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...

Most studies of the EU and its member-states are concerned with how processes of European integration hit the member-states. This article shifts emphasis from this top-down towards a bottom-up approach and asks whether and how differences in domestic institutional constellations shape the...

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...

Within the growing literature on the Europeanisation of national foreign policies of European Union (EU) member states, the case of Portugal has been almost absent. Yet despite its small size and intermediate level of development, Portugal has had relatively extensive international relations...

When aiming at studying the interconnectedness of administrative systems and in particular the integration of domestic governance systems and the institutions of the European Union at least two variables are important to address: (i) the intensity and frequency of cross-level interaction and...

The Council Secretariat General has emerged as one of the institutional winners of the dynamic development of the EU’s foreign and security policy, especially in the field of crisis management. Despite this, the role of the Council Secretariat in European foreign policy remains under...

It is well known that EU citizenship is parasitic upon national citizenship. To become an EU citizen it is necessary to be a citizen of one of the Member States, and the states have exclusive competence to decide who their own citizens are. They therefore function as gatekeepers, and jealously...

Abstract: On June 30, 2009, the German Constitutional Court declared the Lisbon Treaty to be compatible with the German constitution. The Lisbon decision marked the end of an intense constitutional battle. The following text illustrates how different views on and different understandings of...

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...

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...