Eastern enlargement is a process in which the very identity of the European Union is under construction, with its constitutive principles and values being challenged. Policy choices of the member governments participating in this process can not exclusively being explained by rational choice...

Rarely in recent years has a violent ethnic conflict been so clearly foreseen by so many experts as in the case of Kosovo. The escalation of the conflict in early 1999 led to a specific combination of war, terror and genocide which was very different from traditional civil and international war....

Since the last decade, the development of European Party Federations (EPFs) has been followed with increasing attention from scholars. However, the analysis of EPFs' impacts on EU policy-making has been quasi-neglected. Therefore, the main objective of the paper is to present a comprehensive...

Some academic circles have pointed out that the European Union and its Member States suffer from a legitimacy deficit closely linked to the current fiscal policies. In a context which was characterised by the major presence of Labour, Socialist and Social Democrat Parties in the Member States'...

This article discusses the question of the EU's uniqueness. This issue is of particular importance when considered in relation to the nation-state. Uniqueness can then be considered as a case of departure from or transformation of the nation-state. The EU has emerged with a complex mixture of...

Until the Maastricht Treaty, European governments had long pursued European integration on the working assumption of a "permissive consensus" by the public. The popular and legal challenges to the Maastricht Treaty questioned the legitimacy of further integration.Normative political theory has...

In this paper we suggest a research agenda beyond the legitimation strategies of the CIDEL project (i.e. legitimation through outcomes, values and rights). The European Union has developed beyond that of international organisation and derivative democratic construct. But the step from negative...

The Treaty on European Union (EU) has on the one hand increased democratic legitimacy of the integration process by confering new powers to the European Parliament (EP) - legitimacy viewed as an attribute-, while on the other hand acceptance by the citizens - legitimacy conceived as orientation...

Recently, 'new modes of governance' based on voluntary performance standards, rather than compulsory regulation, have gained salience in European Union governance. Can these 'new modes of governance' offer a credible solution to the challenges faced by EU policy making? We argue that a critical...

The salience of European issues to the general public is a major determinant of the domestic legitimacy demands that governments face when they devise their European policies. The higher the salience of these issues, the more restrictive will be the legitimacy demands that governments have to...