Do EU institutions have an influence on the implementation of the rule of law in potential candidate countries and, if so, of what kind? During the compliance monitoring process related to the effective rule of law and democracy the EU Commission tests and criticizes the effectiveness of the judiciary and strengthens the rule of law in preparation for accession. In the Western Balkans this was a process fraught with difficulties. Despite the fact that academic scholarship and democratic politics agree on rule of law as a legitimizing principle for the exercise of state authority, there is no uniform European standard for institution-building or monitoring activities by the EU in this area. With focus on the reform of the judiciary in five case study countries of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia, this empirical research investigates the EU's transformative power with regard to the effectiveness of rule of law and judicial sector reform in its infancy. It analyses the depth and limitations of EU rule of law promotion in the Western Balkans and presents policy recommendations intended to address the shortcomings in judiciary reform. This book aims to fill the gap in the existing academic scholarship of EU politics, law and Western Balkans literature.

This fully revised and updated new edition offers a detailed exposition of EC Directives, individual rights, and the protection of those rights in national courts. Three central themes are investigated: the characteristics of EC Directives; the role played by national courts in protecting the rights which individuals derive from Directives; and the 'devices' and means by which the courts may implement this protection. Focussing initially upon clear examples from the ECJ case law, the author then moves on to discuss specific 'lines' within that case law, and to examine how these 'lines' complement or contradict each other. Throughout the text, the author's empirical argument is enriched by discussion of doctrine and theory. Less orthodox ideas are also incorporated through selective use of a comparative approach which illuminates the workings of EC directives from the broader perspective of the EC as a whole. In an updated conclusion, the prospects of Directives in the future and in the light of the nascent European Constitution are discussed. The result is an extensive and in-depth analysis of Directives, the case-law of the ECJ, and legal writing on the topic, which also engages with the more practical issues of implementation and enforcement in the courts.

The strengthening of relations between Poland and Ukraine over the last 25 years is one of the most positive examples of transformations in bilateral relations in Central and Eastern Europe. In spite of the complex and difficult historical heritage dominated by the events of the World War II and the first few years that followed, after the fall of Communism in Poland and Ukraine, bilateral institutional cooperation was successfully undertaken, and mutual social contacts were recreated. The issue of Polish-Ukrainian relations at the international and trans-border level gained particular importance at the moment of expansion of the European Union to the east, and announcement of the assumptions of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2004. Since then, relations have continued to thrive and provide a blueprint for cross-border relations in other parts of the EU. In this book the authors examine the issue of cooperation and cross-border relations on the new external border of the EU. The book's primary objective is to present the way in which the Polish and Ukrainian parties develop the bilateral cooperation, adapting to the changing geopolitical conditions, and responding to the related challenges. The chapters offer a comprehensive diagnosis of the conditions determining the current and future state of Polish-Ukrainian cross-border cooperation and describe the area as a social, economic, and political space. The EU's New Borderland will be of interest to university students of international relations, geography, economy, or history as well as those willing to expand their knowledge in the scope of regional geography, European integration, cross-border cooperation, and international relations.

The Annual Review, produced in association with JCMS, The Journal of Common Market Studies, covers the key developments in the European Union, its member states, and acceding and/or applicant countries in 2013. * Includes specially commissioned articles by Anand Menon on European foreign policy, Daniel Hamilton on EU-US relations, Heather Grabbe on the 'transformative power' of the EU, Andre Sapir's reflections on the recommendations of the Sapir Report 10 years after its publication and a contribution on David Cameron's EU Referendum pledge * Contains analytical articles and keynote contributions written by leading experts in their respective fields covering political, economic and legal issues * The most up-to-date and authoritative source of information for those engaged in teaching and research or who are simply interested in the European Union

This book takes stock of learning theories in the European Union (EU) integration literature and assesses what insights the concept of 'learning' has added to our understanding of the European integration processes. Given the European integration dynamics since 2000 (including enlargement and new governance approaches and instruments), learning and learning-related theories have gained major EU significance. The book addresses the less noticed micro level patterns of behavioural change that deserve more visibility in the EU's theoretical toolbox. It focuses on the conditions under which EU actors in various decision-making processes learn or do not learn. In asking this question it raises issues about the EU's nature. Do the EU conditions that favour learning outweigh the EU conditions that inhibit learning? Is the EU system too complex for learning processes to have a discernible, concrete impact? To assess the degree that the EU system and its member states learn, the authors selected for this volume are all explicitly comparative in their approach, and have been encouraged to look at differences across political systems. In doing so, the authors study how EU member states, EU institutions, and other groups and organisations pursue learning across the multi-level EU policy process. This book was previously published as a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy.

