In the discussion on the prospects for democratic reform in the European Union, a collective European identity features prominently among the preconditions of greater democracy. The lack of a common European identity in the realm of foreign, security and defence policy has often been lamented....

This paper argues against three traditional dogmas in political theory: the thesis of the (conceptual and practical) incompatibility between democracy and justice; the idea that a context of justice only exists within the confines of a state; and the view that political democracy presupposes a...

The paper suggests a practice turn in the analysis of political legitimacy. Current social science research on political legitimacy suffers twofold. First, it shows an undue (silent) impact of an ethics-first perspective. Second, empirical approaches to political legitimacy mostly focus on...

The paper examines a key dimension of democratic control, namely parliamentary control of military missions and presents the findings of an in-depth case study on the EU’s maritime mission Atalanta that was launched to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia. The case study finds that none of...

This paper analyses the prominence, content and justifications of Euroscepticism as a form of EU legitimacy contestation. Support of and opposition to European integration have so far been mainly measured through the positions of political parties or citizens’ attitudes through public opinion...

Security governance has changed the way societies organise and control the execution of powers. This contribution will focus on the ’German’ approach, and, inevitably these days, also on the EU approach towards new threats to security, especially with regard to terrorism. The main argument...

The gendered nature of democratic decision-making in the EU is the focus of this paper. It outlines a theoretical model of democracy that looks at public decision-making processes through a gender lens: gender democracy. It then takes two instances of democratic decision-making in the European...

In this paper I deny the claim that the European Union is not and cannot be a political community based on a strong sense of solidarity between its members. The influential position that I critically discuss states that such solidarity would have to rely on sovereign law enforcement based on...

This paper asks how ex ante and ex post control mechanisms structuring the involvement of national parliaments in EU policy-formulation affect the size and scope of conflict of parliamentary debates. The direct and indirect effects of control mechanisms are assessed in a comparative case study...