By the end of 2009, Ireland, the Czech Republic, and Poland finally ratified the Treaty of Lisbon. This marked the end of a turbulent period that had seen the Laeken Declaration, a controversial and rejected proposal for a Constitution for Europe (in 2005), and the hard fight over the compromise...

This paper analyzes how EU social objectives and policy coordination have been integrated into the Europe 2020 Strategy and the Union’s emerging post-crisis architecture of economic governance. Based on published and unpublished documents as well as interviews with high-level policy makers,...

The Treaty of Lisbon entered into force in 2009 as the result of the determination of EU Member States to continue with the institutional and political integration in order to overcome the failure of the project of a European Constitution. The aim of this paper is to describe the structure of...

The German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) has found that there are no constitutional objections against the Lisbon Treaty. At the same time, the FCC imposed limitations to future integration by identifying a number of state functions that are non-amenable to integration and which have to be...

In a decentralized setting, are policy targets imposed by the central government on local elected officials effective? And when? We address these questions in Italy, where the central government has set a target for childcare coverage at the municipal level for Southern regions since 2007. We...

In March 2000, the Lisbon Summit set the European Union the goal of becoming ‘the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world' by 2010. This chapter aims to ascertain the extent to which various indicators of innovation in EU15 have improved and whether such improvement...