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The main aim of this paper is to shed light on the link between 'onward migration' and 'onward precarity' as an experience of continuous precariousness by paying attention to crisis/post-crisis contexts and how these contexts have led to precarity becoming structurally embedded in migrant labour markets in Europe. Onward migration studies have centrally focused on crisis contexts, but very little attention has been paid to post-crisis contexts. Thus, this article contributes to complementing the previous research on onward migration and onward precarity. The paper follows a qualitative and multi-sited approach based on in-depth interviews and discussion groups with Latin American migrants living in Madrid, Lisbon, and London. Our empirical analysis elucidates that labour mobility and onward migration are embedded in intersectional dynamics of exclusion which entail a continuous experience of multifaceted precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cosmopolitanism, which is often defined as openness to other cultures and individuals, is significant for understanding processes of stratification in contemporary, globalised societies that are home to increasingly diverse populations. In this paper, we broaden the perspective on cosmopolitanism to include cultural, interpersonal, and political dimensions. We test the associations between these types of cosmopolitanism and three types of correlates: socio-demographic characteristics, personal exposure to other cultures, and exposure to other cultures via various media. We analyse data from nine European countries that differ in the characteristics of their population, cultural traditions, and political models. Results indicate that differences between respondents in the nine countries are better explained by individual characteristics than by country characteristics. Furthermore, it is mainly personal and mediated exposure to other cultures, rather than socio-demographic variables, that play a significant role in influencing respondents' cosmopolitan tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at assessing whether party organizational profiles and policy issue saliency converged in 7 European democracies (Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK), from the 1970s to the 2010s. Building on the theoretical premises of the cartel party thesis and historical new-institutionalism, the paper argues that general tendencies in party policy issue saliency and organizational evolution driven by contextual factors have been taken for granted by party literature based on ideal-typical models. We maintain that party convergence is mainly associated to higher levels of socialization to government. Our empirical analysis shows that patterns of cross-country convergence among parties actually emerge concerning the saliency of the issues placed on the classical left-right divide, as well as party resources, while higher variance characterizes all the other organizational dimensions and post-materialist/value-based policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the perspective of recent political communication studies approaching the online public sphere as a new platform for the political expression of citizens. Based on an explorative, in-depth analysis of user-generated content related to mainstream media coverage of the immigration crisis, with a specific focus on representations of the role of the EU in the crisis, it aims to discover how recent political trends in Europe are reflected in the online political expression of Eurosceptic citizens of a post-socialist Central European country, the Czech Republic. Relating the analysed data to current knowledge of the links between populism, illiberalism and Euroscepticism, and reflecting the post-socialist specifics of this relationship, it suggests that ressentiment may explain the representation of the EU as a traitor to the Europeans in the civic online discourse in times of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional Organizations (ROs) have become a central pillar of governance beyond the nation-state. This paper investigates why European states turned into architects of regional regime complexity: they have created and joined numerous different ROs and equipped them with a broad range of different policy competencies. Thereby, European states – some more than others – have increasingly duplicated identical policy competencies in multiple ROs. The phenomenon is puzzling as it is potentially costly and might undermine the effectiveness of regional cooperation especially if incompatible regional rules trigger non-compliance. Therefore, we ask why states differ in the extent to which they cover identical competencies in different ROs. Drawing on a unique dataset and analyzing cross-sectional temporal variation, we show that both indirect factors, such as late accessions and the number of states in Europe, as well as direct factors, such as state power and democracy, drive regional regime complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers on the concept of European periphery is presented.

