This paper contributes to the EU reform debate that the Commission started with its white paper on the future of Europe. I suggest that we should not only pay attention to the political competences of the EU, but also focus on the restriction of the political room for manoeuvre which derives...

At the end of the postwar period, the politically shaped configurations of normatively integrated European political economies differed greatly among "social-market" and "liberal market economies." Such differences persist even though the characteristic achievements of social market economies...

In Währungsunionen stehen Auf- und Abwertungen zur Korrektur heterogener Inflationsentwicklungen nicht mehr zur Verfügung. Zur Vermeidung von Leistungsbilanzungleichgewichten erfordert der Euro daher die transnationale Koordination von Lohnauftrieben. Seit den Neunzigerjahren und verstärkt...

European social policy changed with the evolution of European and global capitalism, the scope and shape of European-level international institutions, the size and heterogeneity of "Europe" as a polity, and the politics of the European national welfare state. The paper outlines the long-term...

While the consequences of becoming an EU member state for national policies are usually the core concern of pre-membership debates and of post-accession assessments, studies on the effects of European integration on the political systems of the now fifteen member states have so far been less...

The paper investigates the proposition that the impact of European judicial politics on national modes of governance in the field of gender equality is influenced by domestic mobilisation. Domestic mobilisation refers to activities in EU member-states aimed at ensuring that public and private...

In a recent article, Caporaso and Tarrow have argued that the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is increasingly moving in a social policy direction that will ultimately put European politics on a “Polanyian” course. We take issue with their claim and distinguish three...

At first glance, the social purpose and the democratic potential of the EU have made progress in the last 15 years. However, this impression is misleading. We argue instead that the social and democratic potentials of the EU are crucially shaped by the heterogeneity of European varieties of...