A 'constitutional asymmetry' exists at the heart of contemporary EU socioeconomic governance, privileging the economic at the expense of the social. Prevailing academic responses suggest, on the one hand, the need for radical constitutional reforms aimed at redressing this asymmetry and, on the other hand, piecemeal reforms reliant on current soft and non-binding modes of governance for the championing of social concerns. Offering a pragmatic middle way between these positions, we identify the potential within the extant constitutional settlement to pursue a rebalancing in favour of the social. In particular, we highlight the Commission's preexisting legal and rhetorical commitment to social rights, arguing that it might draw on the standards established by the Council of Europe's European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR) and incorporate these into its economic governance mechanism, the European Semester. Such a step would usefully repoliticise socioeconomic governance in the short-term and promote radical reform in the long term.
This article examines the evolution of the third pillar of the financial services sector— insurance—within the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) during 1990-2001. In doing so, special attention is also given to those eight countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) within the CEE and FSU groupings that on 1 May 2004 became member states of the European Union (EU). The purpose of this article is to redress a number of concerns, including the shortage of available research on the subject, problems with data accuracy evident in previous studies, and issues related to 'insurance culture' that have a direct effect upon the evolution of the insurance sector within the region. Accordingly, various sources of data are utilised to examine the development of the insurance market in CEE and the FSU with respect to both life and non-life coverage. Hierarchical cluster analysis is employed to assess the development of individual country markets with regard to both insurance density and penetration rates. The findings from the study show that despite some concerted efforts, only a few countries have been able to transform their insurance markets successfully in accord with international standards.
Despite the development of fundamental rights mechanisms in the EU, including the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the governance of the Eurozone has led to policies that have undermined basic social rights. The purpose of this article is to explain why it is that the EU has been able to act in this manner despite the assurances supposedly enshrined in its own rights guarantees. To do this, recent advancements in critical integration theory that posit European integration as the outcome of competing hegemonic projects are drawn upon. The construction of fundamental rights is conceptualised within the context of the institutional framework of the EU and the current dominant neoliberal project. It is argued that the process of construction of rights has led to a highly restrictive understanding of what the concept of fundamental rights entails in the EU. This has allowed EU institutions to rhetorically commit to rights while simultaneously acting to undermine rights in practice.
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