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The concept of ‘civil society’ has been rediscovered in contemporary discourses concerning the relationship between democracy and governance. This paper analyses this rediscovery in the more specific context of the European Commission’s 2001 White Paper on European Governance. However, processes of transnationalisation, governmentalisation and autonomisation may compromise much of the potential of ‘European civil society’ as an intermediating sphere of social action. By reinforcing these processes, the White Paper undermines the normative claims made for a civil society premised upon the voluntary nature of its associative forms and its distinctive open, communicative and deliberative rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers on European Union law is presented as of May 2014, focusing on information about a special issue of the journal, the role of the journal's editor at a preparatory workshop, and various submission-related deadlines.

In recent years, the US and the Netherlands have been on opposing sides of the spectrum regarding climate litigation. Dutch courts, in several revolutionary climate cases, have been an arena of societal change, whilst climate claims in the US have been largely unsuccessful. In a way this difference seems strange, because the US judiciary has the power of constitutional review, whilst the Dutch judiciary does not. Against that background, this paper extensively compares the doctrines of judicial competence regarding political questions in both jurisdictions. As a comparative framework, this paper uses three judicial phases, namely: the institutional phase, the substantial phase, and the remedial phase. Climate litigation reveals that the Dutch doctrine of judicial competence is focused on the substantial and remedial phases, which has allowed it more freedom in reviewing climate litigation. On the other hand, climate litigation reveals that the US doctrine of judicial competence is focused on a strict institutional phase, dominated by the Political Question Doctrine (PQD). The main contribution of this paper to the constitutional debate is that climate litigation reveals fundamental differences in doctrines of judicial competence. This is not only an important takeaway for future climate litigation, but also, in terms of the Radbruch formula, for other potential gaps between the executive and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the evolution of private powers in the digital landscape, developing a quadrangular systematisation of such a phenomenon based on four main aspects: space, values, (private) actors, and (digital) constitutional remedies. Taking a trans‐Atlantic approach, the paper shows how these categories, typical of constitutionalism, apply to the context of the Internet and of new digital technologies both in the United States and in Europe. On the one hand, the United States has up to now maintained the supremacy of the notorious Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. On the other hand, European legislation has undergone a significant change, moving from a phase of digital liberalism, of which the 2000 E‐Commerce Directive is the emblem, towards a new era of digital constitutionalism, passing through the age of judicial activism of European courts. In this sense, Europe has increasingly attempted to introduce limits to private (digital) powers, with a view to better protect and enforce (also horizontally) users' fundamental rights. Additionally, the evolution of digital constitutionalism, from a vertical‐sectoral approach to a horizontal and procedure‐based one, significantly showcased by the recent Digital Services Package, is underscored, signalling the recent movement of the EU into its second phase of digital constitutionalism. In this respect, the paper argues that the great benefit of stressing the procedural dimension, which may be defined as a European application of "due (data) process" to the relationship between individuals and private powers, is that it is potentially able to help consolidate a (necessary) trans‐Atlantic bridge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's approach to ISDS reform is widely perceived as undecided and ambiguous. This paper provides the first detailed analysis of China's submission to the UNITRAL Working Group III and situates China's approach in the context of global dialogue of ISDS reform and competing reform proposals. The paper shows that China's open, flexible, and evolving approach to ISDS reform could be better understood by a contextual evaluation of the pertinent factors which have contributed to its formation. Moreover, this paper explains why China did not sign up to the EU's investment court system (ICS) proposal in the EU‐China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI). Lastly, the paper argues that China should reconsider its attitude towards the ICS in the CAI context and that the EU's recent suggestion that the envisaged multilateral investment court may adopt an 'open architecture' is likely to enhance its appeal to China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the EU legislative process should be used for taking all decisions at European level that matter, banning the various backroads of European decision‐making (competence creep) that are currently legal but not legitimate. This is a silver bullet, resolving at once a range of seemingly disparate but intimately connected legitimacy problems across all areas of EU activity, that ultimately result from an incorrectly calibrated state of transnational constitutional democracy at EU level, where certain aspects are over‐constitutionalised while others remain fundamentally under‐constitutionalised. This is therefore the key transversal issue that the Conference on the Future of Europe and its ensuing changes should address. The paper makes various concrete proposals to this effect, including for a general legislative competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the use of metaphor and its