Around the world many countries are about to break apart, stay together, join in federations or build supranational organisations. The political debate of the European constitution is embedded in this context. The question arises which policies have to be shifted to the central European level...

While policymakers in Europe were busy implementing EMU during the past decade, persistently high unemployment, which should have been the main policy issue from a normative point of view, was essentially left untackled in most continental European countries. This poses the urgent question which...