The EU »economic constitution« systematically biases EU policy making in a neo-liberal direction. Historically speaking, this was not the intent of the EU founding fathers. The original constitutional settlement of embedded liberalism was significantly redefined in the next major revisions of...

Marx is dead. But so is Hayek. With neoliberalism crumbling, Europeans are beginning to wonder what it is that is really wrong with the current European Union. The paper proposes the following answer: To this day, European integration has not been a process of emancipation. This shortcoming,...

On 24 November 2009 the European Commission published its consultation paper on the EU 2020 strategy. This paper analyses European trade union responses, and contrasts the very limited participation in the exercise with the greater response to the Green Paper Modernising Labour Law three years...

Under the budgetary strain of the economic crisis, many European governments have introduced spending cuts in higher education. As a consequence, universities increasingly have to rely on tuition fees and private sources of funding to sustain themselves. This development fits in with a broader...

The paper presents a distinctive approach to cross-border ties between Europeans. In place of the standard focus on identity or trust, it recommends the study of practices of social comparison, understood as how citizens evoke relevant others for the purpose of situating and evaluating their...

The social question has come down upon us in two different understandings. Modestly understood, it is about helping the needy and creating opportunities for disadvantaged members of society. More ambitiously conceived, by contrast, it is about extricating human life generally from the false...

According to Principal-Agent theory, states (the principal) delegate the implementation of a legalized agreement to an international organization (the agent). The conventional wisdom about states’ capacity to control international organizations is that differences among the member states...

I analyse the nature of the design failures of the Eurozone. I argue first that the endogenous dynamics of booms and busts that are endemic in capitalism continued to work at the national level in the Eurozone and that the monetary union in no way disciplined these into a union-wide dynamics. On...

This discussion of the ECJ in the context of a project on political representation in the EU responds to the Court’s changing functions in the integration process and also to the critique which the exercise of this function has provoked in recent years after the Court objected to...

This paper explores the role played by the newly created European External Action Service as an instrument of cooperation for EU foreign policy. Using two-dimensions spatial modelling to represent decision making at 27 in a unanimity rule Foreign Affairs Council, it highlights the role of...