Pursuing European Strategic Autonomy: Up-to-date Results

2016–2020 witnessed significant structural changes in the foreign and security policy of the European Union. External factors encouraged the need to strengthen the EU strategic autonomy not only in the form of particular practical moves related to the establishment and development of new institutions, but also as part of an attempt to formulate a new common discourse. The article examines these processes through the security communities theory, traditionally applied to analyze transatlantic dynamics. This helps to both systemically address the recent changes and identify miscalculations and missing elements in framing the European security community. Since the 2020 PESCO Strategic Review to a certain extent summed up the initial phase of development of the central initiative of the whole process, the article analyzes the so far achieved results in setting up the new agenda for the EU and the prospects of translating it into joint practices. The main assumption posits that the key obstacle for enhancing strategic autonomy is the need to use a collective identity - both a tool for developing institutions and a goal of this process. As a result, neither a new collective identity, nor a functional network of institutions have been built, leaving the EU unprepared to bring the idea of strategic autonomy further.

11. The institutions of Economic and Monetary Union:

Since 1999, a subset of EU member states—known collectively as the euro area—has delegated exclusive competence for monetary policy to the European Central Bank (ECB), while giving limited powers to the European Commission, ECOFIN, and the Eurogroup in other areas of economic policy. The euro crisis provided the first major test of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), as a sovereign debt crisis spread between member states and threatened to tear the single currency apart. The ECB and two new institutions—the European Stability Mechanism and Euro Summit—helped to keep the euro area together but at significant economic and political cost. EU institutions were better prepared for the initial economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the crisis still produced important institutional changes. The COVID-19 recovery fund Next Generation EU gives the Commission and Council a major new role in economic policy, albeit a temporary one for now. The EMU illustrates three key dimensions of EU institutional politics: the tension between intergovernmental versus supranational institutions, leaders versus followers, and legitimacy versus contestation. It also reveals the explanatory power of new institutionalism among other theoretical perspectives.

Theological Revolution and the Idea of Equality

The transition in Europe from a predominantly agricultural society dominated by a landed aristocracy to an emerging commercial one with an expanding bourgeoisie gave birth to a reformulated expression of Christianity whose doctrines could better legitimate the new institutions and practices of commercial society. Whereas Catholicism provided an ideology that justified the landlords’ capture of economic surplus, Protestantism legitimated the emerging bourgeoisie’s ability to do the same. Protestantism’s privileging of work and asceticism afforded social respectability to the bourgeoisie and ideological support for its capturing a share of society’s surplus. It gave legitimacy to the harsh social treatment of a rising class of wage workers who had been separated from any ownership, control, or ready access to the means of production. Protestantism served as a transitional religion between a traditional agricultural world dominated by Catholic doctrine and a more modern commercial one dominated by secular thought.

Global Co-management and the Emergent Arctic: Opportunities for Engagement and Collaboration between Arctic States, Indigenous Permanent Participants, and Observers on the Arctic Council

Successful collaboration between the indigenous peoples and the sovereign states of Arctic North America has helped to stabilise the Arctic region, fostering meaningful indigenous participation in the governance of their homeland, the introduction of new institutions of self-governance at the municipal, tribal and territorial levels, and successful diplomatic collaborations at the international level through the Arctic Council. This stability and the reciprocal and increasingly balanced relationship between sovereign states and indigenous stakeholders has yielded a widely recognised spirit of international collaboration often referred to as Arctic exceptionalism. With competition in the Arctic between states on the rise, the multitude of co-management systems and the multi-level, inter-governmental and inter-organisational relationships they have nurtured across the region will help to neutralise new threats to ‘Arctic Exceptionalism’ posed by intensifying inter-state tensions.

Administrative Justice and Globalization

This chapter, a discussion of administrative justice beyond the borders of the states, has three related objectives. The first is to point out the growth of this dimension of administrative justice, either within regional organizations or within global regulatory regimes. The second is to examine the challenges facing the new institutions and the commonalities and differences between their foundations, particularly with regard to the general principles of law aiming at promoting sound governance, such as due process, impartiality, and proportionality. The third objective is to examine the role of law. Judicial review and judicial doctrines are part of the story, but are not the whole story. It will be seen that law, both hard and soft, plays several roles in this area and variably impinges on the interest at stake.

Making reform and stability compatible with each other: elite redeployment in Meiji Japan

Nineteenth-century Japan remains a void in the literature on institutions and growth. Developmental institutions evolved in Japan after the Meiji Restoration despite the absence of political participation. Authoritarian change agents usually face a trade-off between reform and stability: they have coercive power to remove underproductive institutions, but at the risk of inviting instability, as politically influential deprivileged elites may engage in counteraction to recover what they perceive as their entitlement. Many authoritarian regimes, thus, coopt elites by allowing them access to rent, but such buying-off inevitably compromises institutional improvement. How did Meiji Japan overcome this dilemma and liberate major fiscal and administrative spaces for productive players who generate wealth and increase the size of the economic pie for society? This article presents a model that it calls ‘elite redeployment’ to answer this puzzle. In lieu of elite bargains in participatory polities in Europe, the revolutionary authoritarian regime in Japan coercively deprivileged traditional elites and redeployed those with financial or human capital among them in productive institutions. By doing so, the Japanese authoritarian change agents dismantled the incumbent institutions in an irreversible manner and swiftly built new institutions such as modern administrative, educational, financial, and commercial sectors, while maintaining stability.

Local Clubs and Sports Culture in Kerala

S.Mohammed Irshad’s essay describes the crumbling of a local sports club in Kerala that was once the heart of a vibrant sports culture and deliberates upon the reasons for the decay. Being a symbol of community ownership and sustaining political mobilization, the local sports club promoted a civic culture within the community through local training and competition. However, the newly-emerging stadium-based sports and emergent cultures of party politics have slowly replaced the community-based sports clubs of old representing sports commons in nurturing talent to new institutions like the gymnasium and sports associations.

‘The Hope of Pessimism’

This chapter reads George Gissing’s Thyrza (1887) and Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) in relation to the settlement movement of the 1880s. The chapter turns to the idealist philosophy of Green, which provided one of the most philosophically advanced articulations of welfarist thinking in this period. Echoing Green, Ward suggests that the success of her protagonist’s reformist plans depends on the workers’ ability to see them as integral to their personal flourishing: instead of appearing as an alien imposition on workers’ lives, these new institutions are shown to depend on entgegenkommende Lebensformen, i.e. forms of social life which lend substance to but also retain a degree of independence from the institutional structures that support them. Thyrza, by contrast, critically interrogates the belief that institutions can create social harmony from above—a scepticism which continues to haunt later engagements with state action in works by Carpenter, Wells, and Forster.

Protective function of labour law and amendments to the code of civil procedure

The purpose of this article is to present the safeguard role of the labour law in the context of labour law disputes. Authors deliberate to what extent the procedural law impacts the substantive law. Particular attention was paid to new institutions of the Polish code of civil proceedings introduced by the law of 4 July 2019 and their influence on the procedural position of the parties of the employment relationship.