The moment it did come up was during the panel I took part in on the post-Brexit UK, where I talked about the instability of the relationship with the EU, something I’ll be returning to presently. My basic argument was that whatever happens, there isn’t a resilient foundation on which to rest and from which to act.

One question that did come up was whether the current relationship – low-key and benign, if unexciting – wasn’t in fact serviceable enough for our needs. After all, neither side seem that bothered about either a return to the fun times of the Brexit years or starting up a journey to re-accession. London and Brussels have got back in the habit of talking to, and listening to, each other, so can we not just assume that we can work it out as we go? Indeed, in a purely practical sense, if the relationship is as it is, does it not just to suffice, since we’ve not got another one to use instead?

My response to this fits my usual diagnosis of the failings of UK-EU relations, namely that an absence of clear strategic objectives on either side of the relationship mean that the dominant mode is a mix of neglect and bursts of crisis management. Put differently, the absence of obvious problems doesn’t mean that everything’s fine.

For a recent example, consider the mini-fuss over marmalade labelling earlier this year.

As part of the (generally pretty smooth) negotiations on an SPS agreement, DEFRA released a list of EU legislation that UK businesses would have to comply with once the deal is done; a rare example of useful forward planning.

That list got almost no media interest at the time, but some weeks later a story dropped on GB News about how the deal would mean that henceforth marmalade would have to be labelled with which fruit it was made of, and this would be a terrible imposition on already hard-done-by companies.

That almost all marmalade currently on sale in the UK already has such labelling was no barrier to a little (but still much larger than the previous) pile of media pieces appearing. Bendy bananas redux, if you will.

In short, the level of public, media and political interest is low, leaving everyone exposed to silly season pieces (and ill-intentioned actors, should they feel so inclined).

A more serious version of this appeared just as I was putting this piece together.

Politico reported that November’s summit won’t see agreement on ‘Burnham’s big new Brexit deal’, which as readers of this blog will know shouldn’t be news, since Burnham has no deal, big, new or otherwise.

That anyone, including the reporter who definitely knows better, should think that this was the case points to the non-management of expectations by either side and the substantial risk of relations entering into vicious circles of briefings and counter-briefings.

In short, the absence of strategic visions for the relationship in either London or Brussels means that there is no master narrative for politicians to cleave to and to smooth out the small bumps in the road.

As much as technical relations seem to be pretty functional, even these evidently rely on a cadre of people who have built up enough experience of working together out through the original Brexit negotiations, but who are liable to be churned by their respective employers with no robust mechanisms for preserving institutional memory.

None of these issues should be a surprise to anyone, since they have been evident for a long time, and indeed much flagged by the small number of people still focused on the matter. But the concern has to be that the current model of getting by will not have the resilience to cope with the next crisis, whatever that might be.

The post Will this do? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In practice, this is not a problem of wrestling Lots of Things, but instead more about trying to work out whether the absence of visible activity is a function of a very tight ship, or of a lack of activity.

Undoubtedly, negotiations on the May 2025 reset agenda in the Common Understanding has progressed well, to the point that several dossiers are largely wrapped up: SPS and ETS are the two big ones. Internal Energy Market talks finally got underway in the early summer too, the last big element to get going.

At the same time, once it became clear that Keir Starmer was stepping down, the EU decided to pause everything, there being little point in making deals with a departing leadership. Moreover, the arrival of a new PM might also offer new opportunities for the EU to secure more concessions, especially if Andy Burnham was really that much more pro-cooperation and wanted to get a quick win.

The evidence of the first couple of months of Burnham suggests that this has not been the case. Indeed, as the tracker below (mildly sarcastically) suggests, Burnham’s time in power has been marked by talking about pretty much anything apart from EU policy.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic148

The ‘regular’ EU-UK summit heralded by the Common Understanding, and already rather uncertain by the time of the May anniversary of the first one, has only been pushed back since, with Burnham’s recent talk of November feeling more aspirational that definite. This is not a government in a rush to press forward on things, despite Burnham’s repeated invocations of the damage of Brexit to the economy.

From what little he has said, the impression is very much one of continuity-Starmer: use the reset process to secure some wins, plus avoid the worst effects of the continual activity of the EU to protect and promote its interests. The language about ‘Made in Europe’ reflects another common thread to Starmer, once the UK had determined the potential impacts on high-profile sectors of the economy and the possible leverage of working together in Europe in the face of – how to put it? – debatable international relations.

However, all of this has been very much off-camera, without much grandstanding by either side, neither of whom really feel any value in kicking up a fuss. Even the failure of SAFE talks was managed away without too much hand-wringing and with efforts to find other ways of building defence procurement cooperation.

But there has been one exception.

Youth mobility has become the poster-child of the reset, and the one with the most conspicuous disagreements.

As a reminder, the two sides have always had different positions with regard to the fundamentals of any scheme, grounded in its purpose, scale and operationalisation.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic127

Since the 2025 summit, those gaps (on caps on numbers, university fees and permitted activities) have not definitively closed down. Instead, there has been a steady drip-feed of briefings by both sides to try to signal intent and (less often) offer possible landing grounds.

The following is a list of all Financial Times stories that include such briefings, the paper being a convenient shared space for negotiators:

• 7 November 2025. ‘EU officials’ flag the need for the scheme to be drawn up as a binding legal instrument, rather than the memoranda of understanding the UK has with other third countries
• 5 December. A leaked EU ‘draft text’ has no cap on numbers, and gives EU students access to UK university fees
• 15 March 2026. ‘UK officials’ offer to give way of fees, in return for a cap and other concessions
• 5 June. ‘UK officials’ reiterate their offer on fees
• 3 July. The ‘Commission’ says the proposed cap is too low, EU nationals need to be exempt from the NHS surcharge and have access to UK fees
• 13 July. ‘EU diplomats’ say the cap offered by the UK is a ‘non-starter’ and repeat points on the surcharge and fees
• 18 August. ‘EU diplomats’ again say the cap offered is too low, but might consider something in the ‘low 100ks’, and say fees is ‘vital’
• 23 August. A leaked UK negotiating brief from ‘UK officials’ says Starmer was willing to concede on fees and up to 100k on the cap, in return for access to Made in Europe or steel tariffs

This procession suggests a number of points that speak to the wider relationship.

Firstly, the UK has moved further than the EU on these points. We might reasonably assume that the EU will get domestic fees, but without any evident quid pro quo on caps or other dossiers. Indeed, when such cross-linkage has been mentioned by the UK, the reply from the EU has been very dismissive. This reflects the underlying asymmetry in the relationship: the UK needs this more than the EU, and the EU knows this.

Secondly, this is as much evidence as we have that Burnham is not going to stray very far at all from Starmer’s positions: The PM was talking again about Made in Europe in his first PMQs this week. Whether that helps or hinders progress on negotiations remains to be seen, but the sense that Brussels was ultimately underwhelmed by Starmer’s translation of rhetoric to action does not look set to be challenged by Burnham any time soon.

Finally, it points to the perils of low-stakes negotiating. None of the items on the table will be of notable macro-economic significance for either side, but instead act as markers of good intent and willingness to try to keep the wheels spinning on the minimal architecture of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement’s free trade area. Part of this might be the anxiety over who will be in power in the UK following the next general election, but more of it is that neither side see their relationship as either particularly important or in need of urgent attention. With plenty of other things to be getting on with, this is something that lacks any strong sense of pressure to wrap things up.

Of course, it’s still early days, but if the last seven PMs have taught us anything, then it’s that their revealed preferences on EU policy are pretty clear, pretty quickly.

The post Not even a new ‘reset’: The minimalist Burnham agenda on the EU? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

If the original justification for a restriction is carried forward with each renewal of the regime without independent reassessment, the measure’s initial necessity risks gradually becoming a presumption of its continuing necessity.

