The highly politicized debate about the recent Alternative Investment Fund Manager (AIFM) Directive of the European Union led many observers to suspect an ideological battle between countries seeking to impose transnational regulation on financial service industries such as hedge funds and...

This paper makes three contributions. First, it presents a new conceptualization and measurement of outsider-status, which is based on social class and which takes into account that the category of outsiders is composed differently in different countries, depending on labor markets and welfare...

What characterizes the EU today is that it is not only a multi-level governance system, but also a multi-context system. The making of Europe does not just take place on different levels within the European political framework, executed and fostered by different groups of actors or institutions....

The eastern enlargement of the EU has greatly increased the heterogeneity in the configuration of preferences of European member states. This scenario was expected to significantly difficult the capacity of the legislative process to take decisions. However, the decision-making in the EU has...

This contribution tries both to assess the impact of the European Union on France and to discuss the rich literature on that topic originating both from EU studies, opinion studies, public policy analysis and institutional analysis. France’s relationship with the EU appears paradoxical given...

The reallocation of authority upwards, downwards, and sideways from central states hasdrawn attention from a growing number of scholars in the social sciences. Yet beyondagreement that governance has become (and should be) multi-level, there is no consensusabout how it should be organized. This...

The forthcoming Commission White Paper on Governance devotes a good deal of attention to the possibility of delegating rule-making powers to independent European agencies. The extensive debate stimulated by thepreparation of this document has revealed deep differences of opinion. The orthodox...

This paper is then focused on the European Neighbourhood Policy and democracypromotion in its Eastern neighbours. Can the EU act beyond ‘hard conditionality’ experiencedduring the enlargement process in order to succeed in democratizing its neighbourhood? Whatare the obstacles to...

No matter how one evaluates the product of its work, the Convention on the Future ofEurope has marked a turning point in the history of European integration. This article is divided into three parts. The first presents the different actors who participated in the Convention and the cleavages...

This article pleads for a systemic approach to European policy spaces formation. The termmutual transformation is used to underline three observations concerning how Europeanpolicy spaces are formed: 1) influence among the levels composing the Union runssimultaneously from Brussels to the lower...