População e Sociedade n.º 42

Judite Gonçalves de Freitas (editor)

Thematic Issue

The Future of Europe

Coordinators

Cláudia Toriz Ramos
Isabel Costa Leite

The call for papers for this thematic dossier, included in nº 42 of the CEPESE journal 'Population and Society' took as its motto the title of an ongoing research project at the centre: 'The Future of Europe'. Furthermore, it started with the seminar 'The European Parliament and the 2024 European Elections' (in May 2024), which was a second edition of CEPESE's monitoring of the European elections, as done in 2019. Whereas the previous edition resulted in an edited book (O Parlamento Europeu e as Eleições Europeias: Ensaios sobre Legitimidade Democrática, 2020), this time we opted for an open call for papers, which may better reflect kaleidoscopic visions of European integration. The texts now printed mirror that diversity. In turn, for the editors, such diversity is evidence of the fine-grained presence of European integration in the life of the national communities of its member states.

Thus, the first set of texts refers to the European elections and their institutional context. Paulo Vila Maior analyses the position of the European Parliament in the institutional system of the European Union (EU). In the second article, Fernando Martínez Arribas, Celso Cancela Outeda and Bruno González Cacheda resume the debate on the European elections as second-order elections, analysing the cases of Spain and Portugal. In the third text, Cláudia Toriz Ramos goes through the electoral manifestos, highlighting the ideas there expressed about the current geopolitical conjuncture of war. In the subsequent article, Isabel Costa Leite addresses the problem of EU enlargement in the present political framework. Flávio Silva then discusses the liberal international order and the role of the EU in it, by analysing the Global Gateway Strategy. In a context that crosses the internal and external dimensions of the Union's policies, Abdon de Paula and Judite Gonçalves de Freitas examine the approach to natural disasters, from the perspective of the EU's humanitarian policies. Carla Valadas, at the subnational level, deals with the theme of Eurocities, with a special focus on its dimension of cross-border collaborative laboratories. Finally, in 'Jeux de miroirs', Cândido Alberto Gomes and João Casqueira take the readers into the discussion of the relations between Europe and Latin America, in a game of mirrors that goes from the economic to the identititarian, and from the past to the present.

On the whole, the past, present and future of Europe are mirrored, with its achievements and its ghosts, anchored in values, challenged by crises, challenging the horizon. In the logic of multilevel analyses, this complex web of themes addresses the complexity itself of type I governance structures, according to the nomenclature of Hooghe and Marks ("Unraveling the Central State, But how? – Types of Multi-Level Governance", 2003), the thematic breadth and horizontal policy coordination of which brings them closer to the complex model of state governance, and therefore indiciates a sui generis political entity  under construction.

The Varia's section contains five articles with different themes. From the perspective of the 25th of April in Spain looking for security and tourism in Cape Verde; passing through society in Montemor-o-Novo in the 18th and 19th centuries, but specifically about the nobles and slaves; We conclude with art that focuses on cultural issues (crafts) and popular aging in Brazil.