Ukraine provides an especially demanding contemporary example of this problem. In July 2026, Ukraine once again extended martial law. As Russia’s armed aggression continues, the grounds for maintaining the emergency regime remain exceptionally strong. Precisely for that reason, the Ukrainian experience makes the distinction particularly clear: between the continued necessity of the emergency regime itself and the narrower question of the fate of particular restrictions operating within it.

Two Objects of Justification

European scholarship has already examined the temporal problem of emergency governance in considerable depth. Alan Greene shows how the duration of emergency powers can blur the boundary between exception and the normal constitutional order. Stéphanie Hennette Vauchez traces the routinisation of emergency instruments and their migration into ordinary governance. Yoomin Won shows how the absence of strict temporal limits and the possibility of repeated renewals can allow derogations to remain in force for extended periods. Stuart Wallace, in turn, draws attention to prolonged derogations under Article 15 ECHR and to the need for procedures for reviewing emergency measures.

What is less clear is how this temporal problem operates at the level of individual restrictions. If the emergency regime itself lawfully continues, should the original justification for each measure automatically continue with it, or does the necessity of the measure require an independent assessment in light of current circumstances?

If one of the central European concerns is that emergency rule may become a durable form of governance, the next question is how to prevent the durability of the regime from becoming the durability of the justification for every measure within it.

This requires a distinction between two objects of assessment. The first is regime-level necessity: why the emergency regime should continue. The second is measure-specific necessity: why this particular restriction, in its present scope and as applied to these persons, remains necessary.

They are connected, but they are not identical.

Article 15 ECHR already provides the basis for such a distinction. There must be a war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation; yet a state may derogate from its Convention obligations only to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation. Recognition of an emergency therefore does not complete the analysis of the state’s particular response to it.

The case law of the European Court of Human Rights adds a temporal dimension to this distinction. Brannigan and McBride v United Kingdom, the Court attached importance to whether the necessity of the relevant emergency measures remained under continuing review. In A. and Others v United Kingdom, recognition of a public emergency threatening the life of the nation did not remove the need for a separate examination of whether the contested measures were strictly required. In Baş v Turkey, the Court again emphasised European supervision of national discretion and the relevance, among other factors, of the circumstances and duration of the emergency.

This is not a new test under Article 15. The proposed distinction simply avoids collapsing two questions that the Convention and the Court’s case law already require to be assessed separately: the continuation of the emergency and the necessity of a particular response to it.

What Time Changes

At the beginning of a serious crisis, the state acts with incomplete information. Threats evolve rapidly, consequences are difficult to predict, and some measures must be adopted before a complete evidential picture is available.

Several years later, the position is different. It is already known how a restriction operates in practice. Some initial predictions may have proved correct; others will not. Public institutions adapt to a prolonged crisis. Less restrictive means of achieving the same objective may emerge. The distribution of the threat itself may also change across territories or categories of persons.

What changes over time is not necessarily the legal conclusion, but the evidential picture on which that conclusion rests. A restriction that was necessary in the first month of a war may remain just as necessary several years later. By then, however, the state will possess information that it did not have at the outset: evidence about the practical operation of the measure, its consequences, possible alternatives, and changes in the threat itself.

This implies neither a presumption that a long-lasting measure is unlawful nor an automatic intensification of judicial scrutiny with each new renewal.

The claim is much narrower. If a restriction remains in force, the reasons for maintaining it must remain connected to current circumstances, rather than only to the circumstances in which it was originally introduced.

When a restriction is introduced, the state explains why it is necessary to respond to the threat. When it remains in force for years, an additional question arises: what current circumstances continue to justify this particular measure, in this scope, and as applied to these persons?

This does not require the state to re-establish the necessity of the entire emergency regime with every renewal. The outcome may remain unchanged. What must be capable of being renewed is not necessarily the measure itself, but the state’s ability to explain why its continued operation remains necessary.

Ukraine as a Contemporary Test

Following the introduction of martial law, Ukraine’s border-crossing rules restricted the departure of various categories of men while providing for statutory exceptions. In August 2025, the government amended those rules to permit male Ukrainian citizens aged 18 to 22 inclusive to cross the border, subject to the applicable exceptions.

For the purposes of the present argument, the political merits or shortcomings of that decision are secondary.

Martial law remained in force. Russia’s armed aggression continued. The general need for emergency regulation had not disappeared. Yet the state altered the category of persons to whom a particular restriction applied, without terminating or weakening the emergency regime as a whole.

This example does not establish that restrictions continuing to apply to other categories of men are unlawful or should be repealed. It shows something different: the duration of an emergency regime and the duration of a particular measure need not follow the same legal trajectory.

The regime may continue while the scope of an individual restriction is reconsidered in light of changed circumstances. A state may have exceptionally strong reasons for maintaining the emergency regime while reaching a different conclusion about the appropriate scope of a particular measure.

Why Is This Measure Still Necessary Now?

It is here that the distinction becomes legally significant for European judicial review. The considerable discretion afforded to national authorities in assessing an emergency threat should not displace independent scrutiny of a particular measure.

Domenjoud v France illustrates this distinction from another angle.

Following the 2015 terrorist attacks, France was operating under a state of emergency. In the run-up to the COP21 climate conference in Paris, the authorities restricted the movement of two environmental activists. The general emergency context was the same, but the individual factual grounds for the measures differed.

In relation to one applicant, the Court considered the information concerning his previous conduct sufficient to substantiate the alleged risk. In relation to the other, there was no comparable individual evidential basis; the Court also found no sufficiently close connection between the measure imposed on him and the threat relied upon by France in the context of its derogation.

Domenjoud therefore demonstrates not a temporal change in a measure, as in the Ukrainian example, but the other side of the same distinction: a general emergency context does not remove the need to establish a sufficient connection between a particular measure, a particular person, and a particular threat.

Two different questions follow:

Does the emergency continue to justify the existence of the exceptional legal regime?

And:

Does the particular restriction remain necessary in its present form?

The second question does not require a court to reassess the first in its entirety. A court may ask the narrower question whether there remains, today, a sufficient connection between the particular measure, its present scope, and the threat on which the state relies.

This does not transfer crisis management to judges. It preserves an independent role for judicial scrutiny of the particular measure.

Temporariness Must Operate Within the Emergency Regime

The European experience of terrorism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and war demonstrates how incomplete the traditional picture of temporariness can be: a crisis begins, exceptional powers are introduced, the crisis ends, and the ordinary legal order returns.

Prolonged emergencies disrupt that sequence.

If temporariness acquires legal significance only once the emergency itself has ended, it offers too little protection in a crisis lasting for years. Temporariness must have legal content within an emergency regime that is still continuing.

That content does not lie in a requirement that measures automatically become less restrictive as time passes, but in preserving the possibility of reviewing their continuing justification. If the factual basis remains, the restriction may remain. If circumstances have changed, the measure may be narrowed, modified, or terminated before the emergency regime itself comes to an end.

In this way, temporariness ceases to be merely a promise of a future return to ordinary law and becomes a legal requirement operating in the present.

For European law, this has wider significance. The longer emergency governance becomes part of legal reality, the more important it is not to allow the duration of the regime itself to become an independent argument for leaving every measure within it unchanged. Otherwise, scrutiny of temporariness will focus only on the fate of the emergency regime as a whole, while individual restrictions may continue on the basis of justifications formed for circumstances that have already changed.

The legal significance of renewal is therefore both important and limited. By renewing an emergency regime, the state confirms the continuing necessity of exceptional governance. But that does not, by itself, determine the fate of every measure operating within it.

To renew the regime is not automatically to renew the justification for every restriction.

In a prolonged emergency, European judicial review must preserve the possibility of asking the narrower question:

Why, precisely, is this measure still necessary today?

