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In the period 1964 – 70 arguably the most significant decisions were taken in British strategic military policy in the whole post-war period. During these years, Britain narrowed its strategic focus away from a global orientation and towards a concentration upon the continent of Europe. With the aid of hindsight, such a transition appears to have been inevitable as Britain came to terms with its status as a middle-ranking European power. However, as the new Labour government came into office ...

The study of the British position during the accession negotiations with the EC can throw light on general questions which have traditionally occupied the minds of political scientists, in this case, the relationship between “public opinion” and “elites”. How was the British position towards the European Community (EC) formulated? Which actors were involved? Whose ‘opinion’ mattered? Whose interests did the policy line reflect? In order to answer these questions and highlight their relevance,...

International audience; Since the start of the 21st century, Europe, the region that extends from the Atlantic Ocean to Russia, has been the theatre of new rivalries. A prerequisite for any proper study of these new power plays is a precise knowledge of the geographical characteristics and recent history of Europe, an ongoing story of division, reunification and dissent. To fully understand the geopolitical parameters of Europe we must also decipher the European Union, its assets, contradictions and weak-nesses. Further, we need to analyse the other components of Europe, be they candidates for EU membership or coun-tries that have rejected the opportunity to join, as well as the jockeying for the spoils of the former USSR, particularly Ukraine. To understand these battles we need to understand the strategy of Russia, a nation that is paradoxical but thirsty for power. Finally, the analysis offers nine prospective geopolitical scenarios illustrating the challenges facing Europe going forward. An analysis of the challenges facing the European Union with a historical perspective and an examination of how the EU operates on the political and administrative levels. Nine prospective scenarios questioning the geopolitical future of Europe in a world where new powers are emerging.

In a series of landmark rulings on patient mobility and cross-border healthcare, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has made clear that Member States’ healthcare systems have to comply with the rules of the EU’s Internal Market when it comes to individual patient rights and the non-discrimination of healthcare providers. The rulings increased the possibilities for EU Member State citizens to get medical treatment in another Member State (“cross-border healthcare”), yet providing that under certain conditions the home Member State has to pay for these treatments in the other country. After a decade of negotiations, these rulings have been codified in a European Directive. Assuming that European integration has an impact on national welfare states and taking the example of European rules on access to cross-border healthcare, this thesis suggests analyzes the domestic impact of European integration in terms of Europeanization of the Austrian healthcare system within the context of the interplay between actors’ interests and practices on the one hand, and institutional effects on the other. European cross-border healthcare in forms of regional projects and privately or publicly organized healthcare arrangements has already become a reality in many European countries, especially in border regions. The main research questions which guides this thesis can be be put as follows: How does European integration in healthcare impact on the interests, practices and strategies of national actors that operate between national institutional constraints and European opportunities? And if national actors’ interests and strategies change, does this in turn have repercussions on the national institutional rules of healthcare governance? Given that European integration in healthcare delivery is a rather a “recent” phenomenon, and based on the assumption that actors’ strategies change more easily than national institutions, the following hypothesis is tested: Even if national healthcare actors use Europe – and hence their practices and strategies change – their interests remain largely determined by the national institutional set-up of the healthcare system. The institutional boundaries of the national healthcare system may have become porous, but for the time being they remain intact. The main findings of this study confirm the hypothesis and can be summarized as follows: Austrian actors responsible for the delivery of healthcare actively integrate various usages Europe into their existing practices of healthcare governance. These usages of Europe are more frequent at European level than at national level. Those actors who have important legal competencies, financial resources, and hence power in healthcare governance at national level, are also in a better position to use Europe effectively than those actors who lack such national resources. Limited usages of Europe at national level by corporate actors can best be accounted for by practices of consensually governing a typically Bismarckian healthcare system. None of the actors analysed, no matter how critical their stance vis-à-vis their own healthcare system might be, puts into question the legitimacy of the national healthcare system in the light of increased European competencies in regulating cross-border healthcare. Advancing European integration, mainly through the ECJ’s rulings on cross-border healthcare, might have rendered national institutional boundaries porous, but national institutions retain – at least for the time being – their power of channelling actors’ interests and of influencing corresponding practices of healthcare governance. These results invite us to further investigate which kind of healthcare governance structures are being developed at European level in parallel to those existing at national level, and to what extent Bismarckian welfare regimes might be showing resistance to institutional change induced by European integration., Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The dissertation is about the impact of the European Union (EU) on the foreign policy of a candidate in the pre-accession period. More specifically, the research analyses the factors and processes that intervene between the EU power to generate change in Turkish foreign policy and Turkish national compliance with the EU conditions between 1997 and 2005 by way of analysing three cases: Turkish foreign policy towards Cyprus issue, Greek-Turkish bilateral problems in the Aegean Sea; and Turkey’s stance vis-à-vis the launch of the ESDP. Main question the research addresses is “why does a candidate choose to comply (or fail to comply) with the EU conditions in foreign policy?” In other words: “How (through what mechanisms) does the EU generate compliance with the EU conditions in foreign policy?” The dissertation approaches these questions through the perspective of the Europeanization literature and its conditionality school drawing on the Rational Choice Institutionalism. In accordance with this rationalist account, main argument the doctoral research intends to prove is that “the EU’s adaptational pressure on Turkey (operationalized as a function of clear/attainable membership perspective and credible conditionality policy) is a necessary yet not a sufficient condition for domestic compliance in foreign policy if the cost of compliance is high for the target government. In this respect, domestic actors’ strategic calculation is the ultimate determinant of the compliance degrees at the domestic level. In order to prove this core hypothesis, the research used theory testing process-tracing, longitudinal comparison of cases, counter-factual reasoning and the use of a control case. The evidence for testing the argument comes from the measurement of conditionality (measured as the linkage between a given foreign policy condition and membership-related reward) and domestic compliance (measured as foreign policy output ranging from rhetorical to behavioural change) through the content analysis of primary documents. This analysis is complemented with 33 semi-structured elite interviews. The dissertation by proving that the EU’s transformative power in foreign policy works through the cost and benefit calculation of the ruling party and by elaborating on the conditions under which the EU can interfere with this rational calculus (hence modify the opportunity structure for the target government), advances our understanding of the EU’s transformative power and contributes to the Accession Europeanization literature in general. Furthermore, the study provides additional empirical as well as theoretical in-depth case knowledge to the available literature on the Europeanization of Turkey and Turkish foreign policy., Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

