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This paper is intended to frame and describe a novel method of political party positioning within the European Union and beyond. Ever since the groundbreaking work by Downs in the 1950s, political scientists have derived a variety of methods to empirically determine the position of parties on scales varying between policy positions or between ideologies. Today, two sets of techniques dominate this research domain: expert surveys and manifesto/programme coding. What is common to both techniques is that the positioning is done by professionals outside the parties, i.e. by qualified researchers in expert surveys and in manifesto coding. Up to now, the parties have never been asked to position themselves. Through the EU Profiler project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary and pan- European research endeavour, some 300 political parties within the European Union (and in a number of neighbouring countries) have been offered the possibility to place themselves on 30 political issues related to party competition in the 2009 European elections. The resulting data will offer unique opportunities for comparing the accuracy and efficiency among party positioning techniques, exploring for the first time and in a systematic way the auto-positioning of political parties throughout Europe. This paper will offer insights into the conceptual design and practical application of this new method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hannah Arendt conceptualizes an evolving "crisis of state sovereignty" and related "perplexities of the rights of man". This paper examines how Arendt addresses the problem by developing ideas for a new federal and republican Europe which may serve as a model for a democratic renewal with universalistic ties. While citizenship rights, according to Arendt, must be defined and limited, Arendt suggests a post-national decoupling of state and nation. Her conceptual foundations of cosmopolitan Euro-Republicanism also point to a new universal political responsibility and post-sovereign politics in the global age. The paper demonstrates that Arendt's reflections provide approaches to mediate the tensions between the two essential claims of liberal democracy, namely democratic self-rule and universalism. Arendt, it is argued, helps to theorize and justify the EU as a post-national political community in its own right but also provides a framework for a critical theory of the European Union and its shortcomings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses take place in many political, judicial and societal arenas within and beyond nation-states. However, we still know little on the conditions, under which they matter. When do discourses facilitate ideational changes and allow for outcomes beyond lowest-common denominator solutions? This paper focuses on cases, in which governments violated international law knowingly and willingly in the first place and maintain non-compliance despite they were detected and infringement procedures were initiated. Since governmental policy interests are eminently strong and rigidly pointing towards non-compliance, states cannot easily be talked into compliance with a norm interpretation beyond the lowest common denominator. In focusing on these least likely cases for successful discourses, this paper addresses the following questions: How can infringement cases, in which governments stubbornly maintain non-compliance, be resolved? Can judicial discourses induce compliance and if so, under which conditions? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that efforts by international donors, in particular the EU, to build the capacity of environmental NGOs across post-socialist Europe, has less to do with fostering democratic stability and civil society, and more to do with establishing new epistemic communities. Amongst critics, the technocratic, apolitical and rather benign term 'capacity-building' has become code for the transformation and undermining of 'local' knowledge, the disregard for existing 'capacities', the construction of new networks of experts, and the importation of rationalities based on west European discourses and constructions of ecological risk, sustainable development and policy responses. Not surprisingly, the weaker the post-socialist state - legacies of ethnic conflict, the severity of economic collapse - the greater the extent to which capacity-building assistance seeks to transform policy communities, actors and networks. From the perspective of Bosnia-Herzegovina it is argued that the limitations of environmental capacity building assistance are due in large part to the failure of donors to distinguish between different 'capacities', and their insistence on prioritising the development of project grant expertise and organisational management know how over and above other developmental needs. The paper illustrates the extent to which environmental movement organisations either require very basic developmental assistance, or need more bespoke support that will enable them to engage effectively in political and legal contestation with the state. However, assistance for the development of either 'capacity' is rarely available from donor agencies.The paper concludes that whilst aspects of environmental capacity building assistance are clearly having a positive impact, the rigidity of donor aid, and the framework of project grants as the mechanism for delivering assistance, are limiting the impact to a narrow elite of organisations, of which some are neither non-governmental, nor linked to indigenous local environmental networks within civil society. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the establishment of the Copenhagen criteria for membership in 1993 the European Community has entered a complex process of guiding Eastern European countries on their way back to Europe. The substance of this process consisted in institutional models and behavioral patterns delivery, which through the mechanics of conditionality, timing and bargaining was expected to produce substantial effects on national governance systems . This paper aims to present this experiment as a distinct governance mode in the EU based on conditionality about institutional performance and political timing. It further argues that as a top down governance process accession affects domestic policy making and institutional building efforts, but is limited to formal institutional choices. Actual institutional performance in candidate countries is predefined by previous and existing formal and informal institutional structures, political actor?s interests and reform capacity. The paper further proposes a more governance oriented approach in researching the substance of accession process and its outcomes in a transformational context. It combines vertical and horizontal analytical tools for discovering at one hand the substance of accession conditionality as a distinct governance structure. On the other hand it takes a closer look at two economic policy sectors for examining the actual functioning of the accession conditionality at domestic level in a given accession country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do