CALL FOR PAPERS ON

"EU POLICY OF EAST ENLARGEMENT"

"LE POLITICHE EUROPEE DI ALLARGAMENTO AD EST - COORDINAMENTO, ESPORTAZIONE E CAMBIAMENTO DI MODELLI DI POLICY"

Editorial project for  No. 2 /2003 RIPP - RIVISTA ITALIANA DI POLITICHE  PUBBLICHE (www.spbo.unibo.it/ripp)

The current project has been drawn up in response to the great interest shown by the general public, policy makers, and social scientists in the question of the planned enlargement of the European Union to take in a further countries from Eastern and Central Europe. The editorial project can also be justified on the basis of the followings declarations and opinions:

The European Parliament, by a large majority, adopted a resolution approving the outcome of the Brussels summit (24-25 October 2002), and particularly the principle that the new member states will not find themselves in a less favorable financial situation than before accession.

European Enlargement Commissioner, Gunter Verheugen, has been reassuring people that enlargement is now firmly on track. ...The political momentum for enlargement is so strong that nothing can delay it now.

Danish prime minister Rasmussen told the PE, during the debate on enlargement, that: "The enlargement is, for better or worse, rooted in our common history, and it will have a decisive impact on the lives and opportunities of our descendants."

In Prague, the EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Fischler, urged the candidate countries to be pragmatic in the upcoming final stages of the negotiations: "Too often the discussion of the process of accession to the EU focuses on the nitty-gritty of quotas, standards and euros, while the larger question - the real advantages of enlargement - gets somewhat forgotten"... "The time for playing politics is over. Realism and pragmatism must be the order of the day."

As a matter of fact, our main interest and focus of analysis will be enlargement policy processes and actors - i.e. EU policies for addressing and supporting a wider-reaching, and deeper form of European integration and the enlargement of the EU to those candidate countries from Eastern Europe.

Our aim is to analyze and discuss not only the strategies (conditionality, ...) and the main instruments (Phare, ...), but also the scope (political and economic integration, stabilization of new democracies, ...) and impact (in terms of institutional and policy changes, in the different sectors, as PAC, cohesion and structural funds, single market and trade, foreign and security, ...) of EU enlargement policy.

In order to do so we need to understand the rationale of EU enlargement policies: the ideas, interests, and objectives that shaped such policies. We are interested in analyzing the behavior and decisions of the European policy makers, i.e. of those players who have taken these historically-important decisions and are engaged in their implementation and enforcement.

Furthermore, we intend to look at the significant modifications of various European policies required by future enlargement - policies that already appeared inadequate before and have been submitted for changes and reforms, in particular the CAP, the regional policy, the common foreign and security policy, and the institutional policy. For example, enlargement requires funding, and the most important debating points at present are structural funds and the CAP budget. Moreover, enlargement requires a deep-rooted reform of the communitarian institutions and methods (of decision-making, voting and vetoing) whereas increased membership and the respectively modified composition of important institutions (the European Commission, Council of Ministers, and Parliament) could lead to an impasse of  EU governance.

7 THIS IS A CALL FOR PAPERS
Submitted papers may be written in either Italian or in English, even if in the latter case they will be translated and published in Italian. We are presently contacting some well-known scholars and experts, together with a number of young researchers who will deal with this question.

7 OUR EDITORIAL PROJECT AIMS TO STUDY THE ENLARGEMENT PROCESS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF, AND USING THE METHODOLOGY OF, THE POLICY STUDIES
We are not focusing on political and theoretical discussions of the enlargement process in general; others (see, for example, JEPP 9, 4/2002, a special issue on theoretical and comparative approaches to EU enlargement) have made a number of important contributions to the analysis of such questions. What we have is the opportunity to move on from this and to develop a policy analysis that is not designed as an alternative to other approaches, but will hopefully complement them.

7 WE WILL SELECT ABSTRACTS - SIX OR SEVEN PAPER PROPOSALS - THAT FOCUS ON THE FOLLOWING TOPICS AND THAT ARRIVE NO LATER THAN END of MARCH 2003
Those abstracts submitted should be no longer than 250 words (in English or Italian), and should illustrate the contents with a general list of the principal sections. The main topics are:
- The ideas, values, interests, and theories characterizing the EU's East enlargement policies;
- Enlargement policies in the process of integration, focusing the analysis on policy legacy aspects and policy changes;
- EU enlargement policy and institutional rules and norms: accommodation vs. reform;
- Continuity and innovations in the strategy and instruments of EU enlargement policy;
- Important and/or dominant players in the East enlargement policy process;
- EU enlargement policies in certain crucially important sectors (agriculture, structural funds, institutional reform, foreign and security policy): interests at stake, participants in the negotiating process, and the kinds of solution proposed;
- Regular reports as enlargement policy instruments: do they indicate  a strategy of cooperation or conditionality?
- EU enlargement policies and adjustments in local institutional and organizational design and practices: case studies in certain candidate countries.

7 APPROVAL OF THE ABSTRACT DOES NOT MEAN APPROVAL OF THE PAPER, AS EACH PAPER WILL BE SUBJECTED TO AN ORDINARY PEER REVIEW PROCESS
Every paper will be read by a member of the editorial board and by three referees; they could require or advice the author to modify or to introduce certain corrections. The paper will be published if it is definitively approved by the editorial board.

7 THE CONTRIBUTIONS WILL BE PUBLISHED IN ITALIAN BY THE RIPP BEFORE THE SUMMER 2003
We will publish 5 or 6 papers of 80.000 characters (spaces and marks are included in this character count); one "focal point", will be an in-depth review  of some important books written on the above topics (35.000 characters); there should also be a database containing wide-ranging, well documented information concerning official sources, statistics, data and websites about enlargement policies (35.000 characters).

RIVISTA ITALIANA DI POLITICHE PUBBLICHE - RIPP

Webpage: www.spbo.unibo.it/ripp

e-mail: ripp@spbo.unibo.it

CONTACTS

7 Cristina Maltoni - Secretary of the Editorial Board
Tel.: +39. 0543. 374823
Fax: +39. 0543. 374822
e-mail: cmaltoni@spfo.unibo.it

PLEASE, SEND THE ABSTRACTS TO:
cmaltoni@spfo.unibo.it