The post Beyond Renewal: Why Continuing an Emergency Regime Does Not Automatically Renew the Justification for Every Restriction on Rights appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

While all European Union (EU) institutions have, to some extent, the obligation to ensure compliance with the Treaties’ values and norms, it is the European Commission that bears responsibility for overseeing and securing compliance as the “Guardian of the Treaties”, including ensuring that Member States do not regress in the democratic standards they committed to uphold when they joined.

Existing research has documented the EU’s limited political will to impose sanctions for rule of law and democracy violations. The problem is that, however much we debate this “enforcement dilemma,” every proposed fix hits the same wall: political will is missing, and fixing that would take either all EU governments agreeing to change course (unlikely) or amending the Treaties (even less likely).

Yet, if institutions cannot be incentivised to act consistently, could not sanctioning inaction be an alternative? Article 265 TFEU offers this possibility as a second-order mechanism, a “check on the check,” by giving the European Parliament (EP) both the normative claim and the legal standing to sue other institutions, including the Commission, for failing to act when the Treaty requires it.

The Parliament has held this competence since the 1980s, but has rarely used it against another institution. That seemed to change after 2021, when it brought three independent actions for failure to act against the Commission, two of which concerned rule of law enforcement (C-657/21, in which the EP sued for failing to activate the rule of law conditionality mechanism, and C-225/24, after the release of frozen funds to Hungary).

My own research on the EP’s lawsuit regarding the inactivation of the conditionality mechanism (C-657/21) shows that this apparent uptick does not deviate much from Parliament’s historical pattern of restraint and reluctance. Two obstacles stand out. The first is about design: the strict requirements of Article 265 make it difficult for Parliament to use it as a routine oversight tool, even when it wants to. And one of practice, referring to the logic Parliament actually follows when deciding whether to use this tool.

In this piece, I explain why, drawing on my previous research involving elite interviews with EP policy-makers and officials, and what this means in practice for the expectation that Parliament could somehow constrain the Commission’s forbearance.

A Design That Works Against Itself

First, although Article 265 formally compels another institution to fulfil its obligations, in practice, it can produce at most a declaratory judgment from the Court of Justice of the EU: no enforcement mechanism beyond the moral and political pressure to comply with that ruling.

Second, Article 265 is meant to target inaction, but that is exactly the problem in practice: it is extremely hard to prove in court that an institution failed to act. Judicial oversight operates on formal acts (decisions, legal bases) that generate a case file, a party with standing to challenge, and a record to examine. A decision not to investigate is precisely the absence of such a procedural act, which leaves courts without a file to review. Put differently: Article 265 is, by design, a “fire alarm” tool, in the classic distinction between reactive (“fire alarm”) and continuous, active (“police patrol”) oversight proposed by McCubbins & Schwartz. A fire alarm needs a triggering event, but inaction produces no smoke without files, acts, or an event that a third party could report.

So, what this means in practice is that, when Parliament lacks a clear legal basis (which is common precisely in cases of inaction or when the Commission resorts to soft law, delegated acts, or emergency procedures), we can expect it to be unwilling to claim Treaty violations, because actually taking the Commission to court is costly and difficult.

Ultimately, therefore, the Commission’s murkiest actions, those in which it exercises executive power free of any legislative control, are the form of noncompliance worst suited to any reactive accountability mechanism, judicial or otherwise. They generate the least incentive for accountability and oversight.

This immediately raises the question of whether the Commission has an incentive to shift toward instruments that shield its inaction from judicial review (soft law, delegated acts, the use of emergency powers that bypass normal legislative processes), precisely because the Commission knows these are hard to challenge before the courts. It would be worth examining whether this shift occurs more often in areas where the Parliament has already shown a willingness to litigate.

As of now, then, we have settled on the inherent design limitation of any complaint-based oversight mechanism when confronted with noncompliance by omission. In addition, using Article 265 depends on EU actors’ willingness to incur political and institutional costs, since it requires parliamentary consensus, and that consensus inevitably relies on political majorities vulnerable to electoral change. Structurally, this further turns horizontal accountability in the EU into a conditional process rather than a systematic one.

An Institutional Logic That Doesn’t Help Either

On the practice side, the bigger problem is that the Parliament does not appear to prioritise its accountability role.

The broader institutional dynamics of an expanding Commission—one that is not only growing by encroaching on legislative powers, but also growing closer to Council governments, at the Parliament’s expense—continue to push Parliament to devote more energy to maintaining its limited ability to shape policy outcomes. To address this marginalisation, the EP decided to sue the Commission (Article 265) and resort to the courts as a tactical instrument to pursue specific objectives, not necessarily accountability aims.

But if this legal instrument is used strategically, where does that leave us in terms of expecting Parliament to more consistently constrain the Commission’s in the future?

A Failed Sanction, or a Successful Signal?

To answer this question, we have to understand Parliament’s motives and aims in its lawsuit against the Commission for the delayed enforcement of the conditionality mechanism. My findings suggest two readings here, and they are not mutually exclusive.

The interview evidence showed that EP policymakers value litigation for its ability to externalise institutional conflict and mobilise public scrutiny. The EP was not necessarily looking to win the case; it was seeking a headline to impose reputational costs on the Commission and push back against its marginalisation. So, we could read this to mean that at least some actors in Parliament (including those able to form a majority) believe not only that failing to uphold the rule of law could undermine public confidence in the Commission as the guardian of democracy, but also that Commission officials are sensitive to this concern.

In this reading, litigation could still shape EU oversight, just not by punishing the Commission. Instead, it works as a signal: taking the Commission to court draws public attention, and it is that public attention (not any court ruling) that hurts the Commission’s reputation, something Commission officials appear to take seriously. So litigation ends up doing something the Treaty never designed it to do: instead of sanctioning noncompliance through a court judgment, it sends a reputational signal to the public, and that signal carries its own kind of accountability effect.

The more pessimistic reading, however, and perhaps more persuasive, points to the limited practical feasibility of horizontal accountability and to its inability to deter misbehaviour among EU elites. The EP’s resort to litigation reflects institutional self-preservation, which in turn points to a strategic logic of power and influence. Not exactly what we would expect or, frankly, want, from our sole check on executive power. Moreover, if Parliament not only avoids contesting Treaty violations but is, as a result, also expected to do so, executive actors have little reason to anticipate costs of noncompliance.

This brings me to the future and the potential for checking the check. Somewhat ironically, accountability dynamics appear to reproduce the same problems of political will and institutional design as the EU’s enforcement dilemma it was intended to fix: it requires parliamentary consensus, electorally vulnerable majorities, and a willingness to bear costs, which has been insufficient if the record is anything to go by. Horizontal accountability, therefore, is unlikely to fulfil its purpose if its activation depends on actors prioritising their own strategic interests over the obligation to enforce the Treaties.

This article is based on the author’s paper in the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP) and was prepared in the context of EUCHALLENGES, a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of Salzburg, co-funded by the European Commission under grant agreement no. 101127539

The Check on the Check: lo que los límites del artículo 265 del TFUE revelan sobre la rendición de cuentas horizontal en la UE

Andreína Victoria Hernández-Ross, IPP & UAM (0009-0008-3211-608X)

Si bien todas las instituciones de la Unión Europea (UE) tienen, en cierta medida, la obligación de velar por el cumplimiento de los valores y normas de los Tratados, es la Comisión Europea la que asume la responsabilidad de supervisar y garantizar ese cumplimiento en su papel de “guardiana de los Tratados”, lo que incluye asegurarse de que los Estados miembros no retrocedan en los estándares democráticos que se comprometieron a respetar al adherirse a la Unión.

La literatura existente ha documentado la limitada voluntad política de la UE para sancionar las violaciones del Estado de Derecho y de la democracia. El problema es que, por mucho que debatamos este “enforcement dilemma”, las propuestas académicas y políticas topan inevitablemente con un límite estructural: no podemos superar la falta de voluntad política sin cambiar los incentivos incorporados al propio diseño institucional de la UE. Nuestros remedios exigen o bien consenso gubernamental (poco probable), o bien una reforma de los Tratados (aún menos probable).

