Tag / European integration

by Erik Jones

Rethinking Europe in an Age of Uncertainty: From Club to Commons

If water started disappearing from the European continent, glaciers melted, rivers ran dry, rain stopped falling, you would think Europeans would come together to do something about it.  They would look closely and compare notes about the sources and uses of water.  They would study why the supply was running down and they would find ways to restrict demand to match.  This would not be an easy task.  It was not an easy task for the communities of the ancient world that lived between the Tigris and the Euphrates either.  Humankind has learned to adapt to these sorts of challenges through bitter experience.  Europeans might fail to pull together, and Europe might be overtaken by the desert.  But they would try very hard to find a solution before they let that happen, and they would work with whomever is necessary to ensure their success.

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by Erik Jones

Regulation, Simplification, and European Values

Europe needs to strike a balance between regulation and simplification. To do so, Europeans need to agree on working together. This is not an easy condition to meet, particularly when it suggests a normalisation of extremist politics. Yet retreating from Europe is not an option. If anything, national politics is even more divided. Learning to find common ground and working together is the only sustainable way forward. Doing so will involve compromises, many of which will be difficult to accept. But there is no better alternative.

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by Erik Jones

The European Union as an Innovation in Politics

People look at the European Union and complain that it is not like a nation state. The EU is slow-moving, indecisive, and lacking in conviction. Look at the weakness of the EU’s response to the atrocities in Gaza, its ineffectiveness in standing up to the United States, and its inability to replace American support for Ukraine. Even the EU’s commitment to climate action appears to be wavering.

Such complaints ignore that the EU is not like a nation state for good reason. The European project exists to temper the behaviour of nation states. It is designed to smooth over the contradictions in liberal democracy and, in doing so, make those democracies both more resilient and more legitimate. And the EU is unique. Only Europeans benefit from that political innovation. The United States does not. Neither does Brazil, Russia, India, China, or South Africa.

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by Erik Jones

Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the European Project

Four recent books – by Sergio Fabbrini, Robert L. Nelson, Iryna Vushko, and Isaac Stanley-Becker – challenge any presumptions about the uniqueness of recent European experience.  They also force us to reflect on how the integration of Europe connects with the integration of individual countries (Fabbrini), how the experience of colonization has shaped the European continent (Nelson), how lessons from Europe’s imperial past continue to influence visions of its future (Vushko), and how the effort to promote freedom of movement has revealed a tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that runs across the European project (Stanley-Becker).

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by Erik Jones

Abandoning Institutionalism

The rise of populism and the weakening of democracy have captured attention across advanced industrial societies, particularly among liberal elites on the centre left. How could voters elect politicians who undermine the provision of social services, chip away at the rule of law, coopt or constrain the free media, and at times even threaten to bankrupt the state? How could they reward or even tolerate those leaders for engaging in overt acts of corruption while at the same time preventing any plausible alternative or opposition group from holding them to account through free and fair elections? Sure, people may feel they got a bad deal from globalization, and they may resent the pretensions – both cultural and intellectual – of an overly educated, out-of-touch elite. A little outrage and protest seem appropriate to gain attention. But why are they turning against the institutions that were created to serve advanced industrial societies, from the smallest local authority through the welfare state to the rules-based multilateral system?

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by Erik Jones

Europe: Mortal, Yet Resilient

The European Union can fail, but it doesn’t have to. That is the message that you read across Emmanual Macron’s 2024 Sorbonne speech, in Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on ‘competitiveness’, and in Draghi’s speeches in Rimini and Brussels last August and September. The argument about failure is primarily a call to action. Both the speeches and the report are long on detail about what Europeans need to do and why they need to do it. What they leave open is what failure would look like and why it would happen.

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by Erik Jones

Transatlantic Crisis? Why This Time is Different

To appreciate the radical changes that have taken place in the transatlantic relationship, it helps to have a sense of perspective.  Why is the ‘crisis’ so much more real now than it was in decades past?  You don’t need to do a lot of reading to learn that the relationship has never been easy.  Somehow, this time feels different.  To explain why, I pulled together a collection of thirteen articles I wrote about the evolution of the transatlantic relationship over the past twenty years.  One of the articles was published in Italian and so I included the English-language working paper for those who are interested.  There are three big themes in this collection – about the changing nature of power in international relations, the challenge of maintaining domestic support for engagement with the outside world, and the progressive loss of trust across the Atlantic together with the breakdown of solidarity on either side.  The articles in this collection were not written to trace these themes.  Those themes arose as I kept coming back to the same subject matter from one year, election, administration, ‘crisis’, or decade to the next.

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by Erik Jones

Europe and the Choice between Drift and Mastery

The President of the European Commission hosted an event to mark the one-year anniversary of the report on European competitiveness drafted by former Italian Prime Minister and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi last September. The message coming out of that meeting both from the European Commission President and from Draghi was that European policymakers need to do their homework. Too many items from the Draghi agenda remain unimplemented or only partly addressed. Too much more needs to be accomplished. And time is of the essence. The world is only becoming more volatile, more uncertain, and more dangerous. Europeans cannot afford to wait in preparing for this changed geopolitical environment, otherwise they will suffer the consequences. ‘Europe’ may even fail as a political project.

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by Erik Jones

Three Perspectives on the Crisis of Democracy in Europe

The usual story about the crisis of democracy centres on populists and other bad actors who spoiled the party for the all the rest. There is some truth to this account. But it only captures a small part of what is happening. To get a full picture, you need to look at the failure of democrats and democracy to deliver on what was promised. You also need to consider the perverse incentives that democratic institutions create. And you have to imagine that there are important groups of people – many of whom are poor and disadvantaged – who come out better under other systems of government (and for whom democratization has made things worse). These perspectives on the crisis of democracy do not deny the great promise that democratic institutions have to offer. But they do give pause to consider the many different challenges that democrats have to face if the project of giving power to the people is going to be a success. Three recent books by Philipp Ther, Zsuzsanna Szelényi, and John A. Gould explain why.

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by Erik Jones

Europe Today — A Twenty-First Century Introduction (Sixth Edition)

European politics is changing, and fast. But the significance of that change is hard to appreciate without a deep understanding of ‘Europe’, meaning its history, politics, culture, and economics. Unfortunately, so much of what we ‘know’ about Europe is based on caricatures and stereotypes. (The same is no doubt true for the rest of the world as well. I blame the demise of area studies, but that is another conversation.) This edited volume — called Europe Today and published by Rowman & Littlefield — can help shed important light.

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