This paper examines the policy of austerity in three European welfare regimes with differing levels of social spending and fiscal balance: Italy; Sweden; and the UK. In spite of significant material differences between the three countries, the paper begins by illustrating that there is ultimately convergence in their responses to the economic crisis. These welfare regimes have justified the terms of austerity by suggesting that economic and welfare reforms address questions of ‘need’, ‘fairness’ and ‘sustainability’. Contrary to dominant political and policy rationale, the paper demonstrates that austerity measures in each country fail to meet policy objectives given their own conceptions of social and distributive justice. The three welfare regimes lack cogent strategies to safeguard their financial sustainability and this results in a neo-liberal paradigm that compromises the ethical and internal coherence of austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of the current Eurozone crisis, this paper argues that the economic crisis has provoked a crisis of identity in the EU. This paper examines popular discourse on Germany and Angela Merkel in the Eurozone periphery, France and the UK according to which Europe is effectively being colonised by Germany—the so-called ‘Fourth Reich’. Using theories of fear and disgust including Burke's Sublime, Kristeva's Abject and, especially, Freud's Uncanny, it is argued that this Discourse can be understood as an essentially Gothic narrative based around the fear of the ‘return of the repressed’—in this case Nazi Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to analyse past European legacies of colonialism, Orientalism and racism and show their contemporary influence on European encounters with and discourses on the 'other'. By showing some examples of European deep and historical implications in many contemporary disputes 'between cultures', we claim that Europe thus fails to recognize its hypocrisy and is therefore not able to approach and solve its 'problems' with the 'other'. Indeed Europe created its 'problematical other'. The paper thus analyses and problematizes general assumptions about the Islamic headscarf issue and its assumed oppression of women, and understandings of minority and immigrant cultures as immanently violent, especially towards women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to explore the place of phantasmatic structures in the production of discourses on the past and the instrumentalization of historiography in the framework of the construction of a European identity. During the last decades, in strong connection with European institutional framing, a heterogeneous discourse tries to impose by means of symbolic violence and authoritative arguments its own truth about Europe's 'Common Legal Past' in order to legitimize European politics in the field of legal integration. In doing so, it conjures both a shared legal tradition and a paradigm for understanding the status of the legal, the jus commune, a kind of Roman Law, a patchwork of Canon Law and scholar interpretation techniques, that emerged in the twelfth century and might have been at work throughout Europe as late as the beginning of nineteenth century. What this discourse also brings to the fore is the idea of a common legal culture that has been largely informed by the religious milieu where most of modern legal concepts have been forged. From this point of view this arguments reveal themselves as variations on Carl Schmitt's problematic stand of a political theology. This paper tries to unravel the internal tensions that undermine the discourse and questions its relation to historical truth and the phantasmatic dimension of meaning construction in historical enterprise. On the other hand, it tries to give an account by means of genealogy of the uncanny relation between this contemporary emergence of the jus commune and other legal ontologies of European modernity that presuppose a strong relation between the legal and the religious. In respect to this, I try to sketch the image of the contemporary discourse on the European 'Common Legal Past' as a discursive strategy that hasn't dealt with its own idiosyncrasies and proffers a doubtful legal ontology with dubious intellectual links that places it in an history of exclusionist and essentialist conservative thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to define the meaning of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the context of the European framework and examine three different European countries. The main elements which encompass the meaning of CSR focus on activities with social and environmental sensitiveness, on a voluntary basis. The paper analyses the dimensions of CSR and presents its benefits. Furthermore, the paper provides a brief description of the recent CSR activities in the European Union, and attempts a comparative analysis of CSR activities and their respective impacts on three European countries: Greece; Denmark; and Hungary. Finally, the paper concludes that the effective implementation of CSR strategy cannot follow strict rules and should be adjusted to the culture, needs and particularities of each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is structured in four sections. First, we trace the rise of the far right in contemporary Malta and describe its more prominent manifestations. Second, we construct a localistic and 'exceptionalist' analytical framework which emphasizes a particular and insular local political-cultural context; in this first sense Maltese far right movements can be understood partly as a deep rooted response to a historical pathos of identity and nationhood, partly as straightforward xenophobia triggered by irregular migration. We then move on in the third section to look at the ways in which the far right in Malta is linked to and interacts with similar groups elsewhere in Europe. Two processes emerge as being of crucial importance. First, the entrepreneurship of transnationally well-connected mobile individuals; second, the burgeoning in recent years of the Internet and transnational cyber-communities. Seen in this light, the far right in contemporary Malta is, to paraphrase James Clifford, both 'rooted' in local social processes and at the same time 'routed' via transnational exchanges. Our paper argues that one way of resolving this apparent contradiction is to think of the far right as a loose 'global' collection of tropes and ideas which, as a result of