Documents Journal of Common Market Studies 375 results

"In this paper, we investigate the adaptation of the EU climate stances between the early 2000s until today. Historically tracing the EU's approach to the green transition, we highlight an increasing role of interventionist frames within European discourses and policies. As the realms of intervention have increased, so has the EU's emphasis on the need to provide social protection for the sections of the population that have more to lose from a large-scale transition. We understand this process as signalling the increasing relevance of what we call the Compensatory State. This concept points to a form of governance that, by setting itself ambitious goals that (if implemented) would have widespread effects on large portions of the population, needs to produce equally extended forms of compensations. The paper historically traces the development of this form of governance from the previously prevalent frameworks (which we understand through the concepts of the Regulatory State and the Competitiveness-enhancing State). The paper integrates contemporary attempts to theorise the role of public authorities within the EU's green transition. In addition, our analysis challenges the expectations of the extant literature in political economy, which looks at increasing social protection mainly as a public solution to market distortions."

"The inception of the European Union's (EU's) ‘Green Deal' – a flagship project of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launched to much acclaim in December 2019 – contrasts with its adoption in the final years of the Commission's term in office in 2023–2024.
In 2019, unprecedented climate protests and mobilisations across Europe and the world – from the ‘Fridays for Future' school strikes to climate marches and to more radical actions by groups like the Extinction Rebellion (XR) – pushed climate change and the energy transition to the top of the EU's political agenda. In this context, the 2019 European elections saw unprecedented successes for Green Parties across the continent, boosting the Greens/European Free Alliance (EFA) parliamentary group to a record 72 members (Pearson and Rüdig, 2020). With the main centre-left and centre-right groups together..."

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"Developing legislation to counter the negative impacts of businesses' transnational activities on human rights and the environment is a recent trend. Supporters of such legislation have campaigned to convince policy‐makers to adopt strong law, but this legitimation process has not been theorised. Using Vaara et al.'s theoretical framework, we uncover the six discursive legitimation strategies used by the proponents of the European Union (EU) Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) to legitimise its creation. Based on interviews with proponents, we offer two main findings. First, the directive's supporters seek to reverse the narrative that legislation with extraterritorial implications is neo‐colonial by arguing instead that the neoliberal status quo exemplifies neo‐colonial exploitation. Second, non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) can convince businesses of the directive's advantages by using playing down, mimicry and rationalisation as discursive legitimation strategies. These findings have major implications for debates on how to make the CSDDD effective in regulating business operations in the Global South."

"The European Union (EU) post-COVID-19 investment and reform programme, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), has been hailed as novel and ambitious, both as a fiscal instrument and as a lever for accelerating progress towards EU climate commitments. Yet, its design also exhibits strong path dependency, drawing on existing processes and commitments. Adapting theories of institutional change and models of hard/soft governance, we argue that the RRF is an example of significant yet gradual change – of evolution rather than revolution – taking place via layering and conversion of existing frameworks, and alteration of their logics of action. We show how the RRF repurposes the European Semester and track continuity and change in climate policy, a key priority area. Our findings suggest that the literature on institutional change should give greater consideration to the interplay between layering and conversion as a mechanism of gradual yet transformative evolution."

"There is extensive literature that explains how liberalization policy deepens and widens. In the literature of European integration such reform is commonly considered to be the result of a bias towards liberalization in the treaties, thereby giving the European Commission and the European Court of Justice wide-ranging leverage to enforce such reform. However, such approaches have been criticized for being de-politicized – for failing to understand the conflicts inherent in controversial policies. It is therefore of interest to explore the scope conditions of this constitutional bias assumption in areas where liberalization policy is disputed. This article analyzes the EU decisionmaking processes across the postal, public transport and port service sectors, highlighting three key conditions, in addition to the treaties' legal foundation. These are: the organization of public services; mobilization by large interests, such as trade unions; and how willing the European Commission is to give in to concessional demands."

"This article provides new evidence on progress in transition and the ‘readiness' for accession of enterprises in two EU applicant countries. A major innovation is to benchmark them against Spain. Approximately 200 manufacturing firms were surveyed in each of Poland, Romania and Spain. Newly-established private firms in both Poland and Romania are found to be growing the fastest, but on measures of integration and investment, it is new and privatized Polish firms that most resemble Spanish ones. Polish state-owned firms, and most Romanian enterprises, typically are less integrated. Polish firms tend to lag behind Spanish ones in complying with EU directives, but are ahead of Romanian ones, although awareness of and compliance with directives does not vary with ownership type. Progress in transition at the country level seems to be consistent with improvements in compliance with much of the acquis communautaire."

"Does the economy affect patterns of far-right party support across countries? This article reconceptualizes micro-level analyses that focus on the effect of unemployment through a framework of costs, risks and the mediating role of labour market institutions. It then derives several hypotheses and tests them on the results of the previous three EP elections in all EU Member States. Findings from multiple regression analyses indicate that unemployment, real GDP growth, debt and deficits have no statistically significant effect on far-right party support at the national level. By contrast, labour market institutions influence costs and risks: where unemployment benefits and dismissal regulations are high, unemployment has no effect, but where either one of them is low, unemployment leads to higher far-right party support. This explains why unemployment has not led to far-right party support in some European countries that experienced the severity of the 2008 eurozone crisis."

"The Euro Plus Pact was approved by the European Union countries in March 2011. The pact stipulates various measures to strengthen competitiveness with the ultimate aim of preventing accumulation of unsustainable external imbalances. This article uses Granger causality tests to assess the short-term linkages between changes in relative unit labour costs and changes in the current account balance for the period 1995–2011. The main finding is that changes in the current account balance precede changes in relative unit labour costs, while there is no discernible effect in the opposite direction. This suggests that capital flows from the European core to the periphery contributed to the divergence in unit labour costs across Europe prior to the global financial crisis. The results also suggest that the measures to restrain unit labour costs may have only limited effect on the current account balance in the short term."