Jacques Delors Centre
Refine
Document Type
- Working Paper (145)
- Article (77)
- Part of a Book (33)
- Doctoral Thesis (11)
- Book (9)
- Contribution to a Periodical (5)
- Editorship book (3)
- Journal (1)
- Review (1)
Keywords
- - (5)
- European Semester (3)
- European Union (2)
- Ireland (2)
- economic and monetary union (2)
- Accountability; Eurogroup; European Parliament; Council of the EU; Economic Dialogue; European Semester; ESM (1)
- Agenda-setting, European Commission, legislation, politicisation, depoliticisation, withdrawals (1)
- Auditing (1)
- Big 4 (1)
- Brexit (1)
Between 6-9 July 2024, the 720 members of the European Parliament were elected across 27 Member States. While the elections have not led to a landslide shift to the right, there is a notable consolidation of far-right parties at the European level. Still, the pro-European centre is holding firm and maintains a majority. In this Policy Brief, Jannik Jansen and Thu Nguyen argue that the results likely indicate by-and-large continuity in the European Parliament, including an ongoing shift to the right on contested issues due to a perforated ‘cordon sanitaire’. But the election results had heavily disruptive consequences on the national level, which in France has triggered snap parliamentary elections. This will have pronounced impact on the balance of power in the (European) Council and on the EU as a whole.
At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, the large democracies of Western Europe experienced some of the most prosperous and peaceful decades in human history. Specifically, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany experienced high and stable quality of life, democratic accountability and state capacity between 2000 and 2019, according to the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index. While all four of these countries are among the top performers in the Index, substantial problems lurk beneath the surface. Notably, each failed to capitalise on the low interest rate environment in the decade following the global financial crisis of 2007–2009—albeit in different ways and for different reasons in each country. In particular, low investment in infrastructure and key technologies, the persistence of stubborn regional inequalities, and resulting sluggish GDP growth have prevented the ‘Big Four’ in Western Europe from improving further and future‐proofing their existing gains.
Much of Latin America has experienced a renewed ‘lost decade’, failing to substantially expand quality of life since the late 2000s. While the outcomes of governance performance across the largest countries – including Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina – have discrete causes, common themes like internal conflict, corruption, and overreliance on natural resources plague the entire region. Put more generally, the inability to turn democratic accountability into a state mechanism able to deliver economic growth and public goods in a sustainable manner is a liability affecting all five countries. To explore the difficulties that the large Latin American countries have faced in the twenty‐first century, this article examines results from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index, and then presents three key issues facing the region: insufficient state capacity, flirtations with authoritarianism, and economic inequality and inflation. While the challenges remain substantial, increased regional integration may offer one way out of the predicament.
AbstractThe United States—often hailed as the ‘oldest democracy in the world’ and the ‘leader of the free world’—has fallen on hard times. In addition to recent headline‐grabbing political events that have highlighted its political dysfunction, data from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) reveal that overall state capacity and democratic accountability have been declining for years. Although public goods provision has remained on a steady course, the US still trails much of the developed world. We find this struggling performance is largely the result of neglecting three types of infrastructure: civic, physical and social. Specifically, we argue that the crisis became particularly pronounced due to an insufficient response to the 2008 global financial crisis. Although some recent political achievements could slow the decline, more drastic action will be required to reverse these troubling trends.
Implementing the EU Green Deal requires annual investments of about €620 billion, most of which will have to be shouldered by the private sector. However, businesses and households are not investing enough as of now. An important lever for greater green investment is reducing uncertainty around such investment. At the start of the next institutional cycle, the EU should hence improve regulatory certainty for green investments, which should be palatable to most parties likely to form a majority in the Parliament. In addition, the EU should adopt concrete tools that reduce cost uncertainty for companies and households in a pragmatic manner. To this end, this policy position recommends using green lead markets and proposes moves to explore two novel mechanisms that cost taxpayers little to nothing but should boost green investments.
