Cultural Identity and Securitising the Korean Peninsula: Transformations in the South Korean Security Narrative

In response to enlargement, the EU’s ‘Wider Europe’ initiative and emerging European Neighbourhood Policy envisage ‘positive interdependence’ with neighbouring countries of the ‘East’ and ‘South’. ‘Partnerships’ are seen as an alternative to direct EU membership and thus as a sustainable incentive for regional cooperation. In order to be effective, such regional partnerships must transcend market logics and accommodate heterogeneous economic and socio-political realities. However, Wider Europe is characterised, in terms of realpolitik, by competing rationales of ‘stability’, ‘prosperity’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘security’ and thus by considerable potential for exclusionary policies. It is unclear whether exclusion can be counterbalanced by multilevel and ‘de-centred’ forms of regional engagement that also define Wider Europe. Applying a pragmatic approach, discussion will centre on rationales, discourses and reconceptualisations of European space upon which the notion of Wider Europe is being constructed and on whether they signal gradual changes in the direction of a ‘post-Westphalian’ geopolitics.     

Off-shoring and Out-sourcing the Borders of EUrope: Libya and EU Border Work in the Mediterranean

The article examines some of the novel ways in which the European Union carries out its ‘border-work’– border-work that stretches far beyond the external borders of the current Union. It highlights, in particular, the role of EUrope's neighbours in new strategies of securitisation, drawing attention to some of the actors, sites and mechanisms that make the Union's border-work possible. The emphasis in the paper is on the Mediterranean, long the premier laboratory for creative solutions to the policing of EU borders. The discussion focuses predominantly on a difficult neighbour turned ‘friend’ – Libya – and its role in the EUropean archipelago of border-work.     

The EU and Its Neighbourhoods: A Textual Analysis on Key Documents of the European Neighbourhood Policy

Over the last twenty years, European Union (EU) actorness at both regional and global scales, has become a fruitful topic of analysis in the field of political science, and more specifically in international relations and political geography. Critical geopolitics dedicated many substantive papers on EU discourses and representations. Our paper aims at providing a complementary way to study texts issued by the EU and to question EU actorness by adopting an approach based on textual analysis. The corpus examined includes the seven communications on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) issued between 2003 and 2013. These communications provide essential information regarding relations between the EU and its immediate neighbours. The textual analysis allows several relevant characteristics of discourses to be highlighted: stability and changes, actors, spaces and scales mentioned. The outcomes of the analysis confirm previous research on the subject: The ENP appears as a bilateral state-centric policy, missing global scale, and neglecting the role of regional powers like Turkey or Russia.     

The Commission,ENP and Construction of Borders

The thrust of the article is to investigate the reasons for the ambiguous character and results of the ENP. The argument is that these are a result of tensions inherent in the discourses produced at various sites in the EU that are involved in the development and implementation of the Policy. These tensions result in the simultaneous construction of mutually exclusive types of borders at the external edges of the EU. The main contribution of the present study to this argument is the detailed empirical evidence it provides for these tensions through the examination of the discourse of the European Commission. The article introduces the concept of soft/ hard borders as a very good analytical tool for studying the ENP and conducts a double-reading of the major types of Commission documents related to this Policy. The main finding is that at present some of the main hurdles the ENP is facing are a result of insufficient transformation of the assumptions and routinised practices that guide policy-making. These lead to underlying themes in Commission discourse that preclude the establishment of the necessary soft external border for the EU. Instead they promote the construction of more traditional hard borders.     

Ukraine and the Big Moral Divide: What Biased Media Coverage Means to East European Borders

ABSTRACT

Geopolitical shifts and the changing significance of borders in the EU’s neighbourhood are usually understood as a matter of international power politics. Factors that accompany geopolitical impact on borders, such as media coverage of geopolitical change, often appear as secondary or irrelevant. However the recent Ukraine conflict revealed the contrary as pro-EU attitudes were strongly supported by ‘western’ media. Therefore this paper seeks to clarify the role of news media in creating perspectives and attitudes on geopolitical shifts and the significance of European borders. Empirical evidence on the coverage of the evolving Ukraine crisis by German news sources portrays the media as promoters of biased framings and imaginaries which suggest that the EU be a potential conflict party in the newly evolving geostrategic confrontation in its eastern neighbourhood. The findings indicate that during critical periods of the Ukraine crisis media reports combined rising euphoria about Europe and ‘the West’, as defenders of the ‘good cause’, with excessive moral polarising and the discursive normalisation of a rhetoric of escalation. Imaginaries of a bipolar world (The West against Russia) and a new Cold War prepared the ground for a new understanding of European borders and neighbourhood relations as being manipulable at will.     

If Borders Did Not Exist,Euroscepticism Would Have Invented Them Or,on Post-Communist Re/De/Re/Bordering in Bulgaria

ABSTRACT

The thesis of this article is that if borders did not exist, Euroscepticism would have invented them. If Sartre is paraphrased, it is to emphasize that Euroscepticism needs borders in the same intense political and symbolic way as anti-Semitism needs Jews. This thesis is argued in three steps. The first analyses the paradox of the intense theoretical deconstruction of borders in the era of an overbordered world and argues the ideas of the ‘revenge of the state’ and of the emergence of the ‘neo-post-Westphalian order’. The second part examines the post-communist Europeanisation as de-bordering and distinguishes three forms: Europeanisation through utopianization, Europeanisation through ethnic de-bordering and Europeanisation through de-territorialization. The third part analyses the interferences and intensification of re-bordering and Euroscepticism. The stato-national and the ethno-identitarian bordering practices are analysed through the images of wall and body. Two types of Euroscepticism – extremist and crypto – are distinguished and compared.     

Gazprom and the complexity of the EU gas market: a strategy to define

Abstract

Confronted with an increasingly competitive market in the European Union and the credible threat of a new entrant in the form of liquefied natural gas imports from the United States, Gazprom’s traditional export strategy is open to question. The company must decide whether it should launch a price war in order passively to adapt to impending competition and its role as a ‘residual supplier’ to the EU gas market, or whether it should take advantage of the current price uncertainty. This article explores the scope for long-term strategic action by Gazprom other than simply engaging in a price war. It is argued that Gazprom could forge a position as a key player in the EU gas market capable of playing the same role as Saudi Arabia does in the global oil market.     

Stuck outside the single market; Evidence from firms in central and eastern Europe

Border effects on firms’ performance are typically estimated following reduced barriers to trade, for instance due to new trade agreements. This paper estimates a border effect on increasing barriers for firms located outside of a new external EU border following the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargement. In a repeated cross-section of three flows of EBRD-World Bank survey data, the study encompasses 23 border regions in 10 countries, four of which bordered new EU/Schengen countries. Taking border transformations as exogenous changes to firms’ environments, and focusing on small and medium-sized enterprises near borders, the results indicate that five years after enlargement, firms in non-EU member states near a new external EU border experienced a fall in sales of 40% and exports of 70% relative to firms near borders that did not change. Firms on the EU side of the same border experienced no such negative effect. Ten years after enlargement, the negative effects effectively disappeared.     

Elite Decision Makers' Strategic Use of European Integration and Globalisation Discourses: Irish and Danish Banking Sector Reforms in the 1990s and 2000s

This article investigates decision makers' strategic use of European integration and globalisation discourses to justify and coordinate national sector reforms. This is done using the example of banking sector reforms in two small European Union (EU) member states, Ireland and Denmark. Two key arguments are put forward: (1) National governments' ability to make credible claims about their ability to influence the direction of European integration is crucial in enabling them to justify sector reforms. Thus, as a full member of the European Monetary Union (EMU), Irish decision makers are able to make credible claims about their influence on European financial integration, an option not available to Danish decision makers since Denmark is not a Eurozone member; (2) Globalisation comprises a particularly compelling set of discourses which enables decision makers to carry through sector reforms in line with European integration measures, even in the absence of national commitment to the latter. Discourses of globalisation have thus become ‘the last resort’ for Danish decision makers in justifying and coordinating reforms that are in line with EU regulations and recommendations.     

The bank lending channel of monetary policy in EU countries during the global financial crisis

The study examines the existence of the bank lending channel of monetary policy in European Union (EU) countries. The paper advances current research on the monetary transmission mechanism in the following ways: Firstly, we analyze the differences between ‘old’ Economic Monetary Union (EMU) and ‘new’ EU countries. Secondly, we examine the key bank characteristics and monetary policy indicators that may have an impact on the bank lending channel. We assume that short-term market interest rates and monetary aggregate M2 affect banks' activities. We apply the generalized method of moments (GMM) with pooled data from 1999 to 2012. We show that in the pre-crisis period the effect of changing the short-term market interest rates on the bank lending channel of monetary policy is more pronounced among ‘old’ EMU countries, whereas the effect of M2 is significant during the period of the global financial crisis (GFC) among ‘old’ EMU countries. Last but not least the important finding is that banks in ‘new’ EU countries react differently to monetary shocks.     

