition of the fact that the neoliberal agenda is one of the defining features of European integration. It is after all, the project of the single market, with its free movement of goods, services, capital, and labour that underpins European Union integrative practice.Secondly, it is the presupposition of this paper, that there is a certain degree of congruence between the economic elites, operating within the neoliberal framework, and the centre-left political elites. The argument here is that the logic of neoliberalism has been fundamentally accepted across the mainstream of the political spectrum. This consequently means that even left-wing parties have had to reposition themselves both ideologically and practically, which brings the conclusion that the market has lost its role as the basic ideological differentiator between the traditional right and left. The axis of political debate has consequently shifted to moral issues such as the relationship between the state and the church, immigration, and gender.


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