Subtitle: Outlook for business, regional aircraft sales remains buoyant, Bombardier maintains.

Against the odds

This article interrogates the concepts in this journal's title and, drawing on the strategic-relational approach in social theory, explores their interconnections. This conceptual re-articulation is then contextualized in regard to the European Union (EU) as a political regime that serves as a real-time laboratory for experiments in government and governance with implications for redesigning polities, politics, and policies, especially in response to symptoms of political and policy failures and other crises. Mobilizing the territory-place-scale-network schema, and drawing on critical governance studies, this article offers an alternative account of these developments based on (1) their sociospatial and temporal complexities, (2) recognition that socio-spatial relations are objects and means of government and governance and not just sites where such practices occur, and (3) extension of this approach to multispatial meta-governance, that is, attempts to govern the government and governance of soci...

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Territory, Politics, Governance and Multispatial Metagovernance

We map the pattern and extent of the European integration of core state powers (coercive force, public finance and public administration) and analyse causes and consequences. We highlight two findings: First, in contrast to historical examples of federal state-building, where the nationalization of core state powers precipitated the institutional, territorial and political consolidation of the emerging state, the European integration of core state powers is associated with the institutional, territorial and political fragmentation of the European Union. Second, in contrast to European market integration, state elites and mass publics, not organized business interests, are the prime drivers of integration.

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More integration, less federation: the European integration of core state powers

This contribution analyses how EU social objectives and policy co-ordination have been integrated into the Union’s post-crisis governance architecture. It argues that between 2011 and 2016, there was a partial but progressive ‘socialization’ of the ‘European Semester’ of policy co-ordination, in terms of increasing emphasis on social objectives in its priorities and key messages, including the Country-Specific Recommendations; intensified social monitoring and review of national reforms; and an enhanced decision-making role for EU social and employment actors. In explaining these developments, the contribution highlights the contribution of strategic agency, reflexive learning and creative adaptation by social and employment actors to the new institutional conditions of the Semester, building on recent theoretical work on ‘actor-centred constructivism’ and the ‘usages of Europe’.

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13501763.2017.1363269

Socializing the European Semester: EU social and economic policy co-ordination in crisis and beyond

Executive dominance in the contemporary EU is part of a wider migration of executive power towards types of decision making that eschew electoral accountability and popular democratic control. This democratic gap is fed by far-going secrecy arrangements and practices exercised in a concerted fashion by the various executive actors at different levels of governance and resulting in the blacking out of crucial information and documents - even for parliaments. Beyond a deconstruction exercise on the nature and location of EU executive power and secretive working practices, this article focuses on the challenges facing parliaments in particular. It seeks to reconstruct a more pro-active and networked role of parliaments - both national and European - as countervailing power. In this vision parliaments must assert themselves in a manner that is true to their role in the political system and that is not dictated by government at any level.

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Challenging Executive Dominance in European Democracy

This article analyses how the European Union's response to the euro-crisis has altered the constitutional balance upon which its stability is based. It argues that the stability and legitimacy of any political system requires the structural incorporation of individual and political self-determination. In the context of the EU, this requirement is met through the idea of constitutional balance, with ‘substantive’, ‘institutional’ and ‘spatial’ dimensions. Analysing reforms to EU law and institutional structure in the wake of the crisis – such as the establishment of the ESM, the growing influence of the European Council and the creation of a stand-alone Fiscal Compact – it is argued that recent reforms are likely to have a lasting impact on the ability of the EU to mediate conflicting interests in all three areas. By undermining its constitutional balance, the response to the crisis is likely to dampen the long-term stability and legitimacy of the EU project.

Constitutional Balance in the EU after the Euro‐Crisis

How should decision-making under EU economic governance be understood following the euro-crisis? This article argues, contra existing depictions, that the post-crisis EU has increasingly adopted methods of decision-making in the economic field which marry the decision-making structure of inter-governmentalism with the supervisory and implementation framework of the Community Method. While this ‘post-crisis’ method has arisen for clear reasons – to achieve economic convergence between eurozone states in an environment where previous models of decision-making were unsuitable or unwanted – it also carries important normative implications. Post-crisis governance departs from the mechanisms of legal and political accountability present in previous forms of EU decision-making without substituting new models of accountability in their place. Providing appropriate channels of political and legal control in the EU's ‘new’ economic governance should be seen as a crucial task for the coming decade.

The Legal and Political Accountability Structure of ‘Post-Crisis’ EU Economic Governance

Introduction 1. The origins of an open method of coordination 2. Relating governance and law 3. Governance as proceduralisation 4. Assessing the procedural paradigm: the case of the OMC SPSI 5. Constitutionalising new governance Epilogue.

New Governance and the Transformation of European Law: Coordinating EU Social Law and Policy

As the crisis (and the Union's response to it) further develops, one thing appears clear: the European Union post-crisis will be a very different animal from the pre-crisis EU. This article offers an alternative model for the EU's constitutional future. Its objective is to invert the Union's current path-dependency: changes to the way in which the Union works should serve to question, rather than entrench, its future objectives and trajectory. The paper argues that the post-crisis EU requires a quite different normative, institutional and juridical framework. Such a framework must focus on reproducing the social and political cleavages that underlie authority on the national level and that allow divisive political choices to be legitimised. This reform project implies reshaping the prerogatives of the European institutions. Rather than seeking to prevent or bracket political conflict, the division of institutional competences and tasks should be rethought in order to allow the EU institutions to internalise within their decision-making process the conflicts reproduced by social and political cleavages. Finally, a reformed legal order must play an active role as a facilitator and container of conflict over the ends of the integration project.

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From Balance to Conflict: A New Constitution for the EU

Contents: 1. Introduction: The European Court of Justice as a Political Actor Elise Muir, Mark Dawson and Bruno de Witte 2. The Political Face of Judicial Activism: Europe's Law-politics Imbalance Mark Dawson 3. The Least Dangerous Branch of European Governance? The European Court of Justice Under the Checks and Balances Doctrine Marcus Horeth 4. Maybe Not Activist Enough? On the Court's Alleged Neoliberal Bias in its Recent Labor Cases Clemens Kaupa 5. The Court of Justice: A Fundamental Rights Institution Among Others Elise Muir 6. Actively Talking to Each Other: The Court and the Political Institutions Vassilis Hatzopoulos 7. The European Court of Justice in the Face of Scientific Uncertainty and Complexity Ellen Vos 8. The European Court of Justice and the Duty to Respect Sensitive National Interests Loic Azoulai 9. A Cautionary Tale: Some Insights Regarding Judicial Activism from the National Experience Maartje de Visser 10. Judicial Activism and the European Court of Justice: How Should Academics Respond? Anthony Arnull 11. The Role and Potential of Civil Society and Human Rights Organizations through Third Party Interventions Before the European Courts: The Case of the EU's Area of Freedom, Security and Justice Sergio Carrera and Bilyana Petkova 12. Strategies Developed by - and Between - National Governments to Interact with the ECJ Mielle Bulterman and Corinna Wissels Index

Mark Dawson

Papers

Constitutional Balance in the EU after the Euro‐Crisis

The Legal and Political Accountability Structure of ‘Post-Crisis’ EU Economic Governance

New Governance and the Transformation of European Law: Coordinating EU Social Law and Policy

From Balance to Conflict: A New Constitution for the EU

Judicial Activism at the European Court of Justice