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...

While in political debates identity is often considered as given, scholars of social sciences concentrate on the formation of new and particularly transnational identities. Insights from nationalism reveal mechanisms of identity formation but European integration has taken its own way. We...

The International Criminal Court (ICC), which commenced work in The Hague in 2002, is viewed by many as a success story for international governance and the beginning of a new era in international law. It is the first permanent institution able to prosecute severe violations of international...

The EU’s foreign and security policy is often criticised for being undemocratic. The article addresses this contention from the perspective of deliberative democracy. The focus is on the procedural qualities of the second pillar decision-making processes as it is not only the quality of the...

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...

Next to states and established international organisations, the European Union is emerging as an actor in the realm of international conflict management. Has the media in the EU Member States reflected this change? Our study reveals that the EU, despite its limited institutional capacity in...

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...

When Turkey began its accession negotiations with the European Union on 3 October 2005, this constituted an important turning point for Turkey’s relations with the EU and for Turkish socio-political transformation. This paper poses the following questions; is there a Europeanisation of Turkish...