national parliaments regain some of their influence over policy areas that have been lost to the European Union? National parliaments influence policy as it travels ‘upstream’ to the intergovernmental level or in the ‘downstream’ implementation process. This paper presents a model that demonstrates how national parliaments could strengthen their influence over European policy in the upstream stage by minimizing information asymmetries with their representative at the European level, the national government. The containment of agency losses in the upstream process is a necessary step toward regaining policy influence, but it is not sufficient. Downstream influence is also necessary. This paper uses principal-agent theory to explain why national parliaments establish European Affairs Committees (EAC) and illustrate EAC limitations. It presents a model for the strategic interaction between national parliaments and governments over European policy. The conclusion describes possible empirical tests of the model and gives suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Maastricht (1992), the EU has begun to supplement its process of economic integration by developing common institutional structures in the security and defense realm. Although not officially challenging NATO, what is now called a European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) signifies an increased degree of cooperation among EU member states outside of NATO, thus challenging the Alliance’s role as the dominant security organization in Europe. The paper seeks to explain this process by addressing the question why, despite NATO’s continued existence and successful performance throughout the 1990, EU member states decided to establish their own common defense structures. Demonstrating that existing theories (realism, institutionalism, supranationalism) are unable to account for this post-Cold War shift in institutional allegiance, a social constructivist perspective traces the formulation of the national security interest back to conceptions of national identity. In essence, it is argued that a shift in collective identity has taken place among EU member states, replacing ‘the West’, the collective underlying NATO, with ‘Europe’, the collective underlying CFSP/ESDP. The paper is divided in two parts. First, addressing the problem of operationalization, the study seeks to improve our theoretical understanding of the identity concept and connect it to the definition of national security. Deploying identity as an intermediate variable that channels ideas into political behavior, it focuses on the recognition of national identity as evolving out of the interplay between collective and individual identity. It shows how the resulting definitions of Self and Other have crucial impact on how a state defines its security space, corresponding threats, and the means to address these threats. The identity shift is accounted for by the ability of the political elite to redefine the ideational parameters of national (collective/individual) identity during critical periods along a temporal axis. Second, the study takes a comparative perspective by looking at the shift in identity and institutional allegiance in Germany. It applies the constructivist approach to show how both Adenauer’s decision for NATO in the post-WW II period and the support of the Kohl government for CFSP/ESDP in the 1990s were attempts to (re)define German normality. While the first case reveals German desire to escape the totalitarian shadows of its own past and define itself as a ‘free’ society, the 1990s show a stronger identification with the European collective, built on the theme of ‘unity’ and the fear of ‘fragmentation’. Outlining increasing discomfort with an American defined post Cold-War world order, the study concludes by suggesting an ideational split of the ‘West’, with ‘Europe’ increasingly establishing its own security identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to understand under what conditions the EU can set an international standard. It details the 1995 EU Data Privacy Directive and the reaction of the United States to it. The Directive has now become the de facto international privacy regime, binding US companies that do business with Europe. It thus becomes the first global standard that the US has been impacted by without having had input into its content. Given that the EU aspires to a greater role in transnational governance (White Paper on European Governance, 2001), what were the important factors necessary for the EU's success in this issue? This paper analyzes three different hypotheses that exist in the literature: 1) US government officials readjusting their views about the need for a comprehensive privacy policy after "communicative action" with the EU, 2) the successful threat of EU market exclusion backed up by the "shield" of the WTO exemption for privacy, and 3) US domestic interest groups trying to use the EU directive (gaiatsu) to accomplish a domestic agenda that they could not push through alone because of US domestic preference aggregation failure. The paper finds support for the third interpretation of the EU's success. For this reason, there may not be many other areas in which the EU can successfully project its regime preferences internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a complete analysis of the online presence (website and social media activity) of those 163 incumbent political parties competing in the 28 member-countries during last 2014 European Parliament Elections. It cross-nationally examines the main functions and intensity of their overall activity by accounting for possible political and institutional explanations. The findings show that while there are significant differences across countries confirming the constraining effect of national institutions, the size or the government/opposition condition do not affect parties' individual campaign intensity, confirming the existence of observable equalization tendencies in the context of this well-known second-order election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines National Preference Formation in the Czech Republic. Although finding that previous scholarly frameworks highlighting the role of powerful societal groups, dependency and ideology in shaping preferences have their merits it suggests that the key to understanding the Czech Republic's Choices for Europe lie in (perceived) weaknesses and vulnerabilities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a six-country comparative panel study experiment with 1197 participants, and focusing on the European example, this paper shows how in the long term, political institutions and the media can change the political identity of citizens. It does not only show that exposure to good or bad news on Europe and to symbols of the European Union have an effect on European identity, but also that news works as a 'time bomb'. It suggests that while increasingly cynical European citizens first 'resist' attempts of political manipulation, this effect ultimately kicks in later and influences citizens' European identity in the long term. The 2 ½ year-long study demonstrates this 'time bomb' effect of news as well as an immediate but growing effect of political symbols on citizens' identity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an analysis of collective action - understood as a range of mobilizations and forms of interest representation - and its transformations associated with European integration. Our principal underlying hypothesis is that the different means by which influence is exerted on European Union institutions - the relatively discreet avenues of lobbying or more openly assertive protest demonstrations - provide an outline of emerging European democracy. The organization and transformation of collective action stemming from European integration however do not simply substitute a transnational civil society to previous national patterns of interests' intermediation. Rather, mobilizations at the EU level supplement collective action still active within the institutional frames of the member states. Moreover, the development of a European public space, where a composite and fragmented civil society can be depicted, attempts to a large extent to compensate for the limitations of political representation at the EU level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) is an increasingly important actor in homeland security in Europe, serving as both a platform for cooperation and as an authoritative actor in its own right. As the role of the EU grows, both scholars and practitioners need to know how the basic features of its policy system enhance or limit the capacity to manage European crises and disasters. This paper takes a "bureaucratic politics" perspective on the question, exploring the degree to which competition between individual units operating within the EU's bureaucracy may influence outcomes during critical situations. We use five dimensions of a policy system that shape bureaucratic politics and measure the EU on each dimension, finding that fundamental tensions exist in the EU that are likely to exacerbate bureaucratic politics. However, we note that the EU is working towards dedicated crisis decision procedures that may change how bureaucratic politics influences outcomes. We also caution against assuming that competition between interest-oriented individuals and organizational units is inherently dysfunctional. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I evaluate whether regional citizens are more likely to support greater autonomy because they find the idea of an independent region within Europe to be more viable. The devolution referenda in Scotland in two distinct time periods provide a quasi-experiment in which to explore this observable implication. In the first referendum, a slight majority voted for devolution but the margin was not enough to overcome the electoral threshold set by Westminster. In 1997, though, the result was overwhelmingly pro-devolution. I argue that the fear of independence, coupled with a preference ordering where the second choice for devolution supporters was the status quo, explained the strategic voting behavior in 1979. Increased support for independence, as both a first and second option for Scots, fuelled the dramatic increase in sincere voting for devolution in 1997. I also presented evidence to support the contention that European integration, especially the Scottish National Party's successful framing of the EU as a mechanism to reduce the costs of secession, contributed to this increase in support for independence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

You might think that the politics of conditionality in Europe are straightforward, that states want to proffer human rights abroad and therefore create rules designed to do so. However, they are not nearly so linear. Instead, overlapping and nested institutions shape the EU's politics of human rights conditionality by encouraging political opportunism that affects negotiations and implementation. The European Union (EU) is nested within the World Trade Organization (WTO) as well as within the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). EU Member States belong to an overlapping regional regime governed by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as well as a global human rights regime governed by the United Nations (UN). The EU's location within these regimes, combined with its drive to promote respect for human rights in other countries, is transforming the politics of repression around the world. And the EU is pushing its agenda one state at a time through the use of regional trade agreements (RTAs). This paper explores how nested and overlapping institutions shape the EU's politics of human rights conditionality by encouraging political opportunism. It argues that nesting and overlap create incentives for actors (1) to choose venues that allow them to get what they want, circumventing the rules they do not like; (2) to choose venues that allow them to challenge the rules they do not like and to gain personal power;(3) to invoke venues 'a la carte' to best legitimize their contentious actions, relying upon a particular venue to govern a specific issue but not others; and (4) to flip-flop between venues when their interests in implementation change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers why some of the postcommunist countries of Europe and Eurasia established democratic polities while others did not and, in particular, what role the European Union may have played in the democratization of postcommunist Europe. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU faces a number of major challenges: to shift its support from the industries of the past to the knowledge-based industries of the future; to rescue the Lisbon strategy, designed to build knowledge-based economy but so far achieving little; to re-engage with the European public after the difficulties with the Constitution. The paper argues that these challenges are intimately connected and that it is only by addressing them together that there is any hope for success. It elaborates these connections with particular reference to a reinvigorated Lisbon strategy with a strong social dimension. It concludes by delineating the corresponding challenge that faces the research community: to undertake a fundamental revision of its analysis of social policy in relation to modern economies; and to build a new toolkit for intelligent benchmarking. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the extent and duration of democratic politics in postcommunist Europe, paying particular attention to the possible impact of the European Union. It concludes with a brief discussion of why it is that the postcommunist democracies that are now members of the EU or soon-to-be members register such high levels of dissatisfaction with the way democracy works and distrust of government, parliament, and political parties. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the origin of a unified Europe. The political role of the Catholic Church during the 18th and 19th centuries is discussed. This paper also examines the role of key figures in the European political history, such as Conrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet and Charles de Gaulle. The establishment of European Community in the 1950s is also discussed.

