Spanish Presidency: Articles

This paper will address the main topics to be explored by the Spanish Presidency of the EU in the second semester of 2023 when it comes to relations with Latin America, and whether concrete achievements in this area may be reached given the EU’s current internal and external challenges. I argue that in order to succeed in fostering a ‘Qualitative Leap’ to EU-LAC relations, Spanish leadership will need to adjust their inter-regional ambitions according to not only the resistance of certain Member States and EU institutions to progress in certain themes and agreements with LAC countries, but also to the EU’s emerging policy priorities, such as the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, and the emerging of rivalry relations with China, which has become a top commercial partner for most of LAC countries. Three topics should be considered high priorities for EU-LAC relations during the Spanish Presidency: the conclusion of association and modernization agreements with key actors in the region, namely Chile, Mercosur and Mexico; the political, economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela; and the energy crisis and EU prospective partnerships with LAC in this area

Propuesta de 10 ejes para la Presidencia Española: 1. Globalización, desarrollo y gobernanza; 2. Retos a la paz y seguridad internacional; 3. Democracia, derechos y ciudadanía; 4. Clima y transición energética; 5. Tecnología y transformaciones económicas; 6. Futuro de Europa; 7. América Latina, actor global; 8. Auge de China, EEUU y nuevo orden mundial; 9. Retos y oportunidades de la vecindad; 10. Influencia e imagen de España

Experts from the TEPSA network present to the Spanish Presidency 3 detailed recommendations: “The Spanish Presidency should maintain momentum in EU enlargement”, by Frank Schimmelfennig;
“Reacting to economic challenges, striving for low-carbon industry”, by Michele Chang & Marco Siddi; and “New approaches and narratives to the relations between the EU and CELAC”, by Jakob Hallgren

América Latina ocupa un lugar central en la agenda de la presidencia española del Consejo de la UE. Este análisis se centra en sus objetivos y en cómo ellos pueden impulsar el relanzamiento de la relación birregional euro-latinoamericana.

Assessment of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union during the second half of 2023, analysing its strengths and weaknesses, and focusing on the challenges Spain faces in order to consolidate its influence in the European project.

For decades, the EU's trade policy has been centred around open(ing) markets. The paper argues that EU the open strategic autonomy has to be understood against the background of a changing global environment. The geopoliticization of trade in particular has changed the Commission's view about how to best serve European interests (and values) but also provided an opening for neo‐mercantilist and socially oriented actors to challenge Europe's embedded neoliberal compromise.

This policy brief has three aims: (1) to explain the lessons from the previous attempts in Europe at industrial policy; (2) the reasons for the current interest in reviving industrial policy in Europe; and (3) policy prescriptions for moving forward.

This report seeks to contribute to more clarity about: the interests and concerns that inform Europe’s quest for digital and technological sovereignty; and the instruments and policies that contribute to achieving these aims. It considers ways both to ‘promote’ Europe’s own capabilities and competitiveness, and to ‘protect’ citizens against the potentially adverse effects of dependencies.

This article examines the key pillars of the EU's open strategic autonomy with a focus on its foreign investment policy. It explores three dimensions the EU's investment policy: 1) the creation of the EU-wide FDI screening framework, 2) the proposal of new investigative and enforcement powers in relation to foreign investment subsidies, and 3) the proposal of new mechanisms to enforce EU values on sustainability, including human rights, environment and labour standards. The overarching objective is to unveil the forces at play in the making of EU investment policy and to interrogate the shifting attitudes towards trade and investment in times marked by geopolitical tensions and economic security concerns.

The article reviews the legal significance of the European Union's quest for "strategic autonomy" in its external relations. First the political origin of the term is recapped and a legal definition proposed. Second, the application thereof in the EU's common commercial policy is reviewed. Third, the Common Foreign and Security Policy is considered. The conclusion identifies a new defining moment for the European project through a remarkable legal push from intergovernmental to integrationist conduct in its external relations in the 2020s.

This article analyses the recent use of European Union (EU) terminology of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy, aiming to identify tensions between policy considerations of fundamental rights, free market principles and geopolitical concerns. These tensions are rooted in the disparity between the EU's considerable economic and regulatory power in digital matters and its limited mandate and capabilities in foreign policy. The article also explores the translation of the notions of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy into EU policy. It identifies three important trends in the geopoliticisation of the EU agenda on digital technologies: (1) the instrumental use of ‘classic’ internal market policies to exert geopolitical influence; (2) the imposition of foreign policy imperatives on national markets; and (3) new ‘hybrid’ digital policies that combine internal market concerns, fundamental rights and geopolitical concerns. Ultimately, digital sovereignty has inherent tensions with the EU's normative power in digital issues and may also result in a strategic cacophony.

