This paper is about the difficult relationship between law and governance in the European Union. The turn to governance which the Prodi Commission has forcefully propagated is a continuation of much older developments. By means of these developments the European Community (now Union) has sought...

AbstractEuropean industrial relations are rapidly internationalizing; internationalization, however, is not necessarily de-nationalization. Even as European integration accelerates, national politics and industrial relations will remain the principal arenas for the social regulation of work and...

AbstractProcesses of economic globalization create regulatory problems that can no longer be solved at the nation-state level alone. Pessimistic scenarios forecast that states will lose control of their policy instruments and that deregulatory "races to the bottom" are likely to follow. More...

Abstract Voters who participate in elections to the European Parliament tend to use these elections to punish their domestic governing parties. Many students of the EU therefore claim that the party-political composition of the Parliament should systematically differ from that of the Council....

Abstract Treaty changes at the Amsterdam summit (1997) established employment policy as an official part of EU policy. European institutions not only gained influence in a policy area that formerly had been a national prerogative but, furthermore, the "open method of coordination" was introduced...

Abstract AbstractThis article challenges the methodological nationalism of the convergence debate by arguing that multilevel governance destabilizes the coalitions thought to underpin liberal and coordinated varieties of capitalism. Existing efforts to explain how coherent production regimes...

In the current debate on the future European order, the European Union is often described as an emerging federation. The paper claims that federalism is not only useful in deliberating about the future of the European Union. It provides a better understanding of the current structure and...

This essay is a renewed effort to overcome the schisms between lawyers and political scientists in their conceptualisations of the European integration project. The first effort was my contribution Das Recht im Prozeá der Europischen Integration to Markus Jachtenfuchs/Beate Kohler-Koch (eds.),...