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Thursday 18:00 - 19:15 WEST (20/06/2024)
About: On the occasion of its 40th anniversary in 2018, the Journal of European Integration inaugurated the practice of inviting a leading scholar to give the JEI Annual Lecture. Since then, speakers have included Nathalie Tocci (IAI Rome, 2018), Kalypso Nicolaidis (Oxford University, 2019), Sven Biscop (Bruges, 2020), Vivien A. Schmidt (Rome, 2021), R. Daniel Kelemen (Rome, 2022), and Mitchell Orenstein (Pittsburgh, 2023). The 2024 instalment will be delivered by Emeritus Professor Brigid Laffan, as part of the 12th Biennial Conference of our Standing Group on the European Union (SGEU) in Lisbon. The lecture: The role of public finance in the dynamic of European integration is under-researched. Conceptualisations of the EU as a regulatory state and the dominance of the Brussels effect have obscured the significance of distributive/redistributive bargains at each stage in the evolution of the European Union. The lecture will analyse the various ways in which public finance is deployed as part of EU collective power, defined as the ‘power to get things done’. In addition to the EU budget which remains small in the context of EU GNI, the lecture will analyse the growth of financial instruments developed within and beyond the treaties to augment the financial power of the budget. The succession of crises that beset the EU from 2009 onwards, particularly the Eurozone crisis, the pandemic and Ukraine, generated an array of financial instruments and new funds as responses to acute challenges. Notwithstanding the establishment of the Recovery and Resilience (RRF) in 2020 and the breaking of a budgetary taboo, the role of public finance in integration remains heavily contested.