In the coming years, the world order of exchange and multilateralism will lose power, and global institutions will find it increasingly difficult to fulfill their mission of balancing interests and promoting international cooperation and development. The EU is entering a new phase in which the rules of the internal market have to be adapted to respond to the new challenges of environmental sustainability and open strategic autonomy The paper argues that demanding "more Europe" as a response to crises is not enough to achieve real change that, as in the spirit of the Delors Plan, realises a new vision of Europe. Before investments can show their full impact at the European level and further political integration can be considered, requirements must be met in order to make Europe more attractive as a location for investment and to stimulate private and public investments.

This policy paper elaborates on the architecture of a European Sovereignty Fund (ESF), shedding light on the critical issue of funding such an initiative. It proposes an one-off levy on the excess profit in the energy sector. The ESF can be instrumental in identifying and financing strategic projects, including those in the Important Projects of Common European Interest list, that would make EU member-stated less dependable to supply-chains disruptions.

The European single market has been the primary reference point for the EU for more than 60 years. This last decade has radically changed this relationship; the impacts of globalisation call for a readjustment. In contrast, trade unions have been internationally oriented for over 100 years. The paper argues that trade unions need to play a global role in the emergent world order now more than ever.

USA legislation designed to support the decarbonization, spur green investment, and counter Chinese competition (and protectionism) is a historic step towards the United States' convergence with the values and priorities of Europe in terms of the green transition and tackling climate change. By reserving extremely favourable treatment for companies that relocate their investments to the US, it also poses a huge threat to the productive base and industrial competitiveness of the European Union. TheEU institutions are urgently elaborating various approaches with a view to formulating a joint EU response to this challenge. The text outline both the problem and the main features for a joint European industrial "Made in Europe" policy.

The EU’s open strategic autonomy agenda is quickly gathering pace, especially in the trade and industrial domain. There is an undeniable tension between the ‘open’ and ‘autonomous’ components of the agenda. Guaranteeing compatibility will require a careful balancing act, contingent on a coherent strategy not only for strengthening the EU’s strategic autonomy but also for fostering and preserving its openness. This policy brief offers suggestions for operationalising the ‘open’ component in the EU’s open strategic autonomy agenda

One dimension of strategic autonomy has been firmly decided upon since the EU created its Common Security and Defence Policy, the projection of military force outside the borders of the EU. The author is of the view that autonomy is a mindset, and he believes that those member states that share this mindset can create a set of permanent multinational formations, with national brigades, ships, and air squadrons as building-blocks.

The paper argues that Spanish perceptions of the European Union-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) are positive given its economic and normative prospects and its compatibility with Spain’s policy objectives. They also value that the agreement does not prevent greater cooperation with the United States, a key ally and more significant partner than China. Finally, the practical implications—and reception—of the agreement will depend of its implementation.

This article situates open strategic autonomy in the theoretical debates of international political economy literature on economic interdependence and geoeconomics to aid our understanding of the debates ensnaring economic strategy in the EU, but also related debates in the US, China and elsewhere. This framework, the article argues, helps us understand changing strategic priorities in economic policy by reference to wider structural shifts engulfing the global economy.

Depuis le début de la pandémie, les appels à réindustrialiser la France au nom du renforcement de la souveraineté se multiplient. Pourtant, l’évaluation de la dépendance de la France et les segments de marché dans lesquels il faut renforcer l’industrie pour atteindre ce but ne font pas consensus. La réindustrialisation de la France doit également s’articuler entre des ambitions européennes et des limites au regard des dépendances comme celle aux matières premières critiques.

The EU’s green transition started with the establishment of long-term goals but now requires short-term actions. The time frame for reaching the ambitious climate target is short in terms of undertaking a deep transformation but long enough to expect unforeseen events. The goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 55% on 2030 cannot be achieved without a thorough industrial and economic transformation. However, the funds available for the transformation are limited and diluted by more pressing immediate needs. In other words, Europe needs to reduce its emissions at a time of economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions and increasing energy pressures.

The UK and EU are beginning to secure supply of critical raw materials necessary for the twin transitions to a digital and net-zero economy. The paper concludes that diversifying supply chains and building resilience will require building partnerships and strengthening trade relations with key supplier countries. Both the UK and EU would benefit from closer coordination on the Critical Raw Materials Club.

In a context where the energy security of the EU is being significantly put at risk, notably by the war waged by Russia against Ukraine, and new reports ring the alarm about the threats of the acceleration of climate change, the European Green Deal is more relevant than ever. However, as the EU seeks to externalise the green transition to its Southern Neighbourhood, this report points to the many questions are yet to be answered.

In recent years, several proposals have emerged from the policy and academic spheres to address climate and energy-related public investment needs in the European Union with an EU-level instrument. This paper provides an analytical contribution to the discussion by examining the rationale for an EU Climate and Energy Security Fund, with a focus on its legal and institutional feasibility.

