The current EU polycrisis has put already fragile founding principle of solidarity among member states further in jeopardy considering the distribution of burden in formulating timely and effective responses to internal and external crises. While this permanent crisis has escalated tensions among the EU actors, some scholars also read it as an opportunity for internal actors to address their needs at systemic and institutional levels. Based on the literature focusing on the internal functions of EU foreign policy, this paper aims to examine how the strategic use of the EU foreign policy and its components by the European Commission is becoming an ordinary practice of foreign policy making while paving the way for alternative venues for European integration process. The content analysis of key documents released by the EU Commission and the relevant officials in the field of external border management is the key source of the data used in this research. The preliminary findings of the study suggest that the EU actors in general and the European Commission in particular have tendency to produce and reproduce components of EU foreign policy and its objectives with an expectation of reinforcing their internal and external legitimacy. This strategic use of EU foreign policy and here in this case external border policy provide a dynamic process of formulating and reinforcing integration and identity objectives and policies of the EU. This dynamism also raises questions over the future of European integration Project.

Audiovisual policies are driven by a complex maze of instrumentalised aims (cultural, social, economic, and integrationist, within a creativity framework) (Psychogiopoulou, 2015). This paper interrogates the policy ideas driving European Commission state aid policy for the audiovisual industries, positing that state aid policy is a form of cultural policy. It uses law and political economy (LPE) framework (Harris & Varellas, 2020) with the Regulation School (Lipietz, 1987) of political economy. This framework allows for unravelling of power structures in the development and application of Commission soft law policy. It interrogates Commission approvals of Member States’ proposed audiovisual State aid regimes under the Commission’s ‘soft law’ policy instruments (2001 & 2013 Cinema Communication). Soft law might be seen as informal or even toothless; but when used for explicit policy formation like in the development of audiovisual State aid policy it is significant economically and politically.

The formation of policy by way of soft law allows the Commission to problematically evade ‘the burden of proof’ required by a traditional legislative framework (Andone & Greco, 2018; Lea Lancos, 2022), instead allowing agenda setting policymaking influenced by stakeholders and sidestepping the subsidiarity principles. The identified wave of cultural marketisation towards the audiovisual industries is subject to other social and political desires of an (albeit non-linear) increasingly consolidated and embedded neoliberalism in competition policy which can be contextualised using an LPE orientation. Using example of “cinema” policy, that is, the scheme of state aids for audiovisual production across member states of the EU, as an example, this paper identifies a complex and uneven policy towards culture, that sees audiovisual culture as simultaneously a unifying force, as an expression of differences, as an economic power, and as a cultural phenomenon.

Andone, C., & Greco, S. (2018). Evading the burden of proof in European Union soft law instruments: the case of Commission recommendations. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 31(1), 79-99.

A. Harris & J.J. Varellas, J.J., ‘Law and Political Economy in a Time of Accelerating Crises’ (2020) Journal of Law and Political Economy 1

Láncos, P. L. (2022). The Many Facets of EU Soft Law.

A. Lipietz, and R. Boyer, 1987. La régulation: les mots et les choses A propos de La théorie de la régulation: une approche critique. Revue économique, 1049-1059

E. Psychogiopolou, (2015). Cultural Governance and the European Union: Protecting and Promoting Cultural Diversity in Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan

This article takes the concept of spatial imaginaries to explore how the post-Brexit negotiations shifted meanings of ‘Europe’ for Polish migrants residing in Scotland. A flourishing subfield of ‘Brexit geographies’ has explored the meaning and consequences of Brexit (as an event, process and affect) for wide-ranging communities on the move and in place. Yet, the question of how ‘Europe’, and in particular ‘EUrope’, is being re-imagined and re-constituted by EU migrants residing in uncertain political spaces remains understudied. In this article, we address this lacuna through analysis of biographical narrative interviews and spatial mapping exercises. In doing so, we conduct a multi-scalar analysis of Polish migrants’ discursive and visual representations of EUrope, defined both as a geographical and institutional space. The study is spatially and temporally situated at a particular time and place in the Brexit timeline – the summer of 2019 in rural and urban Scotland. At this time, Brexit negotiations were ongoing, there was widespread uncertainty about the consequences for migrants in the United Kingdom, and, in Scotland particularly, much resistance to leaving the European Union. The article argues that while Brexit might have not affected European identity among Polish migrants in Scotland, it has prompted them to reconsider their place in Europe and to reimagine both the geographical and conceptual parameters of EUrope.

In the European context, large number of empirical studies found in academic journals about immigration are state or citizen centred, where little is paid on immigrants’ perspective regarding integration and life in the migration society. That is, most of population surveys in academic research and applied research in social sciences seek the citizens opinion towards immigrants, and not vice versa. Tourangeau et al ( 2014 ) criticised population surveys such as censuses created a shortcoming as this presents low number of migrants in the sample, inter alia because they are a “hard-to-survey” population. Exceptions for reaching out immigrants are rare, which includes the Swiss Migration-Mobility Survey, the EU Survey on Immigrants and Descendants of Immigrants, currently running by the European Union Agency for Fundamental rights, Migrant-citizen survey by Migration Policy Group (conducted in 2013), and European Social Survey ( ESS ). To further contribute to immigrant-centred research, we conduct assessment of migrant integration policy in Spain, with young Maghrebi immigrants as target population. The method used in the policy assessment is the perception and opinion of a sample of young Maghrebi immigrants who answered a survey distributed to them in the Spanish region of Andalucía[1]. Preliminary findings show that young Immigrants of Maghrebi origin tend to show a “significantly satisfactory” stance about their experience with integration in Spain. Immigrants’ attitudes towards survey parameters - such as language acquisition, the understanding of Spanish culture and society, citizen-immigrant attitudes and satisfaction with social programs - were generally positive, in spite of concerns regarding obtaining residence permits and other legalities associated mainly with undocumented migrants.

[1] The data collection is still going thus the findings are preliminary. The number of answers collected during the time of abstract submission exceeds 30 answers.

Economic sanctions have been used as a tool of war for centuries, including prohibition on trade, closure of ports and bans on trade in certain commodities. In the 21^st century, economic sanctions are still being imposed in order to deter or correct bad behaviour of certain states, by enforcing economic punishment. It has been utilized as a response to terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, rogue state behaviour, military conflicts or human rights violations etc. The main objective of this instrument is to force rehabilitation or a change in the behaviour of states. However, their successfulness depends on various factors, such as the level of enforcement and its effectiveness. The current proposal, targets to present sanctions from a different angle, not only as coercive measures, but as resilience building tools, using the Belarus-EU border crisis erupted in 2021 as the main case study. The Commission understands by resilience the ability of an individual, a household, a community, a country or a region to withstand, to adapt, and to quickly recover from stresses and shocks. Restrictive measures were imposed on Belarus by the European Union and several Western countries as a feedback to the fraudulent elections in 2020, more sanctions following after the deliberate facilitation of irregular immigration at the EU’s eastern border and the war in Ukraine. It is being argued, that the Belarusian government was weaponizing human beings for political purposes. The effectiveness of sanctions as resilience building tools constitutes the dependent variable of the research proposal, the independent variables encompassing all those factors influencing their effectiveness. Furthermore, the study will shed light on the existence of a direct correlation between the type of regime and the efficiency of the imposed sanctions, by using the statistics provided by the Economic Intelligence Unit, the Global Sanctions Database and the Democracy Matrix of the University of Wurzburg.