After more than a decade of British membership of the European Community, there is still a widespread lack of appreciation of what goes on within the Community institutions, and of its significance for UK political and legal processes. This book aims to provide a concise introduction to the institutions and law-making processes of the Community, and to set them in their proper perspective as part of UK public law. The prime focus is upon the Community institutions and their inter-relations, however, reference is also made as appropriate to the effects which Community decision-making has on Westminster and Whitehall and in the English courts. In particular, the book examines the sources of Community law, the organization and composition of the main institutions after the accession of Portugal and Spain, and the decision-making processes involved in the enactment of the Community's legislation. There are also chapters on the budgetary process and on the role of the European Court of Justice. Despite the UK emphasis some comparative material is used to put the UK approach into perspective.

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

European Foreign Policy explains the historical and political origins of the current foreign process of the European Union. It includes lively descriptions of the fall of communism in Europe, as well as the effect the Gulf War and the conflict in Yugoslavia had on west European policy-making.

The Federal Republic of Germany's position in the European Community had been described as one of interdependence, penetration and integration. Of the three terms this research addresses itself most directly to penetration: to the links between the German political system and policy-making at the Community level. These links operated in two directions. Thus membership for the European Community (EC) imposed certain constraints on German domestic policy-making. Although this research, first published in 1986, concentrates on the structural inter-relationship between the German political system and EC decisions, its main focus of attention is the articulation of German 'interests' in the EC policy process. This book will be of interest to students of politics and history.

How institutional conflicts arise in international political orders and the conditions shaping the outcomes of such conflicts has become the object of considerable contemporary focus. This book considers the dynamics of institutional conflict and institutional change in international organizations, specifically focusing on the European Union, the most highly integrated international political order on the globe. In a world where political decision making increasingly takes place above the nation state level, it theorises the social mechanisms that lead to the point at which these tensions become explicit and the customary functioning of international political orders tips into outright conflict between different organizational entities. Taking a constructivist approach, it examines two in-depth case studies - in the field of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) - to explain the dynamics of the processes that lead up to institutional conflicts and provide some explanation for their final outcomes. This text will be of key interest to fields of and European Integration, EU Politics and more broadly International Relations.

The European Union has increasingly taken on a role as international security provider that extends beyond the geographical scope of its membership. This is clear from the wide range of military and civilian crisis management missions that the Union has undertaken, but also identifiable through its other policies, such as the European Neighbourhood Policy and development assistance, which have also to some extent become security focused. Yet, the role of the EU as an international security provider remains under-theorized and weakly understood. The proposed book analyses the Union's role as an international security provider in a comprehensive way developing theoretical as well as empirical grounding for the understanding of the making and implementation of EU security policy. The contributions in this book cover actors involved in the policy making process, the dynamics of this process itself, its outcomes (strategies and policies) and their impact on the ground. They examine the relevance of, and apply, existing theories of international relations, international security and foreign policy analysis to the specific case of the EU, investigate empirically how particular policies are formulated and implemented, and study the impact and effectiveness of the Union as an international security provider in a variety of cases compared. This book was previously published as a special issue of Global Society.

This book explains German behaviour in the European Community in terms of domestic politics of Federal Republic, covering the period 1969-86. It includes analysis of the attitudes and the role of West German interest groups, public opinion and the legislature regarding European policy.

This book provides a systematic analysis of the EU's extensive, but so far largely failed, efforts to promote democracy in the Mediterranean region, thoroughly assessing its democracy promotion in relation to two Mediterranean countries - Jordan and Turkey. By pinpointing essential prerequisites for democracy promotion and analyzing how the EU's policies have related to these, the author offers a theoretically based analytical framework focused on the importance of the local orientation and ownership of the project of democratization, and the broader dialogue between the democracy promoter and the partner society. The author concludes that there are basic deficiencies in the EU's democracy promotion, leading to policy implications of vital importance as the EU now grapples with how to make its democracy promotion successful. The EU's Democracy Promotion and the Mediterranean Neighbours will be of interest to students and scholars of Democratisation studies, EU studies, Middle East Studies and EU Neighbourhood studies.

Koivula examines the discursive space related to the use of military force by the European Union (EU). By examining the EU's relationship to its use of military force during the course of its history and by demonstrating that the contemporary discursive space of the EU military dimension is incoherent in nature and contains inherent contradictions, he seeks to answer the related question of whether extreme forms of military enforcement, for example killing, is appropriate for the EU.

