Search results

The article analyzes the European Union's response to hybrid warfare and argues that a proper interpretation of the policies adopted offers cautious support for a rational choice intuitionalist approach. It begins with the presentation of the main theories of European decision-making, among which rational choice and constructivist institutionalism and it derives a hypothesis which it tests in the third part of the article. Several policy documents are analyzed in order to provide the empirical material for the analysis. The article concludes that EU institutions prefer to undertake supra-national action in technical fields which are less politically controversial and where supra-nationalization is more easily accepted.

The article represents a reply to several of the points raised by Alexandru Volacu in his recent article "On the Ideological Incompatibilities of Distributive Justice". In his work, Volacu attempts a comparison between the concept of distributive justice and several political ideologies, as epitomized in different party manifestos and platforms. In Volacu's view, distributive justice requires social democracy and is compatible with ideologies such as feminism or environmentalism. Alternatively, distributive justice cannot be reconciled with anarchism or Marxist communism. In the present article, I argue against Volacu's understanding of the very idea of distributive justice and conceptualize it as a field of philosophical investigation where the main issue of debate is the principle distribution of primordially economic benefits. Further, I establish a distinction between patterns of distributive justice and principles of distributive justice. Then, I criticize Volacu's reading of the relationship between anarchism and distributive justice, but reach identical conclusions. Finally, I object to Volacu's conception of Marxism and of the European Left Party Manifesto.

AbstractThe European Parliament is an increasingly central actor in attempts to regulate surveillance and find the balance between safeguarding personal freedoms and ensuring EU citizens' security. However, virtually nothing is known about what drives the positions of MEPs on this issue, or about how the cohesion of European parties is affected by these attempts. We explore this subject and propose a novel theoretical framework focusing on the interplay between the characteristics of the two principals of the MEPs – European party groups and national parties. We tested the model by analysing the votes held on the two most salient directives adopted in this field. The findings indicate that national parties' ideological positions, and the differences between them and the European parties in the salience assigned to human rights and law and order, predict to a great extent both MEP votes on the directives and dissent from the European party line.

The article analyses how the emergence of bulk international surveillance impacts the boundary problem in political theory. It first describes how the boundary problem was defined and developed as well as the solutions proposed in the literature. Then, the paper analyses surveillance as a violation of privacy which has a chilling effect and presents the specificities of bulk collection of electronic information. The main argument of the article is that the permanent uncertainty that bulk international surveillance causes triggers the need for a cosmopolitan legal regime to govern it under any of the solutions proposed to the boundary problem.