Amsterdam Centre for European Studies - ACES
ACES Policy Briefs offer summaries of particular issues facing Europe and the European Union and options how to address them, based on academic research.
Exploring Long-Term Trends of European Identity Across the European Member States
Has European integration left its mark on collective identities? Can we speak of a shared identity among European citizens? If so, how has it developed across Europe, and in response to major political events and the “polycrises” of the past two decades?
The aim of this report is to answer these questions and to highlight the descriptive trends discovered by a novel measure of European identity, built in the context of the EUDENTIFY Project. This tool was created to enable researchers to track European identity across time and across countries with a consistent measure.
Becoming ever more exposed to global developments that transcend the powers of national governments, the European Union needs to widen the spectrum of strategic public goods it provides. To avoid fruitless conflicts over the ‘juste retour’, this should be funded by new permanent EU fiscal resources, with an appropriate mix of taxation and debt issuance, and underpinned by proper democratic governance. Not only would this advance the Union’s strategic goals but also yield benefits for economic stability, convergence and growth.
Drafting, implementing, and monitoring national recovery and resilience plans as an interactive multilevel process
A critical analysis of the functioning of the Recovery Resilience Facility (RRF), examining the involvement of governments in the plans, inclusivity in their drafting, and the role of the Commission in steering the process. Additionally, it assesses the impact of the RRF on domestic policy, identifies obstacles during implementation, and analyzes Commission monitoring, with particular attention to its interpretive flexibility and administrative load.
Copyright of study 2023 by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies.
The current EU GMO regime is based on the precautionary principle and the process-based approach, meaning that any market access of a product resulting from a production process based on genetic modification is conditioned on its general compliance with the level of risk, standards, and procedures prescribed by EU rules.
How can advances in European integration be reconciled with persistent diversity among Member States? One widely canvassed solution to this dilemma is differentiated integration (DI). Its underlying assumption is that deeper integration of markets and societies within the EU requires uniform, centrally determined rules, which some Member States may be unwilling or unable to accept, at least initially.
Electricity’s influence on other sectors, such as transport, electronic communications, and manufacturing, make it an especially important policy domain, and indeed one that underpins our daily lives, both professionally and privately. But how has electricity been regulated throughout the European Union over the past two decades?
How can advances in European integration be reconciled with persistent national diversity? One prominent solution to this dilemma is ‘differentiated integration’, in which some Member States forge ahead with new policy initiatives, while others ‘opt out’. An alternative approach to integrating diversity is ‘experimentalist governance’, in which EU institutions and Member States jointly set and revise common goals and rules.
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Zamira Xhaferri's book examines the law and practice of the delegation of rulemaking powers to the European Commission. It combines legal doctrine with empirical research methods to bridge the gap between “law on the books” and “law in action” to fully appreciate the meaning and the impact of the changes post-Lisbon. The results of the empirical case study provide food for thought on how the current legal framework regime for delegated rulemaking by the European Commission could be improved. The findings seek to contribute to the academic and policy debates on this research topic that is likely to continue in forthcoming years.
Europe against Revolution offers a radical new scholarly interpretation of the topics of Enlightenment legacies, counter-revolution, and conservatism, as well as the construction of the European Past and the international order, while giving a historical perspective on the contemporary (radical) right as well as current expressions of European identity and memory. It also combines Enlightenment thought with counter-revolution and memory studies/ historiography and draws on sources from seven languages to give a truly pan-European perspective.
This handbook builds a shared understanding of the troubling politics of philanthropy and the disturbing history and practices of humanitarianism.
While historical work on philanthropy has long suggested a link between imperial rule and humanitarian aid, these insights have only recently been brought to bear on contemporary forms of giving. In this book, contributors link the long history of colonial philanthropy to current foundations and their programs in education, health, migrant care, and other social initiatives. They argue that both philanthropy and humanitarianism often function to consolidate market rule, consolidating and expanding liberal market rationalities of neoliberal entrepreneurialism to a widening population and set of institutions.
Philanthropy and humanitarianism share a history, growing together out of modernist socio-economic relations and modes of imperial rule. However, the histories and contemporary politics of the two have not been brought together with such breadth or under such a critical lens before. Discussing philanthropy and humanitarianism together, combining both historical scope and contemporary iterations, highlights continuities and convergences—making the volume a unique introduction and critical overview of critical work in these sister-fields.
Winner of the International Political Sociology book award for 2023
What does it mean when humanitarianism is the response to death, injury and suffering at the border? This book interrogates the politics of humanitarian responses to border violence and unequal mobility, arguing that such responses mask underlying injustices, depoliticise violent borders and bolster liberal and paternalist approaches to suffering.
Focusing on the diversity of actors involved in humanitarian assistance alongside the times and spaces of action, the book draws a direct line between privileges of movement and global inequalities of race, class, gender and disability rooted in colonial histories and white supremacy, and humanitarian efforts that save lives while entrenching such inequalities.
