Within the discussion on European governance and constitutional reforms of the EU polity the so-called "open method of coordination" (OMC) has gained much attention as a procedure that occupies an intermediary place between intergovernmental cooperation and supranational legislation. In this...

The reallocation of authority upwards, downwards, and sideways from central states has drawn attention from a growing number of scholars in the social sciences. Yet beyond the bedrock agreement that governance has become (and should be) multi-level, there is no convergence about how it should be...

Germany's presidency of the European Council in the first half of 1999 has focused the attention of schlolars on Germany's attitude towards the EU. Germany's European policy has been guided from the beginning by a pro-European vision of 'the house of Europe'. The hypothesis of the article is...

The effect of European integration on its member states constitutes the new research agenda within the study of European integration. Marked by the the institutionalist turn of Anglo-Saxon political sciences, the most dominant theories on europeanisation focus on structural arrangements....

During the 1990s a new regulatory pattern in domestic environmental policymaking has been emerging which is characterized by an increasing use of cooperative, informational and marked-based instruments. This pattern is to an important extent a result of international policy diffusion the...

AbstractThis article identifies conditions for transnational interest group cohesion by examining German and British employer positions on EU company law proposals. Employers were divided over proposals on takeover bids but formed a united front against proposals on worker participation. I argue...

AbstractWhile the consequences of becoming an EU member state for national policies are usually the core concern of pre-membership debates and of post-accession assessments, studies on the effects of European integration on the political systems of the now fifteen member states have so far been...

The aim of this article is to analyse the development of the concepts of equal opportunities between men and women and gender mainstreaming with regard to a new policy approach taken outside the traditional community method and to raise the question to what extent these policy instruments can be...

Comitology committees are often accused of not being accountable. This paper aims to provide building blocks to analyze the validity of this claim. After briefly discussing the meaning and aims of accountability, it is discussed where the actual accountability problems can be expected....

This paper discusses the basic constitutional problem of modern international law since the UN Charter: How can the power-oriented international legal system based on sovereign equality of states be reconciled with the universal recognition of inalienable human rights deriving from respect for...