specific situations, are embedded—selectively and usually unsuccessfully, and typically by transnational cultural entrepreneurs and self-proclaimed 'elite' individuals—in local histories and narratives of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the livelihood strategies pursued by people in the post-socialist societies of East-Central Europe? This paper critically evaluates the view that most of the population secures its livelihood through the formal economy and that only marginalized populations now have to rely on the informal economy (i.e. work beyond employment) for their livelihoods. Drawing upon extensive survey data from Ukraine, this paper reveals that only a small minority of households in this post-socialist society rely on the formal economy alone and that the vast majority depend on a plurality of both formal and informal economic practices to secure their livelihoods. The outcome is a call for a greater appreciation and recognition to be given to the role of the informal sector in post-socialist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European crisis is the best case study for examining both the vulnerabilities of Europe's framework for economic governance and the very process of European integration itself. This statement is true for several reasons: first, because the European crisis is the most serious crisis the European Union has faced to date; second, because of the crisis, limits on the process of economic integration in Europe have been put to a real test; and third, because the main causes of the crisis are tied into the framework for economic governance that has been developed over the last few decades and therefore are connected to the very process of European unification itself. The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate whether and to what extent the new framework for economic governance in Europe is largely a result of interstate bargaining and consequently whether national preferences continue to play an important role in the framework's general transformation. The economic crisis showed that important issues in economic policy concerning the change in economic governance and the role of the nation-state, which were ‘swept under the carpet’ in recent decades, must be resolved to make the European venture viable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite its elusiveness and undefined boundaries, policy-makers and pundits have strived to pin down what ‘Europe’ as a territorial project actually represents and where it might (and should) be going. Two of the most intriguing arguments refer to Europe as either a ‘super-state in the making’ or a ‘neo-medieval empire.’ These models are typically presented as either mutually exclusive or in tension with one another. In this paper, I argue that the European territorial project's current trajectory is actually characterized by a mix of the two models. Such hybrid form of governance can be defined as ‘neoterritorial’ since it is based on the modern principle according to which freedom can only flourish in a clearly demarcated political space. Yet, this enclosed political space does not necessarily require the modern nation state's entire legal and institutional paraphernalia, but can instead be based on a ‘pooling’ of sovereignty and a flexible institutional framework and be spread out over a larger and more heterogeneous area than the traditional nation state. This hybrid model is epitomized by the Schengen regime, the institutional arrangement governing the management of Europe's borders. Despite its ongoing internal tensions and the challenges it has faced over the years, this model has become—and it is likely to remain in the foreseeable future—an established presence in Europe's political landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2011, the European Council proposed a Fiscal Pact for member states which would impose a binding limit on their structural deficits (SDs), as part of the wider set of measures intended to resolve the Eurozone's sovereign debt crisis. The proposal, adopted by 25 states in the course of 2012–2013, requires that this limit be imposed on each annual budget, with strict rules governing any breaches, subject to sanctions imposed by the Eurozone authorities. The paper examines the economic and political foundations of the measure. It is argued that the SD is meaningless as a policy target, since it is impossible to measure objectively, while politically it reinforces the depoliticisation of economic policy, under which technical experts replace elected governments in managing the national economy. The purpose of the Fiscal Pact is primarily to reassure business and financial élites that there will be no return to the state interventionism and excessive public spending that supposedly characterised the Keynesian era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To get a realist picture of the economic crisis in Europe, we need to know the heterogeneity of European capitalism. Differences in terms of competitiveness and institutions are huge. With the crisis as point of departure, I will outline this heterogeneity. First, I describe the comparative (dis-)advantages of selected EU-member states. The differences are big, particularly in terms of economic specialisation and innovation capacity—aspects getting little attention in the standard literature. In the second part, the paper concentrates on institutional development in the past decades. To identify gradual differences and change, I distinguish ideal-typical from empirical capitalisms, which are located in the field between the types. Based on state–economy and capital–labour relationships as criteria, my types are liberal and embedded capitalism of which the latter is split into statist, patrimonial and corporatist types. Data from the Index of Economic Freedom, the OECD and the World Bank are rough indicators to locate the cases, but show that the strongly corporatist capitalisms in the Nordic countries are highly competitive, while competitiveness and the capacity adequately to act declines the more patrimonial capitalism is, as in the Mediterranean countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of back-to-work support for non-employed sick and disabled people of working age in two European welfare states. Most countries have sought to improve the quantity and quality of such support in order to match the increased expectations of claimants to actively seek work. However, few studies have sought