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Browsing Articles by Subject "European Union"

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    Corporate Social Responsibility: A Promising Social Innovation or a Neoliberal Strategy in Disguise?
    (Romanian Journal of European Affairs, 2014) Savevska, Maja
    Since the Lisbon Summit the European Union has become resolute in its intention to promote the uptake of corporate social responsibility among European companies. The recent financial crisis has provided further impetus for evangelising CSR, which is identified by the EU public authorities as one exit strategy from the crisis and a promising means of fulfilling the Treaty objectives of inclusive and sustainable social market economy. This paper finds the above assertion problematic and uses a Polanyian framework to evaluate its validity. The paper represents a conceptual intervention in the policy justification provided by the European Commission. Contrary to the overly optimistic voices that see decommodifying tendencies within CSR, this paper claims that CSR does not have a potential to re-embed the economy as argued by the Commission. Despite its protective invocation, CSR is predicated on deepened commodification. It depends on the staging of a special type of exchange relation, whereby reputation is quantified and sold as a commodity by being denominated in a common unit. As such the CSR form promoted by the Commission is a microeconomic counterpart to the regime of rule-based macroeconomic depoliticisation.
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    EUROPEAN UNION MEMBERSHIP STATUS AND DECENTRALIZATION: A TOP-DOWN APPROACH
    (REGIONAL AND FEDERAL STUDIES, 2020) Chacha, Mwita
    Despite state resilience and the waning of the ‘Europe of the Regions’, European integration persists in affecting subnational actors. Subnational actors have maintained lobbying offices in Brussels to access European Union institutions while others have continued to organize around regionalist parties in the European Parliament. This study explores whether and how EU membership has influenced decentralization. I argue that states exposed to Europeanization, candidates and members of the EU, decentralize more compared to non-EU states. Quantitative tests using recent data on regional authority and three case studies of France, Poland, and Spain provide support for this argument. This article contributes to the research on Europeanization and multilevel governance by focusing on state-level motivations for decentralization. This study’s findings allude to the need of examining how other facets of European integration affect subnational actors and investigating variations in decentralization between EU member-states.
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    Polanyian Reading of the Socio-Economic Transformation of the European Union
    (Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2014) Savevska, Maja
    In an attempt to analyse the socio-economic transformations of the European Union, an increasing number of scholars have resorted to Polanyi's double movement thesis. In doing so, some scholars, by looking at the evidence of intensified marketisation of social relations, consider the EU disembedded; whereas others identify a re-embedding tendency in the recent surge of socio-environmental protection. The paper follows Lacher, Burawoy, Dale and Streeck's readings of Polanyi and argues that the exiting socio-environmental provisions do not re-embed the economy. Socio-environmental protection does not eclipse the neoliberal accumulation strategy which continues to propagate the disembedding tendency, because it fails to decommodify fictitious commodities. The EU is characterised by a heightened intensification of both disembedding and protective tendencies, which Polanyi contends is disruptive in nature. What emerges out of the dialectics between neoliberalisation and socio-environmental provisions is a decelerated rate of change, which, although it temporarily secures the habitation of man, prevents the inception of a synthesis that is capable of sublating the contradictions of the marketisation/protection binary. Moreover, we have a paradoxical situation wherein the socio-environmental measures, despite their protective invocation, are predicated on deepened commodification.