EU Scholarship Research Articles

The More Favourable Provision Clause in EU Migration Law: Expanding Fundamental Rights through National Discretion?

Abstract Interaction between different levels of fundamental rights protection is a widely debated topic in EU scholarship, which has long dealt with situations in which national legislation lowered legal standards in the EU. Less explored, however, is the opposite case: when Member State regulations set standards higher than those enshrined at EU level. This can occur through application of the more favourable provision (MFP) clause – commonly enshrined in EU directives dealing with (but not limited to) immigration and asylum. Under it, Member States can apply more favourable standards insofar as they comply with EU legislation. Though seldom discussed in existing literature, the MFP clause is a critical issue of EU migration law and illustrative of challenges facing the EU constitutional order, for it highlights the relationship between fundamental rights protection in the multi-layered EU system and general principles of EU law. Against this backdrop, this paper will investigate the features of the MFP clause in EU migration law and analyse the CJEU’s adjudication in immigration and asylum cases, exploring its reasoning in testing application of MFP clause against EU law.

Next Generation EU and its constitutional ramifications: A critical assessment

Following the early turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic on societies in Europe, the foundations of financing the European Union have been overturned. In this article, we demonstrate the magnitude of change that Next Generation EU (NGEU) creates. While explained as exceptional and justified with reference to the pandemic, in substance, the NGEU is not a crisis measure. It will change the reading of EU law permanently by establishing a new type of instrument for redistribution between the Member States and funding this through debt. This article argues that consensus among large Member States and key institutional stakeholders is insufficient for disregarding key Treaty principles. We scrutinize the regulating capacity of EU constitutional law in relation to that consent and discuss the control of constitutionality by the Court of Justice, the role of national constitutional bodies, and the effect of the package on institutional balance. Finally, the role of EU scholarship is considered in relation to such a profound shift in the EU’s constitutional fabric. COVID-19 pandemic, finance, Next Generation EU, NGEU, crisis measures, debt funding, Treaty principles, constitutionality, role of national constitutional bodies, EU scholarship

Multi-level Governance, Climate Change, and Municipal Solid Waste Management: Insights from Murmansk, Russia

The past three decades witnessed a proliferation of academic research on climate change governance in cities around the world. This research has largely focused on case studies of large cities with populations of over several million. However, Arctic cities have received little attention in the urban governance literature, despite being located in the region most impacted by climate change. This paper examines climate change governance in the Russian city of Murmansk, evaluating how the theoretical framework of multi-level governance—derived primarily from EU and North American scholarship and experience—operates in the Russian urban context. We take municipal solid waste (MSW) management in Murmansk as a case study to better understand how climate change issues are framed and governed by the Murmansk city administration. We assess interactions of Murmansk authorities across vertical and horizontal dimensions, with regional authorities and non-state actors (voluntary associations and NGOs) in MSW governance. The research is based on document analysis, news media, and semi-structured interviews with state and non-state stakeholders in Murmansk. Our analysis finds that Murmansk authorities do not frame climate change as a challenge needing to be addressed by explicit climate-related policies. It also shows the absence of major, multi-level governance (MLG) characteristics in the Murmansk case. Our findings suggest further research is needed to better understand urban climate change governance practices in more centralized states like Russia and this contributes to a critical reflection about the limits and utility of the MLG theoretical framework in many parts of the world.

National/European identities and political alignments

Reflecting on the articles in this special issue of European Union Politics, this essay first asks whether EU scholarship has sufficiently conceptualized and measured what it means to identify with the European Project and/or the European Community. The evidence in this special issue indicates that many citizens now have attachments to Europe, albeit in uncertain depth. European attachments also exist in combination with or as an alternative to national identities. European/national identities also now overlap with partisan attachments, potentially forming a new basis of political cleavage. The research in this collection demonstrates a rich portfolio of methods to examine this important topic, and yields new evidence of how geographic identities are related to public opinion on issues such as immigration.

Beyond Balkan exceptionalism. Assessing compliance with EU law in Bulgaria and Romania

ABSTRACT The overwhelming part of EU scholarship has singled out Romania and Bulgaria as examples of failed integration. Studies dealing with these two countries’ EU accession have highlighted that EU membership was premature and found pre-accession expectations largely confirmed when looking at failures to implement anti-corruption policies, deficiencies in the use of rule of law or backsliding in democratic practices. This contribution takes issue with these pre-accession expectations in the literature and focuses on legal compliance with EU legislation as the most direct way to assess whether EU rules are followed or not. Based on transposition data and infringement proceedings between 2007 and 2017, the contribution shows that while the number of infringements from the two countries has increased over time, the record does not show extreme developments when compared to other groups of EU member states.

What is the Added Value of the Concept of the “Essence” of EU Fundamental Rights?

