A history of post-communist remembrance: from memory politics to the emergence of a field of anticommunism

This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian “collective memory” of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but cannot be treated as epiphenomenal to their propagation. The diffusion of bodies tasked with establishing the “true” history of communism reflects, first and foremost, a shift in the region’s approach to its past, one driven by the right’s frustration over an allegedly pervasive influence of former communist cliques. Memory institutes spread as the CEE right progressively perceives their emphasis on research and public education as a safer alternative to botched lustration processes. However, the field of anticommunism extends beyond diffusion by seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticommunist narratives. This results in an entirely different challenge, which requires reconciling of disparate ideological and national interests. In this article, I illustrate some of these nationally diverse, but internationally converging, trajectories of communist extrication from the vantage point of its main exponents: the anticommunist memory entrepreneurs, who are invariably found at the helm of memory institutes. Inhabiting the space around the political, historiographic, and Eurocratic fields, anticommunist entrepreneurs weave a complex web of alliances that ultimately help produce an autonomous field of anticommunism

Turkey and the European Union: the implications of a specific enlargement. Egmont European Affairs Paper, April 2006

Turkey has been an associate member of the EU since 1963 and an official candidate to EU membership since 1999. The European Council of December 2004 finally scheduled to open negotiations in view of Turkish accession to the EU on 3rd October 20052. The December decision provoked intense reactions all across political forces as well as among European citizens. The debate over Turkey’s accession has been a far more intense one than that which surrounded the start of negotiations with the accession countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs) in 1998. Irrational reactions from the public opinion in EU Members States – or real response to the specificities of the Turkish enlargement? After presenting a brief history of the EU-Turkish relationship (§1) and examining whether the Turkish enlargement bears either political, economic, geopolitical or cultural particularities (§ 2), this paper explores the grounds on which the European Commission recommended the opening of the negotiations (§ 3). Finally, in light of the specificities of the Turkish enlargement highlighted in part 2, the implications of the Council Decision to open negotiations in view of Turkey’s accession to the EU are discussed (§ 4)

The construction process of EU cultural policy : explaining Europeanisaton and EU policy formation

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Dynamic Multi-Level Governance – Bringing the Study of Multi-level Interactions into the Theorising of European Integration

This article aims to fill a gap in the theoretical literature on European integration by providing a dynamic and multi-level explanatory framework of the dynamics of European integration – defined as the locus of governance shifts from the national to the European level. While with the development of governance approaches, the multi-actorness of the EU has been taken into account, the objective of understanding how interactions between different actors explain dynamics of integration has been abandoned. Thus, the article shows that by focusing on dynamic patterns of interaction between subnational, state and supranational actors, some core dynamics of the European integration process can be better captured. A dynamic and multi-level model of interaction, termed ‘reversed intergovernmentalism’, is proposed here. The model posits that governments’ intervention at the EU level often takes place as a reaction to developments orchestrated by Community institutions, but that, through their reaction, states in turn foster both the process of integration and another form of EU intervention in such a way that the very nature of EU integration can also divert from initial EU agendas. Setting itself against existing theories of European integration, the argument shows that integration dynamics can only be fully understood within a process of interaction and reciprocal feedback between actors at different levels of governance.integration theory; neo-functionalism; intergovernmentalism; multilevel governance; negative integration; positive integration; social policy; political science

The Politics of Values in EU Governance. Occurrences, Effects and Modes of Regulation of Values

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Evaluation and simulation: Producing evidence in the global politics of social cash transfers

Berten J. Evaluation and simulation: Producing evidence in the global politics of social cash transfers. In: Littoz-Monnet A, ed. The politics of expertise in international organizations. How international bureaucracies produce and mobilize knowledge. New York: Routledge; 2017: 148-166