This policy study shows how and why social issues have increased in prominence during the parliamentary negotiations of the selected Fit for 55 package files, largely as a result of the changing economic and geopolitical circumstances as well as the growing impacts of the climate crisis

To implement the European Union (EU) Climate Law’s newly established 55% greenhouse gas reduction objective for 2030, the EU Commission suggests a wave of reforms to the European energy and climate legislation. The contribution aims to describe the EU Commission’s 16 initial legislative and strategic proposals regarding the major pillars of the European energy and climate legislation and intends to give an overview on the suggested reforms.

The transition from fossil fuels to fuels from renewable energy sources can lead to decentralisation of the energy systems, causing structural changes in economic and political relations between countries. This paper identifying 4 independent variables that, being aggregated, can support the complex process of transition to a new economy: energy consumption from fossil fuels, consumption of renewable energy, number of researchers involved in research and development and the value of domestic credit to the private sector.

Este trabajo examina NGEU y el Pacto Verde como elementos del relanzamiento del proyecto europeo, y de la respuesta societal de la UE a la crisis de la globalización. También se analiza cómo la invasión rusa en Ucrania ha inducido la convergencia de las metas del Pacto Verde en materia de energía con los imperativos de soberanía energética planteados por la aparición de una “Europa geopolítica”.

Decarbonising the world's energy system requires integrated and concise incentives to encourage citizens to participate actively in the energy transition. This article explores community-addressed practices within highly competitive energy projects of the Horizon 2020 framework programme. The findings illustrate and characterise disproportions in generalised practices directed to energy consumption reduction, low-carbon energy generation, social economy, policy and strategy actions. Furthermore, the results discuss and exemplify specific projects in the context of the high-impact framework program's technical, socio-economic and socio-cultural matter.

The emissions trading system for buildings and road transport (ETS2) proposed by the EC in the Fit for 55 package is key for decarbonising these two sectors. To manage its important distributional implications, the Commission has proposed the creation of a Social Climate Fund (SCF). The paper discusses key design choices for the SCF that may have far-reaching consequences for the overall policy package.

The purpose of this article is to review the Commission's 'Fit for 55' package. It first summarises the Commission's proposals as succinctly as possible. It then analyses what is likely to be the collective impact of the package as a whole on specific sectors, and particularly on citizens and industry, as consideration of each proposal in isolation will not enable this. It finally draws some conclusions, identifies where and why some elements may be difficult for the Council and Parliament to agree to and suggests some possible areas of compromise.

One way to achieve energy democracy is through empowering local communities to become agents of value change who can pursue more sustainable and equitable energy provision with community energy initiatives (CEI). However, such people-driven value change is complex in nature. This paper spotlight value relationality to capture the diversity in the value landscape of people-driven energy transitions, claiming that each sociotechnical system has “climate” of its own, or value dynamics, induced by interrelating values.

In line with the Social Development Goals (SDG), strategies for sustainable development must facilitate action from an energy perspective and give citizens a central role. Given that global challenges must be addressed through local action, the transition towards energy decentralisation through Local Energy Communities (LEC) is of central importance. The general objective of this research is to identify characteristics that are key in order for a LEC to act as a driver of local sustainable development and social innovation.

The paper argues that the EU budget needs more flexibility to respond to current geopolitical and societal challenges and investment needs. As political discussions on the next MFF are starting, it discusses avenues for realigning expenditures to changing EU priorities and to unforeseen challenges and crises.

"This discussion paper focuses on the upcoming review of the post-2027 Multi Annual Financial Framework and the debate concerning the future EU Cohesion Policy. It argues that Cohesion Policy’s purpose requires reinvention, not an incremental upgrade." provided by publisher.

The paper examines the NGEU governance and its implementation. It argues that NGEU has shifted the regulatory practices of economic policy towards a new type of “governance by funding”. This governance enhances the solidarity-based approach to EU economic governance, by replacing hard conditionality with financial support in pre-determined areas of investment. However, by linking NGEU funding with economic governance objectives and procedures in the framework of the European Semester, NGEU exacerbates some structural imbalances of the EU institutional setting.

This research investigates the policy narratives that were deployed by the Commission to justify the reform of Cohesion policy in relation to the long-standing process of EMU reform. The paper identifies two narratives : one of EU solidarity, based on the ‘harmonious development’ of the territories, and one of EMU stability, consisting in cross-national solidarity in exchange for structural reforms. The authors ague that, in the context of EMU reform, the narrative of stability found a favourable interest constellation, becoming the ideational driver of the Cohesion policy reform.

A circular economy leads to challenges for the system of corporate taxation. However, there exist already a legal rationale for the levy of corporate tax in a circular economy. Such a rationale, a convincing raison d’être for corporate taxation in a circular economy, contributes to the legitimacy for a green corporate tax. It explores some new measures in corporate taxation that are consistent with a circular economy.
Chapter 6 of Siegmann, A. (Ed.). (2022). Climate of the Middle. Springer Briefs in Climate Studies.

