Search Results

Chapter 3 draws on the perspective towards the local level developed in chapter 2 and discusses how local responses to EU policies tools can be grasped conceptually. By building particularly on the political-science Europeanisation literature and on sociological field approaches, a specific bottom-up perspective will be presented which puts analytical emphasis on the local contextual conditions. The main argument is that local contexts shape the way how actors respond to the ESF as a financial opportunity, and how this shapes local labour market policies. The Europeanisation literature and the field approach provide the background for the development of conditional hypotheses to be tested empirically in later chapters.

Chapter 4 explores the mechanisms through which political actors in positions of power can be influenced to dismantle unjust decision-making and legal structures from which they benefit. It is argued that when such actors are hostile towards principled reform and have the ability to withstand democratic challenges to their privileged position, a combination of civil disobedience and intervention by actors external to the society is required to compel them out of their intransigence. The chapter presents conditionality and transnational networking as practical expressions of this mode of structural change and considers how these practices can inform future efforts at principled reform.

The chapter introduces Habermas's key concepts for a communicative ethics and sets out the relevant debates surrounding his theory of communicative action and discourse ethics. It then looks at a variety of critical interventions which have contributed to reformulations of discourse ethics and how these themes have played out in the application of Habermasian theory to IR. Exploring the conversation between Habermas and those who have adopted and critiqued his theoretical position within IR serves to frame the wider debates concerning Habermas's project and sets out a number of key concerns with his approach. These concerns clarify why communicative ethics as it is developed in this book cannot simply map onto Habermas's own theoretical position. The chapter begins to articulate an alternative conception of communicative ethics which takes inspiration from but is not synonymous to Habermas's position.

The twenty-first century European Union proclaims its respect for fundamental rights. Indeed, in an era of concern for human rights, it would seem strange if the European Union (EU) did not engage with them. Yet, the EU’s concern for fundamental rights has at least two very different historical sources. First, the Internal Market project has always lain at the heart of the Union and it requires the removal of national obstacles to integration—even possibly those predicated upon fundamental rights. Consequently, the EU’s own focus on fundamental rights constitutes a response to the thinly veiled threat of national courts invoking their own human rights standards to review EU law. On the other hand, the second source relates to the Union’s earliest days, as the Coal and Steel Community and later the European Economic Community (EEC), and as a clear response to the horrors of the early/mid-twentieth century. The objective from the outset was to stop yet another deadly, destructive war in Europe. As Klaus Günther has written, ‘We realise that the European history of human rights is written in blood. And it goes on …’. But perpetual peace in Europe did not merely entail economic integration as an end to conflict—it