Lo stato spagnolo delle autonomie e l'integrazione europea

ARGOMENTI ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Francesc Morata

- Drawing on the concept of Europeanization, the paper analyses the interaction between the process of European integration and the Spanish state of the autonomies from a twofold perspective. Firstly, it shows that, though European integration strengthens national executives at the expenses of the regions both at the EU and the national level it may also bring about adaptations under certain conditions related to the specific characteristics of domestic institutions and politics. Secondly, the example of the Euroregions illustrates the extent to which Europeanization provides the regions with opportunities to play a role beyond the nation state.Parole chiave: integrazione europea, europeizzazione, regionalismo, euroregioni.Keywords: European integration, Europeanization, Regionalism, Euroregions.

Author(s):  
Oskar Niedermayer

The German party system has changed since the 1980s. The relatively stable ‘two-and-a-half party’ system of the 1960s and 1970s has become a fluid five-party system. This development can generally be attributed to changes on the demand and supply sides of party competition and to the changing institutional framework. The European integration process is part of this institutional framework and this chapter deals with the question of whether it has influenced the development of the party system at the national level. To systematically analyse the possible impact, eight party-system properties are distinguished: format, fragmentation, asymmetry, volatility, polarization, legitimacy, segmentation, and coalition stability. The analysis shows that one cannot speak of a Europeanization of the German party system in the sense of a considerable impact of the European integration process on its development. Up to now, the inclusion of Germany in the systemic context of the EU has not led to noticeable changes of party-system properties. On the demand side of party competition, this is due to the fact that the EU issue does not influence the citizens' electoral decisions. On the supply side, the lack of Europeanization can be explained mainly by the traditional, interest-based pro-European élite consensus, the low potential for political mobilization around European integration, and the marginal role of ethnocentrist–authoritarian parties.


Author(s):  
Sacha Garben

Title XII deals with EU competences in the fields of education, vocational training, youth, and sport. According to Article 6 TFEU, these four areas qualify among those where the EU has the power to ‘support, coordinate or supplement the actions of the Member States’, meaning that the EU’s role is limited to a secondary one and that harmonization of national laws and regulations is excluded. As we shall see, however, this has not prevented a significant amount of European integration taking place in these very areas that are often considered to belong to the core tasks of the nation state.


Author(s):  
Richard Bellamy

This article examines the political challenges of the European Union (EU). It explains that political theorists and scientists alike have viewed European integration as a laboratory for exploring how far the nation state, and the forms of domestic and international politics to which it gave rise, has been affected by the various processes associated with globalization. It discusses the Charter of Rights and Constitutional Treaty of the EU and suggests that the EU can be plausibly characterized as an intergovernmental organization of an advanced kind, a nascent federation of states, and a new form of post-national and post-state entity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 97-114
Author(s):  
Erik R. Tillman

This chapter examines the evolving relationship between authoritarianism and EU attitudes from the early 1990s until 2017. Up until the early 1990s, EU attitudes were structured primarily by economic concerns. The economic ‘winners’ of European integration (e.g. professionals) supported the EU more than the ‘losers’ (e.g. unskilled workers). With the debate over the EU centred increasingly on socio-cultural issues, the structure of EU attitudes has shifted—activating the perception of threat among high authoritarians. In the 1990s, there is no relationship between authoritarianism and EU attitudes, but a negative relationship emerges in the twenty-first century. Moreover, this relationship is stronger in those countries that had more national-level party conflict over the EU. Because this conflict resulted from the emergence of anti-EU parties, this result indicates that high authoritarians became more likely to oppose the EU in those countries where Eurosceptical parties were more successful in advancing the message that the EU threatens national community. These results suggest that the evolution of EU attitudes reflects the growing perception of threat to national community and sovereignty—and this evolution has been strongest where Eurosceptical political elites have been more influential.


