Suchergebnisse

There is growing attention to problems of European Union (EU) legitimacy and, in particular, the lack of affective links between the political elites engaged in integration and public opinion. Political parties are in an influential position for helping to solve this problem. With the EU's largest ever enlargement in May 2004, it is important to establish whether these problems are likely to be magnified or not. Although there was a strong vote in favour of EU membership in the referenda of 2003 in post-Communist countries, this constituted more formal than substantial legitimacy for the EU. Taking the case of Latvia, it is already clear that some difficulties evident in the older member states are being repeated, notably with respect to mass opinion and European integration, as illustrated by the referendum of 2003 and European elections of 2004. On the one hand, there is a political elite now versed in EU affairs but, on the other, public opinion remains largely ignorant of what membership entails. In addition, Latvia also reveals a serious public mistrust towards the political elite, which is common in post-Communist countries, and this inhibits parties there from developing an intermediary role over European affairs. It therefore remains to be seen whether positive developments in the future linking benefits from EU membership and the achievement of democratic consolidation move Latvia towards a solution of these problems.

Summary
The European Union (EU) has systematically promoted global climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Since the 1990s, despite varying success in international climate negotiations, it has sought to take a leadership role in global climate politics. Internal consolidation of environmental and climate policies has enhanced EU policy coherence and strengthened its ability to influence international efforts to mitigate climate change. Globally, however, the picture is marred by geopolitical competition, rendering the context of global climate politics less propitious for the EU's climate leadership. This article examines how the EU's climate diplomacy is adapting to an increasingly complex international context. It finds that while the EU climate action is still premised on the deep-seated beliefs of the EU's ambitious approach to climate, the practices of EU climate diplomacy have adapted to a changing geopolitical context. This evolution is traced through a set of key diplomatic practices: narration, co-ordination, outreach and mainstreaming.

The Council of the European Union is the European Union's most powerful legislative body. Yet, we still have limited information about Council politics because of the lack of suitable data. This paper validates a new approach to studying Council politics entitled DICEU – Debates in the Council of the European Union. This approach is the first to leverage the public videos of Council deliberations as a data source. We demonstrate the face, convergent, and predictive validity of DICEU data. Governments' ideal points scaled from these videos yield meaningful and well-known conflict dimensions. Moreover, governments' positions during Council negotiations correlate highly with expert assessments and predict subsequent votes on legislative acts. We conclude that DICEU data provide a promising new approach to studying Council politics and multilevel governance.

Thanks to the recovery fund Next Generation EU, the EU considerably increased the size of its fiscal capacity by increasing its borrowing power. Yet, the post-pandemic EU has left the key issue of how to distribute fiscal sovereignty across the EU and the member states unsolved. Departing from influential concepts in the political science literature, this article argues that we still lack a thorough analytical framework to operationalise the coexistence of two fiscal sovereignties—the fiscal sovereignty of the centre (here, the EU) and the fiscal sovereignty of the units (here, the member states). By resorting to comparative federalism, the article first operationalises fiscal sovereignty as the power to collect, administer, and spend resources. A level of government (the centre or the units) is fiscally sovereign if it can decide on its revenues, the administration of its resources, and its expenditures alone or together with the other level of government (what I call "fiscal self- or co-determination"). The coexistence of fiscal sovereignties becomes impossible if one level systematically and unilaterally encroaches upon the other ("fiscal out-determination"), as is still the case with the post-pandemic EU. On the contrary, in a union of states by aggregation like the EU—namely, Switzerland—the centre (Confederation) has its own fiscal powers, while the units (cantons) retain most of their fiscal sovereignty: The coexistence of fiscal sovereignties is thus possible. The article concludes by outlining which "fiscal features" of the Swiss system could not work in the EU and which could instead potentially work.

We will study in this paper the relation between public investment, public debt and fiscal rules in the European Union countries. The strict fiscal rules imposed by EU have negatively affected the investments. The decline in public investment in European Union is related to the fiscal rules (mainly the deficit rule) included in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). There have been made several attempts to amend the SGP in such a way to grant a more flexible treatment to capital expenditure when fixing budgetary targets and ceilings. According to the golden rule of budget deficit, investments can be financed through loans, while current expenditure should be financed from taxes. The golden rule promotes thus intergenerational fairness and contributes to economic growth.

The implementation of European Union (EU) policies has been investigated for several policy areas, but Decisions made under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) have rarely been considered. While many CFSP measures are applicable throughout the EU without the need for further action on the domestic level, some Decisions must be implemented by Council Regulations. These Council Regulations adopted with the intent to implement CFSP Decisions have qualities of Directives, which delegate implementing tasks to member states and require transposition. The aim of this article is to investigate whether restrictive measures imposed by the EU are uniformly implemented across the member states, and, if not, to what extent implementation performance varies. We observe significant differences in implementation performance across member states. The findings of this article are twofold. First, we claim that implementation and compliance studies should involve CFSP decisions more systematically. Second, empirical confirmation is provided of how uneven transposition and application occurs also in CFSP matters. This study is based on empirical work that consisted of desk research and semi-structured interviews with national competent authorities of 21 EU member states taking place between March 2020 and January 2021.

Ben Soetendorp examines the extent to which individual member states - each with their own history, special interests and styles of foreign policy-making - still dominate the common foreign policy making process within the European Union. The first part of the book reviews the diverse foreign policy patterns of the individual member states towards European integration, describes the various styles of foreign policy and examines the institutional arrangements for joint foreign policy-making created by the member states at EU level. The second part looks more closely at the reality of foreign po

What you find inspiring depends to a degree on where you come from and what you are looking for. So, by applying the principle of transparency, let me put my cards on the table. Those who founded the European Communities, and indeed both Jack Mackenzie Stuart and I, went through the last World War. I imagine that I will be the last judge of the Court in Luxembourg of whom this can be said. If you have been through such an experience, it is something which marks your whole life.