AbstractThis Article introduces our Special Issue by posing a central question: What is the added value of the increasing prominence of the concept of the “essence” of fundamental rights in EU law? It will address this larger question in four steps: First, by examining the function of the concept in EU law and the methods for its derivation; second, by summarizing how its application diverges across EU—and international—law; third, by outlining some enduring difficulties with the essence concept; and finally, by reflecting on its future role in EU law, including its impact on other sites of legal authority—such as domestic fundamental rights, the political institutions of the EU, and international human rights law. As the other articles of this issue demonstrate, while there is not yet a coherent approach to deriving and understanding the essence of rights across the fundamental rights the EU must protects, the essence concept plays an increasingly significant role in demarcating the boundaries between the EU’s legal and political orders and between overlapping sites of legal authority. Recent developments—such as the rule of law “crises”—are likely to further amplify the importance of “essence” to EU law practice and scholarship.

Unintended Consequences of EU External Action

ABSTRACTThere is a gap in IR and EU scholarship concerning unintended consequences in an international context, leaving this important phenomenon understudied. To fill this gap, a conceptualisation of unintended consequences is offered, and a set of common research questions are presented, highlighting the nature (what), the causes (why) and the modes of management (how) of unintended consequences of EU external action. The Special Issue contributes to the study of the EU as an international actor by broadening the notion of the EU’s impact abroad to include the unintended consequences of EU (in)actions and by shedding new light on the conceptual paradigms that explain EU external action.

Apathy and impulsivity in frontotemporal lobar degeneration syndromes.

Apathy and impulsivity are common and disabling consequences of frontotemporal lobar degeneration. They cause substantial carer distress, but their aetiology remains elusive. There are critical limitations to previous studies in this area including (i) the assessment of either apathy or impulsivity alone, despite their frequent co-existence; (ii) the assessment of behavioural changes within single diagnostic groups; and (iii) the use of limited sets of tasks or questions that relate to just one aspect of these multifactorial constructs. We proposed an alternative, dimensional approach that spans behavioural and language variants of frontotemporal dementia, progressive supranuclear palsy and corticobasal syndrome. This accommodates the commonalities of apathy and impulsivity across disorders and reveals their cognitive and anatomical bases. The ability to measure the components of apathy and impulsivity and their associated neural correlates across diagnostic groups would provide better novel targets for pharmacological manipulations, and facilitate new treatment strategies and strengthen translational models. We therefore sought to determine the neurocognitive components of apathy and impulsivity in frontotemporal lobar degeneration syndromes. The frequency and characteristics of apathy and impulsivity were determined by neuropsychological and behavioural assessments in 149 patients and 50 controls from the PIck's disease and Progressive supranuclear palsy Prevalence and INcidence study (PiPPIN). We derived dimensions of apathy and impulsivity using principal component analysis and employed these in volumetric analyses of grey and white matter in a subset of 70 patients (progressive supranuclear palsy, n = 22; corticobasal syndrome, n = 13; behavioural variant, n = 14; primary progressive aphasias, n = 21) and 27 control subjects. Apathy and impulsivity were present across diagnostic groups, despite being criteria for behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia alone. Measures of apathy and impulsivity frequently loaded onto the same components reflecting their overlapping relationship. However, measures from objective tasks, patient-rated questionnaires and carer-rated questionnaires loaded onto separate components and revealed distinct neurobiology. Corticospinal tracts correlated with patients' self-ratings. In contrast, carer ratings correlated with atrophy in established networks for goal-directed behaviour, social cognition, motor control and vegetative functions, including frontostriatal circuits, orbital and temporal polar cortex, and the brainstem. Components reflecting response inhibition deficits correlated with focal frontal cortical atrophy. The dimensional approach to complex behavioural changes arising from frontotemporal lobar degeneration provides new insights into apathy and impulsivity, and the need for a joint therapeutic strategy against them. The separation of objective tests from subjective questionnaires, and patient from carer ratings, has important implications for clinical trial design.awx101media15448041163001.

In This Issue

In This Issue

A 'Selfie' from Luxembourg: The Court of Justice and the Fabrication of the Pre-Accession Case-Law Dossiers

How does the European Court of Justice view itself? Which cases does it regard as most important? The question has riddled EU scholarship for decades. Due to a basic lack of empirical evidence, which is in part a consequence of secrecy surrounding the Court, no empirically firm answer has been provided. In this article we seek to close this gap in scholarship by using a unique data-set, compiled by the Court. We use a set of quantitative and qualitative methods to unpack the so-called historic case-law dossiers assembled by the Court, and presented to thirteen member states upon accessions in 2004, 2007 and 2013. We reconstruct the content of the selection as well as the rather specific legal EU that they project. From our empirical analysis, framed by social science theories on the relationship between knowledge and power, it follows that this was not a neutral compilation of what EU law is. On the contrary, the Court seized the opportunity to highlight its own role in the formation of the EU legal order. At the receiving end, the importance of the dossier was not in the detailed legal knowledge to facilitate the transition to the EU, but primarily the institutional knowledge on who were the real masters of the Treaties.

