Abstract: The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) is understood as an important new "instrument" in the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) "toolbox", designed to respond to the contemporary security environment as well as to overcome the inaction and hesitancy of the past....

Altneuland: The European Constitutional Terrain It is in many respects a New Land - for the first time the Union is openly, officially using the word Constitution in its formal self-understanding. But this, in turn, places it, at least lexically, in the age old terrain of constitutionalism which...

Environmental concerns have played a key role for institutionalizing energy policy at the level of the European Union. There is thus a tendency in research literature to assume that the objectives of these cognate policy areas are compatible and mutually reinforcing. There have been only few...

A lot has been written about the European Commission as the main administrative institution of the European Community: about its work, competences, its organisational problems and the administrative reform initiated by President Prodi after the resignation en masse of the Commission of President...

In this article I conduct an institutional analysis on the balance of power existent in the EU, both before the enforcement of the Lisbon Treaty and after. I study the new decisional mechanisms as provided by the treaty, and try to determine the changes in the interactions between institutions,...

This article seeks to explain the varying, and sometimes intriguing, outcomes of the past three revisions of the Treaty concerning the Community’s Common Commercial Policy (CCP). The analysis particularly focuses on the development of competence and decision rules, i.e. the process of...

The purpose of this study is to approach and to explain the new born office of High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, set up by the Lisbon Treaty, recently ratified by all EU members. As a result, the High Representative, member of the European Commission, will have a...

This paper aims to analyse the character of the European Commission, which gravitates between supranational and intergovernmental, by presenting the main arguments meant to support the aforementioned positions. Thus, in order to demonstrate the supranational character I used the arguments...

The Lisbon Treaty has put the consistency of European Union (EU) external action high on the agenda but little is known about how this imperative is concretely given shape. Adopting a single-case-study approach on the EU’s decision in 2012 to renew the partial suspension of development...