to examine the extent to which they have been able to do this and see the provision of support in a static way, whereas there is good reason to believe it is a highly changeable process, with the quality and quantity of support varying over time and place, according to a range of factors. A significant part of the period in which this has been a policy aim has been characterised by economic crisis and subsequent austerity, conditions which existing theory and evidence suggest could pose a challenge to improving such support. Thus, drawing on findings from a broader study of the development of active labour market policy for sick and disabled people, a cross-nationally comparative analysis of these developments in the UK and Denmark is pursued, looking at the extent the welfare settlement between welfare authorities and sick and disabled claimants has been reconfigured in recent years and at the extent to which this can be attributed to recession and austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the late 1990s, the main Italian ‘welfare cultures’ and the resulting innovation strategies of the welfare system refer to the question of ‘pluralization’. The current crisis is causing the expansion of the public functions carried out by different private actors. As a consequence, discussions of welfare cultures are increasingly making reference to the notion of horizontal subsidiarity that requires new forms of governance. Three subsidiarity approaches emerge: the liberal subsidiarity approach which is related to the ‘free choice’ welfare model; the incomplete subsidiarity approach related to the ‘second welfare’ strategy; and the radical subsidiarity approach related to the ‘radical plural welfare society’ perspective. The paper develops a theoretical discussion of these different welfare cultures—these latter seen through the point of view of subsidiarity—arguing that the problems arising from an economic understanding of welfare pluralization could be addressed by a cultural change which sees in the definition of a new plural welfare system and role for the public sphere the opportunity for aggregating social demand, reinforcing social ties, creating shared value and re-socializing social risks. The hypothesis is that the ‘radical subsidiarity’ approach could better capture these chances for social innovation that this phase of crisis can unlock. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contrary to the expectations of the advocates of the EU project, an expanded and integrated Europe has so far not resulted in an inclusive cosmopolitanism of Europe in its actually existing complexity and heterogeneity. The enlargement of Europe in recent decades, instead of contesting Europe and expanding it to include all of actually existing Europe, has rather gone in the direction of confirming a monolithic conception of 'Europe', as culturally and politically defined by Western Europe, and one that properly belongs to a white bourgeois class able to function in a transnational, neoliberal space. This has led to a hyper-consciousness, new or heightened anxieties about 'Europeanness' based on distinctions between East and West, North and South. The paper focuses on the implications of, aspirations for, and insecure belonging in Europeanness in countries and regions in the margins of Europe. It argues that one of the most important outcomes of a heightened narcissism around European identity in the post-Cold War period has been an ongoing expansion, as well as reconfiguration, of exclusionary racist and culturalist logics across Europe. In the margins of Europe, these have been especially destructive, in terms of turning countries, regions and ethnic groups against one another as well as causing (racialized) class divisions and tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to make a contribution to the empirical study of the development of European citizenship at grass roots level, through the analysis of political participation of non-French EU citizens resident in France (NFEUCRIFs) at local elections in 2001 and 2008 in France. Official statistics show that whilst there has been a considerable increase in 2008 both in terms of voter registration and election to municipal councils compared with 2001, these figures still represent only a tiny proportion of the total number of voters and elected candidates. Nevertheless, France remains a fruitful site for further qualitative analysis of how these 'pioneers' of European citizenship may (or may not) be contributing to the building of some kind of 'Eurodemocracy' at grass-roots level, and whether or not any links between municipal politics and the wider European framework can be meaningfully established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the European extreme right in general, and the Serbian extreme right in particular. One can find almost all the symptoms of the extreme right present in the ideology of the Serbian Radical Party, as the leading extreme-right party in Serbia. In the unlikely case of a general upsurge of the European extreme right, the Radicals might even join forces with more extremist neo-Nazi groups and thus produce a frightening reincarnation of the SA formations. A more realistic danger comes from the attractiveness of the Serbian Radical Party to the lower strata. The losers in the process of social transformation, such as the numerous unemployed, unskilled and semi-skilled workers represent a deep reservoir of support for the extreme right, especially given the profound lack of credibility of the left in Serbia at the end of the 1990s. With so many losers produced by the post-socialist economic reforms and with the bitterly disputed status of Kosovo and Republika Srpska, the political potential of the extreme right in Serbia is ominously large. Nevertheless, the recent split will certainly damage the SRP very signficantly, leaving it without able politicians in the leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the thinking of Aleksandr Panarin (1940-2003), a political philosopher who became, during the last 10 years of his life, the most significant advocate of new Eurasianism, an extreme right-wing school of thought, in Russia. I compare Panarin's ideas with those of the representatives of the European extreme right, namely Nouvelle Droite intellectuals, including Alain de Benoist, and shed light on similarities between the two. I argue that Panarin should be considered as a spokesperson of the European New Right in