effect on the interpretation of the 'quality of law' in Art. 8 cases of the European Court of Human Rights. It demonstrates the Court's reproduction of specific metaphorical frames ‐ a finding consistent with the use of metaphor in judgment experiments in cognitive linguistics. The Court employs metaphors conceptually coherent with those used in their cited precedent, in their representation of the successful pleadings within their judgments and insists (implicitly) on different metaphors in dissent. This paper argues that the use of congruent metaphors may be indicative of metaphor as a contributing factor in how judges reason. In the least, it is a significantly understudied phenomenon and this paper provides evidence for the salience of its approach for understanding judicial reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises the question as to whether a theory of justice exists in EU law. The focus is on justice as a system. The assumption is that the independence of institutional actors involved in the administration of criminal justice (mainly judges and prosecutors) vis‐à‐vis each other, and other State powers, is key to that system achieving justice as a value. Against the benchmark of judicial and prosecutorial independence developed in European law, the paper assesses the role for independence in investigative, prosecutorial and adjudicating functions as it emerges from the current state of EU criminal law. The conclusions reveal that the EU's idea of justice remains underdeveloped, and that there is a need for systemic coherence to better protect the rule of law and enhance the legitimacy of EU criminal law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death and disease burden of non‐communicable diseases falls disproportionately on members of lower socioeconomic groups. This paper explores NCD prevention measures introduced through EU consumer law in order to assess the impact these have had on health inequalities. It demonstrates that these interventions often have limited impact, and therefore maintain inequalities. Indeed, when interventions do work, they tend to be more effective with advantaged citizens than disadvantaged citizens, and therefore increase inequalities. From a behavioural research perspective, this paper demonstrates why these interventions – which focus on regulating the consumer information environment – have failed to reduce health inequalities, and analyses the debate on the extent to which behavioural research should act as a core consideration in public health related consumer policy. The paper concludes that, while regulating consumer information is a useful tool for NCD prevention, if information‐based interventions are to reduce health inequalities the EU will need to incorporate greater insights from the way consumers actually behave. Moreover, there are limitations to policies which regulate information, and therefore the EU should make more use of other tools in its regulatory toolbox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few decades, judges and courts have had an important role in global governance. They also now communicate with each other more than they used to. Scholars have named this phenomenon 'the transnational judicial dialogue.' This paper calls for a comprehensive understanding of this judicial dialogue in a way that will explain the influence it has on courts. This paper proposes to use the concept of organisational fields, developed by DiMaggio and Powell, to study the relationships between courts. It will be seen that this concept gives a fuller account of those relationships and their effects than the existing approaches. This paper will first show that the transnational organisational field of the courts is now emerging using the four criteria of structuration. Then, the paper will discuss three examples of how this concept can contribute to the study of transnational relationships between courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a key element in supporting the migration and border management policies of the European Union and its Member States, so far, AI‐based migration technologies have been tested and implemented with limited public scrutiny. In this context, the EU AI Act holds the promise of a regulation in line with the protection of fundamental rights and the rule of law. While Member States are bound by existing EU legislation when deploying AI, the Act represents the first attempt to regulate this technology in migration and border management. This paper examines the evolution of the Act throughout the negotiation process and its potential to hold actors involved in AI‐driven migration technology accountable, thereby promoting the rule of law. It argues that while the regulation offers promising and important elements, a closer examination brings to light important concerns about its ability to ensure accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the role played by the Agency for Fundamental Rights in the wake of the euro area crisis. The Agency was created as part of a wider trend towards a broader, more pro-active strategy for the protection of fundamental rights that includes administrative and political rights promotion as a complement to judicial enforcement. In the context of the euro crisis, however, the Agency has not been able to fulfil this role. This paper will analyze the reasons for this missed opportunity, as well as its consequences. It will argue that the sidelining of the Agency in this area is due to the confluence of two factors: on the one hand, the Agency's lack of discretion in setting its own agenda; and, on the other, the predominance of the executive, and resulting resurgence of intergovernmentalism, that have been a feature of post-crisis developments. Ultimately, this paper argues that the sidelining of the Agency in this context is an unfortunate result, given the magnitude of the political debate in this area and the valuable role that the Agency might have played or could still play in informing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds in its first sections to a series of articles in which Rainer Schmalz-Bruns developed a concept of legitimate governance beyond the constitutional state, which he called ‘deliberative supranationalism’ and contrasted with what Jürgen Neyer and the present author had suggested under the same title. The Epilogue of the paper first comments on more recent critiques brought forward especially by contributors to this Special Issue of the ELJ and then on the programmatic rejection of comitology by the European Commission’s White Paper on Governance in the EU. Our querelles allemandes were not specifically Teutonic: while Schmalz-Bruns presented his approach as a systematic elaboration of the theories of deliberative democracy, based, in particular, on recent contributions by Joshua Cohen, Michael Dorf, and Charles Sabel, Jürgen Neyer and I had offered an interpretation of institutional innovations and decision-making practices as observed in the European market-building project. This discussion has had precursors and follow-ups in various contexts, among both lawyers and political scientists. This essay should hence be understood as a contribution to an ongoing debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supporters of communism, national socialism and radical Islamism, but also people who incite racial hatred or deny the Holocaust, see their rights severely curtailed by the abuse clause of Article 17 of the European Convention on Human Rights. To make sense of this provision, this paper first introduces the distinction between abusable and non‐abusable rights in order to delimit the scope of Article 17. Then, this paper suggests a "test" to spot instances of abuse of human rights by borrowing the concept of performative self‐contradiction from speech act theory. Article 17 is reconceptualised as dealing with conduct that self‐contradictorily uses rights but simultaneously denies their very idea. In this way, it becomes possible to make sense of and to unify the disparate case law that Article 17 has generated so far: it equally targets political human rights abuse, attacking liberal democracy in general; and exclusionary human rights abuse, attacking the rights of other people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consultation is a crucial tool for better regulation, as well as being essential for the accountability and legitimacy of decision‐makers. The European minimum requirements for consultation are fundamental conditions in order to attain these goals. However, they may not be enough, and consultation should also be designed to neutralise or reveal cognitive limitations, both of decision‐makers as well as of stakeholders. This paper claims that enriching the better regulation approach with cognitive insights can in fact increase consultation effectiveness and thus become a critical piece in the puzzle to improve the legitimacy of the European Commission. Moreover, it suggests some techniques to tackle this complexity, which need to be further assessed by ad hoc experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the role of the EU in the global production of transnational law of risk regulation ( TNLRR). TNLRR is defined as a harmonious, cross-jurisdictional regulatory environment that results from the circulation of risk regulatory models among jurisdictions. The EU has adopted extensive regulation to address health, safety, environmental and other risks. In many instances, third countries have adopted the EU models when regulating their own industries and markets. This paper argues that this pattern of circulation turns the EU regulatory models into transnational models for risk regulation ( TNLRR), and further illustrates this thesis by using a case study on the global circulation of the EU ' REACH' Regulation. The paper preliminarily concludes that the EU has been able to influence risk regulatory policy worldwide by turning its own regulatory models into transnational models, thus acting as a global producer of TNLRR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assert their role in global governance, international organisations, including the EU, have progressively involved economic actors in their activities, particularly in the course of law‐making processes. Their integration, even if necessary, raises the risk of excessive influence that they may exert on law‐makers. The paper builds on the theory of regulation that coined the concept of 'capture' and proposes to analyse the conditions and effects of such phenomenon within three selected international organisations that are particularly prone to the influence of economic actors: the United Nations (UN), the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). In light of their practice, the paper suggests key features that an EU legal framework could take to promote the participation of economic actors in its law‐making process while preventing the occurrence of capture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper it looks at some of the normative questions which frame debates about the EU constitutional architecture. Its main objective is to identify the core facets of a ‘responsible and inclusive EU constitutionalism’, and to argue for a focus on process, freedom, fairness and democracy as well as formal constitution–building within the debates inside and outside the Convention running up to the Intergovernmental Conference anticipated for 2003/2004. A model using the work of Canadian political theorist James Tully is constructed. The paper applies this framework in order to analyse some aspects of the work of the Convention on the Future of the Union, looking especially at questions of autonomy, representativity, internal dynamics, deliberation, receptiveness, and decision–making. The interim conclusion is drawn that the Convention method contains within itself the seeds of a critical and reflexive approach to EU constitutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU has demonstrated interesting institutional practices with regard to the evolution