Category: Journal News

“[T]he desire to be a predictive science causes us to imagine the world
to be far more predictable than it actually is.” (Blyth 2006, p. 493)

As the EU stumbles from crisis to crisis, which the Commission President has even referred to as an “existential crisis” in his state of the union address, can we as EU scholars continue with business as usual? Or should we rethink our ways of researching, teaching and communicating the EU?

Over the past decade, the EU has faced an unprecedented succession and accumulation of crises: the banking crisis has led to financial and sovereign debt crises, which have culminated in a Eurozone crisis; a democratic crisis does not merely beset EU-level decision-making, but seems to be a deliberate strategy of some EU governments championing ‘illiberal democracy’. The so-called refugee crisis has been a catalyst for populism and demands to ‘take back’, i.e. re-nationalize, political control. The Brexit referendum was a vivid illustration of these centrifugal forces in the EU and beyond (e.g. with US president-elect Trump calling himself ‘Mr. Brexit’).

For EU scholars, these crises have become primary objects of study, but they have not thrown EU studies into crisis. To the contrary: EU scholars have interpreted the EU’s crisis responses as yet another set of phenomena that can be studied by employing assumptions, theories, and methods that characterize our field. Why let a good crisis go to waste, if it can be analysed with the existing bodies of theories of integration, institutional change, and decision-making? Previous crises, big and small, have surely brought about shifts in the EU’s institutional architecture, they have affected the contentiousness and dynamics of EU policy-making, they have allowed us to assess and refine our theories, but they have hardly led us to re-evaluate our shared premise: that the EU, despite its inefficiencies and deficits, is here to stay.

During the days following the June 23^rd vote, business as usual was hardly an option for those amongst us entering a classroom, or for those being asked by concerned relatives and friends. While we can help make sense of the Brexit vote, given the sophisticated commentary from our peers, the implications of the referendum might unleash more than ‘just’ another crisis: It might very well mark a moment of reckoning for us as political scientists and EU scholars. Have we overestimated the stability of the EU’s political system and its resilience to crises? Are some of our theories biased by equating more integration with successful problem-solving and do they hence insinuate a sense of stability, which, in fact, is more porous than solid? Or have we simply taken the EU too much for granted (alongside, possibly, with other political accomplishments of the liberal, democratic post-war order)? And, depending on our answers to these questions, what follows from this diagnosis for researching, teaching and communicating the EU?

We invite proposals (of max. 500 words) for individual contributions (of up to 5,000 words) to a JEPP debate section on this topic. Please, send your proposals by 12 February 2017 to michael.blauberger@sbg.ac.at and berthold.rittberger@gsi.lmu.de and do not hesitate to get in touch with either of them should you have any further questions.

JEPP and the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) continue their collaboration to publish the best conference papers of the biennial EUSA conferences in a special issue, guest edited by EUSA. As the third special issue of this exciting collaboration is now available through the JEPP website (read the intro here and Alasdair Young’s blog post here), EUSA has issued the call for papers for the next biennial conference to be held in Miami from May 4-6, 2017. Abraham Newman will act as the guest editor of Miami-issue. If you want to be in it, make sure you are on the programme!

Thomson & Reuters has just released the new impact factor scores for 2015. JEPP’s 2015 two-year impact factor score once again rose to new heights and now stands at 1.964, the highest score JEPP has ever received. Adding to that, JEPP clinched an unprecedented spot among the top twenty on the Political Science list, now ranking at 19/163. In the Public Administration list, JEPP stands at 7/47.

By Peter Kidd

As a copy-editor working on JEPP, I am one of those to blame when a typo makes it through from submitted manuscript to printed journal. But we’re all human – well, I am – and being human we all make mistakes. I know I do.  That’s why I buy pencils with erasers on the end.

So what exactly do I do? What do I add to the publication process?

I see my job as ensuring that the text of a submission is optimized so that the reader can absorb its content and meaning with as little effort as possible. If a reader needs to go back and re-read a sentence or paragraph, I have not been 100 per cent successful in copy-editing the text.  Continue reading “Copy-editors of the world untie! You have nothing too lose!!”

The entire JEPP-team wishes you a happy, healthy and successful 2016. JEPP has had a very healthy 2015 with a record number of submissions, surpassing 330 by the end of the year. We hope that you will continue to keep us busy in 2016. In our first newsletter of the new year, we will highlight new journal content, which will appear shortly in the second issue of the 2016 volume.

