By raising the question of what made constructivism possible the paper discusses the puzzle and promises of constructivist scholarschip in IR. It is argued that the communicative style which coined constructivism as a movement provides the key. Two puzzles are the focus, first, a lack of...

When Lee Kuan Yew speaks, presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, and CEOs listen. Lee, the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has honed his wisdom during more than fifty years on the world stage. Almost single-handedly responsible for transforming...

Attempts to explain the "rise of East Asia" often neglect transnational and regional aspects. After analyzing transnational political and economic processes in and beyond the region, the paper concludes that East Asia, in comparison with other conceptualizations of regions (Southeast Asia,...

Process tracing is in, acquiring near buzz-word status in certain circles. Europeanists do it; IR scholars do it – all with the goal of bringing theory closer to what really goes on in the world. This makes our scholarship more policy relevant and increases the reliability of our findings -...

The reallocation of authority upwards, downwards, and sideways from central states has drawn attention from a growing number of scholars in the social sciences. Yet beyond the bedrock agreement that governance has become (and should be) multi-level, there is no convergence about how it should be...

Using an empirically driven case study of the effects of the European Security Strategy of December 2003 this article assesses the trends and nature of European security regime building. In assessing EU security regime building it explores, first of all, a securitisation of the European agenda...

From the perspective of the concept of legalization, the European Union (EU) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) both have a high degree of implementation powers delegated to them by the Member States. Beyond this categorization there are substantial differences in how they use the...

The EU is not a member of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), but relatively elaborate EU coordination takes place anyway. This paper addresses two research questions: 1) How is it possible to evaluate the coordination of the EU in its specific observable configuration in the ILO?, and...

The aim of this article is to analyse the process of socialisation taking place at the level of the Council Working Groups (CWGs) dealing with the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Based on recent empirical evidence, this article explains the main codes of conduct adopted by the...

The paper proposes some hypotheses about the way in which the EU contributes via its MEDA Programme to the promotion of intra-regional economic co-operation among Mediterranean non-member countries. It argues that MEDA is indeed an important political and economic measure to create favourable...