International comparisons of Civil Services usually overlook the difficulties due to differing definitions of the civil service in national legal systems. Comparative statistics are therefore extremely misleading, as they are at best based on formal-legal criteria instead of being based on...

Abstract: On June 30, 2009, the German Constitutional Court declared the Lisbon Treaty to be compatible with the German constitution. The Lisbon decision marked the end of an intense constitutional battle. The following text illustrates how different views on and different understandings of...

While much has been written about the European Union (EU), most of the scholarly work is concerned with the developments at the European level. It is only recently, that we observe increasing attempts to address this research deficit. Notwithstanding a growing number of studies explicitly...

Processes of soft policy coordination in the EU and of Europeanization have in recent years mostly been conceptualised in terms of learning. The OMC is mostly seen as inducing ideational, cognitive and possibly normative learning between member states. However, the generalised learning...