Suchergebnisse

Numerous Central and Eastern European countries have restructured their regional level of public administration in the context of their accession to the European Union. Focusing on the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the article studies how the EU has influenced the institutionalization of regions and regional self-government. Regionalization may have been driven mainly by EU conditionality or, as a competing explanation suggests, more by domestic factors. The article argues that the EU altered the opportunity structure faced by domestic actors but that its role was more complementary than decisive. Czech and Slovak governments instrumentalized a perceived EU conditionality to promote their own political objectives. These findings demonstrate that a top-down concept of conditionality lends itself to fallacies and should be substantiated by reconstructing the domestic politics of Europeanization.

Intensive global warming, declining natural resources, and pollution are the factors influencing the wider debate about what creates a "green economy." Taking the above into account, the purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the eco-innova-tion performance of European Union members and, at the same time, their overall level of innovativeness. The paper also provides insights into the role of eco-inno-vation as the driving force for the international competitiveness of enterprises from European Union countries. The results at the macro level show that there is a strong interdependence between the level of innovativeness and the level of eco-innovation implementation in the EU Member States. In turn, the micro-analysis conducted for EU enterprises shows that there is an interdependence between the introduction of eco-innovation with benefits for the end-user and the level of international competi-tiveness measured by the intensity of exports. Enterprises from countries with a high-er overall Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) and Eco-Innovation Scoreboard (Eco-IS) are simultaneously characterized by a higher intensity of eco-innovation, introducing benefits for the end-user, and an intensive presence with sales on foreign markets. Enterprises from countries with low IUS and Eco-IS rankings, including the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, are characterized by a relatively low intensity of intro-ducing eco-innovation accompanied by a relatively low export intensity.

Has the European Union forgotten its internal borders? This question is often asked after Denmark introduced its terrestrial and water border crossings control with Germany and Sweden and after France sent immigrants from North African countries back to Italy. The aim of this paper is to explain that the freedom of movement of the citizens is one of the main achievements of the Union, and it must be protected. If certain members of the Union try through the introduction of border control to make control to the massive entries intotheir countries, it may occur European Union to lose the character of the community where the "visas", "asylum", "immigration", and other polices connected to the freedom of movement for the persons as a part of the third pillar that is called cooperation in the region of the justice and internal affairs.

The following dissertation investigates the quality of political representation in the programmes of select political parties in four East-Central European countries in the context of European elections. Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary form the Visegrád Group. Since they joined the European Union in 2004, open manifestations of resistance to (further) European integration, sometimes labelled as Euroscepticism, could be observed within the group. These include the deteriorating rule of law in Poland and Hungary as well as some of the lowest turnout rates at the European Elections in Czechia and Slovakia. At the same time, according to the Eurobarometer surveys, public support for the European Union remains relatively high in these Member States. Against this background, this dissertation sets out to investigate the European policy of sixteen established political parties active across the Visegrád Group and whether the public's preferences for European integration are reflected in the programmes of these parties. In other words, whether political parties consider the public opinion when preparing their European election manifestos and what kind of European Union the citizens and parties of the Visegrád Group advocate. In addition, an analysis of the salience of topics that parties address in their programmes is conducted with the goal of finding out which policies play a prominent role in the programmes at the European level. The investigation was conducted by a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The results revealed severe discrepancies between the public opinion and the European policies that most of the political parties advocate, hinting at deficiencies in the representative democracy in terms of the European level in the Visegrád states.

This article identifies relevant explanatory concepts of European foreign policy (EFP) and organizes those concepts into a heuristically useful model that depicts the stimuli, processes and effects of EFP decision-making. A cadre of scholars has worked on conceptualizing the European Union (EU) as an international actor, but explanations are still at the pretheoretical stage. Although theorists are developing new and reworking old explanatory concepts, these concepts are not linked in any meaningful way to an overall analytical model. The article begins on a sober note concerning the problems associated with conceptualizing the European Union external identity, but ends on a more sanguine one about the potential for progress not thought possible a short time ago. Scholars are developing explanatory concepts more balanced, rounded, finessed and nuanced than those of their predecessors, and they are moving beyond establishing the existence of EFP to assessing its outcomes. (Journal of Common Market Studies / FUB)

The economic & social cohesion of Europe constitutes a main policy goal of the European Union. In this article a broad concept of social cohesion is proposed, which covers two principal dimensions: in addition to disparities in living conditions, which can be called the inequality dimension of social cohesion, social ties between countries are another important aspect, designated in brief as the social capital dimension. For both dimensions empirical analyses of selected indicators are presented. They address the question of whether the social cohesion among EU member states increased during the past 15 years. Furthermore, the prospects for social cohesion within an enlarged EU are dealt with by analyzing potential consequences that the accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary, & Poland implies for social cohesion. The analyses reveal that social cohesion within the European Union did not really become stronger during the past 15 years. The entry of the three candidate countries would probably weaken social cohesion even further, especially owing to the limited public approval of their accession in many Member States. Social cohesion could be strengthened by greater solidarity between the prosperous & the 'backward' countries. The main prerequisites for this - mutual understanding, trustful relations, & a sense of community - may be enhanced by intensifying communication & interaction among countries.

This paper shows why the Northern Ireland/Ireland border moved from a marginal to a core concern in the UK's withdrawal from the EU ('Brexit'). Drawing on longitudinal research on the impact of the EU on the Irish border, and contemporaneous research on the Phase 1 of negotiations of the UK's withdrawal from the EU, it explains this case study through three broad themes. First, the impact of EU membership on the transformation of the border and, secondly, the challenges posed by Brexit to the border in practical and symbolic terms. Finally, it analyses how these have been addressed in the call for 'specific solutions' to meet the UK's ambition of 'avoiding a hard border' after withdrawal. In so doing, it explores the ways in which the multi-layered complexities of a small, peripheral geographical region came to influence the course of the UK's most important set of international negotiations for half a century.

Dogs for democratic socialism : US and EU approaches to canine -- Welfare -- Caring for best friends : public policies to protect companions -- In or out of the family? the high stakes for canine status -- Betrayal of trust : public policies to prevent common cruelties -- A discriminating search for canine justice in the US and EU.

AbstractThis paper uses a novel semi‐non‐parametric approach, the so‐called stochastic non‐parametric envelopment on Z‐variables data (StoNEZD), to measure the performance of 279 European regions (in 28 EU member states and Norway) in the years 2000, 2007, and 2014. The StoNEZD approach combines the main virtues of the parametric and non‐parametric methods in a unifying framework. The proposed model accounts explicitly for the presence of contextual/exogenous factors that might affect the regional performance and allows for the use of statistical inference methods to explore the effects of such variables (agriculture‐to‐ gross value added (GVA) share, employment rate, and euro area membership). According to our results, a larger agriculture‐to‐GVA ratio has a negative impact on regional growth rates, whereas a higher employment rate has a positive influence on regional economic levels. In overall terms, the euro area membership appears to reduce regional average growth rates but seems to enhance regional average efficiency scores.