This action supports physical and blended mobility of higher education students and staff from EU Member States and third countries associated to Erasmus+ to any country in the world. Students in all study fields and cycles can take part in a study period or traineeship abroad. Higher education teaching and administrative staff can take part in professional development activities abroad, as well as staff from the field of work in order to teach and train students or staff at higher education institutions.

This research project will explore the Greek debt and austerity crisis to consider what it discloses about the influence of European political economy on the principles and practices of legal rights, and with what implications. The term ‘legal rights’ in this work includes human rights as well as the international rights of states and these respective approaches underpin the two component parts of this study. This is a multidisciplinary study that assumes the validity of law as a means of advancing the cause of justice, but recognises that it is shaped in important ways by other dominant narratives. This study is an exploration of that clash of narratives and its effects on justice in Europe. The first part of this research project is animated by the idea of ‘social rights as fiscal risks’, an idea that finds expression in the latest Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) of August 2015 between the international creditors and Greece. In exploring the means through which human rights safeguards are being made to disappear under fiscal targets, a case study on the influence of austerity reasoning on what constitutes the public interest as a human rights concept will form part of the first section of the project. The second part of this research project will explore the legality of the bailout agreement when measured against the principle of economic self-determination. A preliminary review of the same MoU would seem to offend any reasonable form of economic self-determination, a principle with a long pedigree in international law and demands by states of sovereignty over their economic affairs. Taken together, the two studies will expose ways in which rights are being shaped by the intellectual justifications, logic and practice of economic and financial policy as played out under the European crisis of debt and austerity.

WELTECH investigates how and why European welfare states have reacted and adapted to technological change, which – next to climate change and demographic change – arguably constitutes one of the biggest challenges societies face today. The ambition is to make an original and pathbreaking contribution to the theorisation of welfare state change more generally. Rethinking and going beyond the dominant concepts of institutional path dependence and power resources theory in the welfare state literature, the project does so by placing macroeconomic concerns at the centre of a novel conceptualisation of welfare state reforms. In other words, the project hypothesises that policy makers, in deciding over different reform trajectories, are guided primarily by concerns over how to maintain and further stimulate economic growth. In order to make sense of welfare state change, it is therefore crucial to understand a given country’s specific Growth Model, i.e. the composition of different drivers of economic growth, as well as the social bloc composed key voters and important producer groups that prop up the national growth model. To this end, the project carries out a comparative case study of three countries with distinct welfare regimes as well as growth models, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom over the years 2000-2020. WELTECH conceptualises welfare state reforms in the social investment framework analysing in particular how technological disruption has led to changes in different stock, flow, and buffer policies.

The lack of successful reforms of the internal dimension of migration policies, as witnessed by the stalemate of the recast of the ‘Dublin Regulation’ and by the disappointing fate of ‘relocation schemes’ for migrants across Member States, creates a fertile ground for proliferation of policies of externalisation of migration controls. These aim at creating transnational governance structures geared at sharing the administration of the preventive containment of migration flows directed to Europe. In the words of a layman, Europe pays to keep migrants away from its territories (see EUObserver article ‘Will the EU continue paying to keep migrants away?’, 9/9/2019). The informalisation of readmission and cooperation agreements with third states, the increased relevance of executive governance actors in border controls, the cooperation with Third Country governments in operational settings (information-sharing for risk analysis, return operations) are trends growing exponentially. These recent externalisation practices suggest the creation of governance avenues characterised by a transfer of functions and responsibilities to third-country organs and/or delocalisation of control practices to third-country territories. In this way law, European law specifically, is being set aside (X-LAW). In a first phase, the described tendencies will be mapped and their specific features will be conceptualised. In the second part, the project will analyse the legal consequences of externalisation practices previously mapped. In the third part, the project will focus on accountability mechanisms for the transnational governance systems created. X-LAW is relevant for the Work Program 13: ‘Europe in a changing world’ of the H2020 Work Programme 2018-2020, in particular for the calls Migration 02-2018 and Migration 07-2019.