Results

In terms of concrete results of EuroChallenge, we would identify the following key findings:

• Economic crises provide opportunities for EU policy actors to re-shape both the internal institutional architecture of the EU and its relative position in the global economy, but only to the extent that crises are understood as opportunities to effect meaningful change
   
• Institutional actors (such as the European Commission) have long been important facilitators of the conjoining of particular economic ideas to concrete regulatory/reform proposals, but also in embedding these within an evolving understanding of the crisis itself
   
• There are multiple liberal (including economic liberal) policy logics at work within the EU’s policy-making ecology. Their complex interaction constitutes both internal policy trajectories and external action
   
• The supposed recent dominance of ‘ordoliberal’ ideas is having (perversely) destabilising effects on the capacity of Germany to steer through the crisis
   
• The ‘ordoliberal’ character of the EU needs to be understood in terms of its realisation in EU law as much as in EU policy-making
   
• We cast doubt on the standard claim that the rise and institutionalisation of international courts has been the consequence of the world-wide diffusion of European norms. Local socio-political and legal contexts carry considerably more explanatory weight
   
• Europe is thus perhaps not the key producer of regional and international law across the world
    
• Studying the relationship between national and international courts across Europe suggests that the supremacy of EU law is not practised as straightforwardly as doctrine suggests. We have developed a framework for studying the relationship between national and inter-national judiciaries
   
• Legal proceedings following the Euro-crisis have tended to put a range of welfare and social rights under pressure;
  The internationalisation of criminal law is becoming an important tool of European governance. Its development has been driven by networks of legal professionals who have actively constituted this field of European law
   
• Based upon our studies of international and intra-EU migration to Denmark in times of recession, we show that the socialisation of migrants and the building of new communities among them depends upon the creative use of new media technologies
   
• Our results in Denmark are indicative of how a small country adapts to international migration movements and labour mobility. Despite the absence of multicultural approaches, the Danish flexicurity la-bour and welfare regime has accommodated a diverse group of la-bour migrants less through pre-defined cultural traits or ethnic ties and more through common interests, needs and lifestyles
   
• Social media, even when used as a vehicle for nationalist Euroscepticism, can be a vehicle for the Europeanisation/ transnationalisation of politics. But the specifics of social media platform architecture seem to be a key determinant of the types of political contestation that can emerge
   
• The case of Brexit reveals that events/crises are as much constructed from the outside as they are within the site of the crises. The construct ‘Brexit’ is used in multiple ways to define national identities, geopolitical realities and the nature of economic order. As such ‘Brexit’ has become a discursive tool in contemporary deomestic and international politics.