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Europeanization as Discursive Practice adopts a poststructuralist reading of Europeanization to study the effects of EU accession in the light of political territoriality and consequent state-building processes in the EU and Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) and the Western Balkans, from 1990-2013. Focusing on how domestic actors have framed Europe/EU norms in the debates on territorial reforms and the implications of this framing on policy reforms, it asks how competing articulations of the EU and its norms construct state territoriality in the given political and policy debates. The book argues that the European Union acted as a discursive force and a challenge to the established structures of understanding of territoriality, statehood, and power. With this, the author proposes a new research model for the study of Europeanization that goes beyond the neo-institutionalist account of the EU's policy/norm transfer to member/non-member states. This text will be of key interest to students, scholars and practitioners of European integration, EU foreign policy, enlargement policy, and regional policy and territoriality in post-socialist spaces.
In 1998, the Master’s programme Euroculture started with the aim to offer, amid the many existing programmes that focused on European institutional developments, a European studies curriculum that puts the interplay of culture, society and politics in Europe at the heart of the curriculum. Among other topics, the programme focused on how Europe and European integration could be contextualised and what these concepts meant to European citizens. In June 2018, Euroculture celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a conference to discuss not only the changes within the MA Euroculture itself, but also to reflect upon the changes in the field of European studies over the last two decades writ la...
The year 2017 has been an uneasy one for the EU, with so-called Brexit on the horizon and the rise of populist euroskepticism in a number of Member States. This year, with the tenth anniversary of the Romanian and Bulgarian accession to the Union, is a good year to pause and reflect over the life and future of the Union. In this work, we envision the next decade with Europe 2020 strategy and review the fruits of the 2004 accession in Central and Eastern Europe. What has the Union achieved? Which policy areas are likely to change and how? How successful, and by what measure, has the accession of the 10 Member States in 2004 been? Reviewing European Union Accession addresses a wide range of issues, deliberately without any thematic constraints, in order to explore EU enlargement from a variety of perspectives, both scientific and geographical, internal and external. In contrast to the major works in this field, we highlight the interrelated, and often unexpected, nature of the integration process – hence the subtitle, unexpected results, spillover effects and externalities.
The politico-economic relations between the European Union (EU) and Eastern Europe are currently entering a new phase, which some scholars qualify as a revival of the Cold War. This insightful book seeks to explain whether and why a Cold War Europe has returned and discusses underlying factors that clarify the relations between East and West since the Second World War.
Civil, economic, political and social rights are at the centre of the concept of European citizenship. In this volume, the focus is on the political-constitutional dimension of European citizenship, which is discussed from the perspective of several disciplines – history, constitutional law and political science. It provides a multi-faceted account of the evolution of European citizenship and its institutionalization, explaining why certain rights came into existence at a certain time and focussing on several key actors involved, such as the European Court of Justice.
As well as promoting debates about liberal democracy, the dramatic events of 1989 also bought forth a powerful revival in the interest of the notion of civil society. This revival was reflected mainly in two broad tracts of literature. The first was primarily focused on the events surrounding the Solidarity movement in Poland and the tumultuous events of 1980-81. The second was concerned with the ‘Velvet Revolutions’ more broadly. Following the events of 1989, there appeared a number of works sharing the common central argument that civil society played a key role in the overthrow of these Communist regimes in 1989. Challenging the centrally accepted wisdom that dissent in totalitarian regimes was representative of civil society, Civil Society and Communism posits the argument that the totalitarian public sphere, a new theoretical typology, presents a more robust and rigorous way by which to understand dissent and opposition in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, Poland and the GDR.
Memory has taken centre stage in European-level policies after the Cold War, as the Western historical narrative based on the uniqueness of the Holocaust was being challenged by calls for an equal condemnation of Communism and Nazism. This book retraces the anti-communist mobilisations carried out by Central European representatives in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and in the European Parliament since the early 1990s. Based on archive consultation, interviews and ethnographic observation, it analyses the memory entrepreneurs’ requests for collective remembrance and legal accountability of Communist crimes in European institutions, Pan-European political parties and tr...
This book examines the perception of European Union’s identity by the main actors in international relations. Analysing issues related to public discourse in third countries as demonstrated by, amongst others, their political elites, civil society, and think-tanks, the book highlights a ‘normative gap’ with regards to the European Union's self-definition/perception and its perception in the international environment. It also shows that the European Union’s perception of normative power in international relations is not shared consistently by the main principal actor yet is differentiated relative to geographical area and scope of activities undertaken by the EU. It demonstrates that the perception of the EU’s normative identity is a source of the crisis of the European Union as an effective and significant player in the international arena. This book will be of key interest to scholar and students of European Union politics, European politics/studies, European integration, identity politics, and international relations.
This book proposes a new theoretical framework to move beyond the traditional tenets of modern international relations theory to investigate European integration and shed light on current events. Based on contemporary analyses, Hegel’s political philosophy, and the fundamental role of historical interpretation, this book addresses the institutional dynamics as well as the discursive practices behind both the Eastern enlargement and the current critical situation. Looking back in particular at European integration in one of its most significant events, namely the enlargement of the European Union to include former Socialist countries, it offers a unique conceptualisation of the nature and limits of European integration and for understanding the current crisis between Brussels and the Visegrád countries, 30 years since the revolutions of 1989. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European integration, European politics and history, and political theory and philosophy.
This book explores the modes of European Union (EU) contestation which are mobilized by radical parties and seeks to unearth the relationship of such contestation with populist discourses. It looks specifically at how rightist and leftist parties articulate populist discourses with representations and problematizations of Europe and the EU by examining the left-wing Podemos in Spain and the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany. It argues that radical parties also build their Euroscepticism on other hegemonic discourses and populism is only one possible discursive articulation to mobilize the contestation of the EU. It examines whether populism discourses may serve (or not) as a stimulus for EU contestation and as such shows the implications that this may have for the persistence of Euroscepticism in Western European democracies. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of radical parties, democracy, democratic and political theory, populism, Euroscepticism, discourse studies and more broadly to comparative politics and European studies.