of environmental norms. The paper illuminates a role of law in the institutional practices in terms of the discursive power of law, drawing on the fact that law catalyses discourses and individual laws in and of themselves are also discourses. In order to elucidate this discursive viewpoint, the paper offers a conceptual framework, referring to the concepts of frame and regime. Building on this conceptual framework, the paper understands the development of EU environmental law as an example of normative evolution in a régime and describes the evolutionary process from pre– to post–Single European Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its White Paper on the Governance of the European Union the European Commission has adopted a narrow concept of governance which focuses almost exclusively on public institutions exercising legislative and executive power (in other words institutions of government ). The article suggests that a theory of multi-level control in the EU would attend to greater variety both in the available governance institutions and the techniques of control. The deployment of an analysis grounded in theories of control suggests that the European Commission is substantially holding to a long-held preference for instruments of government premised on the exercise of hierarchical power. This reform path sits uneasily with revived concerns to render the governance of the EU more democratic. Equally it inhibits the generation of more efficient governance arrangements which place greater dependence on communities, competition, and design as alternative bases of control to hierarchy. Control theory suggests that the assertion of different reform agendas and institutional structures by other actors can check the more wayward (and arguably illegitimate) tendencies within the Commission plan, whilst drawing in alternative bases of control which, when combined, may yield technically superior governance solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Commission's open consultations of stakeholders are a central mechanism of the attempt to practice participatory governance at the European level and to open the political process to contributions from the societal sphere. This paper analyses the current practice of open consultations as one important operationalisation of participatory governance and as an implementation of Article 11 of the Treaty of the European Union ( TEU). It asks whether consultations can be a means to give voice to the citizens and to increase the legitimacy of European institutions. The paper presents an empirical analysis of the field of participants in the consultations. A main finding is that business and industry organisations dominate the consultative process while the participation of citizens and not-for-profit organisations is generally weak. The paper explores to which extent the consultations can, considering the empirical findings, be seen as a suitable way for direct or representative citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Given the increasing use of direct democratic devices on questions of European integration, this paper explores whether or not Member States may have good reason to agree on common regulations for popular votes of this nature. Conceiving of the European Union as a political system designed to serve the interests of states and citizens, it is argued that where direct votes have the potential to undermine the territorial, functional, normative or existential integrity of the EU, then states may have good reason to sacrifice a degree of national autonomy to adopt common regulations for certain uses of direct democracy. This leads to a case for democratic standardization across Member States when it comes to withdrawal, accession, Treaty ratification and opt‐in decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rule‐of‐law‐backsliding in some Member States has subverted not only one of the EU fundamental values but also trust among national authorities when implementing European Arrest Warrants (EAW). However, when evaluating the execution of EAWs issued by countries experiencing rule‐of‐law crises, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) sought to preserve judicial cooperation and imposed a rather "top‐down" view on mutual trust among Member States. This approach seemingly disregards the (dis)trust which has emerged in the EU due to rule‐of‐law‐backsliding and fails to acknowledge the psycho‐sociological nature of trust. Drawing on the trust literature, the paper offers novel conceptual elements to rethink mutual trust in the EAW framework. Notably, it critically assesses some of the gaps in the CJEU's interpretation of mutual trust and advances suggestions to embed empirical considerations in the conceptualisation of this principle to bridge the gap between trust in practice and in principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The war in Ukraine triggered significant changes at the European Union level. The speed at which the EU has achieved progress on sanctions, migration and defense is particularly impressive. But the Russian aggression against Ukraine has also served as a pretext for putting aside internal discussions about the rule of law, and provided additional political rationales for inaction against Member State governments responsible for the violation of European values, as well as triggered the deepening of double standards in several fields. Against this background, the paper argues that using this crisis as a justification for further inaction in the context of EU values is not a sustainable course of action. The Union must not delay further the need to act to halt the insidious erosion of democracy and the rule of law within its own borders both at the national and supranational level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criticism of the EU's social deficit has become more vivid than ever following the socially regressive handling of the 2008–10 financial and debt crisis. In 2010, Fritz Scharpf famously argued that the EU 'cannot be a