Y sin embargo, si las instituciones no pueden ser incentivadas a actuar de forma consistente, ¿no podría sancionarse la inacción misma como alternativa? El artículo 265 del TFUE ofrece esta posibilidad como mecanismo de segundo orden, un “control del control”, al otorgar al Parlamento Europeo (PE) tanto la legitimación normativa como la práctica para demandar ante las cortes a otras instituciones, incluida la Comisión, por no actuar cuando el Tratado así lo exige.

El Parlamento cuenta con esta competencia desde la década de 1980, pero rara vez la ha ejercido contra otra institución. Eso pareció cambiar a partir de 2021, cuando interpuso tres recursos por omisión contra la Comisión, dos de los cuales se centraban en el Estado de Derecho: el asunto C-657/21, en el que el PE demandó a la Comisión por no activar el mecanismo de condicionalidad del Estado de Derecho, y el asunto C-225/24, tras la liberación de fondos congelados a Hungría.

Mi propia investigación sobre el recurso del Parlamento relativo a la inactivación del mecanismo de condicionalidad (C-657/21) muestra, sin embargo, que este aparente repunte no se aleja demasiado del patrón histórico de contención y reticencia del Parlamento. Dos tipos de problemas parecen lastrar los esfuerzos de rendición de cuentas en la UE: uno de diseño institucional, en el que el propio artículo 265 restringe su uso consistente como mecanismo de supervisión, incluso si el Parlamento estuviera dispuesto a emplearlo; y otro de práctica, referido a la lógica que efectivamente sigue el Parlamento a la hora de decidir si recurre o no a esta herramienta.

En este texto explico por qué, apoyándome en mi investigación previa que incluyó entrevistas a responsables políticos y funcionarios del PE, y qué implica esto en la práctica para la expectativa de que el Parlamento pudiera, de algún modo, limitar la inacción deliberada (forbearance) de la Comisión.

Un diseño que juega en su propia contra

En primer lugar, aunque el artículo 265 obliga formalmente a otra institución a cumplir sus obligaciones, en la práctica solo puede producir una sentencia declarativa del Tribunal de Justicia de la UE (TJUE): ningún mecanismo de ejecución más allá de la presión moral y política para acatar ese fallo.

En segundo lugar, aunque el artículo 265 se dirige formalmente contra la inactividad, en la práctica constituye una limitación sustantiva, porque las omisiones resultan extraordinariamente difíciles de probar ante un tribunal. La supervisión judicial opera sobre actos formales (decisiones, bases jurídicas) que generan un expediente, una parte con legitimación para impugnarlos y un registro a examinar. Una decisión de no investigar es, precisamente, la ausencia de ese acto procedimental, lo que deja a los tribunales sin expediente que revisar. Dicho de otro modo: el artículo 265 es, por diseño, una herramienta de “alarma de incendios”, siguiendo la clásica distinción entre supervisión reactiva (“alarma de incendios”) y supervisión continua y activa (“patrulla policial”) propuesta por McCubbins & Schwartz. Una alarma de incendios requiere un hecho desencadenante, pero la inacción no genera humo: no hay expedientes, actos ni un suceso que un tercero pueda denunciar.

Lo que esto significa en la práctica es que, cuando el Parlamento carece de una base jurídica clara —algo habitual precisamente en los casos de inacción, o cuando la Comisión recurre al soft law, a actos delegados o a procedimientos de emergencia—, cabe esperar que se muestre reacio a alegar violaciones del Tratado, porque los costes de impugnar la acción del Ejecutivo son altos en términos de lo que supone llevarla realmente ante los tribunales.

Por tanto, las actuaciones más opacas de la Comisión, aquellas en las que ejerce poder ejecutivo libre de todo control legislativo, son la forma de incumplimiento peor adaptada a cualquier mecanismo de rendición de cuentas reactivo, judicial o de otro tipo. Son precisamente las que generan menos incentivos para la rendición de cuentas y la supervisión.

Esto plantea de inmediato la pregunta de si la Comisión tiene incentivos para preferir instrumentos que blinden su inacción frente al control judicial (soft law, actos delegados, el uso de poderes de emergencia que eluden los procesos legislativos habituales) precisamente porque sabe de la dificultad de ser sancionada. Valdría la pena examinar si esto se produce con mayor frecuencia en los ámbitos en los que el Parlamento ya ha mostrado disposición a litigar.

Por ahora, hemos constatado la limitación de diseño inherente a cualquier mecanismo de supervisión basado en denuncias al enfrentarse a un incumplimiento por omisión. A esto se suma que el recurso al artículo 265 depende de la voluntad de los actores de la UE de asumir costes políticos e institucionales, ya que requiere consenso parlamentario, y ese consenso depende, inevitablemente, de mayorías políticas vulnerables al cambio electoral. Estructuralmente, esto convierte además la rendición de cuentas horizontal en la UE en un proceso condicional, más que sistemático.

Una lógica institucional que tampoco ayuda

En el plano de la práctica, el problema principal es que el Parlamento no parece priorizar su función de control.

La dinámica institucional más amplia de una Comisión en expansión —que no solo crece invadiendo competencias legislativas, sino que también se acerca cada vez más a los gobiernos del Consejo, a costa del Parlamento— sigue empujando a este último a dedicar más energía a preservar su limitada capacidad de incidir en los resultados de las políticas. Para hacer frente a esta marginación, el PE recurrió al litigio por la vía del artículo 265 contra la Comisión como instrumento táctico para perseguir objetivos concretos, no necesariamente de rendición de cuentas.

Pero si este instrumento jurídico se utiliza de forma estratégica, ¿qué nos dice esto respecto a la expectativa de que el Parlamento limite, de manera más consistente en el futuro, la inacción deliberada de la Comisión?

¿Una sanción fallida o una señal exitosa?

Para responder a esta pregunta hay que entender los motivos y objetivos del Parlamento al demandar a la Comisión por el retraso en la aplicación del mecanismo de condicionalidad. Mis hallazgos sugieren dos lecturas posibles, que no son mutuamente excluyentes.

Las entrevistas mostraron que los responsables políticos del PE valoran el litigio por su capacidad de externalizar el conflicto institucional y movilizar el escrutinio público. El PE no buscaba necesariamente ganar el caso, sino un titular que impusiera costes reputacionales a la Comisión y sirviera para contrarrestar su propia marginación. Cabría interpretar esto, entonces, en el sentido de que al menos algunos actores del Parlamento (incluidos los capaces de formar mayoría) creen no solo que no defender el Estado de Derecho podría minar la confianza pública en la Comisión como guardiana de la democracia, sino también que los funcionarios de la Comisión son sensibles a esa preocupación.

En esta lectura, el litigio podría incidir de manera significativa en la supervisión en la UE. No funcionaría como una sanción, sino como un mecanismo informativo: modificaría el cálculo del público, el actor capaz de infligir costes reputacionales indirectos que, según parece, resultan centrales para las proyecciones de la Comisión. El litigio no cumpliría, por tanto, su función original (sancionar el incumplimiento mediante una sentencia judicial), sino que se limitaría a enviar una señal de reputación al público, y esa señal conlleva su propio efecto de rendición de cuentas.

La lectura más pesimista, sin embargo, y quizá la más convincente, apunta a la limitada viabilidad práctica de la rendición de cuentas horizontal y a su incapacidad para disuadir la mala conducta entre las élites de la UE. El recurso del PE al litigio refleja una lógica de autopreservación institucional que, a su vez, remite a una lógica estratégica de poder e influencia. No exactamente lo que cabría esperar (ni, francamente, desear) de nuestro único mecanismo de control sobre el poder ejecutivo. Es más: si el Parlamento no solo evita impugnar las violaciones del Tratado, sino que además se espera de él que actúe así, los actores del Ejecutivo tienen pocos motivos para anticipar costes por incumplir.

