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From EC to EU : an historical and political survey
Abstract
Sumario: Birth, chilhood and adolescence -- The Community at the end of the 1960s -- From The Hague to Paris: 1969-72 -- 1973: a turbulent year -- The mid 1970s: locust years -- "Euro-sclerosis": the late 1970s and early 1980s -- The mid 1980: "single Market" and "Single Act" -- The late 1980s and the road to "1992" -- Europe transformed again: 1989-93 -- "Eppur si muove?: 1994-6
... On the other hand, the output assumptions reduce the complexity of the decision-making process in the EU also. The Union is seen as a monolithic political body, but its constituent units, the Member States, have strongly divergent positions on the content of the integration process in general and in relation to the strategy for Eastern enlargement in particular and, moreover, they are not willing to provide full management of the enlargement process to the EC (Mc Allister, R. 1998;Milword, 2000;Dinan, 2010). These contradictions have the potential to affect the formulation of the policy of conditionality, as well as on its implementation by the EC, so that it does not produce the intended effect. ...
The much-awaited Western Balkans Strategy entitled “A credible enlargement perspective for and enhanced EU engagement with the Western Balkans” comes eighteen years after the introduction of the Stabilisation and Association Process for this region. The Strategy aims to provide a credible enlargement perspective for the Western Balkans besides the fact that still the candidate countries are far from membership.
The paper gives critical explication of what “credibility of enlargement” actually means in practice and if there is a realistic perspective for membership of the candidate countries of the Western Balkans by the projected year 2025. There is a disagreement among the EU foreign ministers over the projected year of integration, but the front-runners according to the Commission's assessment are Serbia and Montenegro, while Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia could join later.
The Strategy does not leave a lot of space for optimism because it detects the key issues that have to be targeted, such as poor rule of law performance, organized crime and corruption at all levels of government and administration, etc. Besides that, it emphasizes on the non-functioning market economy among “Western Balkan Six”. And last but not least is the key issue of adopting binding solutions for bilateral disputes prior to their accession, which means that the Greek-Macedonian name dispute should be solved before the accession, without offering involvement of any EU Member States. The Strategy fails to address the idea of grouping countries of the Western Balkans as a whole and offering a package for membership, but instead, it favors individual accession of countries. Besides the good opportunity for the Balkans, the Strategy does not spread much optimism for the region.
The European Union is the product of a unification process which is most highly advanced in the taxation area. The excise duties area represents a highly important element for the European taxation system because much of the competences are transferred at a European level. Moreover, the excise duties play an important role in the completion process of the single market, objective which was set by the White Paper of 1985. The aim of the present article is to prepare an assessment related to the functioning of the excise duties at the European level and to present the relationship between the European Union with the member states, including the possibility to complete the unification process of the single market. The foundation of the topic will be based on the European Union Court of Justice case law, as well as on the case law of the Romanian tax disputes courts of justice.
This thesis explores evolving patterns of European Union (EU) institutional behavior in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). The starting point is the puzzling development of the AFSJ on the EU agenda, which cannot be neatly subsumed under any of the existing theoretical conceptualizations of decision-making in the EU. Given the continuous expansion of the AFSJ since the Maastricht Treaty (1993), the roles of the four decision-making institutions in the field—the European Council, the Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament—have been anything but stable. Over time, institutional behavior in the AFSJ has displayed both continuity and inconsistencies in its patterns. The academic literature can only partly account for these patterns, mainly because the rapid and fragmented development of the field has made scholars focus predominantly on individual institutions, specific time periods, or single AFSJ subfields.
To address this gap, the present thesis introduces an alternative approach to explaining different patterns of institutional behavior in the AFSJ throughout time. Theoretically, the argument draws on insights from organizational theory regarding institutional role expectations combined with the work of political theorist Michael Saward on representative claims-making. It is posited that institutional behavior in the AFSJ cannot be fully understood without examining how each institution seeks to legitimize its role in the EU political system. If treaty rules provide the organizational structure within which institutional roles develop, officials give substance to these roles by constantly justifying policy positions and decisions for the benefit of a constituency they claim to represent. But since the boundaries of constituencies are ambiguous in the EU political system, officials have significant leeway to portray their respective constituency in various ways, providing different lines of justification.
