Twenty years ago, in the pages of the Journal of Common Market Studies, Hedley Bull launched a searing critique of the European Community's 'civilian power' in international affairs. Since that time the increasing role of the European Union (EU) in areas of security and defence policy has led to...

The European Union (EU) straddles accepted categories of political organization. It is neither a state nor an "ordinary" international organization. What sets the EU apart, perhaps above all, is its unique institutions: they resemble no other bodies found at the national or international level....

The legitimacy of international institutions is a contested issue both in terms of concept formation and empirical evidence and attracts attention from across the political sciences. The present contribution posits a relational concept of legitimacy that includes self-justification of rulers on...

This paper measures the net redistributive impact of the EU budget. It finds that for every € 1,000 difference in income per capita across countries, € 9 is offset by lower contributions to the budget and € 3 is offset by higher expenditures by the budget. The overall equalising effect is...

This paper explores the linkages between regional strategies for the social economy and regional development in four EU countries: France, Spain, Sweden and Poland. It provides a comparative perspective of regional strategies for the social economy (Section 1), based on i) the level of...

A unilateral carbon tax trades off the distortionary costs of taxation and the future gains from slowing down global warming. Because the cost is local and immediate, whereas the benefit is global and delayed, this tradeoff tends to be unfavorable to unilateral carbon taxes. We show that this...