Abstract: This paper develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of hard and soft law that is drawn in part from recent work in the field of international relations. We examine the literature on the role of soft law, noting that scholars have approached this phenomenon in very different...

Abstract: The paper looks into the slow and at times controversial process of ‘Europeanising’ the Italian legal system, in order to exemplify how adaptation to changes takes place within entire branches of the state administration. Three examples are selected, all within the domain of labour...

Abstract: The European Union’s quest for democratic and legitimate governance, together with an appropriately defined collective identity and boundaries did not start with the current enlargement process. The Union’s search for its finalité politique and collective identity, however, will...

Abstract: The creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994 with its streamlined and highly automatic system of dispute settlement has left open the question of whether we can identify a theory of its legal system. This article posits the idea that such a theory can be discerned if we...

The more important governmental cooperation and bureaucratic involvement become in ESDP, the more pressing becomes the issue of democratic control of executive cooperation. This article starts from the argument that parliamentary involvement in decision-making is of central importance for...

Although one of the arguments for involving national parliaments in the European Union (EU) is to make EU politics more accountable, the literature has made few attempts to analyse under which conditions their involvement does have this impact. This article argues that it is not the sheer level...

The EU’s foreign and security policy is often criticised for being undemocratic. In this article, this contention is addressed from the perspective of deliberative democracy. The focus is on the procedural qualities of the second pillar decision-making processes as it is not only the quality...

The establishment of ESDP/CSDP in 1999 has been accompanied by the anticipation that the European Union will represent a unique strategic actor because of its ability to mix civilian and military crisis management instruments as part of a comprehensive approach. But to what extent is this...

An increasing number of authors describe the European Union as an advanced form of transgovernmentalism. Whether called Europeanization, supranational intergovernmentalism, multilevel governance, administrative fusion or Brusselisation, the transgovernmentalist thesis states that European...

In this article we approach the functioning of bureaucracy in ESDP from a governance perspective that also focuses on informal patterns of interaction between the relevant bureaucratic actors. Following the governance and related network governance approaches, the interplay between formal and...