Regulation Theory and the Political Economy of the European Union

AbstractEuropean integration theory considers to what extent the EU can realize a telos where American pluralism is the template. Not without merits, but considering the financial and eurozone crises fatally, such perspectives elide power relations and attendant contradictions and irrationalities that are constitutive of transatlantic integration itself. Regulation theory, which synthesizes the reformist ethos of Europe's postwar statist tradition and Marxism, and which has produced a considerable body of analysis of the EU published at the margins of EU scholarship, offers a compelling alternative that potentially overcomes these shortcomings. This article critically assesses how regulation theory has interpreted the single market, financial liberalization and EMU as a suppression of alternatives to neoliberal post‐Fordism, or finance‐led accumulation, in Europe. It argues that understanding the EU's current conjuncture of eurozone crisis management requires a neo‐Gramscian extension of regulation theory, stressing transnational patterns of capitalist accumulation and power relations.

Review of Leone Niglia, "the Struggle for European Private Law: A Critique of Codification"

Controversies around the European Commission’s attempt to codify European Union private law now usher the codification saga into the twenty-first century. Much EU scholarship has focused on the adoption of the Draft Common Frame of Reference or its shortened version, the Optional Sales Law Code. In "The Struggle for European Private Law", Leone Niglia launches a searching critique that revisits the very notion of codification’s distinctly legislative paradigm. That model is, on his view, fundamentally flawed. The true function of a code goes missing. In order to grasp the full effects of codification, and to comprehend the purpose and function of some final text, we must, Niglia argues, shift our attention away from that legislative paradigm, towards what he identifies as a jurisprudential model. Codification becomes comprehensible, he suggests, only through an analysis – neglected in the existing literature – of jurisprudential actors within the process, such as judges and scholars.

Constitutions, Social Rights and Sovereign Debt States in Europe: A Challenging New Area of Constitutional Inquiry

Constitutions, social rights and sovereign debt states in Europe is a rich new seam of constitutional inquiry that challenges existing constitutional scholarship in various ways. I make five claims about how it expands and challenges existing constitutional and EU scholarship. 1. It is new terrain for constitutional social scholarship. 2. Middle-class and public sector entitlements are a deeply problematic area for constitutional social scholarship. 3. Juristocracy charges cannot be the same in times of EU sovereign debt. 4. It contributes in distinctive ways to questions of the existence of a structured EU, and a shared European, constitutional space. 5. Linking constitutional crisis with euro-crisis and social rights is an important project: Hungary under Orban as an example.

Queering Health: Critical Challenges to Normative Health and Healthcare edited by LaetitiaZeeman, KayAranda and AlecGrant. 2014: Herefordshire, UK, PCCS Books. ISBN: 978 1 906254 71 1

models different from the Anglophone liberal countries. But the conclusions are ultimately quite critical as reality does not live up to these high hopes: European integration is conducive neither to an expanding welfare state nor to deliberative democratic processes. This finding is plausible, but should we really be disappointed? Is the welfare state expanding and deliberative democracy thriving in New Zealand and Norway? And is the EU really so off the mark when it supports devolution and outsourcing/privatisation of public services if elected governments, of different ideological leanings and with different welfare systems, inside and outside the EU, push for exactly these trends? Just because comparative welfare state scholars do not like any of this, often for good reason, this does not mean that the agenda is undemocratic. The disappointment, expressed in so much of EU scholarship, should make us think instead whether our conception of what links welfare states, democracy and European integration is appropriate. Just like the welfare state, the EU may be a novel attempt at making national democracy compatible with the demands of international (economic and political) integration. Both extend entitlements to outsiders and minority needs, neglected or even opposed by the popular consensus and majority representation. The best welfare systems share a problem-solving attitude to policymaking with the EU regulatory polity. In sum, both the welfare state and European integration by law may check and complement national democratic processes rather than be their mere continuation. It is to the credit of this volume that it makes us think about these fundamental relationships.

The potential of return migration as a resource for EU public diplomacy efforts: a case-study of New Zealand return migrants from the EU

External construction of the European unity idea is an under-researched topic in EU scholarship. This paper explores the potential of return migration from the EU to third countries to the study and practice of EU public diplomacy and external relations. Attempting to conceptualise the phenomenon of return migration within theories of public diplomacy, this analysis focuses on a case-study of New Zealand (NZ) sojourners from the EU-27 and investigates their awareness and perceptions of the EU, compared with those of the NZ general public's views of the Union. The results of one case-study are presented – a purposive survey of EU perceptions among a particular focus-group. Ultimately, this research assesses the importance of returnees' experiences to the effective practice of EU public diplomacy and considers the importance of 'perceptions' studies in shaping Europe's interactions with the world.

