What kind of democracy might fit the developing Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) given the political developments and the evolution of public debate on security and defence issues over the last twenty years? Different model-designs for a more democratic European Union (EU) in general...

This article addresses the critical issue of how constitutional designing of the EU is related to the expression of collective identities. A European collective identity is perceived in terms of the discursive representation of the underlying demos of a European democracy. Against the common...

While in political debates identity is often considered as given, scholars of social sciences concentrate on the formation of new and particularly transnational identities. Insights from nationalism reveal mechanisms of identity formation but European integration has taken its own way. We...

This study investigates the role of political journalism in EU constitution-making. More specifically, we ask whether political journalists take an active role in shaping public preferences and opinion on European integration. An analytical framework is developed distinguishing between the...

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...

Next to states and established international organisations, the European Union is emerging as an actor in the realm of international conflict management. Has the media in the EU Member States reflected this change? Our study reveals that the EU, despite its limited institutional capacity in...

The emergence of a transnational public sphere in Europe is expected to facilitate democratic control and public debate about European issues as well as enable the formation of a European collective identity. Taking this claim seriously, though, reveals that empirical research has so far taken a...

In this paper, I explore in a systematic manner the different components of the democratic legitimacy of the Union from the standpoint of deliberative democratic theory. Contrary to standard accounts, I claim that the question must be disaggregated, given that the Union has not only several...

Political science literature often claims that the participation of civil society organisations increases the democratic quality of policy-making in international governance arrangements. However, it remains unclear under what conditions such a democratic value can be achieved and how the...

In the literature on European and global governance there is a trend to conceptualize ‘public accountability’ as accountability to national executives, to peers, to markets, to ombudsmen, or to courts. While the empirical analysis of multiple accountability relations within governance...