Search

Introducing this issue, the present article notes how the growing political importance given to foresight in EU governance has so far only sparked limited interest among scholars of EU law and policy‐making. To address this gap, the article starts by clarifying concepts and defining the key terminology at the intersection between (strategic) foresight and EU governance 'in the law' (involving societal actors in law‐making processes) and 'through law' (governmental actors steering society via law). It then offers a comparative discussion of the main insights of the contributions to the issue, highlighting how and why foresight has become institutionalised and how it operates across EU institutions today. In the concluding section, the article turns to the future and calls for more research into how foresight shapes EU governance, setting a research agenda for the study of foresight as a practice informing law‐ and policy‐making in the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a comparative assessment of the current roles of the European Union (EU) in the governance of the Global Spaces − the atmosphere, the high seas, the poles, outer space, and cyberspace. It does so from a twofold perspective: first, it compares the EU's capacity to act and roles across the Global Spaces, drawing on actorness and role theory. Second, to contextualize the EU's roles, it contrasts them with those of the United States, China and Russia. The findings show that the EU is still in the process of calibrating its roles in the governance of most of these Global Spaces. It is primarily a norm defender, which distinguishes its external action from the more competitive approaches of other major powers. The EU's recent attempt to become more strategic has, for now, led to a gap between its role conception and performance, largely due to its limited actorness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) has over time developed close relations, typically taking the form of acquis‐based association agreements, with the countries in its Western and Eastern neighbourhood. This article examines when, where and how these non‐Member States can influence the terms of their association with the EU's law and policies via institutional venues. It expands on the literature of external Europeanization and governance, which has mainly focused on the downloading of EU rules by these countries. Yet, the associated neighbours have the opportunity to exert influence at different stages of the law or policy‐making process: first, before the downloading of relevant new rules by uploading or cross‐loading, that is, by attempting to initiate or shape these rules during the agenda‐setting and the formulation phases; and second, during or after the downloading by tweaking or rebuffing relevant new rules in the adoption and implementation phases. These mechanisms of influence at different points in time and in different bodies are illustrated by examples from the countries of the European Free Trade Association, of the Eastern Partnership and in the EU's customs union. The findings indicate that more uploading opportunities can generally be expected, the more downloading is required, and the better the associated countries' access to EU bodies in the early stage of the formulation of new rules. Weak uploading opportunities make joint bodies more important for tweaking and rebuffing. The proposed conceptual framework contributes to the study of external differentiated integration and opens new research avenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) has increasingly become a foreign policy actor in its own right, sparking the emergence of EU External Action Studies (EU EAS). Although this thriving field at the intersection of EU Studies and International Relations has gradually matured, the interaction of EU EAS with Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) has so far remained limited. This contribution discusses whether concepts and approaches from EU EAS hold valuable theoretical insights for FPA, and how these could be exploited. It argues that there is a largely untapped potential for cross-fertilization between the two fields. This claim is illustrated with several examples as well as two short instructive cases that show how the approach to studying the EU's "external effectiveness" helps addressing FPA's blind spot regarding foreign policy impacts, and how the critical agenda on "decentering" EU external action directs much-needed attention to the "foreign" in FPA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a comparative perspective to identify the likely parameters of the future partnership between the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU). It asks why and how the EU exports institutional norms to its neighbouring countries, and what this implies for the EU–UK relationship. Drawing on historical institutionalism, the authors argue that as a specific legal-institutional order, the EU exports not only regulatory norms and values but also institutional norms into its partnerships with neighbouring countries, mainly through the mechanism of reproduction. For the UK this means that the nature of its future partnership with the EU is likely to be influenced more by established practices in and precedents from the EU's relations with European neighbours than by any sense of privilege emanating from the UK's position as a former member state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]