Two decades on from the start of the 'Singing Revolution', and five years on from the Baltic States' entry to the European Union, the time is ripe to take stock of Estonia's remarkable transition from Soviet Republic to EU member state and address the challenges - some new, some ongoing - and uncertainties that have arisen following the country's entry to the EU. This book locates the post-accession period within the broader sweep of post-communist transition and diagnoses the problems facing Estonia as the global economic downturn takes hold and a new mood of pessimism reigns in Central and Eastern Europe. Until recently, Estonia enjoyed an international reputation as an emerging high-growth 'tiger economy' and reform pioneer, not least in the sphere of IT. This economic success story, however, masked the continued problematic political and social legacies of the Soviet period, including the issue of ethnic integration, which again hit the headlines following riots in Tallinn in April 2007. This fully up-to-date appraisal - the first in English - covers all of the key issues, and will appeal to specialists in Baltic and Central and Eastern European politics and society, as well as to anyone with an interest in European integration more generally. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.

Welfare states are the product of economic, political and social interactions, and undergo changes as these interactions transform. Existing welfare state theories mainly tend to explain the emergence and development of the welfare state in the western, industrialized and capitalist world. While the states of Central and Eastern Europe have recently been integrated in the academic discourse, the countries of the former Yugoslavia have been predominantly excluded from comparative analysis. Issues of nationalism and ethnic polarization have been prevalent there while socio-economic issues have been put on the back burner. This book explores what happened to the strong social states and relatively equal societies which existed in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia, and looks into what accounts for these diverse outcomes. By investigating the applicability of the theories on welfare state development and typologization, it fills in the gap in the welfare state literature. It offers an original typology of social citizenship that takes into account the diversity of welfare policy formations across the region. The aim of this typology is not to compete with existing ones, but rather to offer a framework for better understanding of states that do not necessarily fit into known explanatory categories. In a global context of changing economic circumstances and contending political responses, macroeconomic policy and welfare state reform become order of the day. By featuring the ways that states adjust to new pressures, this book's arguments may come in handy to those trying to make sense of the crisis and the powers that drive the policy solutions.

Translating Institutions outlines a framework for research on translation in institutional settings, using the Finnish translation unit at the European Commission as a case study. Because of their foundational multilingualism, the institutions of the European Union could be described as both translating and translated institutions. The European Commission alone employs nearly two thousand translators, and it is translators who draft the vast majority of outgoing EU messages. Translating Institutions sets out to explore the organizational role and professional identity of this group of cultural mediators, a group that has remained relatively invisible despite its size and central institutional role, and to use the analysis of this data to elaborate broader methodological and theoretical issues. Translating Institutions adopts an ethnographic approach to explore the life and work of the translators at the centre of this study. In practice, this entails employing a number of different methods and interrogating various types of data. The three-level research design used covers the study of the institutional framework, the study of translators working in specific institutional settings, and the study of translated documents and their source texts. This is therefore a study of both texts and people in their institutional habitat. Given the methodological focus of the volume, the different methods and data are outlined in independent chapters: the institutional framework of translation (institutional ethnography), the physical location of the unit (observation), translators' own views of their role (focus group discussions), and a sociologically-oriented text analysis of a sample document (shifts analysis). Translating Institutions constitutes a valuable contribution to the sociology of translation. It opens up new avenues for research and offers a detailed framework for the study of institutional translation.

EU foreign policy once existed in the form of the European Political Cooperation with only a limited political leverage and symbolic institutional underpinnings. In recent years rapid changes have occurred, including an expanding institutional apparatus, increased responsibility and growing demand for action. This book examines new approaches to the EU's foreign policy that address its rapidly changing character, presenting the newest theoretical perspectives and dealing with novel empirical developments. Rather than simply considering structural variations and changes in the agency of the EU, it explores the new complexity in EU foreign policy. The authors offer new theoretical perspectives and new empirical studies dealing, among others, with issues such as: Power delegation to the Commission. EU diplomacy. Parliamentarisation and constitutionalisation. Committees' involvement in foreign policy process. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of European politics, European foreign policy and European integration.

The crisis in the euro area is a defining moment in the history of European integration. It has revealed major flaws in the architecture of the European Union; it has challenged European institutions to shape an appropriate response; and it has tested the patience of a European public that is eager to see their economic prospects improve again. This volume brings together some of the world's top economists and policymakers to explain how this crisis came about and what is to be done. The policy agenda these chapters establish is going to be difficult to implement, not least because of popular misunderstanding and political opposition. This book argues, that it is essential that European policymakers push forward this agenda or they run the risk of seeing Europe's economies fall back into crisis. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

In recent years the financial and economic crisis of 2008-9 has progressed into an equally important political and democratic crisis of the EU. These troubled times have set the framework to re-assess a number of important questions in regard to representative democracy in the EU, such as the normative foundation of political representation, the institutional relationship between representatives and represented, the link between democracy and representation and new arenas and actors. This book examines the diverse avenues through which different sorts of actors have expressed their voices during the Euro crisis and how their various interests are translated into the decision-making process. It offers a state-of- the-art assessment of what political representation means in this context as well as a contribution to the 'representative turn' in democratic theory. The authors address three key themes: * The main actors and channels of political representation in the EU. * Interlocking levels of representation in the EU and the way in which national and supranational representation works. * How the European institutional system represents EU citizens through law and administration. Focusing on the importance of representation in the legitimation of democracy, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, European studies, democratic theory, representation studies, civil society and transnational democracy.