Russia and that his new Eurasianist discourse echoes some European New Right ideas. The intellectual parallels between the European New Right and new Eurasianism, I suggest, are a manifestation of the transnational nature of the extreme right and the Europeanization of Russian ultra-nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to trace continuity in the attachment of the nouvelle droite to a homogeneous notion of pan-European identity since its birth in 1968. Like the nouvelle droite, early post-war neo-fascism and significant fascist elements in Italy were similarly obsessed with the decline of homogeneous pan-European or Western identities. Despite the ultra-nationalistic origins of historical fascism, early post-war neo-fascism and the nouvelle droite in different historical periods, the thread tying them together is the notion of a strong, unified, homogeneous, pan-European empire regenerated in defense against the dominant 'materialist' ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism, social democracy, socialism, capitalism and communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Europe and the western world debates on multiculturalism are shaping national and local policies on citizenship. How to reconcile the tensions between minority rights, cultural difference and the universal notion of citizenship in different nation states has become a central focus when considering how the inclusion of ethnic minority groups is being managed. At the heart of these discussions are concerns about the young and the processes of their inclusion as present and future citizens. In this paper we discuss how citizenship for young people from different ethnic groups is understood and constructed as a 'problem' in the UK, showing how issues of injustice, lack of recognition and problems of self-determination impact on feelings of membership and belonging. In the final section we discuss possible policy solutions and ways forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the German reunification, the situation of Berlin has been rapidly and radically changed. As it is the only place where East and West Germany are spatially organizing an urban society, it seems to be obvious that the city has been shaped by processes of national scope. The replacement of the German government from Bonn to Berlin has been a mayor step in the way of reorganizing the total German urban network. Many infrastructural projects are enlisted to be following this trend. At the same time, the city claims to become a “Global City” with an interconnecting position between the west and east of Europe. It is beyond political rhetoric that Berlin has integrated into the world economy and has found some gateway function in the European networks. The paper outlines some major developments of Berlin and debates in how far certain areas of the urban development are more linked to national or global influences. It argues that globalization has a limited effect on urban development in the case of Berlin. It is insufficient to identify Berlin as the “German Global City” as the city is only in some areas and clusters playing a predominate role in comparison to Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg. As globalization is assumed also to change the cultural and social architecture of cities, particular attention will be paid on the development of the social and ethnic composition of Berlin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to develop a conceptualised understanding of the PES, as a transnational European political party. In so doing it will draw up a framework via which we can actually evaluate a transnational political party. The central claim is that such an understanding rests upon the interdependent relationship of four party-streams (factions) and a realisation of each streams position vis-à-vis weak or strong institutionalisation. I will analyse the resonance of this claim by looking at the historical and contemporary development of the PES. This will encompass the following dimensions: the party's genesis and its continuing legacy and the views of the streams concerning the future development of the PES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British migration to Tenerife has increased dramatically over recent years, with a visible rise in young British settlers who seek jobs in tourism-related sectors. Yet despite significant numbers of young British migrants to Mediterranean and Canarian destinations, the existence of young British people as a newly emergent migrant group has to date received little sociological attention. However, recent theoretical developments in the migration literature have begun to draw attention to new migration typologies, and the fact that the old political and sociological concerns and dichotomies within migration analyses (forced versus voluntary, skilled versus unskilled, legal versus illegal and poor versus rich) have become increasingly blurred and so not entirely useful in addressing questions about the new, diverse motivations and modalities within more recent migration (King, 2002; Cohen, 1995 ). Russell King has recommended that analyses of new European migrant phenomena should recognise that migrant narratives of self-improvement and self-realisation can be pivotal. Drawing on interviews and survey data, this paper discusses young British migrant discourses in Tenerife, in terms of how they might fit with King's theoretical concerns with identity reproduction. Central themes include the desire to escape a crest-fallen and 'overrun' Britain, the self-reflexive significance of 'sun-seeking' and travel, and Tenerife as an idealised geographical and cultural destination. It will look at how specifically classed, raced, gendered and nationalised identities are lived out within this particular location and how these processes can inform the discursive reproduction of a white, British working-class utopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the conference with the theme "Fortress Europe and Its "Others": Cultural Representations in Film, Media and the Arts", held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in the University of London. The topics discussed in the papers presented, include topics on gypsy migration and Black British cinema.

A call for papers on social welfare systems across Europe is presented.

A call for papers for the special issue of the "Journal of Contemporary European Studies" regarding regionalism and fragmentation is presented.