International audience

Organisés au printemps 1993 sur la frontière entre la France et l’Espagne, les Jeux Pyrénéens de l’Aventure, ou los Juegos Pirenaicos de la Aventura, réunirent plus de 1 000 athlètes venus de 26 pays du monde sous les yeux de 21 000 visiteurs. Olympiade des sports d’aventure et de nature patronnée par le CIO, les épreuves se déroulèrent dans la vallée d’Aure en France (département des Hautes-Pyrénées) et le Sobrarbe en Espagne (province de Huesca). Cet article analyse la gouvernance de cette compétition sportive internationale. Plus précisément, cette étude de cas permet d’interroger les modalités d’organisation d’un projet transfrontalier au début des années 1990. Quels sont les différents échanges politiques, sociaux et culturels entre les vallées sur le plan du sport et du tourisme en Pyrénées ? Les résultats montrent un fonctionnement parallèle d’une organisation française et d’une organisation espagnole plutôt qu’un travail de terrain en commun. Division du travail qui permettait de contourner le problème de la langue. La dimension transfrontalière, présente dans cette olympiade de l’aventure en 1993, résulte en fait des pressions de la DATAR au tout début du projet, c’est-à-dire précisément en octobre 1989. Par cet aspect, les Jeux Pyrénéens de l’Aventure 1993 apparaissent le témoin d’une Europe politique en construction au lendemain de 1989.

Organised in the spring of 1993 on the border between France and Spain, the Pyrenees Adventure Games (les Jeux Pyrénéens de l’Aventure or los Juegos Pirenaicos de la Aventura), brought together more than 1,000 athletes from 26 countries and were attended by 21,000 visitors. An alternative Olympics of adventure and outdoor sports patronised by the IOC, the events took place in the Aure Valley in France (Hautes-Pyrénées) and in the Sobrarbe in Spain (Huesca province). This article analyses the governance of this international sports competition. More specifically, this case study will enable us to find out more about the conditions of organisation of a cross-border project in the early 1990s. What were the various political, social and cultural exchanges between the valleys in terms of sports and tourism in the Pyrenees? The results show that the French organisation and the Spanish organisation functioned side by side instead of working together on the field. This division in working enabled them to bypass the language problem. The cross-border dimension of these adventure Olympics in 1993 stemmed from pressure from the French regional planning agency, DATAR right from the beginning of the project, i.e. in October 1989, to be exact. This dimension made the 1993 Pyrenees Adventure Games a testimony to the new political Europe that was being built after 1989. This period was marked by the proactiveness of institutions, which far exceeded the motivations of the populations of the Union.Organisés au printemps 1993 sur la frontière entre la France et l’Espagne, les Jeux Pyrénéens de l’Aventure, ou los Juegos Pirenaicos de la Aventura, réunirent plus de 1 000 athlètes venus de 26 pays du monde sous les yeux de 21 000 visiteurs. Olympiade des sports d’aventure et de nature patronnée par le CIO, les épreuves se déroulèrent dans la vallée d’Aure en France (département des Hautes-Pyrénées) et le Sobrarbe en Espagne (province de Huesca). Cet article analyse la gouvernance de cette compétition sportive internationale. Plus précisément, cette étude de cas permet d’interroger les modalités d’organisation d’un projet transfrontalier au début des années 1990. Quels sont les différents échanges politiques, sociaux et culturels entre les vallées sur le plan du sport et du tourisme en Pyrénées ? Les résultats montrent un fonctionnement parallèle d’une organisation française et d’une organisation espagnole plutôt qu’un travail de terrain en commun. Division du travail qui permettait de contourner le problème de la langue. La dimension transfrontalière, présente dans cette olympiade de l’aventure en 1993, résulte en fait des pressions de la DATAR au tout début du projet, c’est-à-dire précisément en octobre 1989. Par cet aspect, les Jeux Pyrénéens de l’Aventure 1993 apparaissent le témoin d’une Europe politique en construction au lendemain de 1989.

Why did a majority of French voters reject the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe in the 2005 referendum? We argue here that the collective mobilization of the left-wing ‘No’ camp made the decisive difference through its formation of ‘Collectifs pour le non’, a coalition which facilitated the public expression of an anti-liberal and pro-European position capable of bringing together the Green and Socialist electorates, along with other parts of the left. Using a comprehensive analysis of the multi-organizational field of protest constituted by the mobilization of the left-wing ‘No’ camp, we show first that the mobilization was a ‘European affair’, in the sense that it developed a pro-European position in the context of struggles against liberal forces. Second, we show that the mobilization was also a ‘French’ affair because it relied on the high valuation of the ‘national’ mode of belonging, through the defence of the French state model.

International audience; La concrétisation de la théorie du main port, c'est-à-dire de la concentration croissante de l'activité portuaire dans un nombre de plus en plus réduit de ports maritimes, engendre, comme nous le démontre le cas de Lille face à Rotterdam, une redéfinition des relations entre ces main ports et leur hinterland. Cette redéfinition peut, sous certaines conditions, concourir aux nouvelles formes de développement des métropoles situées dans leur arrière-pays.