The qualitative longitudinal study of institutional behavior in the AFSJ from the perspective of patterns of justification is divided into three parts. First, the origins of institutional justification in the AFSJ are traced back to the period before the field became a formal area of EU activity (1984-93). Second, the consolidation and diversification of institutional lines of justification are identified during the gradual communitarization of the field from the Maastricht to the Lisbon Treaty (1994-2009). Third, the stabilization in variation of institutional justification in the AFSJ is illustrated in the post-Lisbon context (2010-2014). The analysis reveals that the more competences EU institutions gained in the AFSJ, the broader the universe of constituencies in the name of whom representative claims could be made, and accordingly the higher the possibility for heterogeneous and even contrasting patterns of institutional justification. The focus on justification additionally allows the identification of mechanisms of inter-institutional conflict in the AFSJ, which is shown to occur when institutions defend policy positions by making competitive representative claims. The findings are based on an analysis of institutional discourse present in official documents, media content, and interview material.
The argument finds synergies with new intergovernmentalist expectations regarding institutional roles in new areas of EU activity as well as with constructivist studies underlining the importance of norms in driving institutional behavior. The main contribution lies in providing an explanation of institutional behavior that takes into account the institutional architecture in the AFSJ as a whole and at various moments in time. Simultaneously, the thesis articulates a framework that contributes to the theorization of EU institutional roles as norm-rooted, fluid, and heterogeneous.
The genesis of transnational connections between national infrastructure networks during the second half of the twentieth century is illustrated in detail. At the same time similarities and differences between railways, inland navigation, postal services, telecommunication and radio are explored with special regard to international cooperation (structures), political negotiations (processes) and international standards for technical, operational, administrative, and legal or tariff parameters (contents).
The European Union (EU) has come a long way since its inception in late 1950s as the European Economic Community, now regarded as the most notable example of regional integration in the world. Yet, the union has witnessed several challenges — among them economic crisis, the dominance of large members within the Union and seemingly less favorable treatment towards new and aspiring members — which, to many, have casted doubts over the future of the arrangement, particularly the common currency and the monetary union. Nationalist tendencies have also risen across the members. Nonetheless, the EU remains far from an imminent failure. What is needed is to make the EU more democratic in its decision making and functioning.
This paper looks at the impact of the change from negotiating EU treaty reform within intergovernmental conferences to the new convention method. As most existing studies of treaty reform explain actor influence based exclusively upon relative actor power and preferences prior to negotiation, in effect 'black boxing' the actual negotiation process, a bargaining model is created that theorizes on the impact of the change in negotiating context and conduct of negotiations for the ability of actor to translate bargaining resources into influence.
The paper then describes three 'ideal types' of negotiating treaty reform, and the proceeds to investigate the opportunities for influence for EU institutions that each type of negotiating method opens. The paper finds that while the Council Secretariat has traditionally had many possibilities to gain influence in treaty reform negotiations, the new convention method had opened up many opportunities for both the Commission, and especially the European Parliament (EP), to gain influence.
Yet to have influence these possibilities must be translated into real influence through the successful use of appropriate strategies in the negotiations. In the present European Convention, while the Commission has had too ambitious and often conflicting positions, central members of the EP delegation have had up to now relative success in building coalitions around their positions, although it is still too early to conclude on whether the MEP's will prove successful in translating their bargaining resources into influence over the final Constitutional Treaty. The conclusions point to the necessity for students of treaty reform of opening up the 'black box' of the actual treaty reform process to investigate how the context and conduct of negotiations matter – enabling us to better explain which actors won in a treaty reform negotiation and why.
This paper attempts to explain the rates of European protest in three core countries of the EEC/EU the Belgium, France, and Germany over a sixteen-year period from 1980 to 1995 based on their institutional differences as suggested by the literature on political opportunity structures. First, the findings support the notion of a Europeanization of protest that is spurred by the changing constellation of national vs. supranational powers in the wake of European integration. The Europeanization of protest occurs, displaying systematic cross-national differences. These differences are, as the results suggest, related to the differential between the constraints of the actors' domestic environments and the common-to-all evolving opportunities on the level of European politics. Secondly, the findings suggest that the rates of protest in cross-national perspective are not simply random. The macro-political structure plays a (statistically) significant, logically consistent, and visible role in the explanatory bundle leading to occurrence or absence of protest actions.
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