Election campaigns are increasingly conducted online. Social media platforms in particular shape political discourse and facilitate new ways of delivering political messages. This was initially considered a boon for democracy, but opaque manipulation tactics quickly turned it into a threat to fair and transparent elections. National regulatory frameworks have often proved to be inadequate for online campaigns and the transnational nature of European elections. The EU has reacted to this with a regulation on political advertising. The initiative facilitates transnational campaigning online and aims to protect the integrity of European elections. The 2024 European elections will be the first time EU rules operate in this area, putting these to the test. This election cycle will indicate whether political actors are striking out for more cross-border campaigns and whether they suffice to protect European elections. Critical here is how online platforms implement the new rules and how transparent they are about campaign-related posts on their sites.
EU enlargement has historically fostered economic growth and political stability. In the Western Balkans, however, the process has stalled for many years due to the myriad crises afflicting the EU and failure to deliver reforms in the Western Balkans. This policy brief examines the evolution of the EU accession process, the challenges faced by candidate countries, and the need for a revitalized approach that builds reforms into the accession process rather than keep them a precondition for kickstarting it. It calls for the EU to remove bilateral disputes from the process and open accession talks with all candidate countries in all areas covered by the acquis, ensuring that all candidate countries have a fair chance based on their merits.
The Court inhabits a ‘political space’ to which it is called upon to respond. This points to its need to develop cooperative relationships not only with courts but also with political actors (such as national governments and the EU legislature) and even to directly address and explain decisions to EU citizens themselves. This book is aimed at answering the question of ‘How does the CJEU position itself as a political as well as a legal actor?’ with a view to better understanding the work of the Court and addressing its contestation. For that purpose, we explore in this introductory chapter what is meant by judicial ‘activism’ and judicial ‘politics’, before examining the different varieties of judicial politics our authors have shown an interest in. This will pave the way to drawing some lessons on the factors to take into account when seeking to address and respond to contestation of the work of the Court.
Addressing the tensions between the political and the legal dimension of European integration as well as intra-institutional dynamics, this insightful book navigates the complex topic of judicial politics. Providing an overview of key topics in the current debate and including an introductory chapter on different conceptions of judicial politics, experts in law and politics interrogate the broader political role of the European Court of Justice.
The first-ever European Defence Industrial Strategy and its financial leg, the European Defence Industrial Programme, saw the light of day in March 2024. The strategy seeks to ameliorate deficiencies in EU defence readiness identified in light of the Russo-Ukrainian war. It offers an ambitious agenda and tailor-made incentives designed to encourage EU member states to invest more, better, together, and European. The Jacques Delors Institute’s Associate Research Fellow Thierry Tardy and the Jacques Delors Centre’s Security Policy Fellow Sascha Ostanina argue that the strategy is a good start to motivate European countries for more action in the defence sector. However, as long as the EU fails to take on a larger defence mandate via treaty change, the strategy success will hinge upon whether the member states, and their respective industrial defence sectors, will be willing to step up to the plate.
In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen promised a geopolitical Commission. Back then, the proclamation was largely derided as empty rhetoric. However, in recent years, a dizzying number of geoeconomic initiatives have come from Brussels, revising and tweaking existing tools and measures, developing new instruments, and announcing a grand new European Economic Security Strategy. This policy brief examines the progress made and outlines the key challenges for the next Commission. While the current Commission expanded the EU‘s geoeconomic toolbox, the incoming Commission must prioritise harmonisation to prevent fragmentation, allocate substantial funds to enhance resilience, and streamline institutional processes to facilitate coherent policymaking at a European level.
Provided it is sufficiently regulated, securitisation can help to fund the economy and share risks within the monetary union. Securitisation combines the advantages of banks in lending and of financial markets in financing. However, a lack of standardisation and legal harmonisation currently prevents the EU from reaping the benefits of this instrument. Weakening the prudential framework will not create a truly European market but may pose new risks to financial stability. Instead, this Policy Brief argues that to scale up securitisation, overcoming the fragmentation in national contract and insolvency laws in the longer term will be key. In the meantime, the European Commission should cut unnecessary red tape and establish an EU-wide standardised securitisation product tailored to an asset class that shows sustainable growth potential. Renovation loans are a promising option.
