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This paper highlights the ways in which the emerging models of migration management are producing new geographies of the European Union’s borders that complicate notions of a tightly bounded and easily delineated ‘Schengen space’ or ‘Fortress Europe’. Under policy frameworks such as the European Neighbourhood Policy and the EU’s Global Approach to Migration, a process of economic and political regional integration is under way that is beginning to transform the ways in which non-accession neighbours and neighbours of neighbours in North Africa and beyond are articulated with the EU. Central to these changes are programmes, institutions and practices of both regional economic development and border routes management. This changing geopolitical and geo-economic approach to regional integration and the nature of European borderlands has at its heart a series of new spatial imaginaries, institutional actors and cartographic experiments that point to a project in process in which the relationships between territory, state and population are being reconfigured to produce new notions of sovereignty across more complex and multiple borders and, in some cases, beyond borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discursive construction of security in the European Union (EU) candidate states has received little attention. One effect of this gap is to discreetly frame EU applicants as learners or adopters of Western concepts of security. This overlooks the key role of local intellectuals of statecraft in the making of security both in the candidate states and in the Western institutions with which these states integrate. Based on the case of Estonia, this paper exposes the essential obscurity and fluidity of security in Estonia, and highlights the role of Estonian intellectuals in the making and operationalizing of this fluidity. The paper thereby emphasizes the capacity of East European intellectuals of statecraft to influence the problematizations of security in these states themselves and in Western writings about them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounts of crisis in Europe have proliferated since late 2009. This article investigates the relationship between the diagnosis of crisis and the cohesion and enlargement of the 'European project' in the context of Southeastern Europe. The article adoptsMichel Foucault's understanding of diagnosis as a strategic activity of language in order to re-construct the diagnostic discourse in relation to ongoing events in Greece and the Republic of Macedonia. Diagnostic practice produces accounts of crisis that are clinical, moralising, and prescriptive, affixing meanings to complex and overdetermined events in order that they can be acted upon. Diagnoses of the crises in Greece and Macedonia converge in their identification of political and cultural features of the national political economy in need of expert correction. The diagnosis of crisis emerges as an essential feature of European Union governmentality, which functions to delimit the bounds of political contestation in times of uncertainty and upheaval in favor of technocratic interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines three dimensions of Europe’s maritime relations with Africa: first, the notion that Europe’s strategic maritime frontiers are linked to Africa; second, the coherence or ‘actorness’ of the European Union’s (EU) anti-piracy force operating off the Horn of Africa; and third, the relationship between the EU’s own military and naval objectives and its wider regional policies in Africa.While the EU adopted a ‘Maritime Security Strategy’ in 2014, the article notes that, in practice, the EU’s strategy at sea has focused on two groups of ‘non-state actors’: the Africans who are ‘pirates’; and the migrants crossing the Mediterranean, who are the object of the EU’s Frontex patrols. As such, the initial question examined charts the somewhat fluid notion of the sea as a maritime frontier: where do Europe’s strategic interests in terms of its maritime frontiers lie? Is the EU’s anti-piracy mission defending them? Is this first-ever maritime mission a more tangible manifestation of EU’s common foreign and defence policy than some of the other shorter and smaller military and policing missions in Africa? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the Economic Adjustment Programmes (EAPs) that came with loans to peripheral Eurozone members Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and now Cyprus, are very similar to the loans with conditionality, also known as Structural Adjustment Programs, that international financial institutions used as a policy tool in the 1980s and 1990s. It defines structural adjustment programs and then shows how Eurozone rules plus the EAPs resemble them. It then canvasses the literature evaluating structural adjustment in the developing world in order to formulate expectations for its performance in Europe. The conclusions from the large literature on structural adjustment policies suggest that the EAPs will: be badly implemented; be neutral or bad for growth; be bad for equity and the poor; have unpredictable policy consequences; and will allow incumbent elites to preserve their positions. Preliminary evidence from the four peripheral countries confirms that the same problems are afflicting EAPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 40 years, the European Union (EU) has developed the most advanced system of coordination of social security rights in the world, as a corollary to the free movement of workers. Notwithstanding, problems with the acquisition, transfer and fruition of supplementary pension rights still undermine labour mobility across the member states. This article aims to describe EU pension regulation in the field and illustrates how the EU has employed two different approaches to tackle the problem. The first approach is to directly facilitate the portability of supplementary pension rights – which deeply affects national social policy. The second is to develop transnational schemes leading to a single market for occupational pensions – an exercise in market-making integration. This article explores the main problems in implementing the portability principle and puts forward tangible solutions to unblocking the situation. This sheds light on the persistent tensions between supranational regulation and national pension policy, showing the need for a holistic strategy to resolve both institutional and technical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent years (pre-Obama) of transatlantic rifts should not deceive us into ignoring the great attraction that the United States has exerted, and continues to exert, on Europeans. This article, first, seeks to uncover the normative assumptions that underpin the US as an exemplar or polity model for the EU, as seen from a European perspective. Second, it briefly considers whether the traits that Europeans find attractive about the US as a polity model have much real bearing on the EU, not in terms of how Europeans would want the EU to be but in terms of how the EU presently is. The point is to get a sense of the empirical distance that Europeans would have to travel if they were to transpose what they find attractive about the US to the EU. Are the features Europeans hold up as attractive about the US also available in Europe? These two undertakings set the stage for the third and most original, endeavour, which is to consider whether there are entities that are more compatible with what we currently find in Europe. The case singled out here is another American state, namely Canada. A clarification and critical assessment of what is referred to here as 'Europe's American Dream' are intended to serve as a kind of mirror for Europeans to consider whether the European project is: (a) one of emulating the US; (b) a unique experiment; or (c) an EU that is closer to Canada than the US. If the reality of Canada is more proximate to the reality of the EU, should then Canada instead serve as Europe's American Dream? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the tensions in Europe that have arisen in 2008 due to the spread of the European Union (EU) and the existing desires of old European states that are members of the EU to maintain their national identities. National identities can be perceived to be under attack for two reasons, the author states, including increased migration which alters national demographics and an increasingly powerful EU which claims member states' functions and duties. Also discussed is whether national identity will remain relevant as the EU becomes more powerful and as a European identity becomes more meaningful and potent.

Conflicts between European Union (EU) members about enlargement result from its redistributive effects. EU members are more likely to suffer from enlargement if they profit from EU transfers and if they are relatively close to applicant countries in which unemployment is significantly higher than in member countries. Phasing in membership rights serves to compensate the relative losers of enlargement to accomplish EU widening. Using data from all previous enlargement rounds until 2004, we demonstrate that EU members are more likely to demand a discrimination of new members if distributional conflicts arise. The existence of these distributional conflicts in turn increases the odds of EU members and the accession candidates actually agreeing on a phase-in period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines the fiscal policies of the Post European Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe. It reveals the EMU gives an exceptional opportunity for social scientists to learn the process of institutional change. The public sector in European Union countries consumes or disposes half of the gross domestic product (GDP), eventhough most of the government resources are devoted to the provision of traditional public goods, redistributive transfers and social insurance programs account for much share of the growth in size of the public sector over the past century. Discussed are the details of the issue.

The article outlines the fiscal policies of the European Union. It reveals that the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam deepened the federation on issues pertaining to defense and development and also widened to take in the Austria, Finland and Sweden. Meanwhile, the Treaty of Nice has widened its relations eastward where most East European accession countries join the organization. It mentions that the Treaty of Maastricht laid the groundwork for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and set up the macroeconomic requirements of the member countries that want to join EMU. Discussed are the details of the issue.