No abstract

The European Police Office has been the object of impressive developments since its creation in 1995, with notably some supranational trends like its transformation into a European agency in 2010. This dynamic raises questions on the influence of Europol itself in this process which tends to favour its expansion and confer it broader resources. This leads therefore to the question to what degree Europol displays supranational activism. To this end, this article uses some principal-agent considerations while considering that Europol has two specific features which could potentially contribute to the specific institutional trajectory of the Office: multiple principals and an agenda-setting function. Consequently, Europol’s principals’ heterogeneous preferences and its capability of defining problems, notably through its Directors, have enabled Europol to act as a policy entrepreneur to project its preferences and its representations for to strengthen itself. However, Europol can be conceived as a supranationalist opportunist as it punctually aspires for supranationalisation, taking care not to antagonize the Member States which remain its main contributors.

What is the impact of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU on British policies, polity and politics and their future trajectories? This question has been overlooked so far, as many observers have focused on the identity, cultural, and political reasons behind the Brexit vote or scrutinized closely the process of withdrawal. The de-Europeanization literature has tried to capture the new dynamics behind the impact of Brexit on the domestic scene by understanding it as a will to dismantle policies and politics previously Europeanized. On the contrary, we argue here that Brexit is not necessarily the end of UK’s engagement with the EU. This editorial and this special issue provide a more nuanced explanation and support the idea that Brexit is not putting an end to the EU’s influence over British public policies. In fact, we identify several pathways to the EU–UK relationship which can be conceptualized along a continuum from de-Europeanization to re-engagement scenarios. Building on the literature that has suggested the trajectories of disengagement and de-Europeanization, this editorial more specifically contributes to the debate by coining the concept of continued engagement and re-engagement and highlighting the need to analyse British politics, policies, and polity in relation to the EU through a variety of pathways.

La recherche sur l’européanisation s’est longtemps révélée optimiste quant aux effets transformateurs de l’Union européenne sur les politiques publiques. Toutefois, l’érosion de l’attractivité du projet européen a mené au développement d’un agenda de recherche autour de la déseuropéanisation. Si ces travaux soulèvent des interrogations nouvelles, ils prêtent encore peu d’attention aux obstacles à la déseuropéanisation et n’interrogent que rarement les différents types de (non-)changement de l’action publique qui pourraient découler des appels à la déseuropéanisation émis par une partie des acteurs politiques et l’opinion publique. Cet article élabore un cadre d’analyse bidimensionnel pour fournir à la recherche dédiée à l’influence de l’Europe sur les politiques publiques des outils plus précis et nuancés dépassant le débat binaire européanisation v . déseuropéanisation. Pour illustrer nos propos, nous mobilisons le cas de l’action publique post-Brexit. Nous montrons que si cet événement pouvait a priori donner lieu à des processus majeurs de déseuropéanisation, les sentiers empruntés par l’action publique ont été divers en fonction des processus préexistants d’européanisation.