Regine Paul

Negotiating varieties of capitalism? Crisis and change in contemporary British and German labour migration policies

ABSTRACT Just a decade ago, the liberal British and cautious German approaches to labour migration policy (LMP) counted as institutional spillovers of two opposed varieties of capitalism. Since 2014, however, Germany has offered one of the most liberal labour migration legislations across the rich world, while the Coalition government in London has severely curbed the rules of admission. Is the explanatory power of capitalist variation already exhausted for comparative labour migration policies? To what extent has the economic crisis disrupted policy paths? By adopting a cultural political economy perspective, this paper examines the interaction of crisis discourses and capitalist varieties in explaining LMP changes. A comparison shows that Britain treats the liberal market economy’s openness to foreign workers as a root cause for a deeply felt migration control crisis and seeks to tame firms’ profitability strategies with restrictive policies. By contrast, German decision-makers have come to view the skill provision mechanisms of the coordinated market economy as key cure to the perceived demographic crisis, liberalising migration routes alongside this economic coordination model. Overall, the paper dethrones capitalist varieties as seemingly deterministic informants of labour migration policies. Instead, policies have both the aim and capacity to negotiate national capitalisms according to shifting notions of crisis.

Risk-based governance against national obstacles? Comparative dynamics of Europeanization in Dutch, French, and German flooding policies

Comparative studies have recently highlighted obstacles related to continental European countries’ proclivity for adopting risk-based governance. However, so far, the interface between risk-based policy-making in the EU and potential policy change in reluctant member states has been underexplored. We compare flooding policies in the Netherlands with those in France and Germany to establish the extent to and conditions under which EU-level risk-based policies can transform national governance approaches. Drawing on the concept of Europeanization, we compare national adaptation pressures stemming from the EU floods directive, investigate adaptation dynamics, and account for transformations towards risk-based thinking. We find that Europeanization enabled a mainstreaming of risk-based flooding policies in France and Germany, as national actors used the EU as a venue to entice a desired policy rationalization and centralization. By contrast, and somewhat unexpectedly, the Netherlands partially retrenched from EU procedures because the directive’s reporting mechanisms were considered to breach The Hague’s aspirational policy approach. Overall, the paper identifies a strong potential for even ‘soft’ EU policies to ease national reluctance to risk-based governance approaches, but it also indicates limits where member states use risk-based techniques within an aspirational protection framework.

Introduction: Society, regulation and governance: new modes of shaping social change?: New Modes of Shaping Social Change?

Since the origins of philosophical reflections, scholars have been busied with questions of how society can best be shaped and how, in turn, society itself shapes the very conditions and patterns of human interaction. Early treatises on “shaping society” include Aristotle’s consideration of the benefits of communal life in a city state, Confucian ideas on how governments can best promote people’s virtue for societal good, and Machiavelli’s thoughts on the prerequisites of successful and powerful ruling. What unites these strands of thought is the belief in societal malleability, i.e. the possibility for intentional, that is, directed and directional “governmental” (in a broad sense) action aimed at making a difference in social developments. While citizens have long puzzled over how society shapes their lives and how society can be shaped according to their ideals, state philosophers, political theorists and sociologists have not seemed to come to any final agreement (either within or across their respective disciplines) about how such shaping occurs, how predictable it can be, and what its exact outcomes are. “Society” presents itself as a classic moving target – today famously vexed with the complex and deeply unsettling dynamics that are summarized under the heading of globalization. Thus, theorizing about “shaping society” has produced countless claims about new instruments, new tools, new goals, new actors, new arenas and new procedures involved in such shaping processes. With such novelty claims and new analytical venues gaining momentum, there has been a tendency to bracket off questions of societal malleability and intentional change. This volume takes up one line of such argumentation and reappraises the academic debate about new modes of regulation and governance. In doing so, it re-focuses on (the possibility of) intentional change in contemporary society. We argue that, in much of the literature concerned with novelty diagnoses, questions of social malleability have been moved back stage, yet they still pull essential conceptual and analytical strings there.