The notion of a broad green backlash is set to dominate this year's European election campaign. Based on new survey data from more than 15.000 respondents in Germany, France and Poland, we show that it is largely overblown. A majority of voters still wish for a more ambitious climate policy and would support a raft of concrete measures to bring down emissions. However, supporting pivotal voters in the middle will require a stronger focus on green investment and industrial policy and offsetting measures for effective but unpopular policies like carbon pricing. Parties should not waste the coming months outbidding each other over how to cater to imagined climate fatigue but compete over concrete recipes to green the economy.
The Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA) was touted as the EU‘s big response to the US Inflation Reduction Act. After a year of negotiations, it will finally hit the legislative books. In his policy position, Nils Redeker analyses what has become of the EU‘s green industrial policy ambitions, what the NZIA teaches us about Europe‘s role in the clean tech race, and what the next Commission needs to do to formulate a constructive answer to the global return of industrial policy.
To achieve some recent EU priorities, such as boosting clean tech manufacturing, reducing energy prices, or strengthening economic resilience, policy makers are intervening more actively in the economy. Getting these types of policies right requires a thorough understanding of the respective business environment, technologies, and market developments. This policy brief argues that the EU level lacks the data and the analytic capacities that are needed to achieve this understanding. The next EU Commission should address these shortcomings by collecting more data in the narrow areas subject to vertical government intervention, by improving how data gets collected, and by dedicating more staff to data-driven analyses.
In fiscal redistribution negotiations, fiscally weaker sub-units aim to secure more funding but are disempowered by their dependency and lack of bargaining chips. What kind of negotiation strategies do fiscally weak actors rely on to maximize their bargaining positions in redistributive negotiations? The article puts forward a novel strategy of discursive framing whereby relatively powerless actors can reach successful agreements. Two strategies of framing, communitarian and coercive, are observed inductively through a comparative case study analysis of two instances of sub-federal redistribution negotiations in Canada. The findings reveal that ‘more is not always better’: more publicity and aggression can backfire, while communitarian strategies grounded in normative argumentation can prove effective despite their non-confrontational nature. Even a mixed communitarian-coercive strategy can prove effective given that sub-units remain consistent with their initial objectives and apply pressure incrementally. The lessons learned from these Canadian cases have broader implications for studying the dynamics of redistributive negotiations globally.
We analyse the rhetoric and reality of EU digital sovereignty by looking at content control. The control of online content is central to sovereignty because it relates to fundamental freedoms and democratic competition. Our main data source is the unique International Organizations in Global Internet Governance (IO-GIG) dataset which contains internet policy output documents across international institutions and issue areas between 1995 and 2021. By assessing policy output, we show structural trends in content control output in volume, bindingness, and orientation. By analysing policy discourse, we show the evolution of frames on content control over time. We find evidence for a comprehensive but still ongoing trend towards digital sovereignty in policy output and a shift from prioritising free access to the public order in discourse.
The ‘asymmetry thesis’, articulated by Fritz Scharpf, holds that EU governance is characterised by an asymmetry between positive and negative integration. The EU has well-developed capacities for negative integration but only limited capacities for positive integration. The present paper challenges the orthodoxy that this thesis has become in EU law and political science scholarship. It argues that the asymmetry thesis no longer accurately depicts European integration, revisiting its key legal and institutional assumptions. Taking the internal market as the most likely case to test the thesis, we show that negative integration has become weaker, positive integration has gained in strength, and both developments have had an impact on the substance of EU law and policymaking, which is promoting non-economic concerns and market-correcting policies to a greater extent than it used to. These shifts, so we contend, could be even more pronounced in other areas of European integration.
This policy brief delves into the potential of regular migration across diverse skill levels to alleviate labour shortages in the EU. It contends that the EU faces a policy dilemma by attempting to curtail certain migration forms, as seen in the recent Common European Asylum System (CEAS) reform, while concurrently encouraging others through initiatives like the EU Talent Pool. The inconsistent approach to third-country migration poses significant trade-offs, necessitating a comprehensive resolution. The brief advocates for a multi-faceted strategy encompassing (a) diversification, (b) integration, and (c) de-bureaucratization at both EU and member state levels. Addressing potential pitfalls such as brain drains and heightened competition among member states, the brief concludes by highlighting three essential criteria for enhancing talent attraction and mitigating EU labour shortages through both high- and low-skilled migration.