We also want to draw your attention to the first issue of 2016, which we released last December. With its focus on the Euro crisis, it may look like a Special Issue, but – we promise – it is not. Based on independent submissions, we were able to put together an exciting collection of pieces addressing different facets of the Euro crisis. Wolfgang Streeck and Lea Elsässer discuss the viability of EMU under conditions of continued economic disparities among its members; George Tsebelis explores some of the lessons that the Greek and other EU governments can draw from the Greek crisis; Sergio Fabbrini compares the EU with other unions of states and argues that the EU’s institutional set-up obstructs rather than facilitates the adoption of constitutional solutions in situations such as the Euro crisis. For Philipp Genschel and Markus Jachtenfuchs, EU integration has made remarkable advances in ‘core state powers’ and they contrast the EU experience with state-building dynamics. Stefaan De Rynck provides a fascinating account of the policy process through which the EU adopted a centralized system of banking supervision. James D. Savage and Amy Verdun show that the Euro crisis has left a firm imprint on the Commission, which adapted its internal organisation and strategies to re-gain influence in the crisis-induced integration process. The crisis has had an impact not only on domestic and EU-level institutions: Alina Polyakova and Neil Fligstein ask if the crisis has transformed public attitudes “causing Europe to become more nationalist?”

With the Euro crisis turning into some kind of permanent state of affairs, it is likely to keep you (and us) busy in 2016. In terms of political and media attention, the Euro crisis has already been surpassed by the refugee crisis. We thus encourage you to send us your work to help us better understand the refugee crisis in all its variegated facets, its dynamics and impact on the EU and domestic institutions, political competition and policy reform. Crises also loom elsewhere: The domestic developments in Hungary and Poland have triggered wider discussions about ‘democratic backsliding’. The possibility of ‘Brexit’ is still looming and raises a plethora of questions about the trajectory of the EU. While we welcome work on all of these topics, rest assured that JEPP is not a crisis journal! We will continue to publish work on European and EU politics and policy-making in the broadest possible sense. Or as Jeremy would say: We are a “broad church”, though a secular one.

Take care,

Berthold & Jeremy

JEPP prides itself on being a fast and efficient journal. However,  JEPP is going into sleep mode for the period December 22, 2015, until January 2nd, 2016 (no doubt some of you will be muttering ‘the Editors are always in sleep mode’). Jeremy will be on holiday with Sonia, Tess, Molly, and Harvey (the dog) at their holiday home in Akaroa, on the Banks Peninsula in South Island, NZ. The family will do some kayaking and coastal walking, but Harvey will only paddle, fearful of actually swimming. Berthold and Jess are spending the holidays in Palm Beach (Jess’ parents refuge from the Candian winter) and will explore the odd island in the Caribbean by boat. Yes, there is something odd here. Shouldn’t Jeremy (at his age) be going on a Caribbean cruise and Berthold doing the kayaking? OK, Berthold does ski and mountain hike much of the year while Jeremy is trying to develop muscles by lifting glasses of NZ Pinot Noir.

Michael will be neither cruising nor kayaking, he also does not own a holiday home (yet), and sees no need to develop (even more) muscles, but simply looks forward to conquering a pile of novels from his sofa, well wrapped into the new Norwegian wool blanket. Philipp will escape London’s confusingly Bavarian Winter Wonderland, leave shopping sprees on Oxford Street and plum pudding behind to spend Christmas with his family near Munich (and also ignore his impending statistics exam as long as possible).

By all means, submit your articles into the online system while we are relaxing during the holiday period. Better still, you too should have a jolly nice break from academic things.

Best wishes for the upcoming holiday from the JEPP team
Jeremy, Berthold, Michael, and Philipp.

JEPP authors and referees might have noticed that JEPP sometimes operates at some rather unsocial hours of the day. We could claim that this is because we are such devoted editors that we never sleep. Indeed, we could go further and blame lack of sleep for the (sometimes wrong no doubt!) decisions, which we take. Alas, neither would be true. To be sure, editing JEPP is a big job but the reason that JEPP operates 24/5 (sometimes 24/7) is that Berthold works in Bavaria and Jeremy works in NZ. A typical JEPP day starts in NZ around 07.30 NZ time, with email traffic off to Berthold during the NZ day. (A lot of North American email traffic will reach Jeremy during his working day). Berthold picks up those emails (less than a dozen, but only when he is lucky) very early on his morning in Germany, often in time for Jeremy to see his replies before having dinner and a glass (or two!) of fine NZ wine. Berthold then carries on processing submissions and reports coming in during the Northern Hemisphere day, resulting in another batch of emails waiting for Jeremy next morning in NZ… and so another 24-hour JEPP cycle starts. Co-ordination is facilitated by the fact that we can follow each other’s ‘actions’ in Scholar One as ‘the system’ logs each action taken, by whom, and at what time.

We think JEPP might be unique in having a 24-hour cycle. Does anyone know of other examples maybe?

JEPP continues to publish Special Issues in 2017. Deadline for submitting proposals for the two remaining special issue slots in 2017 is 30 November 2015. Visit the JEPP Resource Page for further details.

JEPP now awards a JEPP Best Paper Prize for the best paper published in a regular issues. Two members of the editorial board, Dan Kelemen and Sebastiaan Princen, took on the task to select the best paper published in JEPP in 2014. After weeks of hard work, they have chosen the paper by Theresa Kuhn and Florian Stoeckel, ‘When European integration becomes costly: the euro crisis and public support for European economic governance,’ JEPP 21(4): 624-641. Read the congratulatory statement by the prize committee.