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5955 results in European government, politics and policy

Page 184 of 298

  • 15 - The EU and its neighbours

  • Bart Van Vooren, Ramses A. Wessel, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    EU External Relations Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 516-569

  • Summary

    Central issues

  • This chapter examines the wide ranges of policies and means through which the EU engages with the countries in its neighbourhood: first, EU enlargement policy, which is sometimes considered the most successful of all EU external policies; second, the EU has developed the ENP for those countries that are not eligible for membership either permanently or in the short to medium term; third, the Stability and Association Process (SAP) with the Western Balkan countries; fourth, EU relations with the EEA/EFTA countries; fifth and finally, EU relations with the Russian Federation.

  • The EU has gone through seven rounds of enlargement. At present, we can speak of a true EU enlargement ‘policy’ with its own legal basis, rationale, objectives, instruments and decision-making dynamic. This chapter explains the key criteria and soft and hard legal instruments that make up this policy. It utilizes the 2004 ‘big bang enlargement’ to explain how this policy has grown in a piecemeal fashion. Looking to the future, the chapter indicates how future enlargements may raise novel questions, and how the EU’s response will almost certainly be influenced by individual Member State interests.

  • The ENP originated from the fifth enlargement in 2004, and aims to create a special relationship with those third countries to the south and east that were not included in that process. From an instrumental perspective, this policy provides an excellent case study of the use of soft law in EU external relations law. From a methodological perspective, it illustrates how the EU has drawn on objectives and processes from EU enlargement policy, and applied them in a non-accession context, with commensurate difficulties. As regards instruments, it builds on binding bilateral frameworks, and then utilizes a plethora of soft legal documents to reorientate them towards new neighbourhood objectives.

  • The SAP applies to the Western Balkans countries, and has an express EU accession perspective: Serbia, FYROM, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Croatia emancipated from this policy upon its accession in July 2013. The policy is based on Stabilisation and Association Agreements (SAA) which have been concluded specifically to stabilize the region, utilizing conditionality and legal approximation to attain their accession objective.

  • …

  • 5 - European integration and the decoupling of politics and economics

  • Giandomenico Majone, European University Institute, Florence
  • Book:
    Rethinking the Union of Europe Post-Crisis
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 149-178

  • Summary

    Rise and decline of a liberal principle

    The possibility of separating economics and politics was a key, if implicit, assumption of the founders of the EEC. It was not a new idea, but rather a return to a classic liberal tenet which in the nineteenth century and up to World War I had made it possible for the world economy to develop in such a fashion that ‘between national and international economic integration there was only a difference in degree but not in kind’ (Roepke 1954: 219). During the mercantilist era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the relationship between state power and international trade was seen as a problem of exceptional importance, one which was formulated as a debate about the interventionist obligations of rulers rather than as a matter of free trade (Brewer 1989). Against the mercantilist promotion of the power of the state, state regulation of trade, and the subordination of economic goals to political power, liberalism advocated the widest possible separation of the two spheres of politics (government) and economics. By aid of this principle of separation it was possible to reduce to a minimum the economic implications of the coexistence of sovereign states with their different legal orders and systems of administration, their frontiers, and separate citizenship. Applying this same principle of separation between politics and economics to the monetary field, it was possible to create an effective international monetary order: the gold standard. Absent a world government, there could not exist a genuine de jure world money system guaranteeing the possibility of payments at stable exchange rates, but the gold standard made it possible to achieve, in practice, the same result: if not a de jure at least a de facto world monetary system. As Roepke (1954: 225) has argued, in no area can the significance of the principle of the de-politicization of the economic sphere be seen as clearly as in the case of money. In the heyday of the international gold standard, the 1870s to 1914, surrender of national monetary sovereignty was considered not only acceptable but positively beneficial. On the one hand, no serious problems seemed to arise from the application of the essential conditions, or ‘rules of the game’, for operation of a gold standard – including the condition that within each country of the system there must be a high degree of wage flexibility.

