Suchergebnisse

The Lisbon Treaty has brought significant changes into the architecture of the European Union. The most important novelty, however, is the establishment of a full unity of the Union structure achieved by creating new and strengthening the existing elements. The new elements of this unity are the disappearance of the European Community, the 'independence' of the European Atomic Energy Community, constituting the European Union as a single entity and the introduction of EU values. At the same time, the Lisbon Treaty has strengthened the existing elements of the common institutional mechanisms, rules on amending the founding treaties and EU membership. However, constituting the Union as a single entity which has replaced and succeeded the European Communities has not abolished the EU elements of diversity. In the areas that differed, even before the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, from the community pillar, there remain significant differences in the nature and the scope of competences of the Union institutions. This mainly regards the common foreign and security policy, which now includes the defense policy, where the existing model of inter-state cooperation has been only slightly interfered with. In contrast, in the field of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters, which has become part of a larger Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, the inter-state model of cooperation has been abandoned in some of its most important elements. However, the implementation of some of the important elements of the supranational model has been postponed.

Today, Europe is living a new decisive time as it has been in its past after World War II, in search of unity in diversity in the name of a peace project to safeguard future. If, on the one hand, Europe expresses aspirations for profound changes in its external environment, in the domestic context, it ends up colliding with aspects linked to sovereignty and human rights; on the other hand, in European foreign policy, the model reveals the search to legitimize its action. Precisely, the objective and the motivation of this study seek, through the qualitative methodology in Political Science, to analyse and understand the current context of the European Union in the international system. In fact, it is identified that this new hierarchy of powers, in the reaffirmation of the Westphalian system, where economic power comes, is bound to consolidate the democratic development between the old and new times of international relations in the destiny of Europe. From the results obtained during the analysis, in order to face again the unpredictability of the world scenario, it is a reality that Europe must promote the re-encounter of an alternative role, in other words, to assume its initial project of European edification in the name of equality of circumstances and rights of its affirmation in the global arena.

Since the end of the 1980s, the intensifying of the politicization process has been one of the important characteristics of the EU integration process. The politicization in the EU is understood as the way of contesting and decision-making on public issues, the way that is opposite to the elitist and technocratic mode of decision-making, typical for the first decades of EU integration. Thus, the politicization, and also the politicization in the EU, is grasped as complementary to the public character of modern politics, especially with democracy. The European union is conceptualized as an extremely compound and non-centralized political system of a non-state type with the elements of consensus democracy and with a deeply segmented society as its basis, divided by national and many transnational lines. Within that society, as well as within its political institutions, the politicization process has been developing which has been influencing the functioning of the system considerably. We explore the experiences of politicization in other compound, consensus democracies in Europe – Belgium and Switzerland – and by comparing the specific cases of politicization, we are searching for the possible specific characteristics of politicization in the EU that stem from its described nature. Also, we are analyzing the possible impact of such politicization on the future of integration and politics in the EU. Although not always contributing to deepening of integration, the politicization in the EU, under specific circumstances, could have a democratizing effect. It serves as the opportunity for stimulating the debates on important issues and articulating the will of the citizens while the adequate forms of participation in the political process are still missing in the EU. In addition, we discuss the potential impact of the politicization of European issues on the gradual creation of the European public sphere or the Europeanisation of the national public spheres, as well as on the Europeanisation of society and emergence of the European political identity among the EU citizens. ; Jedna od značajnijih karakteristika u razvoju evropske integracije od kraja 1980- ih godina jeste intenziviranje procesa politizacije. Politizacija u Evropskoj uniji se razume kao način raspravljanja i odlučivanja o javnim pitanjima suprotan elitističkom i tehnokratskom načinu donošenja odluka, uobičajenom naročito za prve decenije razvoja evropske integracije. Stoga se politizacija, pa i politizacija u Evropskoj uniji, shvata kao komplementarna sa javnim karakterom moderne politike, posebno sa demokratijom. Evropska unija je konceptualizovana kao izrazito složen i necentralizovan politički sistem nedržavnog tipa sa elementima konsensualne demokratije koji za osnovu ima duboko segmentirano društvo, ispresecano osim nacionalnim i mnogim transnacionalnim podelama. Unutar tog društva, kao i unutar političkih institucija, odvija se proces politizacije koja ima značajnog uticaja na funkcionisanje sistema. Rad nastoji da izuči iskustva politizacije drugih složenih, konsensualnih demokratija u Evropi – Belgije i Švajcarske – te poređenjem pojedinih slučajeva politizacije traga za posebnim karakteristikama politizacije u EU koje proističu iz njene opisane prirode, kao i o mogućem uticaju takve politizacije na budućnost integracije i politike u EU. Iako neće uvek doprineti produbljivanju integracije, politizacija u EU pod određenim uslovima može imati demokratizujući uticaj jer predstavlja način da se oživi rasprava o važnim pitanjima i artikuliše volja građana u nedostatku adekvatnih oblika učešća u političkom procesu EU. Dodatno, razmatra se potencijalni uticaj koji politizacija evropskih pitanja može da ima na postepeno kreiranje evropske javne sfere ili evropeizaciju nacionalnih javnih sfera, kao i na evropeizaciju društva i kreiranje evropskog političkog identiteta među građanima Unije.

