In this book - intended for everyone interested in EU decision making - two main research questions will be answered. Firstly, what is the relationship between the European Council and the other EU institutions? Secondly, what are the various roles of the European Council in the EU decision-making process? The results of this research will show that European Council conclusions have been used extensively in this decision-making process, and this has increased considerably over time. Based on the analysis of European Council conclusions and legal texts a typology is created to provide an orderly picture of the European Council's various roles, such as the European Council as a political initiator, as an interpreter of the Treaties and as an appeals council.
This account of the Council of the European Union examines the Council's place in the EU's institutional framework, its internal workings and its relationship to the other institutions of the EU. The book is up-to-date to the end of 1994.
The policies of the European Union profoundly affect the lives of people in Europe and around the world. The new edition of this highly successful textbook outlines how and why such decisions are made, as well as the key challenges faced by policy-makers in the current political and economic climate. Policy-Making in the European Union begins by clarifying the institutional framework of the EU and the analytical approaches used to understand it. A wide range of crucial and illustrative policies are then explored in detail by subject experts. This volume includes new chapters on ways of analyzing the EU's policy process and on energy policy. A central theme to the volume is how the recent expansion to twenty-seven member states has affected policy-making across the different policy sectors. The conclusion reflects on how this challenge and the protracted constitutional stalemate have affected policy-making in the EU. It also explores the impact of the financial and economic crises that have struck Europe over the past several years. The sixth edition is fully up-to-date, and is the ideal text for all those with an interest in the policy-making of the European Union.
The EU plays an increasingly important role in issues such as the fight against organised crime and the management of migration flows, transforming the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) into a priority of the EU’s political and legislative agenda. This book investigates whether institutional change - the gradual communitarisation of the AFSJ - has triggered policy change, and in doing so, explores the nature and direction of this policy change. By analysing the role of the EU’s institutions in a systematic, theory-informed and comparative way, it provides rich insights into the dynamics of EU decision-making in areas involving high stakes for human rights and civil liberties. Each chapter contains three sections examining: the degree of policy change in the different AFSJ fields, ranging from immigration and counter-terrorism to data protection the role of EU institutions in this process of change a case study determining the mechanisms of change. The book will be of interest to practitioners, students and scholars of European politics and law, EU policy-making, security and migration studies, as well as institutional change.
The Performance of the EU in International Institutions marks one of the first attempts to systematically analyse the subject. It focuses on the role of the EU in decision-making within international organizations and regimes as a major locus of global governance. The book unpacks the concept of EU performance into four core elements: effectiveness (goal achievement); efficiency (ratio between outputs accomplished and costs incurred); relevance (of the EU for its priority stakeholders); and financial/resource viability (the ability of the performing organization to raise the funds required). Based on the case studies herein, the findings presented in this book relate to the identified core elements of performance with a particular emphasis on the dimensions of 'effectiveness' and 'relevance'. Most notably, the EU appears, on balance and over the past two decades, to have become much more relevant for its member states when acting within international institutions. The book highlights four particular factors explaining EU performance in international institutions: the status of relevant EU legislation and policies, the legal framework conditions including the relevant changes that the Lisbon Treaty has brought about, domestic EU politics, and the international context. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration
This new volume develops a conceptual framework for considering and evaluating the roles played by the EU in international politics, drawing upon the literatures of role analysis, international relations and European integration. It pays particular attention to five aspects of role analysis: role conceptions, origins of roles, role institutionalization, role performance and role impact. These form themes running through the volume and are dealt with in individual contributions as appropriate. It also presents fresh applications and empirical case studies that support the conceptual framework and demonstrate the uses of role analysis in relation to the EU and its international activities, and its capacity to inform investigation from different perspectives and standpoints. By taking this approach and by providing both conceptual and empirical argument, this book delivers an innovative perspective on the analysis of the European Union as an international actor, and on the ways in which EU actions are formed and have impact. It also establishes a research agenda based on rigorous development of the framework for role analysis, and demonstrates the ways in which this agenda might be furthered.