  • 11 - Common Foreign and Security Policy

  • Bart Van Vooren, Ramses A. Wessel, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    EU External Relations Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 346-399

  • Summary

    Central issues

  • The Union’s foreign and security policy is based on a set of compromises. From the outset, Member States have been hesitant to hand over powers in this area. Yet, the strong links with other policies as well as the single institutional structure caused an integration of CFSP into the Union legal order. While its distinct nature remains clearly visible, CFSP has become part and parcel of the EU’s external relations regime.

  • In this chapter we will address the historical explanations for the current place of CFSP in the EU legal order. We will analyse the attempts to start political cooperation before the 1990s and will assess the current provisions in that context. We will also address the role of the institutions (including the role of the CJEU) in CFSP as well as the decision-making procedures. Finally, we will assess the legal nature and function of the CFSP instruments.

    • Introduction

    The CFSP of the EU has for decades been the ‘odd one out’. It emerged separately from the EEC in an incremental, pragmatic fashion at the beginning of the 1970s. The process was stimulated through the realization that the coordination of the different foreign policies of the (six, then nine, etc.) Member States was helpful, and occasionally even necessary, for the Community to pursue its goals. At present CFSP objectives have become an integral part of the overall objectives of the Union. Thus, this policy area has developed from a purely intergovernmental form of information exchange, coordination and cooperation in the days of the EPC, to an EU competence in its own right and an area in which the Member States have accepted significant forms of institutionalization and legalization.

  • 3 - Existence of EU external competence

  • Bart Van Vooren, Ramses A. Wessel, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    EU External Relations Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 74-98

  • Summary

    Central issues

  • The EU possesses legal personality and capacity to act as a legal subject in international relations. However, the EU cannot undertake whatever international action it wishes. Its capacity is governed by the principle of conferral laid down in Article 5 TFEU, which states that the Union shall act within the powers conferred on it by the Member States. As regards external competence of the Union, we distinguish between the existence, nature and scope of that power.

  • In this chapter we examine the conditions under which competence to act externally will exist for the Union. First, this is the case when the Treaty expressly confers such external competence on the Union. Second, such competence may also be implied when, pursuant to the ERTA principle, the EU has adopted internal rules on the basis of expressly conferred internal powers; or when, pursuant to the complementarity principle, in the absence of internal rules, it is necessary to attain an EU Treaty objective for which the Treaty confers upon the Union an internal power. Third, when none of the above-mentioned sources are available, recourse to Article 352 TFEU is possible if this is necessary to attain objectives set for the Union in the EU Treaties.

  • Political battles between the institutions and Member States over international presence and representation have regularly translated into litigation concerning the question of whether the EU actually has competence at all. In resolving these conflicts, the CJEU has shown itself sensitive to the legal–political context of European integration in which the legal proceedings took place. At times borderline activist, at other times protective of Member States’ sovereignty, the role of the CJEU in this area of law, and consequently in the development of the EU as an international actor, cannot be understated.

  • 7 - EU law and international law

  • Bart Van Vooren, Ramses A. Wessel, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    EU External Relations Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 208-245

  • Summary

    Central issues

  • The EU is usually considered a special, or sui generis, organization (see Chapter 1). This special status does not only flow from the relationship with its Member States (which indeed differentiates it from other international organizations), but also from its position towards international law. In the early days in particular, the CJEU tended to underline this special position by referring to the ‘autonomous’ legal order that was created in which the relationship between the Member States was no longer primarily regulated by international law, but by EU law. Indeed, the states were first and foremost Member States.

  • Yet, without international law, the EU would not exist. It is based on a treaty concluded within the framework of international treaty law. At the same time, and keeping in mind the rule of pacta tertiis nec nocent nec prosunt, third states are in principal not bound by the EU Treaty since to them it is an agreement between others. This implies that in its external legal relations the EU will have to act under international law and will also have to respect its basic rules. Within the EU legal order, however, this may lead to conflicting norms, and over the years the Court has had quite a task in finding solutions for these conflicts.

  • This leads to a number of questions that will be addressed in this chapter: what is the hierarchical position of international law within the EU legal order? What are the effects of international law (both written and unwritten) in the EU legal order? How did the ECJ solve conflicts between EU law and international law?

  • …

  • 3 - Integration and its modes

  • Giandomenico Majone, European University Institute, Florence
  • Book:
    Rethinking the Union of Europe Post-Crisis
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 88-117

  • Summary

    From shallow to deep integration

    The significance of the distinction between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ modes of economic integration has been increasingly recognized since the 1990s (see in particular Kahler 1995). As we saw in the Introduction to the present volume, shallow integration, at the global or regional level, is economic integration based on the removal of barriers to exchange at the border, with limited coordination of national policies. Under a regime of shallow integration domestic policies are regarded as matters to be determined by the preferences of the nation’s citizens and its political institutions. Such a mode of economic integration imposes minimal constraints on domestic policymaking. Thus, the Bretton Woods regime of the post-war era permitted national policymakers to focus on domestic problems while enabling global trade to recover from the war, and indeed to flourish during the 1950s and 1960s. Governments were left free to run their own independent economic policies and to erect their preferred versions of the welfare state. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the IMF were core global institutions in the management of shallow integration. While the GATT negotiations were responsible for sharp reductions in at-the-border restrictions on trade in goods and services, the problems of using the GATT to govern the increasingly complex world trading system were becoming more and more obvious by the 1980s.

    As economic integration advanced it became clear that domestic, ‘behind-the-border’ policies that had not been previously subjected to international scrutiny, could pose serious impediments to trade. Thus issues of deep integration emerged on the international agenda. Instead of the older agenda of removing barriers that block exchange at national borders, these new agenda items included conflict over domestic regulatory regimes and perceived policy spillovers, as well as concerns over environmental externalities and risk management. In short, the transition to deep integration seemed to require analysis of the economic, political, and scientific aspects of virtually all domestic policies, regulations, and practices. As a consequence the distinction between domestic policy and international trade policy tends to disappear under deep integration since any discretionary use of domestic regulations can be construed as posing an impediment to – and transaction costs on – international trade: ‘Global rules, in effect, become the domestic rules’ (Rodrik 2011: 83).

  • 9 - Integration through cooperative competition

  • Giandomenico Majone, European University Institute, Florence
  • Book:
    Rethinking the Union of Europe Post-Crisis
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 266-294

  • Summary

    The ‘European Miracle’

    We normally think of competition as an adversarial process. In the case of economic regulation, for example, adversarial competition is supposed to resolve the contest between different approaches in favour of one particular regulatory regime so as to avoid conflicting rules in a single transaction. But as Paul Stephan (2000) pointed out, regulatory competition can also exist in a cooperative framework that permits different regimes to coexist. Such systems encourage potential subjects of regulation to choose which regime they intend to follow. These choices in turn encourage states or other rule-making bodies to offer regulatory packages that will attract transactions from which they can derive economic and other benefits. The issue then becomes whether competition among regulatory authorities leads to races to the bottom or to races to the top, in the sense of regulations more closely tailored to the specific needs of different parties. This issue will be examined analytically in the next sections. In the immediately following pages I suggest, by way of introduction, that cooperative competition, far from being a new phenomenon, is one of the most characteristic features of European history in the centuries that preceded the rise of nationalism. Unfortunately, such precedents are too often ignored by those who assume that ‘ever closer union’ can be achieved, not through cooperative competition but only through top-down harmonization of the laws and policies of the member states of the EU.

    David Landes, the distinguished economic historian, has even seen in the political fragmentation of the Old Continent one of the roots of its later global dominance. By decentralizing authority, fragmentation made Europe safe from single-stroke conquest – the fate of many empires of the past, from Persia after Issus (333 BC) and Rome after the sack of Alaric (410 AD) to Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. The American historian concludes his argument with a citation from Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies: ‘Far from being stultified by imperial government, Europe was to be propelled forward by constant competition between its component parts’ (Landes 1998: 528). These and other scholars stressing the importance of inter-state competition in European history have been inspired by the arguments advanced by Eric Jones in his well-known book The European Miracle.