Author(s):  
Richard Bellamy ◽  
Claudia Attucci

This chapter examines the input of normative theory to European integration theory. It first provides a historical background on social contract theory in Europe, followed by an analysis of John Rawls’s work as a way to explore the contribution of contractarian thinking to the normative dilemmas confronting the European Union. In particular, it considers Rawls’s two principles of justice. It also discusses three approaches that emphasize the centrality of democracy and have informed normative assessments of the democratic credentials of the EU, focusing on the writings of Jurgen Habermas, the national limits to the EU, and the normative position that makes sense of the EU’s character as ‘betwixt and between’ the nation state and a supranational institution. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how enlargement illustrates both the appeal of the normative approach and the difficulties it faces.


Author(s):  
Antonina Bakardjieva Engelbrekt ◽  
Karin Leijon ◽  
Anna Michalski ◽  
Lars Oxelheim

Equilibrium ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Anna Ząbkowicz

When economic development is considered, political economy is at stake; in this perspective growth or counter-growth forces operate within the institutional framework. The analysis focuses on corporatist forms of social dialogue in the international environment of the EU and within the European structures. First, the notion of corporatism as opposed to other institutionalized channels of access is explained. Then, the paper presents corporatist forms at the national level under change. Next, it deals with interest coordination at the European Commission level. The paper concludes that an erosion of corporatist forms is visible; no embracing pattern in the EU should be expected instead; on the contrary, increasing fragmentation of lobbying is observed.


Author(s):  
Christopher Bickerton

This chapter explores the role of member states in European integration. It first looks at the idea of member statehood, exploring its ambiguities and arguing for a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to be a ‘member state’ of the EU. The chapter considers in detail the role played by member states in the EU, highlighting in particular the centrality of member state governments and their power to EU policy-making and its institutions. At the same time it notes the relative absence of member state publics. The chapter ends with a reflection on whether there is a return of the nation-state, with its associated trends of nationalism and inter-state rivalry.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spasimir Domaradzki

This paper will look at the concept of de-Europeanisation through the prism of the official relations between the EU representatives and the political elites in two countries – Bulgaria and Serbia. Here de-Europeanisation is defined as a process of deterioration of the quality of integration or more simply as 'it is worse than it was'. The article begins with a critical overview of the dominant theoretical approaches to enlargement Europeanisation. Then, from a theoretical perspective, the article explores the role of EU legitimisation for national political elites. While distinguishing between revolutionary and opportunistic legitimisation, the paper highlights the former, based on Bulgaria and Serbia. Going beyond the liberal political narrative of democratic backsliding in Central Europe, the article will approach critically the dominant Europeanisation assumption of the unequivocally positive effect of European integration on national political elites. Particularly, it will examine the relevance of the argument that in the case of rule of law and human rights, the existing formal Europeanisation not only does not lead to informal Europeanisation of the states, but it can also have a reverse effect through the preservation of pathological political practices and their infusion into the process of European integration. The research will use a qualitative method of analysis to juxtapose the official EU/nation state political elites' rhetoric with political practices at the national level in the context of rule of law and human rights. Based on the findings, the paper argues that the EU oriented institutionalised perspective of Europeanisation omits important interactions on a micro-level that lead to the accommodation of political practices contradictory to EU's fundamental political values. While these practices survive in the peripheries of the integration process, they have the potential to multiply and eviscerate the fundamental political practices and thus the EU's political system.


Author(s):  
Robert Bideleux

Rejecting claims that European integration has been inimical or antithetical to nations, states, and ‘national’ interests, Alan Milward's The European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992) argues that the relationship between European integration and the nation-state has been mutually beneficial and supportive. This article discusses the European Union's ‘rescues’ of small and sub-state nations, languages, cultures, and minorities; EU state-building and ‘rescues of the nation-state’ in the post-Communist East Central European, Baltic, and Balkan regions; transformations of the states in need of ‘rescue’, focusing on ‘embedded neoliberalism’; the EU and ‘the nation-state’ after the Lisbon Treaty of 2009; the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008–2009 and the eurozone crises of 2010–2012; and the decade-long ‘money illusion’ of economic prosperity in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain.


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