Suchergebnisse

Why does the EU deal with some issues but not others? This is the central question of this book dedicated to agenda-setting processes in the EU. Through a comparison of EU and US policy agendas and the analysis of four case studies in environmental and health policy, this book offers a new understanding of how policy issues come onto the EU agenda.

The EU is currently facing some fundamental challenges: the euro and refugee crises are still unresolved, the solidarity between Member States is eroding, and nationalist forces are growing as support for European integration is diminishing. The union appears too heterogeneous, and the economic and political interests of the 28 Member States too diverse, to be able to address these challenges as a whole. Does the concept of differentiated integration offer a possible solution? Can such differentiation offer the European integration project a better and more stable future? Which measures of diversity and flexibility can the "ever closer Union among the peoples of Europe" endure? Or will such differentiation ultimately damage the joint European project? This collection of leading European lawyers tackles these questions and suggests how they might be addressed. --

The human body and its parts are widely perceived as matters beyond commercial usage. This belief is codified in several national and European documents. This socalled 'no-property rule' is held to be the default position across the countries of the European Union. However, a closer look at the most pertinent national and European documents, and also current practices in the field, reveals a gradual model of commercialisation of human tissue. In particular, we will argue that the ban on commercialisation of body material is not as strict as it may appear at first sight, leaving room for the commercial practice of tissue procurement and transfer. We argue for more transparent information for patients and tissue donors, an intensified ethical debate on commercialisation practices, and a critical review of current normative principles. ; peerReviewed

The European Union (EU) has shown considerable interest in receiving the Western Balkan countries into the EU, as did the mentioned countries show considerable interest to join the EU. Although this is a historically very turbulent region, the EU has clearly, unambiguously and unanimously expressed the political attitude towards the Western Balkans:"The Future of the Balkans is in the European Union". In addition to goodwill, the EU is also ready to assist in this process but also each country must do its part of the job in the accession process. The very process of EU accession means defining and meeting necessary criteria for potential new EU members, as well as the process of accession negotiations for the full membership of the new member states. The main objective of this article is to indicate which expansion criteria or Copenhagen criteria will be the most critical to achieve for Bosnia and Herzegovina(B&H), as one of the Western Balkan countries, in the process of access into the EU. In the process of meeting Copenhagen criteria, unlike other Western Balkan countries, B&H shows the least success. In our research, Bosnia and Herzegovina has a problem primarily by satisfying political Copenhagen criteria and then meeting economic and legal criteria. The lack of meeting Political Copenhagen criteria is found primarily in the absence of political consensus in B&H, which stems from the special features of the Government in Bosnia and Herzegovina (two entities and Bosnia's three main ethnic populations). With the lack of political unity in B&H, it is not possible to establish stable institutions that ensure democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights and the right to protect minorities (Sejdić and Finci case, corruption, non-transparent elections, nondependent media and labour unions) Fulfilling the Copenhagen Economic Criteria - a functioning market economy is also dependent on political influence (which is also fractured). The economy of B&H is structurally unregulated and is based on the processing of basic raw materials without the high-tech industry in order to deal with the competition of the European Single Market. During the research, the used scientific methods (analysis and syntheses, descriptions and classifications, historical and comparative, induction and deduction, and quantitative analysis) showed that it would be most difficult to achieve the political and economic Copenhagen criteria for the above reasons.

Defence date: 7 June 2010 ; Awarded the François Mény Prize for the Best Comparative Study of Political Institutions, 2011 ; Examining Board: David Farrell (UCD), Mark Franklin (EUI), Adrienne Héritier (EUI/RSCAS) (Supervisor), Simon Hix (LSE) ; Awarded the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) Prize for Best Dissertation in EU studies: the thesis marks a substantial contribution not only to the literature on parliaments in general and the European Parliament in particular, but also to the understanding of the democratic deficit in Europe and how it might be tackled. ; First made available online: 27 August 2021 ; The European Parliament (EP) now acts as an equal co-legislator with the Council of Ministers in adopting many policies that affect 500 million European citizens on a daily basis. However, the parliamentary legislative organisation is under-researched despite its profound consequences for EU policies and policy-making. Addressing this gap, this thesis studies the internal setup and legislative impact of the EP committees. Drawing on congressional literature, I confront distributive, informational and partisan theoretical approaches to answer the research questions of this project, namely whether and why the EP committees and their legislative output are dominated by preference-outlying legislators with special interests, experts serving the informational needs of the plenary, or loyal members of the working majority party group (coalition). Statistical analyses of committee assignments, allocation of legislative tasks, and adoption of committee reports in plenary are conducted using data on the 6th European Parliament (2004-2009). They are complemented with evidence from semi-structured interviews. The results show that legislators' special interests and expertise account for the formally regulated assignment to committees depending on the predominant character of their legislative output (distributive or regulatory). In contrast, party group affiliation and loyalty shape the allocation of important legislative tasks in committees, owing to the informal allocation process. Furthermore, committee reports are more successful on the floor if drafted by rapporteurs from the working majority party group - perhaps a natural consequence of the EP open amendment rule. Thus, the parliamentary legislative output is ultimately controlled by the working majority party group and not committees. The congressional rationales fail to account for committees' legislative influence when an informal early agreement is reached with the Council of Ministers. This occurs increasingly often, rendering decision-making in committees largely obsolete. The observed regularities are used to advance the literature on legislative organisation by identifying conditions under which each of the main congressional rationales can explain committee setup and influence, namely: 1) the policy areas a committee covers; 2) the parliamentary rules regulating committee-party and committee-plenary relationships; and 3) the balance of power and mode of negotiation between the legislative chambers. More substantively, the EP committees are not conducive for pursuing particularistic policies. Instead, they promote left-right party politics. This has important implications for EU legislative politics, interest representation, legitimacy, and more generally the EU democratic deficit.

Protracted crisis in the European Union has substantially augmented lingering euro-skepticism on the continent. Member-countries are desperate to restore the legitimacy of the organization, while descending perceptions about values of the EU integration model among candidates and would be members are real. Inward-looking EU is less engaged in imposing conditionality which has been for more than a decade a main instrument in exporting democracy. With the EU gravitational effects largely absent, nationalistic and populist sentiments are gaining ground in some parts of the Western Balkans, advocating alternatives to European integration as a regional gate to globalization. What does the past record of several Eurasian regional organizations imply about their potential to serve as sustainable alternatives to the European Union? Can the regional trends in the wider Euro-Asian area eventually open up alternative perspectives for some of the Western Balkan countries trailing back on their European path? In this article, the performances of a few regional organizations in Eurasia in several domains will be analyzed applying the comparative method. The aim of the paper is to depict a different genesis and civilizational background and emphasize structural flaws and comparative weaknesses of these organizations to the European Union, especially in the area of political and cultural values underpinning their engagement.

Defence date: 22 November 2002 ; Examining Board: Prof. Richard Breen, FBA, MRIA (Supervisor); Prof. Anthony Heath, FBA; Prof. Michael Keating, European University Institute; Prof. Richard Sinnot, University College Dublin ; First made available online on 16 April 2018 ; In this thesis the author aims to make a contribution to our understanding o f mass attitudes towards European integration. The initial theoretical backdrop is the field of regional integration, where mass attitudes are generally specified to play a minimal role in integrative developments. I criticise this viewpoint, and in particular the Permissive Consensus approach of Lindberg and Scheingold (1970), from an empirical and theoretical stance, arguing instead that public support for European integration is capable o f fulfilling an important legitimising function. Amongst other researchers that view public opinion as worthy of study, the consensus is that mass support for integration is largely a function o f utilitarian calculations. My starting points are the large, unexplained differences in support by country that remain in many utilitarian studies. I hypothesise that explanations o f mass support for integration are complemented by the inclusion o f variables that account for so-called 'affective* attitudes. Specifically, I construct variables measuring national pride, European identity, nationalism and racism for European Union respondents surveyed in the International Social Survey Programme 1995 National Identity dataset. Here, as elsewhere in the thesis, I use commonly applied social sciences methodologies to test my hypotheses both at aggregate and country level. Essentially, I show that higher levels of pride and European identity are positively related to support, while nationalism and racism are negatively related. A second empirical section to the thesis addresses how the four affective concepts interrelate with one another in the data. Although I do not formulate specific hypotheses in this case, I am, however, informed by the socio-psychological literature concerning social identity. In a final empirical section, I use Eurobarometer data to attempt an explanation o f non-attitudes towards European integration, shown to be ubiquitous in both surveys. Here, the explanatory focus is on education, knowledge and interest in politics rather than affective variables.

Defence date: 6 June 2017 ; Examining Board: Professor Sven Steinmo, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Mark Blyth, Brown University; Professor Philipp Genschel, European University Institute; Professor Leonard Seabrooke, Copenhagen Business School ; For all its powers, we know little about how the European Central Bank (ECB) makes its decisions and why. In light of its ever-increasing importance in European governance and the criticism this has attracted, this is particularly regrettable. Often a welcome scapegoat, the ECB has been accused of doing first too little, then too late. Compared to other major central banks, the ECB has indeed long been a laggard – regarding both conventional interest rate policies and unconventional balance sheet operations. Why? I argue that central bankers' policy experiments after the financial crisis are a prime example of policymaking under conditions of Knightian uncertainty. Faced with an unprecedented situation, central bankers were unable to draw on historical experience and had to resort to their beliefs about how the economy works instead. Based on a survey among 422 central bank economists, I quantify these different ways of thinking. My survey data shows a) that certain beliefs matter for policy preferences and b) that both are unevenly distributed among central banks. In particular, the ECB leans more towards orthodox beliefs and hawkish inflation preferences than the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. It is considerably more conservative. Within the Eurosystem, different national central banks are clustered regarding both beliefs and preferences, revealing a dividing line in economic philosophy between core and periphery. This suggests that the frequently surfacing conflicts inside the ECB's Governing Council reflect a battle of ideas rather than a conflict of interests between creditor and debtor states. Proponents of activist monetary policy at the ECB had to overcome enormous resistance from within before they could follow the examples set by others. I argue that this is why the ECB first did too little to support the economy, and only changed its orthodox stance very late.