This book examines the need for greater legal coherence within international trade negotiations between the European Union (EU) and external trade relations. An introspective analysis of EU trade law and policy is presented that highlights the complex issue of EU unity. A particular focus is...

This paper explores the politics of the Fouchet Plan, the unsuccessful initiative by French President Charles de Gaulle in 1961-62 to create a new 'union of states' for foreign-policy and defence cooperation among the six founding members of the European Community. The paper traces the origins...

This paper examines the effect of popular identification with Europe and the European Union on the level of governments’ willingness to consent to supranational reforms of foreign and security policies. Applying ordinary least squares (OLS) regression on a series of statistical analyses...

The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union (EU) faces an identity crisis to which the member states do not seem eager to put an end. Making incremental changes without defining the objectives will not rise the trust in the EU as a strong international actor. Thus, this...

European states have a long history of banking sector nationalism. Control over credit allocation is believed to contribute to economic development and competitiveness goals, insulation from external economic shocks, and control over monetary policy. This paper explains the potentially dramatic...

This paper explores a neglected aspect of the wider debate about EU enlargement; namely bilateral disputes between a Member State and an applicant, where the former uses, or threatens to use, its membership to block membership to resolve a dispute. As we show through analysis of three cases -...

This essay attempts to go beyond presenting the bits and pieces of still ongoing crisis management in the EU. Instead it attempts at finding the ‘red thread’ behind a series of politically improvised decisions. Our fundamental research question asks whether basic economic lessons learned in...

In June 2012 the European Commission received the backing of the member states to launch a visa liberalisation process with Turkey in exchange for a readmission agreement that obliges Ankara to take back illegal immigrants who passed through Turkey as a transit country. This is a remarkable...