This working paper offers a reconstruction and critical analysis of Joerges’ conflicts theory of European Union law. It is claimed that the theory of European conflicts is structured around three key premises: first, that there are functional and normative reasons to transcend the autarchic...

The Treaty of Lisbon introduces an early warning mechanism (EWM) which empowers national parliaments to intervene directly at the EU-level; they may now raise objections to – and even play a role in blocking – EU legislation. The EWM represents a new model of parliamentary involvement in...

This article contributes to a growing international bureaucracy literature by exploring the relationship between bureaucratic structure and administrative behaviour. The ambition of this study is twofold: First, it explores the extent to which international bureaucracies combine two inherent...

The paper questions the fashionable ideas, that bureaucratic organization is an obsolescent, undesirable and non-viable form of administration, and that there is an inevitable and irreversible paradigmatic shift towards market- or network organization. In contrast, the paper argues that...

The fracture in the European Union during the Iraq war of 2003 threw into relief the fragile nature of the integration process, certainly so far as foreign and defence questions are concerned, and exposed once again the complexity of the EU as a communicative space. Although cultural-linguistic...

The EU’s administrative systems relies to a considerable extend on the delegation of executive tasks to the European Commission, which is in turn controlled in this task through a plethora of implementing committees – the so-called ‘comitology’ system. Considering the centrality of...

The EU’s foreign and security policy is often criticised for being undemocratic. The article addresses this contention from the perspective of deliberative democracy. The focus is on the procedural qualities of the second pillar decision-making processes as it is not only the quality of the...

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...

How can the EU rectify its legitimacy deficit? On the basis of three logics of political integration we identify explicit strategies for how the legitimacy deficit of the EU can be remedied. The first strategy amounts to a scaling down of the ambitions of the polity-makers in the EU. If pursued...