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...

Tackling pensions' problems means engaging with what Pierson (2001) has called 'immovable objects'. Additionally, the EU competence for drafting specific legislation in this area remains unfulfilled potential, while EU legislation in other policy areas creates indirect pressures on national...

This article re-examines the division between 'optimists' and 'pessimists' within the literature on the Open Method of Coordination’s (OMC) effectiveness. Each of those 'camps' tends to focus on a different question. 'Optimists' are more concerned with the question of whether the OMC exerts an...

This introduction provides a brief overview of the existing OMC literature with regard to the introduction of the OMC, its theoretical conceptualisation of effectiveness and legitimacy and related empirical findings. The main part of the introduction, however, focuses on chosen shortcomings of...

The aim of this paper is not only to assess whether the European Employment Strategy (EES) has had an impact on national labour market reforms, but to also evaluate the effects of partisan politics on the EES and vice versa. After establishing three causal mechanisms through which the EES may...

Although we still celebrate the late twentieth-century ‘victory of democracy’, our understanding of what democracy entails in both theory and practice is increasingly subject to a variety of qualifying definitions, many of which now seem to devalue the role of elections and electoral...

The paper presents a new approach to EU governance by stressing the interdependence of governance and integration. It suggests that EU governance is not just shaped by the emerging properties of the EU polity but has a strong impact both on system formation at national and European level. It is...

This paper is about the difficult relationship between law and governance in the European Union. The turn to governance which the Prodi Commission has forcefully propagated is a continuation of much older developments. By means of these developments the European Community (now Union) has sought...

Abstract AbstractThis article challenges the methodological nationalism of the convergence debate by arguing that multilevel governance destabilizes the coalitions thought to underpin liberal and coordinated varieties of capitalism. Existing efforts to explain how coherent production regimes...

This paper studies the distribution and legitimisation of civil, political and social entitlements to non-citizens resident within the territory of EU member states. Is national citizenship indeed no longer imperative to membership in the national political community? Apart from trying to assess...