Conference Agenda

The EU has established a range of privileged partnerships with European states not seeking membership. A core feature of these partnerships is the extent to which they provide for participation in the EU internal market and so the free movement of goods, services, capital and people. Participation depends on the extent to which the European partner aligns with EU rules governing the operation of the internal market. Past agreements have involved various forms of approximation, equivalence and dynamic alignment with EU rules, occasionally supplemented with informal voluntary alignment. Over time, the EU has become more insistent on new and updated arrangements incorporating formalised and dynamic alignment with its rules and incorporated a degree of automaticity into alignment provisions. Such developments are important not only in the context of the EU’s evolving approach to safeguarding the integrity of it internal market but also as states seek to enhance relations with the EU, particularly as regards securing improved access to the internal market. The obvious example here, is the United Kingdom and the current Labour government’s commitment to ‘reset’ relations and remove ‘unnecessary barriers to trade’.

The paper considers the nature and extent of the dynamic regulatory arrangements contained in recent agreements concluded by the EU. The focus is on three sets of arrangements: the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland – now widely referred to as the Windsor Framework – that forms part of the United Kingdom’s Withdrawal Agreement and incorporates a novel form of automatic dynamic regulatory alignment; the association agreement concluded by the EU with Andorra and San Marino in 2024 that allows for the states’ participation in the EU internal market; and the outcome of the 2024 negotiations with Switzerland on new and updated ‘internal market’ agreements. The paper then considers the significance of these arrangements and the precedents they set for the nature and scope of any future EU-UK agreement governing improved access to the EU internal market.

The late 2024 agreement to significantly revise the bilateral treaties between the European Union and Switzerland had been a priority of the EU for well over a decade. Between 2014 and 2021, most efforts to significantly revise the complex bilateral arrangements between Brussels and Bern had been slow and unproductive. From 2021 to 2024, they were effectively frozen by Swiss recalcitrance. The speed in which negotiations proceeded in 2024 was notable given so many years of delay. This research argues that EU relations with non-members states in Western Europe - Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and the microstates - effectively were on hold for much of the Brexit period between 2016 and 2024. Brexit not only engulfed vast time and resources during the British-EU negotiation process, but lingering problems with the Northern Ireland Protocol and Windsor Framework, allowed issues such as the Swiss Bilaterals to remain unresolved. But with Brexit settled, the EU could not only devote more resources to the issue of Switzerland, but also had new strategies gained from Brexit negotiations to bring to bear. Hence while Brexit may have helped delay and stymie progress on Swiss-EU bilateral reforms, it also ultimately put the EU in an advantageous position by the end of the process in which it ended up getting significant concessions. Hence the Swiss case may be the first post-Brexit examples of the EU's new negotiating power and strategies with non-members in not only Western Europe but also possible candidate and association states in the East. While the withdrawal of the United Kingdom is often viewed as the primary outcome of Brexit, its longterm impact on the EU's relationships and strategies of negotiation with non-member states in Europe may be one of imporatnt secondary consequences.

This paper explores the myth of the social contract at the European Union (EU) level in order to assess the expansion of European integration and its influence on the unfolding of democratic aspirations in liberalizing societies. As a political myth, the social contract is dynamic and able to transform itself to address social change and stimulate the creation, diffusion and transformation of other socio-political myths. As such, it has the capacity to adapt itself to different political settings, social demands and individual or collective expectations. This adaptability is particularly relevant in an international environment marked by rapid acceleration, polycrisis (financial, war and refugees, climate and ecological) and manifold societal challenges. Based on this understanding, the paper assesses how political mythologies associated influence the continuous construction of the social contract myth in the EU. To do so, the paper focuses on two transitions propelled by ongoing crises: the EU enlargement – revamped by the war in Ukraine and the EU’s so-called geopolitical turn – and the EU green transition – arguably emerging as a response to the climate crisis. By focusing on these two dimensions of analysis, the paper aims at shedding light on top-down and bottom-up dynamics of both acceptance and resistance to the EU and its emerging social contract. Quantitative methods, such as semi-structured interviews, content analysis and critical discourse analysis will support the research. The study of EU enlargement will also benefit from a case-study approach, focusing on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ukraine and Turkey. The articulated analysis of these two dimensions opens important avenues to explore the coherence, intertwinement and societal outcomes of different political mythologies mobilized in the continuous construction of an EU social contract.

Throughout the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue the European Union (EU) has taken a leading role and, in exchange, has been variously supported or criticized for its relatively light touch and the EU’s mandated position as neutral negotiator. With only 22 EU member states (EUMS) recognizing the independence of Kosovo, the EU has had to walk a fine line to encourage the ‘normalization of relations’ between Belgrade and Kosovo without taking a position on what said normalization would look like. While much has been written on the EU’s level of actorness in the case, both as an external actor in negotiations and through its capacity building operations in Kosovo (Barcani 2019; Noutcheva 2020), there has not yet been a relational study of the EU’s underlying capacity to act in this area. Thus, this represents a prime case study to both refine relational understandings of EU actorness (Bremberg and Borg 2020), as it has been so constrained due to interlocking relations of the EU and EUMS. In its findings, this paper corroborates results from non-relational approaches and finds that adopting a relational approach provides a more robust explanation for the EU’s challenges in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue.