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The so-called practice turn in International Relations (IR) has established a new paradigm that puts practitioners' quotidian doings front and centre of IR theorizing. It is proving to be an influential development also for area studies (AS) that share much of IR's scholarship and objects of study. This is certainly the case for European studies (ES) where the works of International Practice Theory (IPT) scholars has greatly contributed to raise attention to situated, mundane, and everyday practices of EU institutions. This article reviews the contribution of IPT scholars to ES to assess the added value of this research agenda and its potential to become a 'trading zone' where IR and ES/AS scholars can advance understanding of how the local and the global connect. It also identifies two challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the extant literature: (1) finding ways to theorize and empirically observe the transition from the level of situated practices to EU-wide doings (generalization challenge); and (2) assessing the exact role of interaction in structuring and transforming both the global and the local (challenge of relationism). The article ends by calling for a global practice theory as a way to tackle these two challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of environmental regulatory stringency on innovation and productivity using a panel of 8 European countries for 13 manufacturing sectors over the years 2001-2007. This research topic falls under the heading of the Porter hypothesis (PH) of which different versions have been tested. We consider both the strong and the weak versions of the PH, while also adding some peculiar features to the analysis. Firstly, we assess the role played by environmental taxes, that is an instrument rarely tested as a factor which can support the PH. Secondly, we analyse not only the effect of environmental taxes within a given sector (within-sector), but also the role played by environmental taxes in upstream and downstream sectors in terms of input-output relationships. Thirdly, we test these relationships also 'indirectly' by verifying whether innovation is one of the channels through which higher sectoral productivity can be achieved by imposing tighter environmental regulations. Our main findings suggest that downstream stringency is the most relevant driver of innovation and productivity while within-sector regulations only affect productivity but not innovation. Moreover, the effect of regulations on productivity is mostly direct, while the part of the effect mediated by induced innovations, as measured by patents, is relevant only for what concerns downstream regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most empirical contributions to the normative power Europe (NPE) debate concentrate on whether and when the EU promotes its core internal norms abroad. In contrast, we investigate how norms emerging from international fora come to be accepted and internalised by the EU in the first place. We examine the case of the emerging responsibility to protect norm (R2P) and argue that the EU's implementation has been more limited and slower than one would expect from the NPE procedural ethics of 'living by example'. We examine the potential reasons for this failure to 'live by example': the role of persuasion by norm entrepreneurs; the role of inducements and costs; the goodness of fit between R2P and existing EU norms; and the clarity of the norm. We find that the lack of goodness of fit and clarity of the norm are important factors, but argue that low levels of bureaucratic receptivity were the greatest obstacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe is the region of the world where the network of security institutions is the densest. Yet, these institutions did not erase differences about conceptions of force employment among European countries and between European countries and the United States. Why have concepts of military power and force employment remained distinct and varied in Europe, and yet, what facilitates their convergence at the European Union level into the ambiguous notion of crisis management? We argue that an important answer to these questions is endogenous to the military: both role conceptions and organizational frames of military institutions are key underlying aspects of the differences at the national level and of the common ground at the European Union level. We examine and compare empirically the role conceptions and organizational frames of the armed forces in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom since the early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]