The rise to power of such countries as China and Brazil, as well as the EU sovereign debt crisis, have deeply affected the capacity of the EU to influence global realities. This book brings together prominent legal scholars and practitioners to investigate the extent to which the EU can shape this on-going re-orientation of the international scene.
The European Union is facing a profound crisis and is confronted with multiple challenges. Over the last two decades, it has experienced a series of dramatic changes to its powers, its institutional design, its constitutional framework and its borders. At the same time, the uneasy relationship between European citizens and elites has complicated both the reform and the function of the Union. While the Lisbon treaty provided some answers to crucial questions, it did not clarify the nature of the EU, which remains at the crossroads of federal and intergovernmental logic. The current economic and financial crisis puts the EU’s legitimacy further under pressure and creates the impression of a turning point. This book provides a concise analysis of the EU and its dynamics by paying particular attention to its day to day operation. It aims to help students and scholars understand its evolution, its institutions, its decision-making and the interactions between the EU and various actors. Avoiding abstract theorizing, the authors propose an easy to read analysis of how the Union works while recognizing the complexity of the situation. Throughout the book, the key issues of European integration are addressed: democratic deficit, politicization, the role of member states, institutional crisis and citizen involvement.
This book offers one of the most comprehensive accounts of European Council and Council decision-making by covering two decades of European integration from the late 1990s until the years after the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty. Case studies analyse the European Council, the Eurogroup, the Economic and Financial Affairs Council, the Foreign Affairs Council and the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council as well as the role of senior coordination committees. Puetter provides a genuinely new perspective on the European Council and the Council, portraying the two institutions as embodying the new intergovernmentalism in European Union Governance. The European Council and the Council shows how post-Maastricht integration is based on an integration paradox. Member states are eager to foster integration but insist that this is done outside the community method. This especially applies to new prominent areas of European Union activity including economic governance, common foreign, security and defence policy as well as employment and social policy. This book explains how the evolution of these new areas triggered institutional change. Policy coordination and intergovernmental agreement are identified as the main governance mechanisms with the European Council and the Council at the centre of these processes. This book features a novel analytical framework - deliberative intergovernmentalism - to trace institutional change after the Treaty of Maastricht. Joint decision-making among member states is understood as non-legislative decision-making which is geared towards permanent consensus seeking and direct member state involvement at all stages of the policy process.
This book advances a novel interpretation of EU governance. Its central claim is that the EU's regulatory successes within-and increasingly beyond-its borders rest on the emergence of a recursive process of framework rule making and revision by European and national actors across a wide range of policy domains. In this architecture, framework goals and measures for gauging their achievement are established by joint action of the Member States and EU institutions. Lower-level units are given the freedom to advance these ends as they see fit. But in return for this autonomy, they must report regularly on their performance and participate in a peer review in which their results are compared with those of others pursuing different means to the same general ends. The framework goals, performance measures, and decision-making procedures are themselves periodically revised by the actors, including new participants whose views come to be seen as indispensable to full and fair deliberation. The editors' introduction sets out the core features of this experimentalist architecture and contrasts it to conventional interpretations of EU governance, especially the principal-agent conceptions underpinning many contemporary theories of democratic sovereignty and effective, legitimate law making. Subsequent chapters by an interdisciplinary group of European and North American scholars explore the architecture's applicability across a series of key policy domains, including data privacy, financial market regulation, energy, competition, food safety, GMOs, environmental protection, anti-discrimination, fundamental rights, justice and home affairs, and external relations. Their authoritative studies show both how recent developments often take an experimentalist turn but also admit of multiple, contrasting interpretations or leave open the possibility of reversion to more familiar types of governance. The results will be indispensable for all those concerned with the nature of the EU and its contribution to contemporary governance beyond the nation-state.
