Theorizing Precommitment in European Integration: Mending the Constraints of Ulysses

The paper engages with the debate on Europe’s prospects by using Elster’s constraint theory to develop a model of precommitment in a context of diffuse reciprocity as a condition for interactive Europeanization. The current crisis constitutes a juncture in EU development, calling for a reassessment of the established views on Europe’s experiment. Europeanization emerges as a critical field for testing integration. The paper suggests a framework for the analysis of Europeanization which rests on two approaches: (a) the evolution of mixed and diffuse reciprocity (‘beyond tit-for-tat’) and (b) the development of precommitment and selfimposed constraints (‘Ulysses and the sirens’). It is argued that, given enormous challenges for the consolidation of precommitmnent due to a combination of economic strains and political gaps in steering, further evolution of advanced forms of reciprocity in Europe would require new goals, enhanced normative and value contents and increased political and normative scope for the constraints of Ulysses. This reassessment may bring European political traditions such as republicanism back in to the search for appropriate political, analytic, and normative prisms

Introduction: A Crisis of Stateness and a Challenge to Political Participation

Since 2009 Greece has undergone a process of change, involving a far-reaching metamorphosis in some areas, an acute crisis and tremendous depletion of resources in others, and many instances of successful resistance by die-hard supporters of the old ways. This collection of essays on Greeks politics and policy aims to focus more on the development of processes and institutions. It addresses (mostly directly, on occasion also indirectly) issues of policy change and - more generally - of stateness in crisis. In 'stateness' political scientists and international relations experts recognize a concept that has actually travelled a lot since it was first introduced in its modern incarnation in the 1960s by Nettl in a rightly famous article on "stateness as a conceptual variable" (Nettl, 1968), and was taken over more recently by scholars like Fukuyama. Stateness is again, as it used to be in the past, a fascinating concept with which to approach the problems in today's Europe; it is a concept that involves a combination of a number of different dimensions of actual state practice and state behavior. It involves the proactive, the coercive, as well as infrastructural aspects of states’ existence and behavior and the main question therefore is: what has the European integration project done to stateness - what is the impact of EU integration on stateness? Not just on particular states, say on France or Germany or Italy or Greece but on stateness as such in today's Union (see Lavdas 2015 and the references therein)

Räume der Übertragung: Die neue transnationale Politik der säkularen Stagnation

This paper reevaluates recent work on deterritorialization in so far as it relates to transnationalization and the emergence of new forms of nomadic politics. Place has been crucial in the formation of social relationships, the interactive construction of political identities and the emergence of a public sphere. Contemporary forms of deterritorialization tend to disrupt two fundamental conceptions of the modern understanding of democratic politics: the fellowship of citizens and the fiduciary nature of the relationship between political power and those represented. Building on Kevin Cox’s distinction between spaces of dependence and spaces of engagement, the paper argues that spaces of transference emerge as a vital component of today’s political relating. Scale becomes important in the spaces of transference: the shifting of attitudes and emotions involves larger spaces and ever more distant templates

Räume der Übertragung: Die neue transnationale Politik der säkularen Stagnation

This paper reevaluates recent work on deterritorialization in so far as it relates to transnationalization and the emergence of new forms of nomadic politics. Place has been crucial in the formation of social relationships, the interactive construction of political identities and the emergence of a public sphere. Contemporary forms of deterritorialization tend to disrupt two fundamental conceptions of the modern understanding of democratic politics: the fellowship of citizens and the fiduciary nature of the relationship between political power and those represented. Building on Kevin Cox’s distinction between spaces of dependence and spaces of engagement, the paper argues that spaces of transference emerge as a vital component of today’s political relating. Scale becomes important in the spaces of transference: the shifting of attitudes and emotions involves larger spaces and ever more distant templates

From authoritarianism to Europeanization? Paths to a contestable European future in Greece and Poland

The paper aims to explore Europeanization paths, outcomes and prospects in Greece and Poland, focusing on comparative interactions between regime transformation, interest politics and accession processes. The interactions in question involve (a) influences of politics, institutional traditions and interests on the formation of the applicant states’ European strategy and (b) interactions between processes of integration and organized interests and domestic political contestation. Interactions work in the context of more general Europeanization processes, which concern adaptation, adjustment, impact and feedback, beginning in anticipation of membership and expanding to more synchronized if still asymmetrical developments during later stages of full membership. Different paths from authoritarianism to democracy have combined with different Europeanization processes to result in partial divergence in Europeanization outcomes