This paper analyzes how voters decide in referendums on European integration. More specifically, it investigates how political information influences voting behavior. It argues that political information conditions the way in which people make decisions in referendums by altering the impact of the decision criteria that voters use. The impact of political information is examined not only at the individual, but also at the contextual level. It is hypothesized that variations in the context of the referendum - the intensity of the campaign - produce differences in the way in which citizens act in referendums. As the intensity of the referendum campaign increases, more information is available to citizens and voters will rely more heavily on sophisticated criteria, such as attitudes and issue positions on the EU. While the informational context influences voting patterns, individuals also vary in their awareness of politics. It is argued that people with high levels of political awareness receive more information, and consequently rely more on their own attitudes and less on elite cues when deciding. These theoretical propositions are tested by analyzing survey data from European referendums in Denmark, Ireland and Norway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU relies on a distinctive form of national political organisation that permits national political decision-makers to internalise international regime benefits into process of reaching authoritative decisions. This is shown by comparing the politics of NAFTA in the United States to the politics of the Europe Agreements within the European Union. NAFTA and the free trade agreements made by the EU with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs) were both trade liberalisations by large industrialised trading blocks with populous neighbouring developing countries. The economic and foreign policy aspects of these two trade liberalisations have much in common. However, the politics in the advanced industrial countries were very different, with the US repeatedly renegotiating NAFTA in its favour, and facing a massive political struggle over NAFTA ratification, while the EU unilaterally accelerated trade liberalisation, despite the EU unanimity requirement for decision-making. This paper argues, having considered a range of variables related to the politics and economics of trade liberalisation, that the greater difficulty of NAFTA in US politics was driven by a political opportunity structure whose accessibility for organised interests allows for only limited internalisation of international regime benefits in decision-making, particularly in the US Congress, whereas the political opportunity structures of member states in the EU, by contrast, both express national organised interests, and at the same time moderate them in the interest of international regime benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU is a unique type of polity. It is neither a federation nor a state. It has achieved a high degree of integration during its history, but it is still a process, which meets different challenges. The actual institutional and constitutional structure of the EU does not allow it to always cope with the challenges. That is why it needs a change. The EU could take some lessons from successful federations and adapt them to its reality. The USA dual type of federalism is one example. The EU has already a significant number of federal features. However, it still needs reforms in order to function with the new enlargement. The objective of this paper is to see what the EU can learn from the dual American type of federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses two fundamental questions concerning data protection politics in Europe. First, why did the EU take on the issue of data protection? Second, why did it regulate in such a way that raised protection levels while allowing for continued national enforcement variation? Far from a cultural residue or technological inevitability, I argue that the answer lies fundamentally in the historical sequencing of national data protection regulation and the role that the resulting independent regulatory authorities played in international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations of the outcomes of the recent EU Convention on the future of Europe cannot rely on the same assumptions that drive explanations of the output of the Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs) of the EU. The convention format, intended to ?democratize? the process of amending treaties in the EU, has created new roles for participants in this process, and indeed has introduced new participants into the process. Furthermore, the convention format is relatively new, making generalizations about its processes and outputs difficult. This paper offers an initial contribution to building theory about the output of EU conventions by asking how successfully the 2002-03 Convention addressed one of its main challenges, creating proposals to bring the EU ?closer to its citizens?. The regions of the EU have long been seen as critical to legitimate and effective EU governance, enmeshed in long-standing debates about how to improve the relationship between European citizens and EU institutions. Focusing on the role of regional actors in the Convention, this analysis offers an explanation for the failure of regions to achieve more than modest reforms of their role in EU governance, and why the Convention ultimately ?constitutionalized? the role of regions in the ways that it did. Three factors shaped the Convention?s output on regions: the organization and working practices of the Convention, the