This working paper investigates the conditions which prompt a variety of non-EU states grouped within an international organization to adopt European rules or standards rather than any alternative rule or standard available for selection. The paper reviews the main conceptual frameworks from...

The gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with the prestige print press given a privileged place. Yet when it comes to a European public sphere, the mass media are also problematic, or at least incomplete, in several ways: relatively few EU-wide...

The EU has for a long time claimed the title of leader in the international politics of climate change. However, existing research has generally failed to specify whether the EU’s purported leadership has induced the followership of other states. This working paper seeks to shed light on this...

This paper examines the ways in which the EU greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trading system (ETS) affected the design of similar programs in North America. It investigates the conditions under which EU pioneering policy can play a role in extra-EU jurisdictions’ policy-making. The empirical...

Despite early warnings about knowledge-enabled mass destruction and the ongoing battle over agricultural biotechnology, the development of nanotechnology in Europe has been remarkably quiet over the past decade: non-governmental organization (NGO) campaigns against nano were all but inexistent...

Turkey has undergone significant legal and institutional reforms regarding minority rights and cultural rights in the past decade as part of a reform process to meet political criteria for EU membership. However, it has not been studied so far if this increasing institutional compliance has also...

In the past ten years, the long-standing trade relations between the European Union (EU) and the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries have experienced radical transformations. The negotiations of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and seven regional groupings...

The EU has been engaged in democracy promotion, human rights, and civil liberties in the Mediterranean countries for over two decades with results ranging from very limited success to total failure. The revolutions in the Arab world – that have caught the EU and Western countries by surprise...

The EU seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Western Balkan countries in order to foster peace, stability and prosperity in the region ridden by war and ethnic conflict. Unlike in case of the Mediterranean and Newly Independent States, the EU has even offered its South Eastern...

Environmental policy has become an important area of European Union (EU) policy making, even though it had not originally been foreseen in the Treaty of Rome. Its emergence in the early 1970s can be understood as a result of a transfer of the novel policy idea of the environment to the European...