Volume 11, No 1

Politicians tend to use the word opportunity as a catch-all term. This paper is contending that opportunities can be classified as tangible or intangible. Lawmakers do not appear to consider the idea that opportunities are hierarchical or link to a firms’ ability to leverage opportunities. The context for the paper is Brexit and its strategic implications. Furthermore, a hard Brexit will throw up more intangible opportunities than tangible opportunities, which suggests that firms will require different strategies for hard Brexit and soft Brexit environments. This paper suggests that there are two possible dominant strategies available to executives, namely leverage logic and opportunity logic, and the application of the strategies is dependent on the type of Brexit situation. The time horizon to develop and refine the dominant strategies is dependent on the type of Brexit environment, with a hard Brexit requiring the longest time horizon.

This article claims that—notwithstanding limitations—in environmental cooperation with China Europe has been effective in projecting international norms that China has shown interest in embracing. On the one hand, European normative power effectiveness is due to its power of example in global environmental issues and Beijing’s acknowledgement of Europe’s leading global role in this area. On the other hand, it is a result of Beijing’s recognition of the urgency of the issue domestically, indispensable to secure further economic growth and global influence. This suggests the relevance of the power of domestic interest to Beijing’s approach towards international cooperation with international standards as pursued by Europe. Persisting limitations to Europe’s effectiveness, however, include the normative divergence burdening relations with China, and its fragmented governance system. In addition, the economic, political and social problems Europe is facing following the 2008 financial crisis have challenged its global standing, constraining its normative ambitions concerning China.

By applying the Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory, this paper assesses the extent to which immigration has been securitised at the EU level after the 2015 Paris attacks. It is doing so by not only examining the presence of the securitisation actors and the security speech acts, as is commonly done in the current securitisation literature, but also by analysing from a legal point of view, two emergency measures implemented by the EU to deal with the migration crisis. Most importantly, this paper investigates the response of the European public to the securitisation moves and highlights that this aspect of the Copenhagen School’s analytical framework has been not only undertheorised but also understudied.

Consociational democracy has increasingly been adopted as a useful approach for conflict transformation in ethnic and violently divided societies. Its ultimate purpose is to turn former rivals into governing allies by providing power-sharing arrangements. Through theoretically driven process tracing, based on Kosovo as a case study, this article explores whether and how consociationalism has affected peace- and state-building. By examining its application through institutional design, it investigates citizenship policy and the role of the European Union on fostering a multi-ethnic society. The article argues that the existing corporate consociational model has institutionalised ethnicity challenging democracy and statehood, and did not promote a shared identity. Therefore, to overcome ethnic division and strengthen state legitimacy, the paper proposes a modification of consociational democracy into a liberal type promoted by a more persuasive role of the EU.

This paper adopts a region-building perspective to shed light on the nature of the 16+1 framework and elucidates what it means for EU-China cooperation in the Western Balkans. By comparing the 16+1 framework with the European approach to region-building in the Western Balkans, the paper argues that the Chinese and European approaches towards the Western Balkans are largely complementary rather than competitive as China’s engagement works to facilitate the EU’s agenda in the region. The ‘outside-in’ perspective brought about by China via the 16+1 framework could contribute to region- building in the Western Balkans and the EU and China could jointly move forward the next stage of European integration.