The attempt to pin down the constitutive elements of the European public sphere is typically marked by ambivalence between normative and descriptive elements. In normative terms, the European public sphere is identified through the standards which should be used to assess the legitimacy of...

Integration may occur through coercion and intergovernmental bargaining - through blackmail, tradition, functional adaptation, copying, diffusion or exit - but it may also occur through reflexive reason-giving and entrenched commitments. The usefulness of such an approach to transnational and...

This conceptual paper provides a working definition of politicisation of European integration, based on a literature review. Politicisation has often been used by political scientists interested in European integration. We observe that research using the concept is rarely interested in the...