Even though the member states have kept the European Union’s security and defense policy intergovernmental, there has been an emerging democratic deficit in this issue area. Given the standard version of the democratic deficit as a result from Qualified Majority Voting in the Council and from...

This paper is about a counterfactual empirical assumption: If the Laeken convention had been elected, we would have had a more democratic as well as a more legitimate process of European constitution making. Electing conventioneers and re-opening the convention is probably a successful way to...

This paper deals with the issue of institutionalising a legal pacifistic international order. While Kant’s idea of perpetual peace serves as the point of departure, it is argued that in order to find a proper institutional arrangement one would have to look beyond the two notions found in...

Scholarly debate on party-based Euroscepticism centers on the questions of how to define, measure and explain Euroscepticism. As a starting point, this paper observes that studies on Euroscepticism either focus on the positions of individual parties on issues of European integration or on the...

Martínez Sala and Bambaust have become the leading cases on free movement of persons in Community law. It has become standard to see both rulings as heralding a ‘civic’ turn of European integration, by expanding the personal scope of the freedom of personal movement from workers to...

European Foreign and Security Policy is being transformed. This raises potentially important challenges to democratic accountability. But in order to properly assess the state of democracy in this policy field it is necessary first to define the nature of the EU polity. This paper explores three...

By comparing European and US newspaper debates on the 2003 Iraq War, this working paper empirically tests whether a European public sphere exists regarding the contested issue of war and peace. This component of foreign and security policy represents a hard case for the evolution of European...

This article addresses the critical issue of how constitutional designing of the EU is related to the expression of collective identities. A European collective identity is perceived in terms of the discursive representation of the underlying demos of a European democracy. Against the common...

This paper returns to Karl Polanyi and to the logic of his The Great Transformation to understand some otherwise puzzling contradictions in the construction of the European single market. On the one hand, the European project appears to look to the creation of a single market that is detached...