Suchergebnisse

This contribution to the Special Issue focuses on how we might incorporate 'peripheral thinking' on the EU, with a particular focus on teaching the EU at a 'new periphery': in Brexit Britain. First, it considers the challenges of teaching the EU in the context of what now feels like an almost permanent crisis in the EU. It argues in favour of a 'critical-pluralist' approach: that is, an approach that fully engages with a 'peripheral' (including 'critical', 'normative' and 'dissident') set of ideas as part of a commitment to scholarly pluralism. Second, it suggests--with reference to the recent experience of updating an EU politics textbook--that a 'question driven approach' might be one pedagogically practical way of presenting such a plurality to our students. Finally, it turns to consider how such an approach might be realised in the classroom, in the particular context of teaching the EU at the EU's 'new periphery', the United Kingdom. While that context presented various teaching related challenges, Brexit as a case study was usefully deployed in a variety of ways in order to pursue the critical-pluralist approach that is advocated.

AbstractIn the decade after 2007 eurosceptic actors in the UK successfully deployed securitizing narratives to portray the free movement of people (FMoP) and EU citizens as a threat to the 'ontological security' of national citizens. The ensuing exclusionary policies (up to and beyond the end of FMoP) were normatively problematic, particularly given the absence of evidence in support of those narratives. However, the paper argues that a response aimed at de‐securitizing the issue—in this case, a return to the status‐quo‐ante – is not without its own normative problems. Indeed, the permissive pre‐2007 New Labour government's approach to FMoP was not inclusive of all EU citizens. In valorizing EU citizens as 'independent post‐national entrepreneurs', the marginalization of economically vulnerable EU citizens, particularly via tough welfare conditionality, was legitimated. The paper concludes by reflecting on the theoretical and political implications of the argument.

The article offers a genealogy of 'deliberative governance' in the EU—an important contemporary discourse and practice of 'throughput legitimacy' within that setting. It focuses on three key episodes: the late 1990s 'Governance' reports of the European Commission's in‐house think‐tank, the Forward Studies Unit (FSU); the Commission's 2001 White Paper on Governance; and the EU's 'Open Method of Coordination', which emerged in the 1990s and was widely studied in the early and mid‐2000s. The genealogy serves to highlight the particular intellectual lineages and political contingencies associated with such a discourse and in so doing points to its exclusive potential in both theory and practice. In particular, the article argues that it excludes, on the one hand, those championing the enduring sociological and normative importance of the nation state and an associated representative majoritarianism and, on the other hand, those (excessively) critical of a functionalist, neoliberal, market‐making status quo.

The progressive's dilemma suggests that a trade-off exists between, on the one hand, labour and welfare rights underpinned by solidarity and shared identity and, on the other hand, open immigration regimes. With reference to debates on EU free movement in the United Kingdom, it is argued (1) that a progressive European critical political economy literature of the Left has a tendency to accept this dilemma and resolve it in favour of the former; (2) that it does so because it erroneously conflates the free movement of people with the (increasingly neoliberal) free movement of goods, capital and services; and (3) that it could and should treat human mobility as qualitatively different and, consequently, need not accept the terms of the progressive's dilemma. The argument has important implications for a progressive politics in general and for the Left's (particularly the Labour Party's) position in the United Kingdom on free movement (and, by extension, on Brexit).

AbstractImmigrant investor programmes (IIPs) – aimed at attracting investment in return for residency or citizenship for wealthy foreigners – have proliferated in EU Member States in recent years. Such schemes constitute part of a much broader commercialization of citizenship, which has intensified during the crisis. They have been particularly controversial in the EU because they rely for their attractiveness in part on the reality of EU citizenship and the rights of mobility and residence that it entails. The European Commission, among others, has presented them as threat to national citizenship and yet the EU at once champions a 'post‐national' citizenship and is arguably culpable in the very commercialization of citizenship of which investor schemes are a stark manifestation. This paper unpacks the tensions in the theory and politics of investor migration in the recent EU context, arguing that they reveal what is termed a 'quadrilemma' at the heart of a multi‐level citizenship.

AbstractTeaching theory in the study of EU politics has long posed a range of pedagogical challenges, in part because of the broad range of questions that scholars have posed in relation to the EU as object of study. Often such a challenge is overcome by focusing mainly on how integration occurred/occurs and the associated classical theories of integration. However, this article argues that we do our students a disservice by ignoring an extant theoretical plurality, and perhaps never more so than in the context of the current crisis and its multiple effects. In particular, the crisis heightens the imperative for engagement with questions posed by what this special issue calls 'dissident' theoretical approaches. Drawing on the experience of co‐authoring a textbook on EU politics, the article considers some of the ways in which we might practically include such approaches, while remaining cognizant of pedagogical constraints.