  • 14 - The external dimension of freedom, security and justice

  • Bart Van Vooren, Ramses A. Wessel, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    EU External Relations Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 475-515

  • Summary

    Central issues

  • The AFSJ is a relatively new policy area that was mainly designed to facilitate cooperation between the EU Member States. The further development of the AFSJ followed a traditional pattern: as it started to function well internally, it soon required an external dimension and the Union soon found itself concluding international agreements and formulating policies on the wide range of issues covered by the AFSJ. Like many aspects of EU external relations law, the relatively fast coming of age of AFSJ was triggered by a number of external events and developments, including crime, drug-trafficking and terrorist attacks.

  • In all main areas of the AFSJ (immigration, judicial cooperation in civil and criminal matters, approximation of criminal law, police cooperation and fundamental rights protection) the EU has enacted legislation and concluded international agreements revealing the strong link between internal and external policies. One of the elements that distinguish AFSJ external relations from other areas is that the issues almost always relate to what are perceived as fundamental and sometimes constitutional dimensions or prerogatives of statehood.

    • The AFSJ as an internal, organizational concept

    The AFSJ was primarily created as an internal concept, and therefore its position in EU external relations may not be self-evident. The core Treaty provisions in the TEU and the TFEU underline the inward-focused nature of the AFSJ.

  • 5 - Scope and choice of EU external competence

  • Bart Van Vooren, Ramses A. Wessel, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    EU External Relations Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 138-188

  • Summary

    Central issues

  • Once we have established that the EU has a competence to act (existence of competence), and know the impact of this competence on the Member States’ capacity to act in the same field (nature of competence), we must also examine the scope (width, or ambit) of the competence which exists, and we may need to make a choice between different legal bases if EU international action may be based on more than one Treaty article.

  • Establishing the appropriate legal basis entails an assessment of the exact scope of EU powers, and classification of the measure as falling within that scope. Given the different procedures tied to competence-conferring provisions, and the different nature as shared or exclusive, the choice of legal basis is a highly politicized and sometimes controversial process.

  • In scope and choice of EU competence, we can distinguish between a vertical situation between the Member States and the Union, and a horizontal intra-EU situation. From a vertical perspective, the question is, can a given external measure be undertaken at all by the Union on the basis of the powers which have been established to exist? The horizontal situation concerns the question, if a measure does indeed fall within the powers of the Union, and if a number of candidate legal bases exist, which is the correct legal basis?

  • The legal methods to establish the scope of Treaty provisions and choose the correct legal basis provide a central role to the Court in arbitrating competing intra-EU power relations. To avoid subjective views deciding the choice of competence, the Court developed an ‘objective’ legal method to ensure legal certainty for the institutions and Member States: the appropriate legal basis, or centre-of-gravity test.

  • 6 - From the democratic deficit to a democratic default? The normative dimension of the euro crisis

  • Giandomenico Majone, European University Institute, Florence
  • Book:
    Rethinking the Union of Europe Post-Crisis
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 179-207

  • Summary

    The European Parliament: a formal solution to the EU’s legitimacy problems

    No country can become a member of the EU unless it is recognized by the other member states as being a true representative democracy. The EU itself, however, is not a fully-fledged democracy: it suffers from a serious ‘democratic deficit’ – not a total absence but an incomplete development, or even a distortion, of the practices and institutions of representative democracy. For example, legislation can only be initiated by the non-elected European Commission. Hence the jocular paradox: if the EU were a state it could not become a member of the Union! Despite a vast body of literature trying to explain this paradox, and despite the important place the issue of the democratic deficit has occupied in public discourse for the last twenty or so years, few problems of European integration have been so consistently misunderstood, or deliberately misconstrued. I suggest that a correct understanding of the question must start from the realization that the problem of the insufficient democratic legitimacy of the European project only started to attract attention in the late 1980s, and became increasingly visible with the steady growth of European competences, culminating in monetary union.

    The standard explanation of the limited democratic legitimacy of the EC/EU has been first the absence of a directly elected EP and then – after 1979 when direct European elections took place for the first time – the inadequate powers granted to the supranational parliament. As already noted in chapter 1, the powers of this body have been expanded treaty after treaty without, however, producing the hoped-for results. According to a knowledgeable student of the EP, the driving force in this expansion of parliamentary powers has been the power of the democratic idea. He writes: ‘Governments have found it extremely difficult to resist an increase in the role of the EP, because they have not easily been able to formulate an alternative for addressing the “democratic deficit”’ (Shackleton 2012: 145). In fact, it would be more correct to speak of the unwillingness, rather than inability, to formulate alternatives for tackling the question of insufficient democratic legitimacy.

