Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Diplomacy and Economy

 

Special Issue on: "Efforts Towards Stability and Growth in the European Union"

Guest Editors:
Aristidis Bitzenis, Ioannis Papadopoulos and Vasileios A. Vlachos, University of Macedonia, Greece

The Stability and Growth Pact was designed to ensure that countries in the European Union pursue sound public finances and coordinate their fiscal policies. Alas, its preventive and corrective set of rules has not managed to secure stability and growth in the European Union. The crisis emerged as a subprime mortgage and an energy (oil shock of 2007 to 2008) crisis in 2007, but gradually developed into a private and sovereign debt crisis and eventually, into an unprecedented in post-war history multiple systemic crisis, especially in the euro area: debt, banking, disinvestment, political, and social crisis.

The European Union is currently facing a conjuncture whereby sluggish growth, the persistence of rising debt ratios, disinvestment, and unemployment still jeopardise the development potential of EU states. With the eruption of the crisis, further instruments and policies have come recently into play to fulfil and safeguard this aim. Even though the treatment adopted was aiming at the restoration of market confidence, its insistence on rapid fiscal consolidation without countercyclical policies from the demand side sustained a spiral of deflationary tendencies, sovereign debt expansion, and systemic bank fragility. Of course, there is a lively debate on the persistence of the systemic crisis, since (excluding Greece) euro area states have dodged recession and government bond spreads have decreased significantly after massive European Central Bank intervention in capital markets.

Although the aforementioned issues have been stressed in the recent literature, the discussion has been largely concentrating on the development of macroeconomic policy orientations to exit the crisis. The viewpoint of this Special Issue is rather different: it focuses on the process of Europeanisation via the gradual change in the structure and philosophy of the euro area economic governance, the prospects of acceptance of policy orientations concerning stability and growth formulated by various European and national stakeholders, the dialectic relation between ongoing changes in the European and international institutional framework and interstate balance of power, and more generally, economic diplomacy efforts in the European Union to enhance stability and growth as a way out of the systemic crisis.

Some useful references for the preceding discussion are:
Bitzenis, A., Papadopoulos, I. and Vlachos, V.A. (Eds.) (2013) Reflections on the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Papadopoulos, I. and Vlachos, V.A., ‘The controversy over fiscal multipliers as a case of triangular diplomacy: The limits of co-regulation in the management of the Eurozone’, International Journal of Diplomacy and Economy, forthcoming.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the International Conference on International Business (ICIB 2015), but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Subject Coverage
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Diplomacy and the European sovereign debt crisis
• Process of Europeanisation of the EU economic policy
• EU member states' input in the formation of the EU banking union
• Governance, financial and investment aspects of the Investment Plan for Europe
• Insolvency issues in the euro area
• Institutional aspects of EU member states' economic adjustment
• Conditionality of economic adjustment in the European Union and worldwide
• Economic diplomacy over the formation of economic zones

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper has been completely re-written and if appropriate written permissions have been obtained from any copyright holders of the original paper).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process.

All papers must be submitted online. To submit a paper, please read our Submitting articles page.

If you have any queries concerning this special issue, please email Vasileios A. Vlachos at vlachosuk@hotmail.com.

Important Dates

Manuscripts due by: 15 October, 2015

Notification to authors: 5 December, 2015

Final versions due by: 31 December, 2015