social market economy' owing to its institutional architecture, legal features, and collective action issues. The COVID‐19 pandemic has nevertheless led to a new agenda combining investment, social concerns, the green transition and more fiscal solidarity. However, a lot remains to be done, it is argued, to bridge the social gap. A three‐pronged model is outlined to conceive of the EU's role in enhancing national, inter‐national and transnational social cohesion. The paper furthermore points to where the EU's action must be intensified to make significant progress on the way to a competitive and social market economy. In many respects, the hard political battles remain to be fought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, cyberspace has gradually become an engine of unsustainable outcomes from an economic, social and environmental perspective. The European Commission has launched several new initiatives, in the attempt to restore public control over cyberspace, remedy the distributional imbalances generated by the rise of large‐scale digital platforms, and promote Europe's digital sovereignty. The paper argues that only by embedding rules and values in "code" and preserving openness towards the rest of the world will the EU manage to achieve its desired goals. Current initiatives such as the data strategy, the AI regulation, the Digital Services Act and the European Cloud Federation appear still too sparse and uncoordinated to really deliver on Europe's ambition to lead the world in the sustainable use of technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a treaty-based organisation account for its shifts in policy and procedure? With the European Union's history in focus, the paper observes a pattern of evolution by which departures from existing practice are justified as moves to better honour commitments already held. This logic of change-as-fidelity has long been the usual way of doing transnational politics in post-war Europe. The concept of revisionism, borrowed from the study of innovation in purposive organisations more generally, elucidates its place in the early European Community. The paper goes on to examine how more recent developments, especially visible in the Euro crisis, challenge this logic of change and threaten to displace it. It concludes by discussing what this implies for the political nature of the EU, and whether the revival of the revisionist method is plausible or desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his seminal 1944 book The Great Transformation, Polanyi describes the rise and fall of liberal capitalism during the long nineteenth century. Many have realised that Polanyi has a lot to tell about the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The paper begins with an overview of Polanyi's historiography of the failure of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism and his account of the four elements that helped liberal capitalism thrive, while precipitating its collapse-the idea of the self-regulating market, the gold standard, international peace and liberal constitutionalism. Thereafter, the paper describes the particular transformations that these four elements underwent in the course of European integration and after the financial crisis, with a particular focus on the case law of the Court of Justice. The paper argues that their current constellation has a destructive potential that exceeds the economic dimension of the Union and might pave the way for a much greater failure, one that might defeat Europe's greatest success: the establishment of peace. Ultimately, the paper assesses current reform proposals in light of these insights and makes a number of proposals for re-embedding the economy in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Article 18 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union enshrines the right to asylum. Nonetheless, despite its 'constitutionalisation' within primary law, asylum remains a far too amorphous right, whose axiological potential has gone virtually unnoticed in the ongoing migratory crisis. The paper will argue that this is partly due to the fact that the Court of Justice on a few occasions has declined to clarify the scope of Article 18. The provision at issue therefore remains a pathological element that requires an adequate diagnosis on which accurate prognoses can be based. In an attempt to diagnose the right to asylum enshrined in Article 18 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, this paper will compare different hermeneutical approaches and reflect on the contextualisation of the mentioned provision through the lens of domestic and EU case law and in the light of the recent EU-Turkey Statement. The article will ultimately propose to interpret the EU asylum legislation as instrumental to the effective exercise of the right to asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European economic integration with a minimalist social policy at EU level was in part made possible by strong domestic labour market and social welfare institutions. The main contention of this paper is that EU market liberalisation was embedded within institutions of social citizenship at domestic level, which served to counter the liberalisation of the internal market. But this settlement has been put under strain. In addition to the challenges posed to the sustainability of European welfare states by the global economic crisis, the internal market jurisprudence of the Court of Justice casts doubt on the sustainability of the 'embedded liberal bargain'. This paper focuses on the role of the Court, in particular in its jurisprudence on the interaction between (EU) market freedoms and (national) labour law, which undermines the ability of states to retain their regulatory autonomy over labour or social welfare law and, arguably, speeds up the unravelling of the 'embedded liberal bargain'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The word 'governance' has become an increasingly central policy motif in the European Union and elsewhere yet its