Contemporary European Politics最新文献

{"title":"Seeking Shelter From Brexit: Ireland and the United States","authors":"Mary C. Murphy","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the factors that account for the US foreign policy position on Brexit and situates that discussion in a ‘seeking shelter’ context. Through a specific focus on how Ireland approached the challenge of Brexit, it determines the logic for pursuing US shelter and identifies the conditions which facilitated the cultivation of American support for the Irish position. Using a framework developed by James (2022), the article documents how Ireland used efforts at bargaining, lobbying and bonding to encourage key US actors and institutions to offer diplomatic and political support for the maintenance of an open border on the island of Ireland. It concludes that US shelter, though not determinative, served as a key lever among others that Ireland deployed to influence the EU–UK negotiations.</p>","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70049","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149028032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bridging Silos in EU Climate Governance? Elite Perceptions of the EU Cities Mission and Its Mechanisms of Change","authors":"Alexandra Buylova,&nbsp;Naghmeh Nasiritousi","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The existence of silos across governance levels and sectors has been identified as a key barrier to effective governance toward sustainability transformations. Climate policy remains siloed between ministries, sectors, political cycles, and governance levels. While previous literature suggests ways to overcome such silos through top-down political steering and institutional reforms, this paper asks whether silos could be bridged through alternative and more indirect means. Specifically, we examine perceptions of EU-level officials on whether a research- and innovation-rooted initiative like the EU Cities Mission can overcome silos in EU governance to advance effective climate governance at the local level. The mission approach is grounded in research and innovation, but it also seeks to foster coordination and collaboration to produce ambitious outcomes. This gives rise to the question of whether such an approach can overcome silos and advance systemic problem-solving. The paper conceptualises the EU Cities Mission as a case of experimentalist governance and examines how policy officials and experts understand the role of the EU Cities Mission and its contribution to silo bridging strategies. Specifically, the paper highlights the use of normative and relational mechanisms, including tools such as shared ideas and visions, policy integration, leadership, and institutional arrangements. Through an interview study with 19 representatives of the Cities Mission governing bodies and experts, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of the opportunities and limits of mission-oriented innovation policy in enabling silo bridging towards more integrated climate governance in the EU.</p>","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70048","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148994268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Through the Looking Glass: Uncovering the EU's Gendered Foreign Policy to Afghanistan","authors":"Luís Matos","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Afghanistan has consistently ranked among the most challenging contexts for the promotion of women's rights. This situation has intensified with the Taliban's return to power in August 2021 and the subsequent consolidation of what has been termed a system of gender apartheid. For the European Union, Afghanistan serves as a litmus test of its external gender policy commitments. One in which the gap between normative ambition and operational reality has been put under scrutiny. This article examines how the EU's engagement with women's rights in Afghanistan has been reconfigured across two structurally distinct phases: January 2014–August 2021 and September 2021–April 2024. Relying on a mixed-methods approach which combines project-level data, institutional document analysis, and elite interviews, complemented theoretically by Feminist Institutionalism and Woodward's (2009) feminist triangle framework, the article argues that the Taliban's return constituted a critical juncture that fundamentally altered the institutional opportunity structure within which EU gender policy operates. Prior to 2021, gender considerations were formally integrated but, for the most part, subordinated to a US-led securitisation and state-building rationale, with gender mainstreaming reduced to a procedural exercise devoid of transformative potential. The post-2021 period has produced a measurable and qualitatively significant recalibration. Humanitarian funding increased considerably, a greater proportion of EU-supported initiatives directly targeted women's empowerment, and the discursive framing of EU engagement shifted from stability-oriented development cooperation to an explicit prioritisation of women's rights. The article further identifies the emergence of a fourth phase of EU engagement characterised by de facto supranationalism, in which the withdrawal of US and NATO strategic dominance created institutional space for a distinctive EU articulation. The article concludes by refining the feminist triangle framework in two respects. First, it demonstrates that the presence of a feminist triangle is a necessary but not sufficient condition for feminist policy outcomes. Second, numerical representation within EU institutions must be differentiated from substantive feminist commitments. While a post-2021 recalibration is visible, it remains constrained by structural perpetuance in aid architecture and accountability mechanisms, ultimately reflecting a degree of political convenience, i.e., the consensual recognition of a gender apartheid in the country, that prevents generalisation to other external action contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70047","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deterrence, Development, and Denial: Securitising Climate-Induced Mobility in the European Union","authors":"Manasa Bollempalli","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70044","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Climate-induced mobility poses a mounting governance challenge for the European Union (EU), where climate action, migration control, and security policy intersect in uneven and contested ways. While EU discourse frequently frames climate change as a “threat multiplier,” migration governance remains anchored in deterrence logics, producing a structural gap in protection for environmentally displaced populations. This paper examines how the EU conceptualises and operationalises the climate–migration nexus through a novel comparative securitisation framework, document analysis and expert interviews. It identifies three securitisation logics, positive (humanitarian–development framing), hybrid (development–deterrence overlap), and negative (deterrence and externalisation), applied across four policy instruments, the European Green Deal (EGD), the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), the Deterrence Policy Package (DPP), and non-harmonised Member State protection measures. Despite their divergent rationales, these logics converge on three analytically distinct yet structurally equivalent pathways of exclusion, viz., exclusion by omission, exclusion by development–deterrence overlap, and exclusion by deterrence and externalisation. The paper argues that this convergence is produced by two cross-domain mechanisms, viz., governance fragmentation between EU climate and migration institutions, and a shared discursive tendency to constitute climate-displaced persons as objects of risk management rather than rights-bearing subjects. It concludes by outlining pathways for integrating climate displacement into EU legal and policy frameworks, including harmonised protection categories, funding realignment, and cross-DG coordination.