broader concerns about the project of constitution writing of the main EU institutions, and the incoherence of the regional participants? positions on key issues. Although we may not be able to derive sufficient conditions for successful convention outcomes from these factors, we may identify some necessary conditions. The failure of EU regions to secure significant reforms derives primarily from these conditions and provides a cautionary tale for possible future conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates sources of opposition to European integration. Drawing from recent research on attitudes toward the European Union, we introduce four theoretical approaches to help explain variation in these attitudes: (1) utilitarianism, (2) group conflict and sociotropic economic concerns, (3) symbolic politics, and (4) proxies. We analyse the relative impact of variables measuring each of these approaches and find that perceptions of costs to the group (i.e., the nation), both economically and symbolically, and perceptions of the national political situation (the proxy approach) are slightly more influential in determining where individuals fall in terms of support for the EU than personal, utilitarian calculations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares integration efforts in Europe - focusing on the European Union (EU) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) - and the Americas - focusing on the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Caribbean Community (Caricom), the Central American Common Market (CACM), the Andean Union, the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), and the Union of South American Nations (Unasur). Europe has achieved a high level of integration, backed by rights guaranteeing the four freedoms: free movement of goods, services, capital, and people. The achievement of these freedoms is a lengthy and ongoing process driven not only by economic rationales but also by the desire to create a common, supranational political community. Such a desire appears weak or nonexistent in regional integration efforts in the Americas. Most notably, the key freedom for individuals central to European integration - free movement of people - has been almost entirely absent in the Americas. The lack of this freedom inhibits further integration along the European model but need not prohibit other varieties of integration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on insights from the international relations literature, I develop a formal framework to analyse interactions between domestic high courts and supranational judges in the EU legal order. I find that domestic high courts difier considerably in their ability to inuence ECJ decision making but that, as long as the domestic costs arising from an escalated conict continue to be substantial, overt judicial non-compliance should remain rare. Weak domestic courts, in general, have much to lose and little to win from an escalated conict with the ECJ. Meanwhile, domestic judicial superpowers-such as the German Federal Constitutional Court--do wield suficient inuence to contain the European Court's activism. But they, too, face strong incentives to seek compromise and dialogue with supranational judges. In the longer term, a decrease in the non-compliance costs of powerful domestic judges is what may pose the greatest systemic threat to the authority of EU law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has European integration affected national electoral politics beyond the margins? Experts describe its main impact as empowerment of radical voices. Mainstream parties avoid EU issues that divide their left/right-based organizations; extreme parties attack the EU and the center's silence. But EU issues also generate important dynamics inside mainstream parties. We theorize cross-cutting EU issues as an example of a general model of cross-issue interference. Two mechanisms of interference alter party strategizing. When electoral victories have strengthened leaders, cross-cutting issues produce muffling of more recently-emerged issues. Divided parties cling to left/right issues and suppress fights over integration. But interference also runs the other way. When leadership is weak, muffling fails, and challengers aggravate dissent. Internal fights on newer (EU) issues affect the selection of leadership on older (left/right) issues, generating displacement from electorally-competitive positions. We document these mechanisms and their generality with mixed methods: pan-European panel analysis and interview-based accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows that the European Court of Justice has used its growing discretion within the institutions of the European Union (EU) to modify the disembedding of markets using detailed empirical evidence from the case law of the European Court of Justice regarding the free movement of labor. It draws on the inspiration of Karl Polanyi who saw a similar dialectic between market making and market modification in early state responses to the Industrial Revolution in England. The role of states and markets in Europe's first great transformation is noted.

The article examines the conditions under which electoral representation is functioning particularly well or badly focusing on voter preferences about European integration. It explores the impact of strong issue effects on vote choices on the representational bond between parties and their voters. It provides an overview of the voter-party congruence on the issue of European integration. It has found the importance of the degree of politicisation of the European issue to effective representation.

Three significant events in European politics and technology occurred almost simultaneously in the early 1990s: the signing of the Maastricht Treaty created the European Union; the formerly-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe emerged as democracies; and the publication of the World Wide Web changed the Internet from an academic, text-only email network into a graphic, user-friendly phenomenon, connecting millions worldwide. These events started trends that are now converging around new types of social and political networks, enabled by technology. Examples include new issue-based pan-European political communities (e.g. Euroskeptics, the Greens;) decentralized, socio-technological political networks (e.g. Otpor in Serbia; Pora in the Ukraine;) and an array of web-0based social and commercial networks.Political science, technology, and social network scholars are only beginning cross-disciplinary study of these networks. Although the penetration rates of new technologies in the formerly-Communist countries lagged behind those of the EU, some of the most interesting and early examples of the Internet's unprecedented ability to support the creation and growth of social and political networks can be found amongst them. Of these, none was more interesting than the role played by new technologies in the resistance to and overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia.My central research question is: can the Internet, together with related technologies and applications, facilitate the formation of social and political networks and affect political behavior in the context of an evolving Europe? I use a focused case study of Milosevic-era Serbia, divided into three phases, or sub-cases, to addresses the efficiency and effectiveness hypotheses raised by this question:1.The early, 'informal' resistance to Milosevic (1991-1998) 2.Organized resistance—the Otpor movement (1998-2000)3.The end of the Milosevic era: election, demonstration, and concession (September 24 - October 5, 2000) I use two methodologies: network mapping and process tracing. I depict and analyze the formation of, first, informal networks, then actual communities of interest and resistance organizations, and finally of more formal political networks. A survey will provide the data on who was connected to whom, and how, so that these maps can be generated.* Then I describe and analyze the process chain both within the context of each of the three phases and how it evolves over time as the use of technology becomes more effective through both innovation and penetrationThe main contribution of my work will be to create an analytical framework to examine political events in multi-party democracies, primarily in Europe. I plan to do so in post-doctoral work by testing the methodology in a study of the Estonian vote to join the EU in 2003 and/or the Dutch EU Constitution referendum in 2005, in both of which the largely-Internet-based opposition played a major role. For those who will be doing further research into the political impact of the Internet in Europe or elsewhere, this work contributes a modeling framework and structured analysis to fields that currently lack them. * This is a work-in-progress, pending the results of an extensive survey of participants in political and resistance networks in Serbia during the Milosevic period. Initial results are reported. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) has become increasingly involved in protecting the security and safety of European citizens. The latest additions to this new policy space are counter-terrorism policies and critical infrastructure protection. A central role for the EU in guarding against global terrorism and infrastructural breakdowns may seem evident. In reality, the precise nature of such a role remains unclear. Enthusiastic rhetoric is not always matched by firm action, and the political commitment of national leaders to supranational policies is often vague. One way to gauge the prospects of a "capability/expectations" gap, and to make a fine-grained assessment of the nature of European cooperation, is to compare the institutionalization of these two sectors. An institutionalization approach allows us to uncover the degree to which new structures, rules, and norms are becoming embedded - and thus influencing cooperative behavior in the EU. We build a generic framework for measuring, and categorizing, institutionalization within sectors. We then apply the framework to the two policy sectors, finding that counter-terrorism is best categorized as an "ascending" sector whereas critical infrastructure protection is a "nascent" one. Neither sector can be categorized as a "mature" area of cooperation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roberto Rossellini's 1946 film Rome, Open City is generally regarded as one of the crucial films in the history of cinema. With its use of contemporary events, location shots, and a complex plot that mixes comedy, tragedy, and passion play, Rome, Open City is regarded as the founding film of the movement known as "Italian Neo-Realism," whose echoes in serious film continue to this day. Yet in addition to its cinematic genius, the film also presents a teaching on politics: indeed, it may have been the most effective presentation of the Christian teaching on the relation between religion and politics in the 20th century. Because that teaching was so at odds with its own time and our own it is hardly understood even today, sixty years after the film's release. Rome, Open City is a film about Nazi oppression and Italian resistance that teaches that resistance to oppression is noble, and frequently humanly irrepressible, but often childish and futile. It is not on the basis of tales of resistance, no matter how edifying or true, that Italy and Europe can be rebuilt, Rossellini argues, but on the basis of the Christian command to "love your enemies." Rossellini shows how one can acknowledge the human weakness that makes us not just resist, but hate the sinner, while at the same time acknowledging this hate to be a weakness the Christian teaching calls upon men and women to overcome. By reflecting on Rossellini's masterpiece I propose to examine the triumph and the tragedy of the Christian Democratic Europe that Rome, Open City foretold and helped to found. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructing Authority in the European Union ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of dotEU policies and a survey among businesses on their TLD strategies and expectations will contrast the Internet realities with the original political strategies and goals regarding dotEU. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2002 and 2003, a European constitutional convention drafted a constitution for Europe. Two actors in particular influenced the negotiations in the Convention: the President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and the Praesidium. We first examine how the Praesidium was able to structure the agenda inside the Convention due to the absence of voting on amendments. The Praesidium was able to conclude every particular proposal-amendment round by accepting, rejecting or amending proposed amendments. We then analyze cases which show how the Presidency was able to control the agenda of the Convention. By investigating institutions, we demonstrate that the Presidency used several tricks to manipulate the result. We find evidence that (1) the Presidency filtered proposed amendments, considering only some of them, (2) it determined consensus in the Convention without saying how many members approve of a particular measure, and (3) it juxtaposed proposed amendments and concluded that the Praesidium proposal constitutes the best compromise.The second part of our agenda-setting analysis complements these cases by examining the timing of the Praesidium proposals. Analyzing the entire set of amendments in the Convention, we show that the Praesidium structured the agenda by presenting its draft proposals in multiple sequences. While the Praesidium could have proposed the entire constitution at once, such an iterated procedure resulted in fewer amendments over time. This suggests that timing was used for strategic reasons by the Praesidium. We support our hypothesis by showing that (1) some of the most important issues were presented at the end of the Convention, and that (2) the actual timing of proposals does not correlate highly with either the initial timetable or with the final constitution. We conclude that in the absence of majority or unanimity voting, agenda control mattered and thus the possibility of political manipulation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European integration experiment might be sui generis in many ways, but this does not mean that one could not import theoretical insights from other fields of study that seek to understand the workings of political unions where unity and diversity coexist. In particular, the literatures on comparative federalism, political theory, and constitutional politics can help set the study of the European Union in a broader context. One point that emerges from this theoretical cross-fertilisation is the absence of a shared language space that could function as the forum for European democratic deliberation. As a result, democracy in Europe by default functions through the underlying real constitution of national demoi instead of a pan-European demos. Similar experiences in multination federations suggest that in such cases formal constitutions will inevitably come to reflect the deep differences between the constituent units. In this context, some degree of constitutional ambiguity might be not only unavoidable but also desirable. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the formal category of EU citizenship was introduced with the Maastricht Treaty (1993), the extent to which the term reflects reality is unclear. In its most common definition, citizenship is comprised of rights, which usually evolve through a process of contestation among individuals, groups, and institutions, shaped by and in turn transforming the political culture. European citizenship emerged out of a series of critical political junctures that span the entire history of European integration, coupled with an ongoing institutional and political commitment to safeguarding and promoting the development of European rights. Initially, the freer trade of the 1950s and 1960s created demands for freer movement of labor. Political commitment transformed this demand for mobile labor into individual mobility rights for workers. This altered the political environment and produced pressures to extend the scope and expand the content of those rights. Because of continued political commitment on the part of national political leaders, supported by the supranational institutions they or their predecesors had created, this process of extension and expansion of rights resulted in a common European citizenship in the Maastricht Treaty. But as long as the resulting supranational citizenship continues to be based on a political bargain among member states rather than deep popular support, the process that created the supranational citizenship and the rights that comprise it are not irreversible. EU citizenship thus remains contingent on sustained political support from the member states and their populations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses the findings of a very recent major international research collaboration on the impact of federal arrangements on the development of the welfare state to explore the possibilities of progress beyond Europe's present diversity of nation-state welfare standards. These findings - based on the long-term historical experience of the OECD's oldest federations - suggest that federal arrangements tend to slow down welfare state consolidation, but that much depends on the context of historical development. The emergence of bypass mechanisms circumventing federal veto-points is located as the key to welfare progress, and the role of regulation in European integration and the special role of the European Court of Justice as well as that of 'the open method of co- ordination' are tentatively identified as possible EU by-pass equivalents. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the causes that lead governments to adopt different reform strategies. It focuses on the European monetary union, which is said to be a factor that could potentially explain the adoption of structural reforms in Western Europe. This also examines the structural pension reforms adopted by EU member states from 1995-2004 and presents an analysis of the impact of the European monetary union on the politics of pension reform in Germany.

The article explores the significance of acquis communautaire to the European Union (EU) and international politics. The phrase acquis communautaire generally refers to community patrimony. Some academics, such as Philippe Schmitter, defined the phrase as the sum total of obligations that have accumulated since the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community and are embedded in a number of treaties and protocols. The article also examines the key elements explaining the similarities of standard of civilization and acquis communautaire.

