Suchergebnisse

This report includes information regarding issues and policy challenges with U.S.-European trade relations. Growing strains, resolving longstanding disputes, and strengthening the multilateral trading system are among topics discussed in this report.

For improving sustainability and resilience of EU farming system, the current state needs to be assessed, before being able to move on to future scenarios. Assessing sustainability and resilience of farming systems is a multi-faceted research challenge in terms of the scientific domains and scales of integration (farm, household, farming system level) that need to be covered. Hence, in SURE-Farm, multiple approaches are used to evaluate current sustainability and resilience and its underlying structures and drivers. To maintain consistency across the different approaches, all approaches are connected to a resilience framework which was developed for the unique purposes of SURE-Farm. Results of the different methods were compared and synthesized per step of the resilience framework. Synthesized results were used to determine the position of the farming system in the adaptive cycle, i.e. in the exploitation, conservation, release, or reorganization phase. Results were synthesized around the three aspects characterizing the SURE-Farm framework, i.e. (i) it studies resilience at the farming system level, (ii) considers three resilience capacities, and (iii) assesses resilience in the context of the (changing) functions of the system. ; EU; en; contact: pytrik.reidsma@wur.nl

This Article seeks to explain the rationale behind the recent jurisprudential turn of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It identifies an enhanced trend to legal realism and articulates its three main propositions through an exploration of competition law, state aid law and trade mark law. Vigorous engagement with social fact and analytical clarity, the fundamental contributions of the Court's realist trend, lead to knowledge and ensure that normativity, anchored in the goals and values of the Union, can gain its full thrust. Further, decoupling a more economic approach from the realist approach reveals its independent normative value. The enhanced turn to realism represents a qualitative leap of the Court's overall judicial analysis, and is vital for effective judicial review. The Court's realist trend thus importantly serves the right to effective judicial protection, as foreseen in Article 47 of the Charter, by avoiding arbitrariness and error in law. Any departure from the three realist propositions, for example for the sake of increased administrability, thus carries an important social cost. Bearing these insights in mind, the described trend is also of broader importance to any field of European Union law.

The development of a European economic and social model poses serious challenges for European trade unions. On the one hand, demand for a strengthening of the social dimension of the European integration project is growing and it is realised that this cannot be achieved by unilateral action at the national level. On the other hand, the identities and organisational capacities of trade unions are deeply embedded in national welfare state institutions, limiting the leeway for a common European social model. This article presents empirical evidence from over 100 interviews with trade union leaders and politicians from 17 EU Member States on trade unions' positions in various policy fields (economic, social and competition policies). The conclusion is that unions should reflect more critically on their embeddedness in national welfare state arrangements in order to move forward together towards the realisation of a Social Europe.

Social constructivism has come of age in contemporary international relations (IR) theory. Indeed, more and more submissions to presses and journals in both Europe and America characterise themselves as constructivist or situate their arguments vis à vis those of constructivists. In substantive terms and as the three books under review attest, constructivists also now offer detailed empirical studies that amplify and enrich their earlier conceptual and meta-theoretical critiques of mainstream approaches. Yet, as with any maturing research programme, there are gaps to be filled and challenges to be met. These include a better appreciation and theorisation of domestic politics; more explicit attention to research methods; further work on the linguistic turn so central to much of constructivism; and, finally, a rethink of attempts to build bridges.

In 1955, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to re-legalise abortion on the principle of women's rights to abortion. How could this happen in Stalinist society which prohibited feminist movements? 'Replacing the Dead' finds an answer in previously secret archives that document the difficult decade after World War II, which killed 27 million Soviet citizens and the government's policy to increase fertility by promoting out-of-wedlock births. The result was an abortion battle between women, government, and Soviet legal and medical professionals that has continued for decades.

In today's globalizing world, which is formally based on state sovereignty but in which the latter is called into question by economic, cultural and technological trends, new institutional frameworks need to be designed to allow people, goods, services and ideas to move across legal systems. The European Union provides an interesting model in this regard. Looking at the EU institutional model for achieving legal interoperability, this case-study explains how supranational law can achieve the interoperability of a diverse array of legal systems to attain larger policy goals, while pointing to the fact that lack of coherence between different legal orders (supranational vs. national) can be an obstacle to legal interoperability.

The main thesis of the author starts with the fact that the Sustainable
Development Strategy of the European Union is one of the major long-term
reducing instrument of energy dependency of the European Union. This paper
gives an overview of the total energy consumption and production in the EU
and its energy dependence on imports, mainly oil and gas. In order to meet
the needs of sustainable development, the EU aims to cut consumption of crude
oil, natural gas and solid fuels, and also to encourage the production and
consumption of renewable energy, which would reduce the import of fossil
fuels and contribute to energy efficiency. Despite numerous measures in order
to achieve sustainable development, crude oil and natural gas remain the most
important fuels in the EU, while its total energy dependency has increased
over the past ten years.

From the introduction of the European Reconstruction Plan for economic recovery following World War II, the European Union has evolved into the world's largest trading block. Sweeping changes in Europe have had a profound effect on globalization of the insurance industry. Several political and economic forces have changed the commercial landscape of the European Union affecting the non-life sector of the industry. Theories advanced in the early 1980s claimed that greater competition created by the European Community Single Market Program would reduce prices and increase capacity. However, recessionary conditions, privatization of government-owned industries, alternative markets and shaken confidence in the London markets and Lloyd's have taken their toll on the earlier predictions. Today the non-life commercial insurance industry is a US$360 billion global industry. The barrier-free environment of the emerging European Union has caused deregulation to improve competition and stimulate the economy while presenting opportunities for organizations willing to accept and make change. On the other hand, in an era of deregulation and increased standardization, many insurance syndicates and companies have financially collapsed causing increased prices, reduced capacity, and changes in the structure of the non-life insurance industry for the foreseeable future. Many of the aims of the Third Council Directive on the coordination of laws, regulations, and administrative provisions related to direct insurance other than life assurance, and measures in the strategic business plan to rebuild Lloyd's of London will have a major influence on and bring discipline to the non-life insurance industry.

For more than four decades, those who supported the creation of a single patent regime with European-wide legal effects must have felt a lot like Sisyphus, struggling pointlessly towards an unreachable goal. This may be about to change in light of the adoption of the "unitary patent package" by the European Union (EU), provided the thirteen Member States (including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) ultimately ratify the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA).