The potential of European student mobility to promote a European identity and,consequently, European integration has long been stressed by transactionalistssuch as Karl Deutsch but was never tested empirically. The EU-funded exchangeprogramme ERASMUS moves more than 150,000 university students...

The paper uses the ‘political opportunity structure’ model to show how suicide missions andpolitical violence are legitimized by militant groups to their constituency, and how constituencycan act as one of the constraints on the militant group. Militant groups in situations of...

This paper offers a critical exploration of the term ‘governance’, its rise to prominence within EU political discourse, and the new forms of authority and expertise it has come to be associated with within the EU’sevolving political regime. Its argues that a critical understanding of EU...

In democratic theory it goes without saying that people should establish their own politicalorders.1 Perhaps the most famous expression of this moral intuition is found in the preambleof the American constitution. By the opening phrase ‘we the people … establish thisconstitution’ the...

Based on an interpretation of the European Union (EU) as a compound democracy, thisarticle argues that the constitutionalisation of the European Union is necessarily acontested process.. A compound democracy is defined as a union of states constituted byunits of different demographic size,...

The paper assesses the contribution of gender approaches to understanding Europeanintegration. It offers a conceptualization of such approaches as including a distinctontology, epistemology and methodology. While feminist literature on the EuropeanUnion is diverse, all such literature sheds...

The puzzle of international society has long occupied International Relations (IR) theory, but it lends itself to a clearer articulation in legal positivist theory. On strict legal positivist terms, international society is defined as a compact of legal equals, states. However if states claim to...

This paper addresses the function of a European basic law. The author argues that if the basis of the original legitimising act of a basic law is weak, or even nonexisting, a need arises for succeeding or continuous legitimising acts. The concept of continuous legitimation implies that the basic...

The European Union is without question the most densely institutionalisedinternational organization in the world, with a welter of intergovernmental andsupranational institutions and a rapidly growing body of primary and secondarylegislation, the so-called acquis communautaire. Small wonder,...

The connection between nation and state is far from settled, and though naturalized in ordinary political discourse, it is often regarded with circumspection by many social scientists. Can Charles Tilly’s application of Nettl’s idea of stateness to European state formation illuminate the...