This book examines the democratic legitimacy of the European Union (EU) and evaluates the democratic credentials of the EU's main decision-making procedure. It finds that though there is potential for democratic decision-making in the EU, the actual process is dominated by technocrats and secret meetings. The book assesses and discusses the conditions for democratic input in decision-making with five empirical chapters each addressing the ordinary legislative procedure from different dimensions: democratic deliberative forums, inclusion, openness, power neutralising mechanisms and decision-making capacity. The analytical framework provides for an in-depth assessment of the ordinary legislative procedure's potential democratic qualities and examines whether it fulfils democratic criteria, how the procedure works in practice and whether it has the necessary democratic clout. The author provides both a theoretical discussion and an empirical assessment of what role the principle of democracy could play in the EU. Filling a gap in EU legislative studies and contributing to the debate on the European democratic deficit, Democratic Decision-making in the EU will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, legislative studies and deliberative democracy.

The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg are well-known cases of consensus politics. Decision-making in the Low Countries has been characterized by broad involvement, power sharing and making compromises. These countries were also founding member states of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors. However, the relationship between European integration and the tradition of domestic consensus politics remains unclear. In order to explore this relationship this book offers in-depth studies of a wide variety of political actors such as governments, parliaments, political parties, courts, ministries and interest groups as well as key policy issues such as the ratification of EU treaties and migration policy. The authors focus not only on Europeanization, but also analyse whether European integration may gradually undermine the fundamental characteristics of consensus politics in the Low Countries. Drawing on consociationalism and Europeanization research, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of Europeanization in these three EU member states as well as a better understanding of the varieties of consensus politics across and within these countries. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of European studies, European integration, European law, political science, European political economy and comparative politics.

The objective of European integration serves as an ideal of the legal order of the European Union and invites reconsideration of law's conceptual features. This book critically assesses the legal order of the European Union, focusing on the operative aspects of the Union constitution with particular reference to the institutional practices of the Court of Justice in expressing the values underlying this constitution. Drawing together positivist and non-positivist accounts within an institutional understanding of law, Timothy Moorhead breaks new ground in applying a range of analytic jurisprudential perspectives to the Union legal order, and in employing the theoretical resources provided by the Union to model a revised conceptual viewpoint concerning legal order generally. In offering this conceptual approach, Moorhead emphasises the flexibility inherent in law's institutional character as the basis for a theoretical rationalisation of the Union legal order. This book will be of great use and interest to scholars and students of European Union Law, Jurisprudence and European Constitutionalism.

Successive Enlargements to the European Union membership have transformed it into an economically, politically and culturally heterogeneous body with distinct vulnerabilities in its multi-level governance. This book analyses core-periphery relations to highlight the growing cleavage, and potential conflict, between the core and peripheral member-states of the Union in the face of the devastating consequences of Eurozone crisis. Taking a comparative and theoretical approach and using a variety of case studies, it examines how the crisis has both exacerbated tensions in centre-periphery relations within and outside the Eurozone, and how the European Union's economic and political status is declining globally. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of European Union studies, European integration, political economy, public policy, and comparative politics.

This book explores European Union crisis management and draws implications for its role as an international security actor. The success of EU crisis management has varied greatly and this book aims to identify the key factors that explain the differing degrees of coherence through a comparative analysis of its multidimensional crisis responses in Africa. The empirical focus lies on three prominent EU crisis management cases, namely Libya in 2011, Somalia in 2011-2012, and the Sahel in 2012-2013. It analyses the activities and interaction of EU institutional actors and member states, with a focus on France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The book argues that the EU represents a rather unpredictable security actor, whose multi-level coherence is contingent on the congruence of domestic economic and electoral interests, as well as national threat perceptions, and the extent to which EU-level coherence norms resonate with national norms on the use of force and modes of multilateral cooperation. In sum, this book offers systematic insight into EU crisis management and clarifies the conceptual and empirical boundaries of the comprehensive approach. Finally, the study of the micro-foundations of coherence allows for policy-relevant suggestions on the EU's future role as a security actor. This book will be of much interest to students of EU policy, European Security, Peace and Conflict Studies, African Politics and IR in general.