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

The context within which this volume was developed is the rise, in the last years, of concerns among national authorities and judiciaries, and within European civil society, about alleged judicial activism at the European Court of Justice. The subject of judicial activism has become a fashionable topic of academic commentary once again. This volume does not take sides in this debate, in the sense that it does not seek to offer a simple answer to the question of whether the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is indeed an activist court. Indeed, a simple answer would be misleading when the question itself is underdetermined. Arguing that a court is activist may indeed mean many different things. We do, however, assume that the Court of Justice is (also) a political actor. It is sometimes claimed by judges of the ECJ that their institution cannot be a political actor for the simple reason that it is a passive institution which has to wait and see which cases will come its way, and which then will try to solve those cases as best it can, without the capacity to steer the evolution of EU law on the basis of political priorities. Although one can understand why members of the Court should claim such a politically neutral status, that claim is not very plausible. Indeed, the kinds of cases that will be submitted to the Court are often quite predictable, and some of the ‘unexpected’ cases (those that arrive at the Court in a surprising manner) may still have strong political connotations, in that they involve contrasting political preferences among the parties to a case regarding the interpretation of an ambiguous norm of EU law. The national authorities and judiciaries generally do not mind this political role of the Court of Justice. Today still, the dominant perception among political actors is that the Court of Justice plays a useful role in the European integration process. Harsh criticism is sometimes made of single judgments, and sometimes States hesitate to extend the Court’s power to new areas of cooperation (most famously, at the time of Maastricht Treaty, in respect of the new areas of cooperation on foreign affairs and home affairs), but only a few governments have ever expressed

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Introduction: the European Court of Justice as a political actor

A. Categorizing the Challenge of Exit In identifying challenges for the EU and EU law in the 2020s, a whole host of topics and questions present themselves. Like any legal order, EU law has to keep pace with its surrounding environment, developing knowledge and tools to deal with new regulatory challenges. What, however, if the EU order’s biggest future challenge is also its original one? As I will argue in this short Article, that challenge is fundamentally one of relevance, that is, of maintaining EU law’s rule-making and adjudicative capacity in the face of existential threat. The challenge in this sense is to maintain the legacy of the immediate post-founding moment, within which EU law became a relatively autonomous and effective legal order. I will posit this as three challenges—of exit, evasion, and subversion. Exit is simple departure. AsCarlosClosa observed, bymaking a provision underArticle 50 for the exit of Member States from the Union, the EU formalized, and even made respectable, the outright redundancy of EU law for certain states.1 This exit canbe absolute—theBrexiteer notionof a no-deal Brexit under conditions of high regulatory divergence—or partial—for example, the exit of states from certain areas of EU law2 or the decision of third states integrated in elements of EU law to become less integrated. Evasion is much more nuanced. States may decide to turn their backs on EU law without turning their backs on the EU order as such—they may even seek more integration but do so outside of EU law categories. Examples in this basket include the use of international law to regulate relations between EU states,3 the increasing development of regulation through guidelines andother formsof soft law,4 and the channeling of EUauthority through expert institutions inwhich judicial review is formally possible yet practically difficult to operationalize.5 The final category, subversion, is to formally accept EU law and participate in EU decision-making, but to undermine its foundations, either through refusal to comply, or through eroding domestic structures necessary to provide EU law with practical force. The refusal of Member States—often for important constitutional reasons—to complywith enforcement proceedings or preliminary rulings,6 and the persistent questions regarding judicial independence in a number of states,7 fall into this basket.

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Coping with Exit, Evasion, and Subversion in EU Law

The failure of individual and institutional remedies to ensure the effective enforcement of European Union (EU) law has increasingly focused attention on collective routes to ensuring adherance to EU policies and rights. How comprehensive, however, should collective remedies under EU law be? This introductory article – as well as the other articles of this volume – explores the feasibility of a horizontal approach to the collective enforcement of EU law. While the hope for such an approach has been bolstered by the engagement of the EU institutions, the Commission’s most recent 2013 Recommendation fails to significantly advance the development of collective remedies at EU level. The article will conclude by exploring some further, non-legislative, alternatives to furthering the collective enforcement of EU law.

One for All and All for One? The Collective Enforcement of EU Law

Quantitative easing at the Court of Justice: doing whatever it takes to save the euro : case C-493/17, Weiss and Others, Judgment of the Court (Grand Chamber) of 11 December 2018, EU:C:2018:1000

Mark Dawson

Papers

Introduction: the European Court of Justice as a political actor

Coping with Exit, Evasion, and Subversion in EU Law

One for All and All for One? The Collective Enforcement of EU Law

Quantitative easing at the Court of Justice: doing whatever it takes to save the euro : case C-493/17, Weiss and Others, Judgment of the Court (Grand Chamber) of 11 December 2018, EU:C:2018:1000

Introduction: The Governance of the Transformation of Europe’s Economic, Political, and constitutional Constellation since the Euro Crisis