In recent years, not only governance, but also civil society has been a veritable growth industry both in politics and academia. Depending on the author, organised civil society was associated with expectations of increasing input or output legitimacy. With regard to the EU, participation of...

AbstractThe debate on economic "globalization" suggests that the blurring of territorial boundaries shifts the power relations between nation-states and domestic market constituencies in favour of the latter. States have lost autonomy since policies are increasingly formulated in supranational...

AbstractThe complexity of the multi-level European polity is not adequately represented by the single-level theoretical concepts of competing intergovernmentalist and supranationalist approaches. By contrast, empirical research focusing on mul-tilevel interactions tends either to emphasize the...

AbstractEuropean social policy has two central dimensions: the relation between liberalized market freedoms and social protection, on the one hand, and the distribution of regulatory competencies between the supranational and the national level on the other. The posted workers issue, i.e. the...

This paper examines the politicization of European integration. We begin by asking how neofunctionalism and its precursor, functionalism, conceive the politics of regional integration. Then we turn to the evidence of the past two decades and ask how politicization has, in fact, shaped the level,...

Communicative action now commonly takes place in electronically mediated global networks and the networks are a powerful form of social ordering. This article analyzes the different forms of power that operate in communicative networks and how these alter communicative action. It suggests that...