Suchergebnisse

In spite of a continued increase in the substantive scope and reach of EU fundamental rights, little attention has been paid to their practical enforcement. In this book, Mark Dawson looks at the mechanisms through which EU fundamental rights are protected and enforced, closely examining the interrelation between the EU's pertinent legal and political bodies. He argues that in order to understand EU fundamental rights we must also understand the institutional, political and normative constraints that shape the EU's policies. The book examines the performance of different EU institutions in relation to rights and studies two important policy fields - social rights and rule of law protection - in depth.

The development of non-binding new governance methods has challenged the traditional ideals of EU law by suggesting that soft norms and executive networks may provide a viable alternative. Rather than see law and new governance as oppositional projects, Mark Dawson argues that new governance can be seen as an example of legal 'transformation', in which soft norms and hard law institutions begin to cohabit and interact. He charts this transformation by analysing the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) for Social Inclusion and Protection. While this process illustrates some of the concrete advantages for EU social policy which new governance has brought, it also illustrates their extensive legitimacy challenges. Methods like the OMC have both excluded traditional institutions, such as Courts and Parliaments, and altered the boundaries of domestic constitutional frameworks. The book concludes with some practical suggestions for how a political 'constitutionalisation' of new governance could look

ABSTRACT
This article investigates how the European Union's political process affects the level of rights protection afforded by European Union (EU) law. It does so in two steps, firstly by analysing how institutional politics plays an important role in the evolution of the EU fundamental rights framework and secondly by demonstrating empirically how legislative interaction affects the level of protection provided by three important EU legislative acts. As the article will demonstrate, this interaction tends to result in the overall level of rights protection being increased. Analysing this finding, the article uses institutionalist theory to argue that the EU's political process carries certain positive effects: the diversity of the legislative process (both within and between institutions) makes the explicit overlooking of rights-based concerns difficult. These findings carry implications for the increasing tendency to channel EU law and policy outside of the 'ordinary' legislative process.

This editorial critically examines the decision of EU leaders not to follow the 'Spitzenkandidaten' procedure when recently nominating the new President of the European Commission. It does so by situating that decision in a consociational model of democracy, that seeks to share political authority rather than link it directly to electoral processes. As the editorial argues, this model leaves the EU exposed to elitist critique and sits uneasily with certain aspects of Article 17(7) TEU. The review and renewal of the Spitzenkandidaten system promised by the incoming Commission President is thus sorely needed.

The flurry of recent activity in the EU over "Better Regulation" has important constitutional implications, particularly for the Union's institutional balance. As this article will argue, however, the main question the Better Regulation debate poses is one of how to reconcile the increasing tension in the EU between different paradigms of regulation. Is regulation "better" because it conforms to the preferences of citizens as expressed in national and EU elections, or rather because it meets technical and procedural standards, from consultation to impact assessment, able to improve the "objective" quality of EU legislation? While Better Regulation tries to split the difference between these two avenues for the future of EU regulatory law and politics, each avenue carries the capacity to significantly frustrate the other. Current debates in the EU about regulatory reform defer rather than answer a fundamental question: what makes regulation better?

At no point in history has the education system been so intimately entwined with a globalised, market-driven, technical system. As Bernard Stiegler has argued, this synchronization of the education system's mnemotechnical capabilities with technical systems of production is unprecedented (Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol.3, 2001). Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the figure of the scholar; a nexus of personal drives and social influence, public and private spheres, (mnemo)technology, educational institution and market influence. This paper argues that the confluence of these factors raises urgent questions as to the future of digital technology in education, and scholarship in general.The paper will address these issues through two interrelated discourses: one which reads digital technology through the figure of the pharmakon (that which can be both poison and remedy), and the other which aligns the scholar 'to come' with a future it must remain impossible to pre-programme, predict or know in advance. Both strands of the paper follow the work of Jacques Derrida and — via the work of Donald Winnicott on the Transitional Object — Bernard Stiegler, but resituate their argument within the realms of academic practice and technology enhanced learning. It argues that Derrida's reading of the pharmakon in Plato's Phaedrus (Derrida, La dissemination, 1972), in which he deconstructs Plato's opposing of anamnesis and hypomnesis (between 'originary' knowledge and hypo-mnemetic writing as its technological and supplementary contamination), and Bernard Stiegler's repositioning of this through his reading of the technical/'transitional object' (Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971), suggests that the inherently 'pharmakological' nature of tekhnē gives us a framework to think through the position, application and impact of the digital upon academic scholarship. By reading this against Derrida's distancing of 'the future' (le futur) from the 'to come' (l'avenir), however, we can also suggest how digital technology provides conditions for a scholarship 'to come'; one which can look the radically ambiguous technological condition of the modern academic institution in the face and speak to it.It begins, however, with Hamlet, and with the odd suggestion that only Horatio, the scholar, can speak to the spectre of a King who demands justice.

The article discusses early modern newspaper advertisements from publications of London, England dated from 1651-1750, focusing on how they represent popular notions of body images. The ideas of the four humors of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile representing personal characteristics is considered. A database of wanteds, or advertisements searching for people, is divided into groups including criminals, missing domestics, and military deserters. The author considers who was responsible for giving physical descriptions placed in advertisements and their social status.

AbstractHow should decision‐making under EU economic governance be understood following the euro‐crisis? This article argues, contra existing depictions, that the post‐crisis EU has increasingly adopted methods of decision‐making in the economic field which marry the decision‐making structure of inter‐governmentalism with the supervisory and implementation framework of the Community Method. While this 'post‐crisis' method has arisen for clear reasons – to achieve economic convergence between eurozone states in an environment where previous models of decision‐making were unsuitable or unwanted – it also carries important normative implications. Post‐crisis governance departs from the mechanisms of legal and political accountability present in previous forms of EU decision‐making without substituting new models of accountability in their place. Providing appropriate channels of political and legal control in the EU's 'new' economic governance should be seen as a crucial task for the coming decade.

The article discusses early modern newspaper advertisements from publications of London, England dated from 1651-1750, focusing on how they represent popular notions of body images. The ideas of the four humors of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile representing personal characteristics is considered. A database of wanteds, or advertisements searching for people, is divided into groups including criminals, missing domestics, and military deserters. The author considers who was responsible for giving physical descriptions placed in advertisements and their social status.

This working paper discusses the future of the EU's 'new governance' paradigm, as a particular category of the EU's legal acts in light of developments in EU economic governance following the Euro crisis. It advances both an empirical and a normative argument. While EU economic governance 'after' the euro crisis would seem to carry 'hard law' elements, the paper's key empirical claim is that 'post' euro-crisis economic governance has generalized central elements of the new governance paradigm into an increasingly central domain of EU policy-making. Policy-makers have turned to an enhanced form of new governance as a way of managing complex, multi-level problems which traditional command and control regulation could not solve. Normatively, however, some of the more promising aspects of the new governance legacy – its experimental focus on policy innovation and mutual learning between states – is precisely the aspect of the new governance paradigm post-crisis economic decision-making seems to have left behind. New governance is used in the economic field not to promote learning or experimentation between states but to foster greater harmonization and convergence in fiscal performance. Learning the lessons of new governance's past may be vital in securing a central (and positive) place for new governance instruments within the EU's future constitutional landscape.