</p>","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70044","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148386367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The European Political Parties and the Strategic Agenda 2024–2029: A (Party) Political Convergence?","authors":"Diogo Ferreira","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70045","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The European Union's Strategic Agenda establishes the EU's priorities and its strategic orientations for the next institutional cycle. Before setting the Strategic Agenda for 2024–2029, the European political parties have set their policy positions in the months before the 2024 European Parliament elections. However, European political parties do not determine the Strategic Agenda, but their preferences may be filtered through intergovernmental bargaining. As such, this research seeks to understand if the Strategic Agenda, while under the influence of collective intergovernmental bargaining, reflects the preferences of major political forces within the EU. By analysing the convergence between party manifestos of the EPP, PES, ALDE and ECR with the Strategic Agenda's policy issues, results suggest the existence of selective convergence. Strategic-partisan alignment is highest in less contested domains, such as external relations and economic competitiveness, while issue salience shows strong convergence with mainstream political families such as EPP and lower for ideologically peripheral actors like the ECR.</p>","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70045","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148343065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Addressing the Polycrisis With the Same Logic That Created It? A Critical Analysis of Sustainability Discourses in the EU Strategic Agendas Between 2014 and 2024","authors":"Viktor Lovén","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines how the EU frames problems and solutions regarding the current interconnected crises of climate change, inequality and other social, economic and environmental problems. The EU's main strategic priorities are summarised in the EU Strategic Agenda, but the latest agenda was published in 2024 and has not yet been sufficiently examined or compared with its predecessors. Therefore, this article analyses the assumptions and discourses that underpin the agendas of 2014–2019, 2019–2024 and 2024–2029. It offers a critical discourse analysis informed by the sustainability trilemma and postcolonial intersectionality as a theoretical and interpretive framework, and guided by the following research question: How have sustainability discourses in the EU Strategic Agenda developed between 2014 and 2024? The analysis interprets the sustainability discourses in all agendas to be underpinned by neoliberalism, Eurocentrism, anthropocentrism and geopolitical realism, which point to an overarching logic of competition, separation and social, economic and environmental hierarchies. The agendas appear to paradoxically address the polycrisis by using tools and strategies that are underpinned by the same logic and basic assumptions that may have caused the polycrisis in the first place.</p>","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70043","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148282126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Democratisation By Default? Change and Continuity of Poland's Contemporary Democracy Promotion in Its Eastern Neighbourhood","authors":"Wicke van den Broek,&nbsp;He/him","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70042","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Following a breakdown in the post-1989 liberal consensus that governed Polish democracy promotion in its eastern neighbours under Law and Justice's term from 2015, we can expect policy changes to Polish democracy promotion. Paying tribute to historical explanations of Poland's democracy promotion, this article links the historical legacies of the Giedroyć-Mieroszewski doctrine and the Solidarity trade union to 21st-century democracy promotion. It shows how change and continuity are not only related to current events, but to longitudinal tenacity of ideas and historical legacy. Both legacies create the boundaries of change from one government to the next and provide the ideological differentiation for present-day policy change.</p>","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70042","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Administrative Europeanisation of Local Governments: A Matter of Mainstreaming","authors":"Hans Vollaard,&nbsp;Marij Swinkels,&nbsp;Lucia Feiters,&nbsp;Harmen Binnema,&nbsp;Lisanne de Blok","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70038","url":null,"abstract":"<p>European integration poses multiple challenges for local governments, including the implementation of EU law and the free movement of businesses and labour migrants. In this article, we develop a novel understanding of local administrative Europeanisation, defined as the organisational adaptation of local governments to European integration. Existing studies tend to examine organisational aspects—such as the presence of an EU unit—in isolation, without offering a comprehensive conceptualisation of how these aspects are interrelated. Moreover, local governments' Europeanisation is often categorised using Peter John's ladder, which ranges from EU law implementation to lobbying at the EU level. Empirical research shows, however, that local administrative Europeanisation does not necessarily proceed along these sequential rungs. Responding to calls in the Europeanisation literature for the use of general concepts and theories, we conceptualise local administrative Europeanisation as a process of mainstreaming—that is, the integration and normalisation of European issues across relevant policies, actors and governing practices. We identify the interrelated components of mainstreaming that capture its extent, including knowledge and framing of Europe, strategic choices regarding adaptation to European integration and organisational capacities to embed the European dimension of politics and policies throughout the entire administration. Building on these components, we propose a new categorisation of local governments' administrative Europeanisation based on phases of mainstreaming, ranging from ad hoc responses to European integration to treating Europe as a self-evident and integral part of local policies and governing practices. The seemingly erratic patterns of local Europeanisation identified by the ladder approach can be better understood by focusing on the underlying organisational logic of mainstreaming. Local administrative Europeanisation can thus be examined more comprehensively and accurately as a matter of mainstreaming.