In the spring of this year, within only a couple of weeks, the institutional order of the European Union (EU) has been thoroughly shaken, turning into sheer institutional "disorder". After the referenda on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe held in France and in the Netherlands, hardly anybody will question that the Union finds itself in an utterly dramatic situation. Seen from the point of view I am going to sketch out in the following sections, what became manifest with the turbulences of May and June 2005 are the symptoms of a crisis that had remained more or less latent for a longer period of time. The trends culminating in the rejection of the European Constitution by a majority of French and Dutch citizens reflect a crisis of political legitimation. I will argue that this crisis is basically the crisis of 2 specific mode of political legitimation, or, to be more precise, a consequence of the tendencies to link governance in the EU primarily to this mode. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The excerpt presented herein, which is taken from the book "Advances in European Studies," explores the implementation of European integration through a problem-centered approach.

Attempts to create a single European market for corporate control stretch back more than thirty years. The EU takeover directive which passed in December 2003 is a far cry from this ambition. After decades of negotiation, member states agreed to disagree on the legality of anti-takeover defenses. Analysis of the political issues at stake indicates two distinct lines of conflict. First, active markets for corporate control have distributional implications inside firms by securing benefits for shareholders at the expense of employees. Second, due to different national starting points, the benefits and costs of a unified European takeover regime are distributed unevenly across EU member states. How did political struggles over these issues play out in the European Parliament, where delegates from all EU member states join European party groups according to their ideological inclinations? Analyzing the roll call vote on the takeover directive of July 4, 2001, we find systematic differences in the relative importance of national and party group affiliation depending on the party group in question. Intra-group cohesion was strong among the left-wing, green, liberal and right-wing party groups. By contrast, the center-right and center-left party groups were both internally divided, with nationality serving as a strong predictor of voting behaviour. Our findings are relevant to debates about the political underpinnings of Varieties of Capitalism, research on cleavages structures in the European Parliament and anyone interested in the prospects for legislative convergence of European takeover regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Exchange-Rate Mechanism II (ERM II) is one of the Maastricht nominal convergence criteria, that Central Eastern European Countries (CEECs) have to comply with before they are admitted to the European Monetary Union (EMU). However, EMU-accession is not a `free lunch’ but entails so-called costs of convergence. In accordance with the `Treaty establishing the European Community’ CEECs have incurred these costs. Starting from the point of view that these new European Union (EU) members are in fact credibly committed to joining the EMU for political reasons---i.e. ensuring political stability in CEECs---it is demonstrated that CEECs are enabled to pass some costs of convergence on to current EMU-members. The CEECs’ leverage is brought about through exchange-rate policy: CEECs will under identifiable conditions threaten to halt the entire enlargement process by putting their exchange-rate regimes and, as a result, political stability at risk. The according stance of exchange-rate policy is denoted as a ‘threaten-thy-neighbour’-strategy. If a CEEC’s brinkmanship constitutes a deterrent threat, both parties will negotiate the distribution of these costs of convergence. In line with this rationale, the entire process of transition, in reference to the phase of ERM II, can be modelled as a two-stage threat game, which is completed by a Rubinstein-bargaining solution (RBS). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the dispute over the Takeover Directive between the European Union Mediation of Global Finance and the National Corporate Labor Coalitions from 1989 to 2003. Factors that influence the financial market; Overview of the directive; Framework of mediation of global finance; Analysis of the political process of European Union.

Provides information on delegation and agency in the European Union. Objectives and institutions of the Union; Role of the member countries in the governance of the Union; Creation of supranational organizations by the member countries.

Leading theories of financial change provide increasingly inadequate explanations for changing financial arrangements in western Europe. They either emphasize the internationalization of domestic finance, convergence to global standards and the causal role of increasing levels of mobile capital or ideas. Or they describe change within a national trajectory and attribute its causes primarily to the determining role of domestic politics and historical institutions. They exclude by assumption the possibility of distinct regional outcomes and European-level causes. My empirical study of changing financial arrangements for smaller European companies between 1977 and 2003, however, reveals a characteristically European pattern of change and causes primarily rooted in European Union politics. Neither global forces nor continuity of national institutions was primarily responsible for drawing the stock exchanges of Europe into cross-border competition, prompting them to create new US-style marketplaces and assets or luring international investors as customers. Instead, the interventions of EU supranational political actors and new EU legislation were the primary causes behind this pattern of significant change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are post-socialist, pre-EU institutions staffed by "backward-looking" (towards the socialist past) or "forward-looking" (toward the European future) civil servants? Do CEE civil servants more resemble their socialist-era predecessors or their member-state counterparts? Are socialist-era patterns persisting, or are we witnessing isomorphism toward a common "European Administrative Space"? Or both? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]