Esto me lleva al futuro y a la posibilidad de controlar a la Comisión. De manera un tanto irónica, la dinámica de rendición de cuentas parece reproducir los mismos problemas de voluntad política y de diseño institucional que el dilema de enforcement que pretendía resolver: exige consenso parlamentario, mayorías electoralmente vulnerables y disposición a asumir costes, algo que, a juzgar por el historial, ha resultado insuficiente. La rendición de cuentas horizontal, por tanto, difícilmente cumplirá su propósito si su activación depende de que los actores prioricen sus propios intereses estratégicos por encima de la obligación de hacer cumplir los Tratados.

Este artículo se basa en el trabajo de la autora publicado en el Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP) y se elaboró en el marco de EUCHALLENGES, un Centro de Excelencia Jean Monnet de la Universidad de Salzburgo, cofinanciado por la Comisión Europea bajo el convenio de subvención n.º 101127539.

The post (Available: EN/ES)) The Check on the Check: What the Limits of Article 265 TFEU Reveal about Horizontal Accountability within the EU appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

European Parliament https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en

Anne Goldmann

When the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act was finally adopted in 2024, most of the public debate had already moved on from how the Act regulates to whether it should. Headlines focused on the moments when it looked as if everything might still fall apart: the dispute over facial recognition and law enforcement powers¹, the trilogue negotiations that nearly collapsed², the industry lobbying that shadowed the final months³. These flashpoints are usually what people remember about the road to the AI Act.

Behind these visible and widely discussed developments lies a more structural question: what kind of story did the European Parliament actually tell about AI while it was co-shaping this law? In our recent article in Government Information Quarterly “Narrating the AI Act: Policy narratives on artificial intelligence, their construction, and evolution within the European Parliament”⁴, we set out to answer exactly that.

AI narratives in the European Parliament

Most existing research on AI policy narratives has focused on strategy documents and white papers produced by executives such as national governments⁵ or the European Commission⁶. The Parliament’s own discursive role has received far less attention, even though it was a key actor in shaping the final text of the AI Act, most visibly in the fight over remote biometric identification and its use by police and law enforcement authorities.

For our study, we didn’t focus on the legal text of the AI Act itself; instead, we built a corpus of 18 documents produced by the European Parliament between 2019 and 2024: records of hearings by the special committee on Artificial Intelligence in the Digital Age (AIDA)⁷, working papers on topics from AI and health to AI and the labor market, committee reports, and the two plenary debates dedicated to the AI Act. Within these documents, we manually identified 500 narratives, small stories related to AI in which someone or something acts in a specific setting.

To analyze them systematically, we used the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF)⁸, a political science approach that breaks every policy narrative down into four building blocks: characters (who acts in which position – as a hero, a villain, a victim, or a beneficiary), a plot (a story of either rising, decline, control or helplessness), a setting (the context), and a moral (the proposed solution). The NPF lets us ask not just what MEPs said about AI, but how they structured what they said – the underlying grammar of the debate, so to speak.

What it tells us (and what it doesn’t)

It is worth being precise about what this kind of analysis reveals to us and where its limits lie. We studied the structure of the narratives told in Parliament, not the content of every individual argument or speech. So, what does this structure look like?

On characters, the picture is strikingly one-sided: nearly half of all character codings were heroes, and beneficiaries were the second-largest group. Villains and victims made up a much smaller share. In other words, when MEPs told stories about AI, they overwhelmingly cast someone, e.g. the EU, or something, e.g. AI, as the actor responsible for success rather than harm.

The plot tells a similar story: again, nearly half of all plot codings were stories of control, and another third were stories of rising. Stories of decline or helplessness were comparatively rare. Put simply: the Parliament’s underlying understanding was “we can steer this, and it will make things better”, not “this is happening to us”.

The setting and moral categories give us more content-specific details. Settings in which the topic of AI was placed ranged from security and law enforcement to global economic competition, with frequent references to existing European law and fundamental rights. The dominant moral, unsurprisingly, was the call for a risk-based regulation, followed by claims about protecting democracy and the need for not only a joint European but also an international approach.

Perhaps the most striking finding, though, is how stable all of this was over time. We expected the release of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022 to function as an external shock that would visibly shift the Parliament’s narrative components – and other research on parliamentary framing has indeed found such shifts⁹. But at the level of narrative structure, we found no such break: the plenary debates held well after ChatGPT’s release contained roughly the same share of stories of control and rising as the documents published before it. The surface-level framing of AI issues may have adapted; the deeper storyline, presenting AI as governable and beneficial, did not.

Why AI narrative research is more than “just another technical discourse”

Debates about new technologies and their consequences are as old as societies undergoing technological change themselves. It would be easy to file AI narrative research under this well-worn category and move on.

But there is something qualitatively different happening in the broader AI debate. Increasingly, AI and its potential capabilities are being positioned not merely as tools that governments and administrations can use, but as something that could substitute for political judgement itself, a better way of deciding than politics itself. And while efficiency gains in administration and bureaucracy are, of course, worth pursuing, a discourse that quietly displaces the political as such is a different matter entirely. Scholars such as Timnit Gebru have long warned about the costs of uncritically adopting techno-solutionist narratives around AI – narratives that ultimately tie technology’s promise to nothing less than the future of humanity itself¹⁰.

In the material we analyzed, the European Parliament’s narratives don’t yet go that far – MEPs consistently cast themselves and European law as the actors in control. But this framing is not equally dominant across the whole AI discourse. Outside Parliament, and especially among tech industry voices, the narrative increasingly leans toward AI as an alternative¹¹, even a superior one, to political deliberation¹². A shift worth watching closely, since narrative research shows that stories can travel across institutions.

This is, ultimately, why we think narrative analysis matters for AI governance research: laws are not only made through legal text and formal votes, but through the stories legislators tell about what a technology is, what risks it poses, and what kind of future it should enable. Those stories shape which problems get taken seriously and which get quietly sidelined. If you want to dig into the full findings, including the breakdown by document type, our GIQ article is available here⁴.

Anne Goldmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Bochum (Germany). Her research focuses on digital governance, artificial intelligence, and democratic innovations.

References:

[1] Liboreiro, Sanchez Alonso 2023 https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/06/14/meps-endorse-blanket-ban-on-facial-recognition-in-public-spaces-rejecting-targeted-exempti

[2] Volpicelli 2023 https://www.politico.eu/article/france-germany-power-grab-kill-eu-blockbuster-ai-artificial-intelligence-bill/

[3] Vranken 2023 https://corporateeurope.org/en/2023/11/big-tech-lobbying-derailing-ai-act

[4] Goldmann, Plümer 2026 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0740624X26000560

[5] Bareis, Katzenbach 2021 https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211030007

[6] Malmborg, 2022 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ropr.12529

[7] Website AIDA https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/archives/9/aida/home/welcome-words

[8] Jones et al. 2023 https://www.routledge.com/Theories-Of-The-Policy-Process/Weible/p/book/9781032311241?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23994944584&gclid=CjwKCAjwkaXUBhASEiwAZI3dsw_3pwctP4MEIWEIGZ0EJr7Mvh53VwUoRAaOpvBLIlYl9beom6QtuxoCku0QAvD_BwE

[9] Suter et al. 2025 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/poi3.70010

[10] Gebru, Torres 2024 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636

[11] Lepore 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/aug/18/the-long-read-democracy-v-the-machine-digital-age-warnings-computer-history-technology

[12] Oleart, Palomo 2025 https://delibdemjournal.org/article/id/1839/

The post We Can Steer This: How the European Parliament Told the Story of AI appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

These cases were not simply individual anomalies or exceptions. They revealed an underlying systemic problem: the vulnerability of European financial and political systems to infiltration by foreign actors seeking to bypass democratic processes in order to advance their interests, a phenomenon increasingly described as strategic corruption. While these vulnerabilities had long existed, they were arguably overlooked until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine exposed how weak and uneven anti-corruption laws across the EU Member States could be exploited by foreign actors to expand their influence within EU borders. This article thus investigates how the public narrative of Members of the European Parliament (MEP) on corruption have shifted following the war in Ukraine.