Assessing the trade impact of the European Neighbourhood Policy on the EU-MED Free Trade Area

The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) set an additional objective for the Southern Mediterranean Countries (SMCs): the prospect of ‘a stake in the internal market’. The launch of this new policy has been the occasion for a revival of empirical studies aimed at assessing the impact of the EU-MED partnership on bilateral trade. The novelty of this work is twofold: (i) to present nonparametric matching estimators besides gravity estimates; (ii) to assume as a counterfactual of the treatment the ex-post long-run average treatment effects of the Europe Agreements. By controlling for likely selection bias and country and time heterogeneity, using both qualitative and quantitative measures of the policy variable, we assess ex-post the trade-enhancing impact of the EU preferential agreements towards SMCs and ex ante the actual efficacy of the ENP.     

Europeanisation and Discourse Building: The European Commission,European Narratives and European Neighbourhood Policy

Europeanisation is a legitimising process through which the European Union strives to gain meaning, actorness and presence internationally. However, this process continues to be described in less than complimentary ways as ambiguous, incomplete, unsettled, or impotent. We contend that it is the contradictory demands of negotiating order at the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ levels both operationally and normatively which critically affect the EU's ability to achieve presence and actorness in international affairs. In this paper we focus upon the role of the European Commission in the external projection of Europeanisation towards the Mediterranean with an emphasis upon the discursive construction, performance and survival of Europeanisation. We show the ways in which the external projection of Europeanisation produces fuzziness and messiness in which the Mediterranean emerges as both a chaotic conception and site of chaos.     

Building a Transnational Fusion Bureaucracy? A Study of State Officials and Opinion Leaders in Rousse (Bulgaria) and Transcarpathia (Ukraine)

This paper compares how officials in Rousse, Bulgaria, and Transcarpathia, Ukraine, interact with ‘foreigners’: officials from agencies of the European Union (EU), other member states, and foreign consultants. The goals are: a) to compare the extent to which officials in the two communities participate in transnational networks of European bureaucracies, the so-called ‘transnational fusion bureaucracy’; b) to assess the ways in which the bottom-up actions of those officials relate to the broad, top-down policy goals of the EU; and c) to analyse the effects of those interactions on the business environments of the two communities. As a result of comparing the two regions, this paper argues that similar processes of integration in the transnational fusion bureaucracy occur in the internal periphery of the European Union (Rousse) and in areas outside the EU borders (Transcarpathia). In doing so, it questions the extent to which both regions participate in an emerging ‘transnational fusion bureaucracy’ emphasising difference in intensity of the considered processes, as well as the different responses by the two bureaucracies to inputs and opportunities provided by the EU.     

Globalisation and/or Europeanisation? The Case of Flexicurity

The relationship between globalisation and Europeanisation is conventionally studied by focusing on the domestic level. In this article we explore this relationship at the international level instead. We examine the way in which the two phenomena in the form of the ILO and the EU relate to one another. Adopting a discursive institutionalist approach and focusing on flexicurity, we investigate whether, how and under what conditions the discourse on flexicurity provides a point of convergence or divergence between globalisation and Europeanisation. Our empirical data reveals attempts by the European Commission to use globalisation as a legitimating device for a market-accommodating programme for labour market reform. The ILO remains more sceptical, both about the overall effects of globalisation and the more concrete uses of flexicurity. Meanwhile, the concept of flexicurity is subject to change and rearticulation in line with the evolving policy agenda endorsed by the Commission and/or the member states. The relationship between Europe and globalisation is thus far from neutral. ‘Europe’ is active in shaping globalisation; translated into the work undertaken here, Europeanisation could be conceived as a facet of globalisation rather than as a bulwark to it, or merely as a process running parallel to it.     

The Frontiers of the European Union: A Geostrategic Perspective

While state borders remain the pre-eminent frontiers within geopolitics, regional blocs are also acquiring frontier characteristics. How might we understand the function and identity of such frontiers? Taking the European Union as its focus, this article offers answers to these questions by developing the idea of geostrategy. Four geostrategies are identified: networked (non)borders, march, colonial frontiers and limes. Each corresponds with a particular way of territorialising the space of the border, as well as a certain idea of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and of the risks and problems that the border is to govern. A geostrategic perspective uses contemporary social forms (such as networks) but also historical forms of borders (march, limes) in order to enhance the intelligibility of the frontiers of the EU. As such, this approach seeks to capture the multiplicity and plurality of borders.     

