Suchergebnisse

The claim that ideas play a central role in the European integration process has been recently gaining a large resonance among EU scholars. The reason for such cognitive turn(s) can be partly explained by the important transformations of EU politics and EU theories since the beginning of the 1990s. This paper identifies a strong/weak cognitivist divide in EU scholarship, and within the second, at least three different lines of academic inquiry about the role of ideas in the EU politics. The current paper points to three inter-related dimensions of the notion of ideas: instrumental, cognitive and normative, arguing that the diversity of the reviewed scholarly interpretations is due to their respective emphasis on one or another of these three dimensions. Furthermore, this three-dimensional conceptualisation of ideas facilitates a partial re-consideration of the relationship between ideas-institutions and ideas-interests in the European polity.

Throughout the history of the political economy of innovation, the patterns of territory, competition/co-operation, knowledge production/distribution, and public action have been constantly re-organised. The trends in Europe, since the post-war period, are a good example of this. The political and economic space created by the EU and pan-European integration process has been modifying the context for innovation throughout these decades. The current paper examines these historical transformations, and provides a critical picture of the context in which innovative European firms operate today. In so doing, the study acknowledges that changes in the 'real world' of politics and economics are accompanied by changes in the 'cognitive framework', both in terms of how innovation is understood and how public action is designed accordingly. Consequently, it is the main claim of this paper that the political economy of innovation is as much the result of the constraints and dynamics imposed by the globalisation/acceleration of the innovation process, as it is the result of an active socio-political construction through the re-alignment of public actions following a new interpretative and institutionally negotiated framework. The conclusions identify open research lines.

Following recent theoretical and conceptual developments this paper examines the extent to which the gradual introduction and unfolding of new soft instruments in the European Union is in fact changing the EUs system of governance and the nature of the European integration process. The paper focuses on issues of effective coordination based on voluntary action and on issues of democratic legitimacy in post-parlamentarian political processes. To do that, the paper presents and discusses the theoretical aspects based on rational and sociological institutionalism, and proposes a set of assumptions about the different types of instruments. These assumptions will be tested empirically in the future.