meanings are ambiguous and often poorly understood. This article examines the genealogy of that concept focusing in particular on the European Commission's claim to have developed a new, more open and progressive model of 'European governance'. The paper is set out in four steps. The first analyses the European Commission's claims for 'governance' as a concept integral to its new vision for Europe. The second interrogates some of the conflicting definitions and meanings inherent in the term and examines the highly selective paradigm of governance that has been developed in official Commission discourse. The third addresses two specific areas where the Commission's governance model has been applied: the Green paper on The Future of Parliamentary Democracy and the Open Method of Coordination. The fourth turns to analyse these findings using critical social theory. I conclude that far from laying the grounds for a more inclusive, participatory and democratic political order, the Commission's model to governance represents a form of neoliberal governmentality that is actually undermining democratic government and promoting a politics of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2009, the "Blue Card Directive" has become one of the most important elements of the EU's legal immigration scheme for attracting the best immigrants to Europe. Taking advantage of its current revision, this contribution takes a legal theoretical look at the Directive. Drawing upon the republican conception of freedom defined as the absence of arbitrary interferences, this paper sheds light on some positive steps as well the margin of progression still left in order to fully operationalise the EU's commitment to respecting equal freedom. The article also adds to the limited doctrinal contributions on the Blue Card Directive and illustrates the added value of a republican approach to EU migration law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to anticipate the implications of the transitional arrangements contained in the Accession Treaty on the agri-food acquis after enlargement on 1 May 2004. While the combination of the current reform of agri-food law and the system of transitional arrangements will contribute to the complexity of EC agri-food law, enlargement also raises other important implications for the future evolution of EC agri-food law. Drawing on experiences gained as a result of the pre-accession strategy, together with an analysis of the readiness of the new Member States to apply the agri-food acquis, this paper concludes with a number of comments on the future evolution of the agri-food acquis in a Union of twenty-five Member States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the adoption of a number of Community regulations, each for a specific sector, to be implemented not just by a supranational administration (central or peripheral), but by a plurality of national, supranational and sometimes mixed authorities, with a special role assigned to a Community office set up by the same legislation for a given sector, and granting it legal personality. The purpose of this paper is to verify whether the various regulations by sector ought not to be regarded as variants of an emergent general model of joint exercise of certain Community functions. It is argued that such general model is still in the making, but it is in the process of becoming consolidated, notwithstanding the variety of approaches adopted by European legislators. Such a pattern is characterised by specific, differentiated organisational and procedural features. This conclusion is relevant in several different ways, the first of which is that it provides new conceptual tools for interpreting and explaining the process of administrative integration between supranational and national public authorities, in particular by specifying the taxonomy of the patterns through which a Community function can be carried out by two different authorities acting jointly. Second, the decentralised integration model should be considered as a sound and feasible option for the administrative evolution of the Community legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The open method of coordination (OMC) has emerged as a new policy instrument in the European context. While it was initially confined to the employment field, it has recently been applied to several other areas. The aim of this article is to provide a reconstruction of the OMC. The focus is in particular on the structure and process of the OMC, but also on the new approach to law that it proposes. The OMC differs from traditional EC methods but also from traditional soft-law mechanisms. In order to highlight those original features, the paper analyses the key steps in the evolution of a strategy, the European employment strategy, which slowly became a new mode of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon the experience of the Convention for the elaboration of the Charter of fundamental rights and upon the suggestions of the White Paper on European Governance, this article puts forward proposals for a better involvement of the 'civil society' in the system of the European Union. It offers a general diagnosis of the misunderstandings surrounding the notion of 'civil society' and the relationship of representative democracy to participatory democracy. It then draws some lessons from the experiment in deliberative democracy which led to the drafting of the Charter of fundamental rights. Finally, it focuses on the contribution the organisations of the civil society can make to good governance in the European Union. Altogether, the proposals presented tend to encourage a better structuration of the actors of the civil society. Such a structuration, the article concludes, although it is usually considered with suspicion even by those whom it would most benefit, must be seen instead as a condition for the effective exercise of whichever participatory rights might be granted to the organisations of the civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]