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Victor Hugo once described revolutions as a return from the artificial to normalcy. Certainly, revolutions are processes that unveil the unknown in history. Revolutions are revelations. 1989 was such a revelation in Europe. It changed the European perspective from Yalta to Malta, that is: from internal division to global exposure. The turn from Yalta to Malta was not only a semantic gag. It was also more than describing the end of the Cold War. To link Malta to Yalta was not a nice way for writing an obituary to a closed chapter in history. To the contrary, "Malta" opened a new chapter in the history of Europe. I call this fundamental fact "the Malta turn of Europe". Most people which were living the political events of 1989 or were observing them from a distance did not instantly grasp the meaning of the political changes that happened across Central Europe. Two basic meanings were revealed by the history of 1989: a fundamental geopolitical change and a fundamental sociocultural change – and both were fundamentally interrelated. The fall of communist regimes that had been governing many societies was met with excitement and joy, sometimes even with disbelief and worry across the world. With hindsight knowledge, two facts remain evident: 1989 did not begin in 1989 and it did not end with 1989. When we compare the fall of communist regimes in Europe with the French Revolution of 1789, we instantly realize the meaning of this thought: also 1789 did not begin in 1789 and it did not end with 1789. The French Revolution in its time went through periods of incubation. And it continued through several periods of transformation, of revolutions inside the revolution, of unexpected results and unintended consequences. The same was happening in Europe again two centuries later. Three insights remain fundamental to better contextualize 1989 and the Malta summit in that year that declared the Cold War dead. ; N/A

For the European Union to continue to succeed leaders in all 25 member countries have to devote more attention to the factors of culture and business. However, the key to successful business enterprise across Europe is not only understanding the impact of culture on human behavior and organizations, but for managers and other professionals to develop skills in coping with multiculturalism and diversity within the EU populations.

Questions whether a European Union with 25 members will be manageable; suggests that it will not be unless, over time, it has an improved decision-making system and develops a simplified revision process for treaties.

Cybersecurity is increasingly seen as a fundamental problem of the state, which comprehensively affects its security and defense, economy, certain spheres of public life, in particular energy, health care and others. Reliable operation of data networks, computer systems and mobile devices is a prerequisite for the effective state and society functioning, an individual's life. The reliability of key public information systems depends on many factors: cyberattacks, hardware and software failures, and all kinds of errors. The significant increase in the number of incidents in cyberspace necessitates a systematic analysis of sources of threats, the first place among which is phishing. The introduction of criminal responsibility for phishing is complicated by the fact that "phishing" is an "umbrella" concept that covers a number of launched or committed crimes. From criminal law point of view, phishing attacks can correspond to different categories of crimes (extortion, fraud, blackmail, offenses related to the processing of personal data, etc.). The attempt by some states to impose criminal penalties for phishing at the national level does not solve the problem, since it is not difficult for phishers who work worldwide to cross national barriers. That is still the reason why counteracting cybercrime requires significant efforts not only by individual states but also by international organizations, in particular by the European Union.

In recent years, Turkey has become an ever more important actor on the international stage. However, Turkey-EU relations still remain in a state of flux. The EU and Turkey seem to have moved apart in their political aspirations after Turkey's EU accession talks faced a stalemate over the Republic of Cyprus' EU accession as a divided island. Likewise, both Turkey and the EU have recently faced new socio-political realities, such as the Eurozone crisis, the Arab Spring and the Turkish government's shifting foreign policy towards the Middle East region. Such developments have rendered EU membe.

The economic crisis within the European Union has had a significant impact on domestic politics in the member states, affecting the links between parties and citizens and accentuating the tensions parties face between governing responsibility and being responsive to public opinion. This article examines whether parties in EU countries have shifted their left–right ideological positions during the current crisis and whether such shifts are a direct response to the pressures of wider economic conditions or are more affected by changes in the preferences of the median voter. Party-based and citizen-based data are examined between 2002 and 2015, encompassing both the precrisis and crisis periods. The main findings are that the economic crisis has made parties less responsive to public opinion on the left–right dimension, and this effect is more pronounced for parties that have been in government.

The aim of this article is to show through the comparative analysis, the basic characteristics of regional policy, or the policy of support to the development of less developed areas in our country compared to the regional policy of European Union, with an accent on the instruments for implementation of that policy. Without putting accent on different starting positions for those two development policies, what is for sure the main reason of differences in realized results, the experiences of European Union can be in any case useful and instructive for Serbia as a country with a task of rationalization and establishment of an effective regional policy being a necessity in the forthcoming period. ; Cilj ovog rada je da, kroz komparativnu analizu, ukaže na osnovne karakteristike regionalne politike, odnosno, uslovno rečeno, politike podsticanja bržeg razvoja nedovoljno razvijenih područja naše zemlje u odnosu na regionalnu politiku Evropske Unije, uz naglasak na instrumentima njihovog sprovođenja. Bez obzira na različite startne pozicije u kojima su ove dve razvojne politike zaživele, što je i osnovni uzrok razlika u ostvarenim rezultatima, iskustva Evropske Unije svakako mogu biti korisna i instruktivna za Srbiju kao državu za koju afirmacija regionalnog nivoa predstavlja neminovnost i ozbiljan zadatak u periodu koji sledi.

