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This paper describes an EU-funded project under the Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) Programme, with a particular emphasis on the Oxford-based part. Involving six European universities, the overarching investigation was concerned with the tensions between standardization and tradition in education. In Oxford the focus was on aspects of EU education and training policy in four Member States: the United Kingdom, German, Sweden, and France. The paper describes the research undertaken and its outcomes, using the project as an example of EU funding programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationships between the migratory policies of the EU countries with more experience of immigration and their national political cultures. It focuses on France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It then looks at Italy, a relatively new country of immigration, which, with 3,000,000 legal immigrants, has become the fourth country of immigration in Europe and the first in the Mediterranean basin. In its final part it highlights the incipient process of 'communitarisation' of the immigration policies of EU countries in the last decade. This process, which has already entailed a significant convergence of their migratory policies, is expected to continue after the recent enlargement of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europeanization, differentiated from European integration as the impact of European policies on national policies, practices, and politics, has had differing effects on EU member states, depending upon a number of independent variables. These include the constraints imposed by EU decisions in any given policy area, that is, whether the decisions demand that countries follow highly specified rules of implementation, less specified rules, suggested rules, or no rules at all. But adjustment also depends upon certain mediating factors, including countries' vulnerability to global as well as European economic pressures, their political institutional capacity to respond as necessary, the 'fit' of European policies with national policy legacies and preferences, and the discourses that influence policy preferences by changing perceptions of economic vulnerabilities and policies and thereby enhance capacity. Only by putting the decision constraints together with the mediating factors can we adequately explain countries' differential policy outcomes, whether inertia, absorption, or transformation. To illustrate, this paper considers three countries, France, Britain, and Germany, across a representative range of economic policy areas, including monetary policy, financial services, telecommunications, electricity, transport, and mutual recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]