Advice for Boris Johnson: don’t take the EU on in lawfare

The UK government has admitted it intends to break international law, thereby adopting a ‘mad man’ rollercoaster strategy for the end phase of the Brexit negotiations. However, Brigid Laffan‘s advice for Boris Johnson is: don’t take the EU on in Lawfare

Collective power Europe? : (the government and opposition/Leonard Schapiro lecture 2022)

Published online: 13 February 2023Since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, the EU has been tested and contested as it struggled to come to terms with a series of crises, sometimes labelled a polycrisis. In response to crises, the EU has emerged as a collective power and the concept ‘Collective Power Europe’ (CPE) offers a promising lens with which to analyse the 21st-century European Union and the nature of the polity that is emerging. The aim of this article is to unpack the concept of CPE and to analyse its core features – collective leadership and framing, institutional coordination and the evolving policy toolkit – in response to three crises: Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2023-2025)

The Next European Century? Europe in Global Politics in the Twenty-First Century

This article addresses the key challenges facing Europe in the face of the fraying of the World Order that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. It identifies four issues that may disrupt the multilateral world order – the rise of China, disruption to the trans-Atlantic relationship, the challenge of Russia and climate change. It concludes by highlighting EU efforts to respond to this challenge and questions whether these are a case of failing forward, failing better or the growing pains of a new strategic actor.

Brexit : what role did process play?

First published online: 29 April 2022The outcome of the UK referendum on 23 June 2016 was a major political event in the history of European integration. A member state voted for exit over voice and was on a journey to third country status. The objective of this article is twofold. First, it analyses the EU’s response to Brexit, including the role of process, up to the departure of the UK from the Union on 31 January 2020. Second, it explains why the EU adopted the approach that it did. The analytical lens builds on Kooiman's three governing orders, all of which were deployed in managing Brexit.This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - Wiley Transformative Agreement (2020-2023

Divergence via Europeanisation: rethinking the origins of the Portuguese debt crisis

A founding myth of the euro was that profound economic convergence could be achieved across the core and periphery of Europe. Scholarship from within Comparative Political Economy (CPE) has compellingly pointed to this myth of convergence as the fundamental mistake of the euro project (Regan, “Imbalance of Capitalisms”). Economic and Monetary Union was applied across a range of incompatible varieties of capitalism with little appreciation for how difficult it would be for peripheral economies to overcome long-standing institutional stickiness. Yet, while institutional stickiness tells us much about the causes of declining competitiveness, it tells us much less about the origins of brand new patterns of debt-led growth. This article modifies this CPE account by drawing attention to the much overlooked case of Portugal. In contrast to CPE’s emphasis on institutional stickiness, this paper explores the ways in which negotiation of European integration has been generative of institutional transformation leading to debt-led growth in Portugal. By combining Europeanisation with CPE, this article shows that, far from an inability to do so, in the case of Portugal, it has been the attempt to ‘follow the rules’ of European Integration that explains its damaging patterns of debt-led growth