The Council Secretariat General has emerged as one of the institutional winners of the dynamic development of the EU’s foreign and security policy, especially in the field of crisis management. Despite this, the role of the Council Secretariat in European foreign policy remains under...

Abstract Lobbying by economic actors constitutes a central element of a large part of the literature on trade policy-making. However, it is mainly considered as input into the political system, which then aggregates the demand of different societal interests. As such inputs, the preferences of...

While role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have been fairly well documented, studies on the internal functioning of the College of the European Commission have been almost lacking. Thus, highly inconsistent images exist; ranging...

The aim of this essay is to contribute to an improved comprehension of the university’s dynamics of change, as part of a larger transformation of the relationships between society’s key institutions. A distinction is made between seeing the University as an institution and as an instrument,...

Eastern enlargement is a process in which the very identity of the European Union is under construction, with its constitutive principles and values being challenged. Policy choices of the member governments participating in this process can not exclusively being explained by rational choice...

Drawing upon a multi-faceted understanding of human rationality, this essay highlights the role of three generic social mechanisms - strategic calculation, cognitive role playing and normative suasion - in promoting differing degrees of cooperation within international institutions. I focus in...

Most studies of the EU and its member-states are concerned with how processes of European integration hit the member-states. This article shifts emphasis from this top-down towards a bottom-up approach and asks whether and how differences in domestic institutional constellations shape the...