Who governs the European Union? How are powers and competences to implement EU policies distributed among its components, and what determines that? Throughout this dissertation I aim to address these questions by providing four specific contributions to the academic debate about EU executive governance. First, I extend our knowledge of delegation dynamics in the EU to the whole post-Maastricht period. I analyse competing factors affecting the distribution of executive competences between national administrations and the European Commission. Second, I account for the reliance by the legislator on EU decentralised agencies in secondary legislation for implementation purposes. Third, I analyse and account for the evolution of EU agencies' mandates and budget from the Maastricht treaty onward. And fourth, I look at the implementation of a specific policy item in the field of food safety regulation in order to investigate how the European Commission and EU agencies use their powers and tasks to shape policy outputs. The underlying goal linking the chapters throughout the thesis is, in sum, to grasp process of delegation to – and the empowerment of – supranational bodies in the EU multi-level administration. The thesis is structured as follows: in Part I, I address the determinants of delegation to executive actors in the EU. After presenting a newly collected dataset of relevant EU legislation in Chapter 2, throughout Chapter 3 I test well-established hypotheses grounded in the delegation literature. I consider policy-specific features – mainly policy complexity– the distribution of preferences of the main decision makers– Council, European Parliament and the Commission– in the legislative process and the decisions rule as explanatory factors for the incentives of decision makers to grant executive leeway to the main supranational institution, the European Commission, and to national administrations. Compared to previous studies, I extend the observation of this phenomenon to the whole post-Maastricht period and show how executive discretion is distributed among salient legislative acts covering the period between 1985 (the Single European Act) and nowadays. My findings, obtained through linear regression models, show that decision rules and conflict along integration lines are the main explanatory factors behind the granting of executive discretion to the European Commission. Moreover, my results suggest that the involvement of the European Parliament through co-decision has resulted into lower discretion granted to the European Commission. Given that the creation and use of specific executive bodies– such as EU agencies and regulatory networks– are actions concerted between the EU legislators and a bureaucratic actor, the Commission, in Chapter 4 I employ both delegation theory and theory of bureaucratic behaviour in order to account for the reliance on EU agencies by the legislator in the same dataset of major secondary laws. By means of logistic regression analyses I demonstrate that the more complex a policy issue is, the higher the probability to rely on an agency in policy implementation. Moreover, I identify a curvilinear relationship between the powers accumulated by the Commission overtime and the likelihood of agency use in EU secondary laws. This finding points to the fact that reliance of agencies goes together with the empowerment of the Commission, so long as this latter is not highly powerful. In Part II of the thesis I move from executive delegation in legislation to the consequences of delegation through two different chapters. In Chapter 5 I first describe and then analyse the growth of the EU agency system by assessing the determinants of the variation in the allocation of EU agencies' budget. In particular, after an assessment of agencies reforms and developments since the early 1990's, I investigate whether the observed reforms have led to a significant empowerment of those agencies in budgetary terms. To do so, I employ theories of budgeting (incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium theories) and legislative- bureaucratic relationships. I build an original dataset tracing the developments in tasks and budget of all EU agencies overtime from 1992 to 2016. It tests my hypotheses by means of a cross-sectional time-series analysis, revealing that trends in agencies budgetary allocation are explained by (i) crisis response, including the financial crisis and the Schengen borders crisis; (ii) by the reforms agencies have gone through overtime (iii) the typology of agency. Finally, in Chapter 6 I look at the configuration of actors that, together, shape EU policy outputs. Given the growth of the agency system and the alleged reliance of the Commission on these bodies, through this last chapter I seek to grasp the concerted role of Commission and EU agencies in producing policy outcomes in politicised situations. I build a theoretical framework by drawing different configuration of the Commission's preferences of in comitology decision making vis-à-vis national governments, stakeholders, agencies and public opinion. I test my theoretical propositions through theory-testing process tracing, focused on the Glyphosate's license renewal (2015-2017). I find that under strong political pressures the Commission engages in blame-shifting strategies and tries to avoid the burden of taking unpopular policies, while following agencies' expertise becomes less of a priority.

This article discusses European Union (EU)-North Africa energy relations with a special focus on renewables in North Africa, arguing that the research so far has not taken due account of North African perceptions of EU external energy policy. It is argued that current research on EU-North African relations has not taken sufficient note of the multidimensionality of energy or addressed the inconsistent nature of EU policy making. However, addressing these issues is vital in approaching EU-North Africa energy relations and EU policy towards North Africa in general. The study of perceptions is introduced as one way to develop research further, to give further impetus on understanding how EU-North African energy relations develop and to understand energy relations in their complexity.

The issue of women's under-representation in politics continues to be controversial and pressing in countries all over the world. According to the Inter Parliamentary Union, only 14.7 per cent of the world's legislators are women.1 In no country do women achieve parity with men in terms of parliamentary representation. The record of many of the world's most developed countries is particularly poor. Looking at lower houses of the legislature, in the US women's representation is only 14 per cent, in the UK 18 per cent, France 12 per cent and Italy 10 per cent. These countries are considerably out-performed by others such as South Africa and Argentina, both at 30 per cent.2