Will future historians write about the last half-decade of the twentieth and the first half-decade of the twenty-first century as the beginning of the end of political unity of the West? If it will not be a more or less politically unified West, what will it be like? The breaking up of the North...

Even though the member states have kept the European Union’s security and defense policy intergovernmental, there has been an emerging democratic deficit in this issue area. Given the standard version of the democratic deficit as a result from Qualified Majority Voting in the Council and from...

European Foreign and Security Policy is being transformed. This raises potentially important challenges to democratic accountability. But in order to properly assess the state of democracy in this policy field it is necessary first to define the nature of the EU polity. This paper explores three...

By comparing European and US newspaper debates on the 2003 Iraq War, this working paper empirically tests whether a European public sphere exists regarding the contested issue of war and peace. This component of foreign and security policy represents a hard case for the evolution of European...

In this article, I outline an analytical framework allowing for an assessment of the democratic legitimacy of the decision-making system of the EU’s second pillar with reference to five criteria. The criteria are developed on the basis of a discourse-theoretical reading of a deliberative...

What kind of foreign policy may be produced by an entity such as the EU – which is neither a state nor an international organisation? The efforts to build a common European foreign and security policy forces us to rethink deep seated understandings of what foreign and security policy actually...

The European Union is commonly described as a temple-like construction resting upon three pillars. Whereas the first pillar, Community law, constitutes a "new legal order" of supranational character, the second and third pillar are considered to be of intergovernmental kind, i.e. traditional...

Using an empirically driven case study of the effects of the European Security Strategy of December 2003 this article assesses the trends and nature of European security regime building. In assessing EU security regime building it explores, first of all, a securitisation of the European agenda...

The aim of this article is to analyse the process of socialisation taking place at the level of the Council Working Groups (CWGs) dealing with the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Based on recent empirical evidence, this article explains the main codes of conduct adopted by the...

This paper will appear in Genèse et Destinée de la Constitution Européenne Commentaire du traité établissant une Constitution pour l’Europe à la lumière des travaux préparatoires et perspectives d’ avenir edited by Giuliano Amato, Hervé Bribosia and Bruno De Witte. It seeks to...