Member States engage in tax competition to expand their tax bases thereby risking a ‘race to the bottom’ in corporate tax revenues. The global minimum tax under Pillar Two is expected to contribute significantly to curbing this practice. Countries reducing their tax enforcement adhere to a policy that implicitly encourages tax evasion. Hence, enforcement and observability problems can also be addressed indirectly by targeting their outcome – tax evasion. Anti-money laundering legislation can therefore help to close a still unnoticed loophole in curbing tax competition that will not be addressed by introducing minimum taxation.

With each negotiation round for a new multiannual financial framework (MFF), European policy actors are confronted with claims for significant reforms. This paper argues that there are two main challenges that exist for the post-2020 budget. Firstly, the 2021-2027 MFF has to reinforce the EU's problem-solving capacity in areas of integration that are largely undisputed among member states. Secondly, the budget must provide a sufficient amount and targeting of resources to prevent the Union from further disintegration in socio-economic, territorial, and political terms.

EU corporate tax policy has long consisted solely in eliminating fiscal barriers. This changed after the financial and Eurozone crises. This article explains the substantive re-orientation of EU corporate tax policy through the concept of politicization. It details the politicization process of corporate taxation resulting from changes in global governance, media tax scandals, and the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It explores the reciprocal interaction between social forces and supranational actors to demonstrate that ‘politicization at the top’ can facilitate a more progressive deepening of European integration.

While the European project was previously generally described as a teleological depoliticized project, aiming at building peace and comforting growth, different competing visions of the European project are nowadays acknowledged and surface among the public on occasions. The paper provides a comparative qualitative answer to how citizens envision European integration, showing that, first, official narratives do not fail to reach citizens, but they are also loosened, contested, and do not systematically produce a sense of common belonging. Second, they highlight the importance of socio‐economic contexts, as well as national and personal experience in the re‐appropriation of these narratives.

The papers of this special issue of "Journal of European Integration" investigate the persistent challenges to European Banking Union and explore the tensions between broader financial stability objectives and national political and socio-economic pressures through a diversity of lenses.

Differentiation is not only a design feature of European integration, it is also a Member State strategy to overcome preference divergence. However, putting together an optimal group is difficult: Either the resulting club lacks the capacity to produce the club good efficiently; or differentiation attempts lead to an equally suboptimal outcome of a club too large and too heterogeneous to be effective. This paper develops an explanation of this differentiation paradox.

The positive impact of EU integration has increased over time. Nearly all EU Member States benefit from the EU’s positive impact on trade in goods and services - this is particularly true for the more recent entrants from Central and Eastern Europe. The European Union often has a negative impact on non-EU countries through trade diversion.

This paper draws on the methods of analysis and synthesis to study the regulatory framework governing the modern operating mechanism of the EU single market. The functioning of the single market depends on shared responsibility between the EU's centralized management and the many policies of its Member States. There are barriers within the single market system that limit the free movement of goods, services, people and capital and lead to an imbalance. These are sanitary and phytosanitary standards, tariff measures, and technical and quantitative barriers.

This paper explores the EU recovery strategy with a specific focus on its potentially transformative aspects vis-à-vis European integration and on its implications for the social dimension of the EU’s socio-economic governance. It aims to provide a reflection on whether the established measures put forward sufficient safeguards against the spectre of austerity and on whether these constitute steps towards disfranchising social and labour policies from being used as ‘variables’ of economic growth.

The concept of differentiated integration (DI) has spawned a wide-ranging research agenda that has significantly advanced scholarly understanding of the complex and often uneven process of European integration. The paper proposes to distinguish between DI and differentiated co-operation (DC) as two subtypes of differentiation, depending on whether such a phenomenon occurs in a policy area that operates along the lines of integration or co-operation respectively.

The paper argues that EU studies would benefit from tracing the interactions between global order and contemporary dynamics within the EU and that a new global disorder has emerged. The decentring of globalization, geopolitical turbulence, monetary and financial instabilities and ideological fluidity are reshaping the context within which EU integration unfolds. This presents an old European question but under a new set of volatile conditions: how to secure a degree of relative autonomy within a rapidly changing global political economy.

This chapter is an historical perspective on the internal market. The first part is concerned with negative integration and the four freedoms. The focus in the second part of the chapter switches to positive integration and harmonization. The final part of the chapter considers the tension between the economic and the social in the internal market.

This study provides insights into the economic benefits of the European Single Market (SM) for countries and regions across Europe. Specifically, it evaluates the impact of the trade boosting effects of the SM on productivity, markups, product variety, welfare and the distribution of population across European countries and regions. The findings suggest that on average, all EU citizens gain substantially from the SM. Yet, we uncover a strong heterogeneity of gains across European countries and regions.