The Great Recession renewed calls for a return of state activism in support of the European economy. The widespread nationalization of ailing companies and the growing activism of national development banks led many to celebrate the reappearance of industrial policy. By reviewing the evolution...

European Studies used to be dominated by legal and political science approaches which hailed the progress of European integration and its reliance on law. The recent set of crises which struck the EU have highlighted fundamental problems in the ways and means by which European integration...

The article analyzes the integration of Central and Eastern European (CEE) trade unions in European policy-making. With reference to transnational cooperation in two fields of European-level decision making (issues concerning freedom of services and a European minimum wage), it investigates the...

European social policy changed with the evolution of European and global capitalism, the scope and shape of European-level international institutions, the size and heterogeneity of "Europe" as a polity, and the politics of the European national welfare state. The paper outlines the long-term...

Border regions are likely to play a critical role within the spatial dynamics initiated by the enlargement of the EU. This paper deals with the effects of integration on labour markets in border regions. Within the framework of different theoretical approaches, the effects of integration on...

A basic result of new economic geography (NEG) models is that the proximity to consumer markets impacts wages and employment within regions. The ongoing process of European integration, being targeted on the reduction of barriers to trade and factor mobility, has presumably changed relative...

In 1999, eleven European countries formed the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU); they abandoned their national currencies and adopted a new common currency, the euro. Several recent papers argue that the introduction of the euro has led (by itself) to a sizable and statistically significant...

National borders are still strong barriers for mergers and acquisitions in Europe. We estimate a gravity equation model based on NUTS 2-regions and find that the restraining impact of national borders decreased by about a third between 1990 and 2007. However, there has been no significant change...

This paper deals with the voting rules in the EU Council. Both internal and external impact of the voting rules are evaluated. Internal impact affects the distribution of power among the member states and external impact affects power relations between the main decision-making bodies in the EU....

The member states of the European Union have given up sovereignty in quite a number of policy areas and subjected themselves to joint decisionmaking at the European level. Policy instruments are no longer available nationally in many policy areas, including monetary policy, trade policy, the...