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...

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...

Rarely in recent years has a violent ethnic conflict been so clearly foreseen by so many experts as in the case of Kosovo. The escalation of the conflict in early 1999 led to a specific combination of war, terror and genocide which was very different from traditional civil and international war....

This article seeks to explain the varying, and sometimes intriguing, outcomes of the past three revisions of the Treaty concerning the Community’s Common Commercial Policy (CCP). The analysis particularly focuses on the development of competence and decision rules, i.e. the process of...

Social constructivism has come of age in contemporary international relations (IR) theory. Indeed, more and more submissions to presses and journals in both Europe and America characterize themselves as constructivist or situate their arguments vis-à-vis those of constructivists. In substantive...

Within the growing literature on the Europeanisation of national foreign policies of European Union (EU) member states, the case of Portugal has been almost absent. Yet despite its small size and intermediate level of development, Portugal has had relatively extensive international relations...

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,...