This book examines the efforts of European regional organizations in promoting democracy, human rights, and the rule of law among states seeking membership. In country-specific chapters, experts test prevailing theories about how effective the regional organizations' efforts at improvement have been.
Approaches democratization of the European neighbourhood from two sides, first exploring developments in the states themselves and then examining what the European Union has been doing to promote the process.
This book examines the political and legal challenges of regional governance of the 28 countries of the European Union and the 48 in the Council of Europe. The contributions, dilemmas, and moral hazards from this record of nearly seven decades of regional inter-governmental institutions has kept the peace, but produced episodes of crisis from overstretching jurisdictions, thematically and geographically. Polarization between nationalist and integrative forces has displaced the idealistic aspirations of prior decades to build the rule of law and deter violence. Academics and policy makers will learn from the various legal and political efforts to integrate supranational and inter-governmental agencies with national political systems.
The EU is a supranational organization, whose reach and influence extends well beyond its member states, especially to the many states that have signed various forms of association agreement with it. This book asks whether qualifying states who have eschewed EU membership experience negative effects on their legal and political self-governing abilities, or whether they manage their independence with few such effects. It explores the idea that the closer the affiliation a non-member state has with the EU, the more susceptible to hegemony the relationship appears to be. In addition, the book provides an overview of the total range of agreements the EU has with non-member states. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of in EU/European studies, Scandinavian studies, European and comparative politics, international relations, and democratization studies.
This book provides an expanded conceptualization of legalization that focuses on implementation of obligation, precision, and delegation at the international and domestic levels of politics. By adding domestic politics and the actors to the international level of analysis, the authors add the insights of Kenneth Waltz, Graham Allison, and Louis Henkin to understand why most international law is developed and observed most of the time. However, the authors argue that law-breaking and law-distorting occurs as a part of negative legalization. Consequently, the book offers a framework for understanding how international law both produces and undermines order and justice. The authors also draw from realist, liberal, constructivist, cosmopolitan and critical theories to analyse how legalization can both build and/or undermine consensus, which results in either positive or negative legalization of international law. The authors argue that legalization is a process over time and not just a snapshot in time.
Our world is in urgent need of global answers on subjects such as Big Data, climate change, and the interconnected global economy. This volume tackles those issues and more, with the goal of advancing more democratic modes of decision-making.
This book analyses the development of anti-corruption as a policy field in the European Union with a particular focus on the EU Anti-Corruption Report. It reconstructs the origins of anti-corruption policy in the 1990s when the EU started to recognise corruption as a serious crime with a cross-border dimension. It also analyses the processes surrounding the downfall of the Santer Commission on charges of corruption in 1999 and the enlargement of the EU. This incorporation of transitional new Member States was accompanied by a number of specific measures, instruments and monitoring mechanisms to combat corruption at the supranational level, finally leading to the introduction of the EU-wide Anti-Corruption Report in 2014. The book presents an in-depth analysis of its implementation, abandonment and the way forward under the European Semester as the new instrument for achieving EU anti-corruption reforms. It offers a new interpretation of the Report as a form of reflexive governance that operates at multiple levels and involves not only the European institutions and national governments, but also the role of civil society actors in the process of developing anti-corruption policy. It applies the theory of reflexive governance in analysing the impact of the Report in the UK, Romania and Albania, including the involvement of non-state actors in anti-corruption policy making in these countries. The book concludes with a discussion on how future EU Anti-Corruption policy can make use of reflexive governance and offers recommendations to enhance anti-corruption policies of the EU, the Member States and Candidate States.
This volume is the first book-length study of disguised forms of plagiarism that mar the body of published research in humanities disciplines. As a contribution to applied research ethics, this practical guide offers a typology of the principal forms of disguised plagiarism. It provides detailed analyses, in-depth case studies, and useful flow charts to assist researchers, editors, and publishers in protecting the integrity of the body of published research literature. Disguised plagiarism is more subtle than copy-and-paste plagiarism; all its varieties involve some additional concealment that creates further distance between the plagiarizing text and its source. These disguised forms are the most difficult forms of plagiarism to detect. Readers of the volume will become acquainted with the subtler forms of plagiarism that corrupt the production and dissemination of knowledge in humanities fields. The book is valuable not only to those interested in research ethics, but also to those in humanities fields including philosophy, theology, and history.
Comparative constitutional change has recently emerged as a distinct field in the study of constitutional law. It is the study of the way constitutions change through formal and informal mechanisms, including amendment, replacement, total and partial revision, adaptation, interpretation, disuse and revolution. The shift of focus from constitution-making to constitutional change makes sense, since amendment power is the means used to refurbish constitutions in established democracies, enhance their adaptation capacity and boost their efficacy. Adversely, constitutional change is also the basic apparatus used to orchestrate constitutional backslide as the erosion of liberal democracies and democratic regression is increasingly affected through legal channels of constitutional change. Routledge Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Change provides a comprehensive reference tool for all those working in the field and a thorough landscape of all theoretical and practical aspects of the topic. Coherence from this aspect does not suggest a common view, as the chapters address different topics, but reinforces the establishment of comparative constitutional change as a distinct field. The book brings together the most respected scholars working in the field, and presents a genuine contribution to comparative constitutional studies, comparative public law, political science and constitutional history.