</p>","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70038","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148167067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rethinking Subnational Europeanisation: Relational Agency in the EU's Multilevel System","authors":"Donat Elisabeth,&nbsp;Simon Lenhart","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70039","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Recent geopolitical upheavals have rightly focused the attention of politicians, researchers and media on global dynamics. At the same time, there is unrest within many European democracies, with populism and destructive Euroscepticism threatening European and (sub)national decision-makers in day-to-day politics and elections. A recent study by the German Social Science Center WZB finds that the political ‘firewall’ against the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland remains largely intact at the subnational level, while simultaneously cautioning that democracies tend to ‘die’ from below, as antidemocratic movements have historically originated at the local level (Schroeder et al. &lt;span&gt;2025&lt;/span&gt;). Europeanisation can play a variety of roles in this context: in the past, the EU has been seen as a lever for achieving autonomy (Massetti &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;; Massetti and Schakel &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;; Sanjaume-Calvet et al. &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;); it has also been (and continues to be) viewed as a means to an end (Huggins &lt;span&gt;2018a&lt;/span&gt;), a way of financing regional and local projects that are not always in line with fundamental democratic values (Dąbrowski &lt;span&gt;2012&lt;/span&gt;; Medve-Bálint and Svensson &lt;span&gt;2013&lt;/span&gt;; Pajvančić-Cizelj and Jano &lt;span&gt;2025&lt;/span&gt;), and much more. The subnational level is thus one important element in the backbone of contemporary democracies in Europe, providing early information on how democracies are developing, and it should therefore be scrutinised on a regular basis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this context, the specific role of European integration in shaping subnational political dynamics and their societal implications deserves closer attention. The European Union has enhanced cross-border activities and networking at the subnational level through its political framework and financial support, and it has thus given an additional ‘boost’ to Europeanisation (Gänzle et al. &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;; Medeiros &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;). This ‘push factor’, consisting in the engagement of the EU in legal and financial terms, may be considered one important discriminant of Europeanisation from other relevant developments like globalisation. In this sense, Europeanisation can be understood as the impact of and reaction to the influence of European integration at the various societal and political levels (Trenz &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;). By ‘reaction’, we do not simply mean the mechanisms of adaptation to the new rules, modes of funding and laws (Graziano and Vink &lt;span&gt;2008&lt;/span&gt;; Olsen &lt;span&gt;2002&lt;/span&gt;) but rather refer to the active interpretation and forming of these new standards.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This Special Issue conceptualises Europeanisation at the subnational level as a relational and interpretative process in which actors' agency emerges from continuously shifting multilevel contexts rather than from static structures or networks. This perspective advances existing approaches by broadening their explanatory scope, especially in contexts of conteste","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70039","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Regulatory Power Beyond the Brussels Effect—How Data Localisation Requirements Restructure Global Cloud-Infrastructures","authors":"Laura Meyer","doi":"10.1002/cep4.70041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cep4.70041","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The regulatory power of the European Union (EU) is commonly conceptualised as its capacity to externalise its regulations into other jurisdictions, a form of influence widely referred to as the Brussels effect. Yet, within the digital economy, scholars observe a departure from global regulatory convergence toward patterns of competition, conflict, and divergence. These developments raise the question of how changing global conditions affect the nature and scope of the EU's regulatory power in the digital economy. This paper argues that regulatory divergence foregrounds another, less explored aspect of the EU's regulatory power: its structural dimension. It contends that the global influence of European regulations not only operates through regulatory diffusion, but that regulations can also function as instruments of structural power that reshape global (infra)structural networks underpinning the digital economy. These (infra)structural changes, in turn, affect global power dynamics conditioned by those very structures. The argument builds on a two-dimensional understanding of structural power that bridges the power operating through structures and the power to shape those very structures. The paper illustrates the structural dimension of the regulatory power of the EU through an exploratory case study in the cloud sector, where European data localisation requirements trigger a market mechanism, labelled here as the ‘pull-in effect’. This mechanism restructures the topography of global infrastructure networks by provoking the establishment of ‘sovereign’ cloud capacities in the EU. By influencing the spatial architecture of these cloud infrastructures, European regulations affect global power dynamics in the data economy by mitigating strategic vulnerabilities arising from asymmetrical interdependence. The paper aims to contribute to scholarly discussions concerned with the consequences of regulatory convergence in the digital economy, changing (infra-)structural dynamics, and the geoeconomic turn of the EU.</p>","PeriodicalId":100329,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European Politics","volume":"4 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cep4.70041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148173773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}