EPC Special Collection. Juncker’s Investment Package: essential background reading, 27 November 2014. Collection of papers recently published by the European Policy Centre reflecting on current social, political and economic affairs

This special collection combines the latest publications written by our experts on Europe's investment future. In chronological order, this package follows the developments of how European investment has been dealt with, and what would be needed to make for a more ambitious plan.

Challenges and new beginnings: Priorities for the EU’s new leadership. EPC Challenge Europe Issue 22, September 2014

THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS A COLLECTION OF ARTICLES WHICH ARE AVAILABLE ON THE ARCHIVE AS SEPARATE ARTICLES. There has been a lot of attention on the current transition of power taking place in Brussels. The new EU leadership will be confronted with a number of internal and external challenges. They will have deal with economic stagnation, the negative effects of fragmentation and the need to increase the Union's legitimacy. There is no better moment to take stock of the ‘state of the Union’ and to look ahead into the next European political cycle (2014-2019), focusing not on personalities but on content: what challenges do we face and what should the EU focus on in the coming years? These new beginnings will encounter new challenges, and who better understands the issues than some of the key players in European politics. Challenge Europe brings these players together and explores what social, political and economic challenges are facing Europe, and its’ citizens.

One country, two societies? Germany twenty years after reunification. OSW Study 35/2011

3 October 2010 marked the twentieth anniversary of the reunification of the two German states. This is an occasion for summing up and evaluating the changes which have taken place in Germany since 1990. Germany became reunited through the incorporation of the East German federal states to the then Federal Republic of Germany. The West German point of view is predominant in public discourse regarding this issue, which is manifested through grading the new federal states for their progress in assimilation to the western part of Germany. However, this way the positive changes which have taken place in the social, political and economic areas in the eastern federal states over the past two decades are often disregarded. This paper is an attempt to show the changes which have taken place in Germany, involving areas in which new federal states have outperformed the western part of the country.

The International Conference Education and Creativity for a Knowledge–based Society – Social and Political Scinces, Communication, Foreign Languages and Public Relations. Vienna, Osterreichish Rumanischer Akademischer Verein, 2012. VIth edition

No abstract.

EPC Special Collection: Moldavan Elections, 29 November 2014. Collection of papers recently published by the European Policy Centre on the economic, social and political situation in Moldova

In time for the Moldovan elections on 30 November, this special collection combines the latest publications written by EPC experts and partner organisations on Moldova to provide the essential background reading to the Moldova-EU-Russia nexus. This package covers issues from trade exports, to elections, to the geostrategic position of Moldova.

Bundeswehr 3.0: The political, military and social dimensions of the reform of the German armed forces. OSW Point of View Number 28, May 2012

This reform of the Bundeswehr, launched in 2011, is the latest of the three decisive stages in the post-war transformation of the German armed forces. The reform aims at “constructing” the armed forces anew in the political, military and social dimensions.The present paper presents the evolution of the role of the armed forces in German foreign and security policy and the ongoing process of “constructing” a new Bundeswehr. It analyses the process of redefining the objectives and principles of: the Bundeswehr’s participation in international operations, its current military transformation, and changes in its image and social identity. It also presents the implications of this broader transformation for political and military.

Integrating Europeans: The Political Economy and Social Aspects of Europeanization. ACES Working Papers (Curriculum Development), 2012

This course, then, investigates the effects of integration on European citizens as well as the duality of the EU as a competitive and social model. It is sensitive to the involvement of social groups, protest, and domestic politics in the study of market integration. Some of the questions we explore are: What are the effects of regulatory policy-making on social actors, how do such actors’ strategies and behaviors change as a consequence, and how to they overcome their collective action problems? Why is it that the logic of integration has at times followed a logic of “permissive consensus” while at other times it has been described as a “constraining dissensus”? What is the importance of discourse in domestic politics in order to articulate and legitimate Europeanization? How do European identities change as a consequence of policymaking as well as of protest? To what extent do ordinary Europeans matter in terms of accepting and opposing the project of European integration, how do European citizens in core and peripheral EU states experience Europeanization, and how is their involvement in the integration project to be conceptualized?

Promoting the agenda for a social Economic and Monetary Union: Attention, credibility and coalition-building. Bruges Political Research Paper No. 37, November 2014

In the aftermath of the crisis, new instruments of economic governance have been adopted at the EU level. Until recently, these have been strongly dominated by what I assume to be the ECFIN coalition. However, at least since 2011, this coalition’s supremacy has been challenged by the competing coalition’s (EPSCO) willingness to rebalance the economic governance so that social concerns are better taken into account. Hence, drawing on the agenda-setting literature in the EU context, this working paper aims at retracing the process that has led to put this issue of the social dimension of the EMU on to the EU political agenda. Three hypotheses are made concerning the rise of this issue, the strategies employed by agenda-setters, and the policy subsystem of the economic governance. First, this study shows that the interest in this issue has been gradually fostered ‘from below’, at the level of the European Parliament and the European Commission. Second, due to its ‘high politics’ nature, this issue could only be initiated ‘from above’ (European Council) and then expanded to lower levels of decision-making (Commission). Specifically, DG EMPL has managed to attract attention to this issue and to build its credibility in dealing with it by strategically framing the issue and directing it towards the EPSCO venue. Finally, I analyze the outcome of this agenda-setting process by assessing to what extent the two new social scoreboards which form part of this social dimension have been taken into account during the 2014 European semester. The result of this analysis is that the new economic governance has not been genuinely rebalanced insofar as its dominant policy core remains that of the ECFIN coalition.