Light and shadows in Europe’s new Action Plan for Capital Markets Union. ECMI Commentary No. 40/5 October 2015

The European Commission’s Action Plan consists, in a nutshell, of a short list of technical proposals and a longer one of (rather general) potential actions. Overall, the plan indeed proposes to achieve some short-term objectives, such as a reduction of listing costs for SMEs, but it lacks long-term vision. The plan bundles actions under rather generic objectives of long-term finance or cross-border investing. Improving the informational infrastructure (e.g. accounting standards, company data) and cross-border enforcement of rules is left to vaguely defined future actions, but these constitute the core of the capital markets infrastructure. Without a well-defined set of measurable objectives, the whole plan may lose political momentum and become an opportunity for interested parties to cherry pick their pet provisions. Building a single market, i.e. removing cross-border obstacles to capital circulation, is too challenging a task to simply appear as one of many items on a long list of general objectives, which incidentally do not include institutional reform. The ultimate risk is that the Commission may just miss a unique opportunity to revamp and improve the financial integration process in Europe after almost a decade of harmful financial retrenchment.

Trends and gaps in the academic literature on EU labour migration policies. CEPS Paper in Liberty and Security No. 50/December 2012

This paper provides an overview of the ‘state of the art’ in the academic literature on EU labour migration policies. It forms part of the research agenda of Work Package 18 of the NEUJOBS project, which aims at reviewing legislation and practices regarding the labour market inclusion and protection of rights of different categories of foreign workers in European labour markets. Accordingly, particular attention is paid to the works of scholars who evaluate the status of rights of third-country national workers in relation to labour market access, employment security, social integration, etc., in European legislation on labour immigration. More specifically, the review has selected those scholarly works that focus specifically on analysing the manner in which policy-makers have addressed the granting of rights to non-EU migrant workers, and the manner in which policy agendas – through the relevant political and institutional dynamics – have found their translation in the legislation adopted. This paper consists of two core parts. In the first section, it reviews the works of scholars who have touched on these research questions with respect to the internal dimensions of EU labour migration policies. The second section does the same for the external dimensions of these policies. Both sections start off by analysing the main trends in the literature that reviews these questions for the internal and external dimensions of European migration policies as a whole, and then move on to how these ‘trends’ can (or cannot) be found translated in scholarly writings on labour migration policies more specifically. In the final section, the paper concludes by summarising the main trends and gaps in the literature reviewed, and indicates avenues for further research.

The Criminalisation of Migration in Europe: A State-of-the-Art of the Academic Literature and Research. CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe No. 61, October 2013

In the last 30 years, a clear trend has come to define modern immigration law and policy. A set of seemingly disparate developments concerning the constant reinforcement of border controls, tightening of conditions of entry, expanding capacities for detention and deportation and the proliferation of criminal sanctions for migration offences, accompanied by an anxiety on the part of the press, public and political establishment regarding migrant criminality can now be seen to form a definitive shift in the European Union towards the so-called ‘criminalisation of migration’. This paper aims to provide an overview of the ‘state-of-the-art’ in the academic literature and EU research on criminalisation of migration in Europe. It analyses three key manifestations of the so-called ‘crimmigration’ trend: discursive criminalisation; the use of criminal law for migration management; and immigrant detention, focusing both on developments in domestic legislation of EU member states but also the increasing conflation of mobility, crime and security which has accompanied EU integration. By identifying the trends, synergies and gaps in the scholarly approaches dealing with the criminalisation of migration, the paper seeks to provide a framework for on-going research under Work Package 8 of the FIDUCIA project.

Multilateral Interchange Fees: Competition and regulation in light of recent legislative developments. ECRI Research Report No. 14, 31 January 2014

Two-sided payment card markets generate costs that have to be distributed among the participating actors. For this purpose, payment card networks set an interchange fee, which is the fee paid by the merchant’s bank to the cardholder’s bank per transaction. While in recent years many antitrust authorities all over the world - including the European Commission - have opened proceedings against card brands in order to verify whether agreements to collectively establish the level of interchange fees are anticompetitive, the Reserve Bank of Australia – as a regulator - has directly tried to address market failures by lowering the level of interchange fees and changing some network rules. The US has followed with new legislation on financial consumer protection, which also intervenes on interchange fees. This has opened a strong debate not only on legitimacy of interchange fees, but also on the appropriateness of different public tools to address such issues. Drawing from economic and legal theories and a comparative analysis of recent case law in the EU and other jurisdictions, this work investigates whether a regulation rather than a purely competition policy approach would be more appropriate in this field, considering in particular, at EU level, all of the competition and regulatory concerns that have arisen from the operation of SEPA with multilateral interchange fees. The paper concludes that a wider regulation approach could address some of the shortcomings of a purely antitrust approach, proving to be highly beneficial to the development of an efficient European single payments area.

"Europe-as-hegemony" and discourses in Turkey after 1999: Dialogue with the Europeanisation literature

It is not a prophecy to say that one of the most common concepts that those working on "Europe" would encounter at various points in different capacities would be "Europeanisation". This buzzword has also been crucial in understanding and explaining for Turkey's European orientation path, which acquired a new dimension and has been carried to a more substantive and institutional level with the Helsinki European Council in December 1999 when Turkey was granted formal candidacy status in its application to join the EU. Especially after this date, the concept of "Europeanisation" and the literature attached to it have almost automatically been employed to assess the relationship between Turkey and different aspects of European integration. For this aim, firstly, I present a tri-fold picture of the European studies. According to this categorisation, the studies dealing with the notion of „Europe‟ could be categorised into three groups: the studies which takes "Europe" as a fixed concept ("Europe-as-fixity"), those which subscribe to a notion of "Europe" solely as a construct ("Europe-as-construct") and the studies which take "Europe" as a contestation ("Europe-as-contestation"). After critically locating the Europeanisation literature within this categorisation, I argue that there is both a historical and epistemological need for the Europeanisation literature to address to the conflictual nature of the notion by focusing on how the discourses on "Europe" hegemonised the Turkish political terrain after 1999 and I introduce the notion of "Europe-as-hegemony". The overall argument is that the hegemony of "Europe" does not originate from the automaticity of the relationship between the European and domestic level as stipulated by the Europeanisation literature, but rather from the power of discourses on "Europe" and their ability to hegemonise the political realm. In this respect, this paper offers a novel approach to the Europeanisation literature with a particular focus on the Turkish context where the political is not only given and constructed but is also reflexive and open to contestation and negotiation.