  • 2 - Instruments of EU external action

  • Bart Van Vooren, Ramses A. Wessel, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    EU External Relations Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 34-73

  • Summary

    Central issues

  • In this chapter we analyse the instruments through which the EU conducts its external relations. We distinguish between instruments that are adopted within the EU legal order (internal) and those adopted by the Union in the international order (international). These may be instruments adopted by the EU alone (autonomous instruments) or the result of agreements between the Union and a counter-party (conventionally agreed instruments). These instruments can then be legally binding (hard law) or they may be committing in other more indirect or political ways (soft law).

  • International agreements are the EU’s legal external relations tools par excellence. They form the key legal instrument to allow the Union to play along in the global legal order and to establish legal relationships with third states and other international organizations. If the EU lacked the competence to conclude international agreements, its external relations would be the object of study of political scientists and international relations experts only, and not so much of lawyers. The main part of this chapter will therefore be devoted to the conclusion and variety of international agreements (including mixed agreements, association agreements (AAs) and agreements to accede or withdraw);

  • 1 - The EU as a global legal actor

  • Bart Van Vooren, Ramses A. Wessel, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    EU External Relations Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 1-33

  • Summary

    Central issues

  • This chapter points to the fact that the EU is an international actor. We define this notion as an entity which interacts with third countries and international organizations (and even its own Member States), in ways which are legally and politically distinguishable from its constitutive Member States. In the global context, this entity thus has a stand-alone identity composed of values, interests and policies which it seeks to define and promote internationally as its own.

  • This chapter then indicates the importance of legal rules in organizing EU international action, and shows that EU external relations law consists of an internal and an external dimension. In its internal dimension it consists of the set of rules which govern the constitutional and institutional legal organization of this legal entity in pursuit of its interests in the world. The external dimension comprises the rules governing the relationship of the EU with the international legal order in which it is active.

  • In order to study EU external relations law in all its complexity, this chapter provides an overview of the architecture of EU external relations. It outlines the existence of the EU as an international organization with legal personality, which exists legally distinct from its Member States. It also shows that the EU is based on the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union (TFEU), which each contain crucial legal principles constituting the body of EU external relations law.

  • Finally, in order to be an international actor, the EU needs agents to make the decisions and represent the EU on the global stage. These include the EU institutions, but also other key players in the law of EU external relations.

    • An international organization or something else?

    A textbook on EU external relations law is founded on the premise that the EU can have legal relations with third states and other international organizations. Hence, it is an international actor, with a distinct legal existence just like EU Member States, or international organizations such as the United Nations. What does it mean to say that the EU is an international actor?

  • 1 - Monetary union as a metaphor

  • Giandomenico Majone, European University Institute, Florence
  • Book:
    Rethinking the Union of Europe Post-Crisis
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 20-57

  • Summary

    The rhetoric of European monetary union

    The agreement on EMU included in the 1992 Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty) represents the most daring move towards fully-fledged integration undertaken by European leaders so far. However, the crisis of the euro zone, its origins and political and economic consequences, cannot be discussed only in terms of that fateful decision, but must be viewed as part of a more general crisis of the particular approach to European integration that has been followed since the 1950s. Piris (2011) distinguished three dimensions of this crisis: the risk of a collapse of monetary union; popular distrust in the European institutions and widespread disenchantment with the very idea of European integration; and dysfunctional institutions and ineffective decision processes in a Union of twenty-eight highly heterogeneous member states. The best way to understand the nature of the general crisis, I submit, is to start from EMU because monetary union, with all its gaps and fragilities, is a metaphor for the entire process of European integration as it has developed so far.

    The essence of metaphor is ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). In particular, structural metaphors ‘allow us. . .to use one highly structured and clearly delineated concept to structure another’ (ibid.: 61). In the following pages and chapters I shall use EMU primarily as a structural metaphor.

Page 184 of 298