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....

The use of one and the same word, i.e. Justice in the English or French language to render the two concepts of Gerechtigkeit when the issue is about equitability or fairness in social relations, and of Justiz when the issue is about the administration of justice often leads lawyers to overlook...

This paper analyses the prominence, content and justifications of Euroscepticism as a form of EU legitimacy contestation. Support of and opposition to European integration have so far been mainly measured through the positions of political parties or citizens’ attitudes through public opinion...

Die Euro-Krise ist nicht nur ein Härtetest für die europäische Integration, sondern auch für die vielbeschworene „Solidarität unter Fremden und für die Annahme, dass europäische Identität zu dieser Solidarität führt. Jetzt muss sich zeigen, ob Europäerinnen und Europäer –...

How can sociology contribute to the understanding of the social and political transformations that are affecting contemporary Europe? The article proposes that sociological accounts of European integration should focus around the basic problem of internal differentiation and external adaptation...

Integration may occur through coercion and intergovernmental bargaining - through blackmail, tradition, functional adaptation, copying, diffusion or exit - but it may also occur through reflexive reason-giving and entrenched commitments. The usefulness of such an approach to transnational and...

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...

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the identity problem of the European Union (EU). In order to do so the EU’s justifications of past and present enlargements are investigated. What kind of understanding of the EU do decisions to enlarge speak to? Given that the EU is based on more than...

This paper examines the progress of, and conditions for, Europeanisation in one of the EU's new neighbours to the East. Since the late 1990s under Leonid Kuchma's presidency, Ukraine regularly expressed its willingness to participate in European integration via membership of the European Union....