Mămăligă, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of World War One, and also the image of mămăligă in art and popular culture. Drawing on a rich array of sources and with many new findings, Drace-Francis shows how the making of mămăligă has been shaped by global economic forces and overlapping imperial systems of war and trade.
The Return of the Native explores how diverse phenomena, such as populism, anti-black racism, and islamophobia in various countries share the same core: nativism. It also includes in-depth, original analysis of political developments in three countries (US, France, and the Netherlands) and focuses on the most liberal countries in the world and shows why liberalism is not a safeguard against the rise of nativism.
The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, although recent institutional and political developments suggest that such a trend is underway.
This book sheds light onto this phenomenon by taking a comprehensive approach to understanding four key dimensions of personalization concerning institutions, media, politics, and citizens. In doing so, it relies on an innovative longitudinal and cross-country comparative research design and applies multiple methods.
EU–Middle East relations are multifaceted, varied and complex, shaped by historical, political, economic, migratory, social and cultural dynamics. Covering these relations from a broad perspective that captures continuities, ruptures and entanglements, this handbook provides a clearer understanding of trends, thus contributing to a range of different turns in International Relations.
The interdisciplinary and diverse assessments through which readers may grasp a more nuanced comprehension of the intricate entanglements in EU–Middle East relations are carefully provided in these pages by leading experts in the various (sub)fields, including academics, think-tankers, as well as policymakers. The volume offers original reflections on historical constructions, theoretical approaches, multilateralism and geopolitical perspectives, contemporary issues, peace, security and conflict and development, economics, trade and society. The chapters adopt various research methodologies organised into six main sections: History; Theoretical perspectives; Multilateralism and Geopolitical perspectives; MENA-EU relations in the contemporary world; Peace, security, and conflict in the Middle East; and Development, economics, trade and societal issues.
This Handbook provides an entry point for an informed exploration of the multiple themes, actors, structures, policies and processes that mould EU–Middle East relations. It is designed for policymakers, academics and students of all levels interested in politics, international and global studies, contemporary history, regionalism and area studies.
Pandemic policies have been the focus of fierce lobbying competition by different social and economic interests. In Viral Lobbying a team of expert authors from across the social and natural sciences analyse patterns in and implications of this ‘viral lobbying’. Based on elite surveys and focus group interviews with selected groups, the book provides new evidence on the lobbying strategies used during the COVID 19 pandemic, as well as the resulting access to and lobbying influence on public policy.
Habits are comforting. They make life predictable and familiar. It prevents stress if the circumstances in your daily life do not deviate too much from the norm. But there is also something vicious behind that longing for the ordinary. In this book, sociologists Menno Hurenkamp and Jan Willem Duyvendak question the habit of glorifying the ordinary. But they also look at the efforts to dismantle the ordinary, which surprisingly come from both the far right and the radical left.
Over the last three decades cross-border innovation has profoundly changed. The fragmentation of global value chains, increased global connectedness, and pervasive digitalization have helped shape innovation processes that now increasingly span national borders. This changing process has involved a wide array of actors (players) in a variety of geographical locations and organizational spaces (places), calling for new guidelines, public interventions, and regulatory frameworks (policies).
This book presents complementary and novel perspectives on the phenomenon from distinguished scholars, bridging perspectives from a rich set of research streams including international business, strategy, innovation studies and policy, international economics, industrial organization, economic geography, ethics, and sustainability.
This book explores pandemic invisibilities and datafied policies, but also forms of resistance and creativity of communities at the margins as they try to negotiate survival during the COVID-19 crisis. It features 75 authors writing in 5 languages in 282 pages that amplify the silenced voices of the first pandemic of the datafied society.
In so doing, it seeks to de-center dominant ways of being and knowing while contributing a decolonial approach to the narration of the COVID-19 emergency. It brings researchers, activists, practitioners, and communities on the ground into dialogue to offer critical reflections in near-real time and in an accessible language, from indigenous groups in New Zealand to impoverished families in Spain, from data activists in South Africa to gig workers in India, from feminicidios in Mexico to North/South stereotypes in Europe, from astronomers in Brazil to questions of infrastructure in Russia and Github activism in China—and much more!
This edited collection offers interdisciplinary and cross-national perspectives on the challenges of negotiating the contours of religious tolerance in today’s Europe. Offering multidisciplinary insights from leading thinkers in political theory, political philosophy, anthropology, and geography, the chapters in this collection address both changing understandings of religious freedom, as well as the ways in which these are negotiated in practice in specific contexts. The volume draws upon an international conference on this topic organized under the auspices of ACCESS EUROPE in December 2016.
Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe's terms and through European eyes; while this may not seem so unreasonable to Europeans, this perspective has unforeseen consequences. This book brings together respected scholars from history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy, and from different geographical perspectives, who explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of Europe's past.