Europe united? The impact of the EU's eastern enlargement, five years on

The ‘eastern enlargement’ of the European Union in 2004 and 2007 marked the unification of Western and Eastern Europe, yet many scholars feared negative consequences of enlargement—both for the institutions of the EU, which were expected to encounter gridlock in a Union of 27, and possibly for the new members themselves as the end of ‘conditionality’ might lead to backsliding on political or economic reforms. Despite these concerns, a growing body of EU scholarship has begun to explore both questions, and the results give substantial grounds for optimism. EU institutions have proven remarkably adaptable in the face of enlargement, while the new member states show little or no signs of backsliding, remaining committed to democracy, the rule of law and free markets.

Europe United? The Impact of the EUUs Eastern Enlargement, Five Years on

The ‘eastern enlargement’ of the European Union in 2004 and 2007 marked the unification of Western and Eastern Europe, yet many scholars feared negative consequences of enlargement - both for the institutions of the EU, which were expected to encounter gridlock in a Union of 27, and possibly for the new members themselves as the end of ‘conditionality’ might lead to backsliding on political or economic reforms. Despite these concerns, a growing body of EU scholarship has begun to explore both questions, and the results give substantial grounds for optimism. EU institutions have proven remarkably adaptable in the face of enlargement, while the new member states show little or no signs of backsliding, remaining committed to democracy, the rule of law and free markets.

Visibility, framing and importance: Images of the EU in Japan and South Korea

Addressing an under-researched theme of international images and perceptions of the EU, this paper scrutinizes the framings of the Union endorsed in the news media and expressed by the general public in the two East Asian OECD countries – Japan and South Korea. Conclusions indicate that the EU’s importance and presence is often underestimated in the region, and frequently seen in terms of ‘economic muscle’ only. The empirical data comes from a trans-national comparative research project, sponsored by the Asia-Europe foundation (ASEF). The research framework is interdisciplinary, drawing resources from critical discourse analysis, media and image studies, EU scholarship and political science

The Pitfalls of (Comparative) Constitutionalism for European Integration

The purpose of this paper, in contrast to the mainstream EU scholarship, is to expose the other, much less studied and potentially darker side of the EU constitutionalism. It therefore asks a question about the constitutional pitfalls for European integration. Relying on a social constructionist approach following which the current state of EU legal affairs is a product of the dominant constitutional narrative, it examines whether and to what an extent constitutionalism as a dominant narrative is itself a source at least of some of the problems that haunt the integration. The paper thus proceeds on a hypothesis that if practices of integration do not deliver as they should, this must be due to the guidance of the dominant narrative. For any practice that is based on the wrong narrative can not be but self-defeating. To prove this hypothesis the contours of the dominant constitutional narrative will be examined first. It will be explored how the integration appears in the light of the constitutional narrative and why and where the constitutional narrative has emerged from. The answers to these questions will subsequently reveal the central, unique and peculiar role that comparative constitutionalism has played in the emergence of the EU constitutional narrative. It will be demonstrated and explained how and why a constitutive dependence of the EU constitutional narrative on a very specific comparative constitutional experience actually created two at present major legal and political problems of integration. Finally, by the way of conclusion, the paper will assess why and whether the present EU constitutional narrative, in spite of its numerous drawbacks, should and could be reformed so that the very idea of European constitutionalism could be salvaged and that integration could continue its constitutional journey, albeit following a different track.

European Political Development, Regulatory Governance, and the European Social Model: the Challenge of Substantive Legitimacy

Abstract: This article takes issue with aspects of the influential ‘regulatory’ perspective on European governance, especially as developed by Majone and Moravcsik. While many of their claims are compelling, these accounts become much less convincing when they move from empirical analysis to normative prescription—an argument developed in the article's first major section. The article charts the ambivalent treatment of connections between national democracies and at the EU level by regulatory theorists, considers their treatment of democracy, efficiency, welfare, social citizenship, understood here as features or legacies of majoritarian, or more accurately mass, democracy in Europe. The second section offers an alternative academic agenda for the analysis of Europe's multi‐level politics, which places it in historical perspective. It seeks to contribute to a growing body of EU scholarship that finds inspiration in the macro‐comparative approach of Rokkan, while also drawing links with studies in American political development. A rounded assessment of the prospects for democracy, legitimacy and political stability in Europe needs at least to integrate national and Europe level trends.