The Transnationalization of Economies, States, and Civil Societies: New Challenges for Governance in Europe

ISBN-13: 9780387893389 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 302 str.

Ronald Holzhacker; Laszlo Bruszt

Opis

7. 1. 1 Research Question The electricity sector has undergone and continues to experience a fundamental transformation. Liberalization, deregulation and re-regulation have spread around the world, which has led to a far-reaching restructuring of the sector. In Europe, this trend has been reinforced by a European Union (EU) directive adopted in 1996. This directive alone, however, cannot suf ciently explain how and why most co- tries, some of them not members of the EU, decided to liberalize their electricity sectors. First, the directive gave large leeway to the member states about how to implement liberalization, and second, the phenomenon is an almost global trend, not limited to Europe. Therefore, Europeanization as an explanation for the electr- ity market's liberalization has been criticized for overemphasizing the impact of the EU (Fligstein and Merand 2001; Jordana et al. 2006; Levi-Faur 2004; Verdier and Breen 2001). A more encompassing approach to explain why governments decided to lib- alize their electricity markets is offered by the recent research agenda of trans- tionalization. Transnationalization can be de ned as ' . . . ] the regular interactions between state and non-state actors across national boundaries aimed at shaping political and social outcomes at home, abroad, and in an emerging global sphere of governance' (Orenstein and Schmitz 2006: 7). The approach of transnationalization includes both state and nonstate actors.

Spis treści

Three Converging Literatures of Transnationalization and the Varieties of Transnationalization: Introduction.- Transnational Integration Regimes as Development Programmes.- From Employee Governance to Corporate Governance: Transnational Forces and the Polish Corporate Governance Debates Since the 1980s.- The Domestic Regulation of Transnational Labour Markets: EU Enlargement and the Politics of Labour Migration in Switzerland and Ireland.- The Transnationalization of Change in Economic Institutions: The Case of Industrial Standards Regulations in Ukraine.- The Politics of the Competition State: The Agents and Mechanisms of State Transnationalization in Central and Eastern Europe.- Transnationalization and Domestic Policy-Making Processes: Electricity Market Reform in Belgium and Switzerland.- Transnationalization and the Georgian State: Myth or Reality?.- Transnational Strategies of Civil Society Organizations Striving for Equality and Nondiscrimination: Exchanging Information on New EU Directives, Coalition Strategies and Strategic Litigation.- National and European? Protesting the Lisbon Agenda and the Services Directive in the European Union.- Transnational Governance of Labour Standards: Insights from the Clothing Industry in Turkey.- Transnationalization and Its Governance – Actorhood and Power in the Shadow of Global Crisis.

Blurb

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are witnessing an ever quickening dissolution of the boundaries between internal and external actors and the critical factors for understanding domestic institutional change. In the transnationalization of the economies of Western and Eastern Europe, international cross-ownership networks are playing a growing, and at times dominant role in domestic economies. These economies are governed by states that are increasingly sharing larger and larger parts of their regulative powers with non-domestic actors.

These regulations are contested by civil societies that are increasingly based on networks of interlinked domestic and external NGOs. This is an emerging research agenda extending earlier research on transnationalization, which focused on the supra-national level, and it goes beyond the Europeanization literature that focused on externally induced or imposed change in domestic institutions. This book brings together in one volume the study of transnationalization in three institutional fields: civil society, state and the economy and extends the research of processes of transnationalization to evolving new democracies and emerging market economies. This book should be of interest to scholars and students in the field of political science, public policy, European studies, and international relations.