The paper analyzes military capabilities of the European Union, as an important element of the credibility of the EU Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). It discusses the development of these capabilities, and main problems that go along with the operationalization of these capabilities, as well as the prospects of their further development. Is the intergovernmental approach to the area of the EU security and defense policy a barrier to the development of EU military capabilities? What is the extent of the harmonization between 'military' competences of the EU and national specificities? The paper aims to provide answers to these questions. The first section analyzes the institutionalization of the EU security and defense policy, which includes both the establishment of special political and military structures responsible for the decision-making process within the framework of this policy, and the adoption of specific goals for the development of EU military capabilities. The second section analyzes the main difficulties met in the operationalization of EU military capabilities, concerning the efficiency of decision-making procedures, lack of strategic capabilities, the discord of national reforms regarding the modernization of the armed forces, and duplication of national programs covering the military equipment. The third section discusses the prospects of the development of EU military capabilities in the light of EU member states' military budget cuts. It concludes that the gradual evolution of the EU security and defense policy can be seen as an incentive for coordinating the efforts of the member states in the development of EU military capabilities.

It is common today, even in the European media, to treat the current crisis of the European Union almost exclusively as an economic crisis. The present article pretends to show that such a focus is not only wrong but is indeed dangerous for the future development of the European Union as a whole. The article will argue that the present economic crisis simply aggravated – and a lot – a crisis of legitimacy through which the European Union has been passing for some time. Showing that the anti-European tendencies which are spreading throughout the countries of the continent threaten the very future of the European project, the article will make suggestion on reforms for the future development of the EU, alerting to the necessity to finally elaborate once again a coherent argument for the continuation of the European integration process which puts the European population at the heart of the political process instead of just austerity.

When in 2007, after the rejection of the Constitution for Europe in France and the Netherlands, European politicians defined their mandate to work on the Reform Treaty, they explicitly promised that 'the constitutional concept is . abandoned' and that 'the Treaty of European Union and Treaty on Functioning of the Union will not have a constitutional character.' In its Maastricht and Lisbon decisions, the German Federal Constitutional Court concluded that the European Union did not have a constitution since it did not have demos. The main purpose of this article is to prove the opposite. Accepting Weiler's argumentation that the EU is a political messianic venture par excellence, the author claims that, in addition to pursuing messianic goals, Europe's political elite has for a long time been streaming to root Political Messianism into democracy and position the EU in the global world. The main vehicle to transform the Community/Union from an international to a constitutional legal order has been constitutionalism. Starting from the French revolutionary Declaration, which declared civil rights and in Article 16 proclaimed 'a society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all,' the author has showed that the Union has an antirevolutionary, uncodified and evolutive constitution, whose elements are to be found in the Lisbon Treaty and its related documents, the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice, and to some extent in the constitutional orders of the Member States. The European constitution does not mirror a national constitution in the sense that it is attributable to the people, nor it is a revolutionary product aimed at limiting the government in the name of individual freedom. It is a rule of law-oriented type of constitution, born in the process of constitutionalization and aimed at submitting public power to law on the Union level. From the perspective of modern constitutionalism, the quality of this constitution is a matter of concern, since it has managed to connect the rule of law with the protection of human rights, but has failed to do the same with regard to democracy. Despite some efforts to entrench the democratic principle in the Lisbon Treaty, the present crisis in the Union is to a great extent the result of this failure. The fact that democratic defects at the Union level appear less visible when pitted against the state of affairs in national constitutional systems cannot mitigate this failure. Yet, assuming that the EU will survive the present crisis and having in mind that the Union is 'work in progress', the issue which still remains open is whether the future efforts to eliminate the defects of the European Constitution should be tied to traditional ways of thinking about democratic accountability within nation states, or one should stop thinking in terms of a Westphalian nation-state, and accept that transnational systems can provide a cure for democratic failings in ways that differ from traditional postulates of democracy.

The aim of this paper is to establish and clarify the relationship between corruption level and development among European Union countries. Out of the estimated model in this paper one can conclude that the level of corruption can explain capital abundance differences among European Union countries. Also, explanatory power of corruption is higher in explaining economic development than in explaining capital abundance, meaning stronger relationship between corruption level and economic development than between corruption level and capital abundance. There is no doubt that reducing corruption would be beneficial for all countries. Since corruption is a wrongdoing, the rule of law enforcement is of utmost importance. However, root causes of corruption, namely the institutional and social environment: recruiting civil servants on a merit basis, salaries in public sector competitive to the ones in private sector, the role of international institutions in the fight against corruption, and some other corruption characteristics are very important to analyze in order to find effective ways to fight corruption. Further research should go into this direction.