European policymakers have long recognized corruption as a European policy problem. Yet, they diverged on the appropriate course of action. While Member States envisioned limited integration in areas with clear cross-border implications, where cooperation was perceived to serve their common interests, supranational institutions like the EP advocated deeper integration, ranging from broad criminal law harmonization to European enforcement mechanisms.

As criminal law has traditionally been regarded as a matter of national sovereignty, the introduction of supranational tools against corruption in Member States has been challenging. Despite having limited impact on the outcome, the EP often pushed the Commission and the Council to introduce ambitious tools to curb Europe’s corruption problem. However, advocated tools have often lost their teeth during negotiations due to persistent dissensus on where should power lie in anti-corruption governance.

MEPs’ discursive strategies in pushing for more assertive EU action have primarily rested on underlining the cross-border implications of corruption, that corruption wastes common budget, undermines liberal democratic values, and threatens the internal security. With the war in Ukraine, the nature of security threats and its relation to corruption have changed in broadly four ways.

First, the referent actors shifted from non-state to state actors. Until 2022, when linking corruption to security, MEPs primarily focused on organized crime groups, such as the mafia, human and drug trafficking networks, and terrorist organizations, and the ways in which they used corruption to finance their operations. After the war, the responsible actors shifted to foreign governments, particularly to Russia, pursuing strategic objectives through the corruption of European politicians. The threat was no longer covert criminal networks but with visible state-linked actors who exert influence within the EU through oftentimes legal ways such as investing in real estate to obtain EU citizenship or by hiring European policymakers to major Russian companies.

Second, such security considerations became a legitimization strategy employed by MEPs to advance robust EU tools against corruption. The analysis of MEP speeches of the last decade shows a visible increase in MEPs’ resort to the war as a way to push through previously failed anti-corruption measures, such as ban on citizenship by investment schemes or the long awaited Anti-corruption Directive. As Renew MEP García Hermida-Van Der Walle put forward: “There will be no more rolling out the red carpet for Putin’s cronies and other corrupt people trying to access the EU to launder their money… We can ban all sorts of golden passport schemes forever within the European Union. And, maybe more importantly – also for the long term – I’m asking the Council, the Member States, to please, please, please allow us to have an anti-corruption directive in the European Union with real teeth.”

Third, security threats have started to be combined with democratic considerations. Previously, organized groups only threatened the physical security of the Union by engaging in criminal activities often sustained by corruption. Now, corrupt actors also threaten democratic decision-making in the EU often by channelling resources to pro-Russia media outlets in the EU. In this way, foreign influence was portrayed as capable of undermining democratic institutions and political decision-making.

Lastly, foreign influence and concerns for strategic corruption have started to be utilized by not only-pro EU political groups but also Eurosceptic MEPs. While the former used these threats to justify stronger supranational tools, the latter used it for opposite means: less EU intervention. They argued that current problems were because of the EU’s interventionist policies that created bureaucratic burdens and regulatory complexity that facilitated corruption.

They also criticized what they perceived as the EU’s  “hypocritical” approach to corruption, arguing that it selectively targeted conservative governments while overlooking how EU-funded NGOs or liberal policymakers can also become targets of strategic corruption.

In sum, geopolitical developments not only affect the Union’s security architecture but also its anti-corruption policies. This article thus demonstrated how corruption is politically framed and debated in the European public sphere in an era of growing geopolitical instability. Understanding the evolving relationship between corruption and security in this context enables policymakers not only to develop more nuanced policy instruments that respond to emerging realities, but also to recognize how security-related corruption narratives can be mobilized to advance pro as well as anti-EU positions and to respond to the variety of arguments more effectively.

The post Framing Corruption in the European Parliament: Shifting Narratives after the War in Ukraine appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Illustrative photograph of a university campus in Kazakhstan. The universities discussed in this article have been anonymised. Photo credit: Abylkas Saginov Karaganda Technical University website

Danagul Yembergenova

In 2018, Kazakhstan granted public universities greater institutional autonomy, encouraging them to become more entrepreneurial, internationally competitive, and responsive to societal and economic needs. But autonomy reforms do more than change governance arrangements; they reshape how universities understand themselves.

Rather than asking whether universities have become more autonomous, our recent research asks a different question: How do universities redefine who they are when formal autonomy expands but practical constraints remain?

Universities do not begin these transformations with a blank slate. They carry organizational histories, traditions, values, and identities that have developed over decades. As new policy expectations emerge, institutions must negotiate these legacies while responding to growing pressures for internationalization, research excellence, and competitiveness.

This blog presents findings from our recent article Negotiating organizational identity under symbolic autonomy: evidence from regional universities in Kazakhstan, published in Higher Education and authored by Ahmet Aypay, Danagul Yembergenova, Aida Sagintayeva and Murat Özdemir.

Autonomy on paper – but not always in practice

Institutional autonomy has become a central feature of higher education reforms worldwide. Governments increasingly expect universities to become more innovative, internationally visible, and responsive to labor market needs while reducing direct state control. Kazakhstan has embraced this agenda through reforms intended to decentralize university governance and strengthen institutional decision-making.

However, our study suggests that legal autonomy does not automatically translate into genuine institutional freedom. Although universities have formally gained greater authority over governance and strategic planning, many regional institutions remain constrained by state funding dependence, rigid accountability requirements, ministerial performance indicators, and limited internal governance capacity. As one vice-rector puts it, “Full autonomy is not possible in an environment where the government provides funding as a founding institution.”

We describe this situation as symbolic autonomy—a condition in which universities appear autonomous in legal terms but continue to operate within strong structural constraints that limit their ability to act strategically.

Organizational identity matters as much as governance

Importantly, our research goes beyond examining whether autonomy reforms succeeded or failed. Drawing on and extending Stensaker’s framework of organizational identity, we show that identity work unfolds differently when autonomy is largely symbolic. Under these conditions, organizational identity is shaped not only by strategic ambitions but also by structural constraints, institutional histories, and regional contexts.

To explore this process, we conducted interviews and focus groups with 63 university leaders and academics across five regional public universities in Kazakhstan. Rather than evaluating policy implementation alone, we examined how institutional actors interpreted, negotiated, and experienced organizational change in their everyday work.

Five universities, five identity trajectories

Our findings reveal that there was no single response to autonomy reforms. Instead, the five universities followed distinct organizational identity trajectories. In four universities, identity change was largely driven by leadership efforts to strengthen the institution’s external image through research excellence, internationalization and global competitiveness. However, these ambitions frequently collided with practical realities, including limited resources, staff shortages, bureaucratic reporting requirements and continued ministerial oversight. Many faculty members viewed these initiatives through the lens of their everyday constraints, creating a gap between the image projected by institutional leaders and the lived experience of academic life.

Although these universities shared a broad orientation towards external prestige, they followed different identity trajectories. Some selectively adapted new ambitions while preserving long-established traditions. Others experienced fragmentation as competing priorities, historical legacies and bureaucratic pressures pulled the institution in different directions. In several cases, externally promoted institutional images proved difficult to integrate into everyday practices, leading to a decoupling between organizational identity and institutional image.

One university, however, followed a markedly different trajectory. Instead of building its identity primarily around external prestige, it grounded institutional development in local culture, regional heritage, and addressing community challenges. The university has preserved local heritage by naming classrooms and laboratories after historical figures, making local culture part of its institutional identity.

Organizational identity, thus, emerged more organically through shared values and collective engagement rather than through top-down strategic branding. Although this university continued to face many of the same structural constraints, including limited resources and bureaucratic pressures, it demonstrated stronger internal commitment and a clearer sense of shared institutional purpose.

