Conventional wisdom in European studies has long held that social policy is not anarea in which the European Union can make a large difference. Solidarity, it is said, can onlydevelop in societies where clear boundaries exist between individuals. Such is not the casein the EU, where a...

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...

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...

In the second half of the nineties, a number of EU Member States went through intense public controversies over agro-food biotechnology. These controversies occurred almost synchronously, brought about parallel issue-framings and actor-constellations, led national governments to adopt...

(english) Based on wide-scale surveys conducted in the capitals of seven WAEMU countries, including Abidjan in May and June 2002, this article gives an original perspective of the crisis in Côte d'Ivoire. It examines two general issues, seeking first to identify the respective roles played by...