Suchergebnisse

The Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) used by the Council of the European Union developed to a high degree of complexity from one modifying treaty to another, until the latest definition stipulated in the Treaty of Lisbon. This paper analyses this EU intra-institutional voting method using a rational choice approach and emphasizes that there are situations when not even the institutions, as rational actors, can avoid a collective irrational outcome even when they are addressing subjects such as voting power distribution. It also addresses several shortcomings of the Liberal Intergovernmentalist explanatory framework focusing on the insufficiently developed level of credible institutional commitments. The core part of the article consists in investigating several types of EU Council internal decision-making options, proposing how they can be designed to be considered in the same time fair and efficient, and in analysing how close this voting power ideal type configuration is to the current decisional system.

Migrants play an important role in shaping today's EU, both in terms of the labour market, and society as a whole. The analyses of the migration policies, including the labour sector, are generally focused on the control and, respectively, on the security dimension, while a third branch includes the researches on the broader term of incorporation of migrants into the fabric of the host societies. This paper starts from the questions "why does the EU labour market need migrants?" and "what role can migrants play in community development?", and it argues that using an incorporation approach in public policies concerning migrants could provide a theoretical and actional solution to overcome challenges posed by various other policy and political positions aimed against migrants. An assessment of labour-connected incorporation policies and practices is presented as a study case, using evidence-based policies and practices from Romania. The main findings of the paper indicate that there is a huge gap between stated aims of written strategies, actions being implemented and the perception of intended target groups. The article argues that this deviation is due, at least in the case of Romania, to a weak administrative capacity to manage migrant flows and the challenges they bring to traditional and rigid legal and administrative systems. The gap is also due to poor operationalisation of the concept of incorporation in policy practice, with contradictory simultaneously policy narratives of adaptation, assimilation, inclusion, or integration, and without a clear goal that should shape a national labour migration policy.

In this study, we analyse the manner of developing a particular system of coordination of European affairs at national level, as well as its efficiency, the aim being to provide suggestions for improving it. The introductory section highlights the need for such a study, given the current political and institutional context of Romania, and it states the objectives of the study. Special attention is given to presenting the theoretical approach (expressing, on the one hand, the authors' vision that European affairs - distinctly from foreign affairs - are part of the complex governance process specific for the European Union (EU) and, on the other hand, operationalizing the idea of efficiency within a national system for coordinating European affairs, etc.) and the research methodology (reasons for choosing a comparative research design to support the presented arguments, as well as the qualitative research performed). In the first part, the paper also provides information on the legislative and institutional configuration of the EU, following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, because the novelties and reforms brought by this regulatory framework (supperior to the one of the Nice Treaty, but inferior to the proposals stipulated within the Constitutional Treaty) have a direct impact on designing the structure for coordinating European affairs in the Member States. Given that in Romania the European affairs coordination system was initially inspired by the French model, while later suffering a series of institutional changes (some inspired by models from other EU states), an important part of the study addresses the need to know, from a comparative perspective, the best practices in European affairs coordination and cooperation mechanisms in other EU Member States. [.]