Why this matters beyond Kazakhstan

Although our study focuses on Kazakhstan, its lessons extend well beyond one national context. Across Europe and many other higher education systems, governments continue to encourage universities to become more autonomous while simultaneously increasing accountability through performance metrics, rankings, funding conditions, and quality assurance systems. Universities are therefore expected to act independently while remaining closely monitored.

Our findings suggest that successful reforms require more than legislative changes. Universities need sufficient financial resources, governance capacity, and opportunities for meaningful participation by academic communities. Without these conditions, autonomy risks becoming largely symbolic, encouraging institutions to project ambitious public images without enabling genuine organizational transformation.

The study also suggests that regional embeddedness – strong connections to local communities, culture and history – should not simply be viewed as an obstacle to modernization. Instead, these local foundations can become valuable resources for organizational renewal, helping universities integrate external reform agendas with internally meaningful missions.

Looking ahead

Higher education reforms are often assessed by changes in governance, funding or institutional performance. Our findings suggest that another question deserves equal attention: Who do universities become as they reform?

Organizational identity cannot simply be engineered through legislation or strategic plans. It is continually negotiated through interactions among leadership, academic communities, institutional histories and structural constraints. Paying closer attention to these processes may help explain why universities experiencing similar reforms follow very different developmental paths.

As policymakers continue to promote university autonomy across Europe and beyond, paying greater attention to organizational identity may help ensure that reforms foster not only new governance structures, but also meaningful and sustainable institutional change.

Dr. Danagul Yembergenova holds a PhD from the University of Geneva. She is a researcher specializing in higher education governance, university autonomy, organizational identity, and higher education reform. Her research focuses on institutional transformation in Central Asia, with additional interests in secondary education, inclusive education,

The post University Autonomy and Organizational Identity: What’s the Story of Regional Universities in Kazakhstan? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Some of us grow up on folk tales featuring kind grandpas and grandmas (or on the contrary), of magical beings appearing in the guise of older folk in the woods, or of another type of magical childhood, not involving spells and other realms, but the unrestricted freedom of a youngster left to their own devices in a rural landscape. Via such means, as well as later schooling and experiences, the rural itself can become an otherworld (see Williams’ The Country and the City, or Brass’ Peasants, populism and postmodernism…) not the anthropological other (though it includes it, analytically), but a different ‘world’, which we perceive as having distinct rhythms, rules and atmosphere. As adults, we read, listen, and more recently, consume video blogs and short form videos on tech-free retreats, places where people live like ‘100 years ago’, ‘traditional’ lives on farms, and, on the other end of the spectrum, of the backwards, underdeveloped and uneducated rural. Our early experiences, our education, our readings and the media we consume influence how we perceive the rural and are layers that anthropologists must recognise and see beyond.

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In the mid 2010s, I was hiking up a mountain, with a couple of colleagues. In need of a hot cup of tea, we ended up knocking on the door of one of the local houses. The owners welcomed us warmly, took us to a room with a lit fire and made the best mint tea we ever had. We ended up spending New Year with them and marvelled at the ‘traditional’ building materials and layout, at the hand embroidered tea towels, the wood burning stove’s warm glow, and enjoyed the extremely flavourful home made food. It felt like we were experiencing a living village museum and reliving our childhoods in our grandparents’ houses, at the same time.

Many years later, countless other hikers, walkers, tourists and visitors, and I, are still in awe and in love with the sights, sounds and feeling of the place. But as an anthropologist, I had to learn how to see beyond what one experiences through affect, through the practices of reflexivity and positionality.

In my case, as a city dweller, I yearned for the nature, the quiet, the seemingly tight knit and ‘simple’ living of a village. And I thought I found the quintessential place on my hikes. Upon returning as a researcher, I learned to put to one side the awe struck walker and ground myself in another type of seeing. I had to be a listener and participant observer first. The myth of the impassive, objective and detached anthropologist-observer and recorder-of-facts has long been dismantled. Since, we have become aware how our own experiences, impressions, wants and education shape how we perceive the world and how all of that can influence our ethnographic work, which is why positionality and reflexivity are such important parts of our work.

Even so, it’s not an easy feat and it is a conscious effort we must make continuously, throughout our research. On one occasion, after a few hours climb, with a full backpack, in the heat, I was greeted by a distant whirring, which I had trouble identifying. A few moments later I met my host and after the usual greetings, I asked about the noise. She laughed and said that it was the neighbours’ lawn mower, which took me by absolute surprise, though it shouldn’t have. At that time I had not encountered a lawn mower so high up before, and focused my questions on the difficulty of access. As a result, I had assumed such items were out of reach. My trained gaze faltered in the face of the idyllic landscape, and I briefly succumbed to an idealised vision of the hamlet. The noise broke the spell and reminded me of synchronicity, access, opportunity and the importance of not making assumptions. Such moments are not necessarily rare, nor are they completely avoidable, which is why taking time to sit and think about the views and ideas we bring into our research can prevent personal experience showing up as unproved certainty.

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The above example illustrates that despite learning to put aside elements that influence perception, the tourist-me and the amazed-but-slightly-essentialising-me never made fully went away, as became apparent when I was confronted with a new situation. New fieldsites, other circumstances and perceptions will come into play at different times. Consequently, catching oneself sliding into preconceived ideas and unverified conclusions is part and parcel of the fieldwork, precisely because reflecting on how one’s presence, background, and assumptions actively influence data supports ethical practice and responsible data collection in the field.

The post People Who Live Like a Hundred Years Ago: Unlearning (?) a Borrowed Gaze appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Jess Gosling at LASA 2026

I had been planning for this moment for a while, So, rather than writing chapters in isolation and looking for conferences afterwards, I tried to align each chapter of my thesis with a conference, where I could test out the thesis of each chapter properly, in front of people who knew the region itself, rather than just the theory alone. My Mexico chapter is the first empirical chapter of my thesis, assembled from fieldwork completed at the British Embassy in Mexico City in July 2025. Paris was the first time I had presented a full empirical chapter, rather than a conceptual paper, outside that of my own seminar room.

My PhD chapter argues that UK soft power in Mexico operates through individuals and relationships rather than being driven by state projection: drawing on interviews with both British officials working in Mexico and locally employed Mexican staff from the embassy. A panel the day before mine had spent an hour on nineteenth-century postal diplomacy and contemporary trade negotiations with a level of regional expertise that sharpened my sense of what a rigorous account of Mexico would require. The questions after my own paper pushed in the same direction: people wanted to know more about how the Mexican staff I interviewed experienced these dynamics, and where the line sits between genuine co-production and something more asymmetric. Those are exactly the type of questions I wanted my chapter to be answering well and hearing them from people who study Latin America for a living informed me precisely where my argument still needed more weight.

What struck me the most was how supportive that scrutiny felt. Nobody was trying to catch me out. They treated a PhD chapter with just the same careful attention and worthiness as anyone’s else’s paper, with several people, among the audience being academics from Mexico, Argentina, and Spain, who all stayed afterwards to talk through specific points with me, and asked about the comparative chapters still to come on South Korea and Poland. I left with a growing list of people whose work I now wish to follow, contacts who feel less like networking and more like the start of an actual research community.

Jess Gosling Presenting at LASA

My paper itself was in English (as was my presentation), but the corridor conversations afterwards were not always, and that felt like its own small milestone, one I am still a little proud of. When I started the PhD, I could barely hold a conversation in Spanish. Talking through my own ideas in Spanish with some Portuguese with people I had met, even haltingly, mattered more to me than I expected.

The other community came from somewhere I had not planned for at all. I fell in, almost by accident, with a group of Brazilian PhD students on the first afternoon, and they adopted me for the rest of the week, talking me through the conference over dinner and breakfasts some mornings. Most of them were historians working on questions far from mine, but this did not matter.

