Michael Malone's List: Globalization

Distinguishing the contrasting/conflicting identities within the EU by conceptualizing the various attitudes, meanings, and interpretations of Europe, European integration, and 'European power', and also manifestations of 'Europeanizing' processes, across 'EU'rope.

ABSTRACT: We note the importance of work that captures both the diverse expressions and meanings attributed to Europe, European integration and 'European power' in different places within and beyond the EU, and the variegated manifestations of 'Europeanizing' processes across these different spaces. We also suggest that political-geographic research can add crucial input to reconceptualizing European integration as well as Europeanization as it now unfolds in a time of 'crisis'.

INTRO:
The current European economic crisis has not only prompted an intense political debate on notions of 'European solidarity' and 'European values', but has also drawn attention to significant political, economic and cultural differences in 'EU'rope.

The events of 2011 have in fact highlighted not only the power of EU institutions to transform seemingly domestic economic and political issues into 'all-European' matters, but have also resulted in a wholesale remaking of a distinct 'European' political space, not just within but also vis-a-vis its putative 'outside'.

The crisis has indeed put well into evidence the argument that European integration can be understood as a set of discursive practices that set boundaries for imaginations and articulations of the EU, as well as of its future geopolitical role in Europe and in the wider world. Not surprisingly, one of the most visible geopolitical imaginations of the economic crisis has been premised on a distinction between the irrational, naive, irresponsible and chaotic European South, and a rational and (fiscally) responsible North

Writing in the midst of one of the flash points of the crisis, The Economist (2011: 34) could thus note that '150 years after Italy cast off foreign rule and won independence, the country still needs the vincolo esterno, the "external constraint"', distilling a variety of similar arguments for politico-economic paternalism and the 'defense of [European] monetarist orthodoxy against Mediterranean leniency' 

What is more, and related to the above points, the current condition has also illuminated that Europe means different things in different places, and that the politics of integration evokes different responses, tactics and strategies in different geographical contexts. The crisis has, indeed, given rise to widely different imaginations of 'EU'rope, differentially mobilized by various political groupings, institutions and elite fractions across the continent (Clark and Jones, 2012), highlighting the wide variety of ways in which the influence of the EU and associated 'European values' are interpreted and called up in various parts of the EU, and beyond.

In particular, the complex geographical articulations of the current crisis highlight the need for a spatially sensitive, contextual approach, one able to capture not only the diverse expressions and meanings attributed to 'Europe', European integration and 'European power' in different places (within and beyond the EU27), but also the highly variegated manifestations of 'Europeanizing' processes across these different spaces.

---->Most importantly - and in this sense going beyond existing reviews of work on Europeanization - our aim is not only to provide an assessment of contributions focusing on the 'internal' political geographies of European integration, but also to problematize more widely the sociospatial imaginaries of 'EU'rope as constructed and deployed from both within and outside the EU. <----

2010: Journal of European Public Policy

2010: Euro. Review of Labor and Research

National Interest v. Special Interests 

The author is rightly concerned about possible shifts of administrative tasks from enterprises to public authorities. An overhaul of the whole strategy in the light of the crisis is necessary. The gaps between the better regulation agenda and other EU strategies such as industrial policy, sustainable development, post Lisbon, climate change, etc. have to be closed. Finally, the author of the publication under discussion asks whether the better regulation agenda is a war machine or a Trojan Horse intended to undermine the Community method and acquis. He opens an overdue discussion.

Acta Sociologica: 2002

Market integration led to possible economic 'Europeanization'.
"As a result, the largest European corporations have increasingly focused their investments across Europe and worked to gain market share within the EU. Our results imply that at least part of what we call globalization is the result of states' deciding to build rules for market integration in Europe."

INTRO:
My term for this phenomenon is ‘domestication’, namely the ways in which domestic factors frame and infuence the incoming impacts of Europeanisation. The combination of the two elements has provided Europeans with some leverage on the process of Europeanisation; it is a shaped process, not a passively encountered process, at least for those actors and territorial units that have had certain attributes. It seems probable that this experience of Europeanisation provides Europeans with distinctive ways of mediating the impacts of globalisation.

Thus Europeanisation is not an even process across the continent, although, as will be argued below, it is not a process conŽ ned to those countries that are members of the European Union (EU).

CONCLUSION:
Experience and practice have made western Europeans relatively adept at managing their cross-border connections. There has been a cumulative process of institutiona l inventiveness in terms of European-level regime-building, ac- companied by adaptive behaviour within countries to retain domestic identities, even in small countries. Territoriality has not disappeared as a domain for practising political and social differentiation.

Western European patterns of managing the cross- border connections have been shaped by transnational institutions, but built upon cross border connections, in which a variety of agents and organisations (both private and public) have become stakeholders.

One result of the extensive process of Europeanisation has been to produce a quite high degree of self-sufŽ ciency and self-absorption in Europe. Europeans trade with each other much more than they trade with the rest of the world—the proportions are much the same as those for the USA. Europeans deal multilater- ally with each other much more than with the rest of the world. In the defence arena Europeans are currently grasping for ways of diminishing their reliance on the USA.

Thus Europe as a region exhibits a vigorous pattern of intra-regional organisation, with extending scope across multiple dimensions of integration, combined with country differentiation. How widely [sic] Europe is cast in geographical terms remains to be settled, but the outlying countries to the east and the south are caught in the impacts of Europeanisation. There is little evidence that Europeanisation is diminishing in impact, although its forms and modes of operation are becoming more diverse.

Hard cooperation is achievable on many of the political economy issues and softer, less predictable, cooperation on other issues. But Europeanisation is sufŽfciently deeply embedded to act as a filter for globalisation.