This book examines the management of migratory flows in the Mediterranean within an international security perspective. The intense migratory flows registered during the year 2015 and the tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea have tested the mechanisms of the Union’s immigration and asylum policies and its ability to respond to humanitarian crises. Moreover, these flows of varying intensities and geographies represent a threat to the internal security of the EU and its member states. By using Spain and Italy as case studies, the author theorizes that the EU, given its inability to adopt and implement a common policy to effectively manage migratory flows on its Southern border, uses a deterrence strategy based on minimum common denominators.

In recent years the countries of southern Europe have undergone, with varying intensity, a serious and prolonged economic crisis. Most have had to implement comprehensive economic adjustment programmes, including a wide range of structural reforms. Economic Crisis and Structural Reforms in Southern Europe examines these reforms, drawing policy lessons from their successes and failures. This book employs two basic strands of analysis: issues of policy design, and political economy considerations. It considers the choice of timing and sequencing of reforms, the choice of the appropriate policy instruments, the pressure of interest groups and the political calculations involved in reforms. Featuring chapters in which contributors explore both national cases of specific structural reforms, and a comparative approach in order to evaluate similar reforms across countries, this important and topical work explores ongoing issues within the economy. Focusing on the challenges of designing and implementing structural reforms under conditions of crisis, this book will be of interest to policy makers and researchers from national and international organizations as well as academics and members of research institutes interested in the economics and politics of the Eurozone crisis.

Fueled by new data from the Varieties of Democracy project, Democratic Quality in Southern Europe takes a close look at the democratic trajectories of France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain over the past fifty years. Despite similar beginnings, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain have experienced significant variations in the way their democracies have evolved. Covering ground from the protest movements of the late ’60s and early ’70s to the challenges that resulted from the financial crisis of the Great Recession, editor Tiago Fernandes expertly draws together a collection of essays that look beyond the impact of socioeconomic development in these five countries, exploring innovative and nuanced explanations for their diverging paths. Democratic Quality in Southern Europe combines new data with classical methodologies to create fresh, convincing hypotheses on the development, quality, and depth of democracy in this critical region. Contributors: Tiago Fernandes, Rui Branco, João Cancela, Edna Costa, Pedro Diniz de Sousa, Pedro T. Magalhães, Edalina Rodrigues Sanches, José Santana-Pereira, Tiago Tibúrcio

Euroscepticism has emerged as a growing constraint on European integration, starting with the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s, continuing with the mid-2000s constitutional debacle and intensifying with the eurozone crisis – a crisis in which Southern Europe has played a key role. But is opposition to European integration really greater now than in the past? The only way to answer this question is through diachronic studies, focusing on change over time. This is the gap in the literature which the present volume aims to fill, through an examination of the origins, evolution and prospects of opposition to integration, focusing on a region traditionally regarded as exceptionally europhile. As a laboratory for the study of attitudes towards European integration, Southern Europe offers a particularly rich range of case studies, including a founder member (Italy), three ‘second generation’ states (Greece, Spain and Portugal), two recent entrants (Cyprus and Malta) and a negotiating candidate (Turkey). The volume traces the evolution of euroscepticism in each South European country, assessing its significance, identifying key turning-points and highlighting both continuity and change. Covering party and popular euroscepticism, the book illuminates similarities and differences between national experiences of euroscepticism. This book was published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.

`Europe is sometimes credited with a `polis,' but not a `demos'. Political integration and economic globalisation cannot diminish local identity and social memories. This fascinating collection of national case studies shows why there will always be a local `demos' located in ecology, economy, and society. But there will never be a transnational `demos', precisely because locality is the basis for meaningful sustainability. Long may it triumph.' Tim O'Riordan, CSERGE, University of East Anglia 'The book offers a refreshing perspective on the diversity of Europe and at the same time, on the interdependence of the policies, economies, and societies of European countries. Going beyond the dichotomies of `good and bad' and `leaders and laggards' in environmental matters, the authors contribute to a different understanding of the North-South divide in the process of European integration.' Angela Liberatore, European Commission, Directorate General for Research `This is a self-consciously revisionist volume, whose findings are theoretically significant, policy-relevant, and timely. Its insistence on `bringing society back in,' its debunking of the notion of a `Mediterranean syndrome,' its emphasis on developmental `leapfrogging' capacity of late-comers to emerge as leaders in contexts of late modernity, and its systematic attempt to reconceptualize the politics of Europeanization should be carefully listed to students and policy-makers concerned with collective action, Southern Europe, European integration, and environmental politics.' P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, University of Athens

This collection of original essays deals with the effects of unemployment on regimes, parties, immigrants, economies and families in Southern Europe.

Large or small, old EU member or new, and even EU member state or not – political economies across Southern Europe have been increasingly but distinctively ‘Europeanised’. In political, public and scholarly debates on processes of Europeanisation, Southern Europe invariably features as the area of concern. These concerns have been all the more heightened when the current sovereign debt crisis disproportionately hit this ‘flaky fringe’. This volume systematically investigates the dynamics of Europeanisation in the ‘Southern Periphery’ by tracing the domestic constellations of ideas, interests and institutions over the course of the 2000s which came to a close with the crisis. Bringing together a multidisciplinary team of leading specialists, the volume focuses on the political economy of public policy reform in Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Turkey. In order to allow for cross-case comparisons, these original country studies follow a common template framed by what the Editors call the ‘Europeanisation as research programme’. The volume casts empirical light on the causes of the crisis in these cases as well as the past legacies conditioning their responses to the crisis. Its conclusions point to variegated patterns of Europeanisation in different policy areas across Southern Europe. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of European integration, European political economy, European public policy and comparative politics as well as specialists of Southern Europe. This book was published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.

How have Malta and Cyprus - both EU members – transitioned from colonial island states to independent democracies? With the assistance of primary documentation this book traces the difficult path of these two states to becoming independent liberal democracies by using the pathway of democratization through decolonization. Using socio-economic and political data, analysed through the microscope of political science and international relations theories, Isabelle Calleja Ragonesi charts the progress of the two islands in the context of a number of four distinct phases. Firstly decolonization, independence and achieving the status of procedural democracies; secondly post-colonial independence consolidating democracy and regime breakdown; thirdly sovereign nation-state status and second attempts at consolidating democracy and finally attempting to reach substantive democracy status and EU membership. The study of these two states is contextualized within the context of democratization in Southern Europe and the cases of Malta and Cyprus provide new insights on the region for scholars of political science and international institutions.

European integration has had a profound impact on the politics of Southern Europe, a region that was initially at the margin of the decision-making processes of the European Union, but is gradually becoming more and more influential. This volume offers a comparative overview of modern politics in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, focusing in particular on the process of integration of these countries into the European Union and on the impact of European public policy. The author analyzes the development of Southern European political systems, from the establishment of democratic governments to the most recent political events, looking at each individual system and finding patterns, similarities of development, as well as differences between them. Among the topics examined are the building of institutions, the parties and party systems, foreign policies, the political culture of each country, and the recent efforts towards the creation of a space of security and peace in the Mediterranean.

This volume is the first of its kind to discuss social welfare issues using case studies from a broad range of Southern European countries, both large and small, a decade after the financial crisis. It identifies similarities and differences in the ways in which Southern European countries engage with specific welfare issues and examines whether Southern European welfare is distinct from that of the rest of the continent. The book also engages with the impact of COVID-19 on the social welfare issues under investigation. The volume is divided into four sections, each examining in detail issues including employment, education, health, sexuality, globalization, social movements and migration. With its contributions from experts in the field, the volume is recommended for academics, researchers and students of sociology, social policy, economics, education, politics and social movements.