Jess with PhD Students she met at LASA

I went on my own, out of curiosity. During gaps in my schedule, to panels on Brazil’s foreign policy and on Global South diplomacy, and one on Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay that ranged from feminist foreign policy to the social backgrounds of foreign ministers. There were a lot of Early Career Researchers (ECRs) , often putting arguments in front of people for the first time, and there was a real solidarity in that, regardless of which region or discipline any of us worked in.

If any of this is useful to other PhD students presenting an empirical chapter for the first time, here are a few things which might be useful to think about.

Firstly, align your chapters with conferences rather than the other way round. I chose LASA because it matched my Mexico chapter and the timeline, which meant I arrived with something ready for scrutiny with the right people to present it to.

Secondly, go to panels in the days before you need to present your own paper at your panel. Try to attend other panels in subfields which you do not work in. Some of the biggest insights and reflections on my own argument came from a session I attended the day before, out of curiosity, and the friendships that carried me through the week came from panels on Brazil that had nothing to do with my research.

Thirdly, let the gaps in your evidence stay visible in the Q&A rather than being managed away. I had written a line into my paper anticipating the obvious limitation, and answering the questions honestly told me more about where the chapter needed to go, than what a smoother performance would have taught me.

Finally, don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone, even when that means going it alone. I went to LASA without knowing a single person there and ended up befriending people who work in different fields entirely. The Brazilian cohort I fell in with made the week feel like a shared experience rather than something to get through alone.

The challenge was real. So was the welcome.

The post What Presenting My First Empirical Chapter Taught Me appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

“One can say without exaggeration that Europe invented a ‘convergence machine’, taking in poor countries and helping them become high-income economies.” This was the famous assessment of Indermit Gill, Chief Economist for Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank, in 2012. Now, more than a decade later, this ‘convergence machine’ has delivered meaningful economic catch-up (Bulgaria’s GDP per capita has risen from approximately 35% to 65% of the European Union (EU) average since the 2007 accession). Yet, the country’s performance looks more uneven when assessed through the lens of innovation capacity.

Nearly two decades after EU accession, the Eastern European state remains classified as an “Emerging Innovator” on the European Innovation Scoreboard. Business Research & Development (R&D) expenditure remains low, university-industry collaboration remains limited, and overall innovation outputs continue to lag behind EU averages. However, Bulgaria is neither institutionally isolated nor insufficiently integrated into European innovation governance. On the contrary, it has formally adopted key EU innovation frameworks, such as a smart specialisation strategy, and has embedded digital transition agendas in its National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The country participates in collaborative R&D instruments such as Horizon Europe.

Bulgaria’s experience therefore presents a puzzle. Despite deep integration into European innovation governance, innovation performance remains persistently weak and uneven. This suggests that convergence cannot be understood simply as policy alignment or participation in EU frameworks. Instead, the key question becomes why deep integration has failed to generate systemic innovation upgrading and why outcomes remain conditioned by deeper structural and historical constraints.

The Convergence Expectation and Its Limits

EU integration has been expected to lead to institutional and economic convergence, yet European Commission reports, such as those on “Regional Trends for Growth and Convergence in the European Union” and “Missing Convergence in Innovation Capacity,” indicate that this has not happened uniformly in practice. European innovation governance seeks to strengthen innovation capacity and reduce territorial disparities, but its effects depend heavily on domestic conditions and are often strongest where pre-existing industrial capabilities, dense knowledge networks, and robust administrative capacity already exist (Rodríguez-Pose & Crescenzi, 2008).

Evidence increasingly suggests that innovation outcomes remain shaped by differences in economic structure and institutional capacity, even under common policy frameworks. EU Research & Innovation funding, for example, remains geographically concentrated across the Union. Such patterns highlight the importance of absorptive capacity, since formal policy harmonisation does not eliminate the influence of historical industrial structures, the quality of domestic demand, or the ability of local actors to translate external resources into sustained development. Where institutional and economic conditions are unevenly developed, externally supported innovation may become fragmented into short-term, project-based activity. Büttner (2019) describes this process as the ‘projectification’ of EU governance, a process that can limit systemic spillovers under conditions of weak domestic capacity. Collectively, this evidence indicates that the effects of EU integration cannot be reduced to policy alignment alone.

National Innovation Systems (NIS) theory helps explain why these constraints matter by treating innovation as an outcome of historically embedded relationships among firms, states, research institutions, and financial actors rather than policy instruments alone (Freeman, 1987). From this perspective, EU frameworks may improve formal coordination without necessarily strengthening the institutional capabilities required for innovation performance – a limitation also identified by Karo and Kattel (2015) in their analysis of Central and Eastern Europe.

Post-Socialist Legacy and Institutional Friction

To understand why Europe’s ‘convergence machine’ struggles to generate broad-based innovation, one must look beyond current policy frameworks to Bulgaria’s post-socialist institutional legacy. The country’s NIS remains heavily shaped by communist-era path dependencies. Bulgaria’s research landscape is marked by fragmentation, with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and regional universities operating as small, dispersed units that struggle to achieve the scale and infrastructure needed for international competitiveness, while institutional arrangements provide little support for building research-industry linkages (World Bank, 2026).

When the centrally planned economy collapsed in the 1990s, the country’s relatively advanced but highly state-dependent innovation ecosystem suffered a severe shock. State funding for R&D plummeted, leading to a “brain drain” and the physical decay of research infrastructure; indeed, R&D institutions were among the most adversely affected by the emigration of talent during the transition. According to the European Commission’s 2025 Policy Support Facility country report, these deep-rooted structural frictions persist despite EU funding and formal alignment with European standards.

In fact, the interaction between EU integration and this socialist legacy has produced complex, often unintended outcomes. EU structural and R&D funds have contributed to laboratory modernisation, yet their effects have remained uneven. As a European Joint Research Centre report (2015) observes, investment has frequently produced isolated “islands of excellence” within universities while leaving broader systemic linkages underdeveloped. Because traditions of university–industry collaboration remained weak, funding was often channelled into short-term, project-based activities rather than durable institutional partnerships. The World Bank (2026) notes that industry partnerships remain limited, applied research sporadic, and technology transfer largely dependent on temporary EU-funded initiatives. In this sense, EU resources became embedded within existing institutional arrangements, limiting their capacity to generate broader systemic change.

This structural disconnect persists because Europeanisation in Bulgaria has operated primarily through policy adoption rather than institutional transformation. Bulgaria’s strategic documents align closely with EU innovation priorities, including digital transition, competitiveness, and knowledge-based growth, as reflected in frameworks such as the EU’s New European Innovation Agenda. However, the institutional and financial capacities required to implement these ambitions remain unevenly developed. Bulgaria continues to rank among the weakest EU performers in innovation capacity, with persistent deficits in public R&D investment, firm-level innovation activity, and institutional coordination (World Bank, 2026). Consequently, alignment with European innovation governance has generated institutional compliance without systemic convergence. Policy frameworks increasingly resemble European models in form, while the underlying organisational capacities and research–industry linkages necessary to sustain broad-based innovation remain underdeveloped. Rather than overcoming inherited institutional fragmentation, European integration has frequently adapted to it, reproducing uneven innovation outcomes despite formal convergence.

Conclusion

The discussion supports scholarship that questions linear assumptions linking Europeanisation to developmental transformation. Bulgaria’s experience suggests that participation in common innovation frameworks does not necessarily produce convergence in innovation performance. In peripheral economies shaped by enduring institutional legacies, European integration may strengthen formal policy alignment while leaving underlying capacities for knowledge creation, diffusion, and commercialisation unevenly developed. This implies that innovation convergence should be understood as the ability of domestic systems to absorb, coordinate, and sustain innovation over time rather than through institutional resemblance alone. Reconsidering convergence in these terms may help explain why integration continues to generate differentiated outcomes across the EU.

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