Resiliency or Change? The Contemporary Canada—US Border

The developed states of North America have not experienced transnational integration to the same degree as those of the European Union. Indeed, some scholars have argued that North American States and the border functions which define their territorial limits, are essentially unchanged in the face of globalisation, hardening rather than softening, and remaining unabashedly archaic and state-centred. This article suggests that although there has been considerable change in the border functions and geopolitical discourses which mediate transnationalism among the highly developed North American states – namely Canada and the United States – the nature and structure of transnational integration has remained more limited than that of the EU. It argues that the reasons for this more limited international integration agenda lie in the specific geopolitical discourses which sustain cross-border institutions and national identity before and after 11 September 2001 (‘9/11’). The Canadian state, for example, has demonstrated considerable resistance to greater levels of integration with the United States, at the same time that it has became increasingly open to cross-border trade under NAFTA. This resistance is based upon a national-identity discourse that relies upon distancing the Canadian state from its larger neighbours to the south. At the same time, however, the national security discourse which has emerged in the Canada and the United States following from 9/11, has failed to close borders to increasing levels of economic integration, and must accommodate the need for a degree of openness to the heightened levels of cross-border trade under NAFTA. As a result, there has been considerable reorganisation and reorientation of borders within North America. It is simply inaccurate to view the continent as a place where borders have remained unyielding to the broader forces of globalisation. If the role of borders in maintaining security while facilitating trade has resulted in an increased awareness of, and concern with the Canada-US border, the latter is not simply a continuation of ‘old-fashioned state-centred geopolitical concerns’ but is instead a newly-fashionedpost-9/11 response to the ramifications of globalised trade and terrorism.     

Delay determinants of European Banking Union implementation

Most countries in the European Union (EU) delay the transposition of European Commission (EC) directives, which aim at reforming banking supervision, resolution, and deposit insurance. We compile a systematic overview of these delays to investigate if they result from strategic considerations of governments conditional on the state of their financial, regulatory, and political systems. Transposition delays pertaining to the three Banking Union directives differ considerably across the 28 EU members. Bivariate regression analyses suggest that existing national bank regulation and supervision drive delays the most. Political factors are less relevant. These results are qualitatively insensitive to alternative estimation methods and lag structures. Multivariate analyses highlight that well-stocked deposit insurance schemes speed-up the implementation of capital requirements, banking systems with many banks are slower in implementing new bank rescue and resolution rules, and countries with a more intensive sovereign-bank nexus delay the harmonization of EU deposit insurance more.     

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Role of Computable General Equilibrium Modelling: An Exercise in ‘Managing Fictional Expectations’

Negotiations between the world's two largest trading partners, the European Union (EU) and the USA, on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have been ongoing since July 2013. Anticipating the controversy the agreement has sparked, EU trade policy-makers in the European Commission have put considerable effort into discursively framing the agreement on their terms. Drawing on computable general equilibrium (CGE) models of the agreement's likely impact, the central claim has been that the TTIP promises to deliver much-needed ‘growth and jobs’ without stretching the public purse at a time of austerity. Our main argument in this article, drawing on the insights of the economic sociologist Jens Beckert, is that these CGE models – and the figures they have produced – represent an important exercise in ‘managing of fictional expectations’. The models make overly optimistic predictions about the ability of the EU and the USA to eliminate regulatory barriers to trade – which are unlikely to be realised in the face of considerable political opposition – and also downplay the potential deregulatory impact of an agreement. Rather than act as a reliable guide to future outcomes, we thus show that these models serve the pro-liberalisation agenda of the European Commission and other advocates of the TTIP.     

Fiscal policy and capital mobility: the construction of economic policy rectitude in Britain and France

This research examines the regulatory response of the European Union to the global financial crisis, addressing the questions of whether, how and why the global financial crisis has changed the ‘old’ politics of financial services regulation in the EU and resulted in the emergence of a ‘new’ politics. It is argued that, with a good dose of political opportunism and ‘anti-free market’ rhetoric, a continental advocacy coalition sponsoring a ‘market-shaping’ regulatory approach has capitalised on the crisis, tipping the balance of regulatory power in the EU in its favour, as compared to the pre-crisis situation.