Although scholars and practitioners have long argued that greater political coherence will make the European Union a more effective international actor, the relationship between coherence and effectiveness has not been well defined or tested. This article defines the two concepts, proposes three hypotheses regarding the relationship between them, and examines the extent and consequences of EU coherence on an issue that the EU has highlighted as essential to its foreign policy mission: the good functioning of the International Criminal Court (ICC). It finds that the EU exhibited considerable coherence in its response to the United States' campaign for ICC ‘non-surrender agreements’, yet failed in its effort to shape the behaviour of other states. Coherence may be necessary for the EU to exert its influence abroad, but it is not sufficient in a multi-centric world order where many others do not share the EU's collective policy preferences and are ready to deploy vast resources in pursuit of their goals. The article also considers the implications of this study for future research on EU foreign policy actorness, coherence and effectiveness.

Who in the European Union drives the process of pursuing bilateral trade negotiations? In contrast to societal explanations, this article develops a novel argument as to how the European Commission manages the process and uses its position in strategic ways to pursue its interests. Rooted in principal–agent theory, the article discusses agent preferences and theorizes the conditions under which the agent sets specific focal points and interacts strategically with principals and third parties. The argument is discussed with case study evidence drawn from the first trade agreement concluded and ratified since the EU Commission announced its new strategy in 2006: the EU–South Korea trade agreement.

Danny Nicol argues in this journal that my effort to devise a realistic normative conception of the European Union is unconvincing. I respond to his objections by correcting a number of misunderstandings of my original argument. I also use a more principled standard for providing evidence that the EU is indeed structurally unfit for democracy and emphasize the argument that the supranational layer of the EU is in need of a normative standard that is independent from the idea of democracy. The last section explicates the strength of normative realism.

This article looks at the influence of minimum quality standards in a two-region partial-equilibrium model of vertical product differentiation and trade. Three alternative standard-setting arrangements are considered: full harmonization, national treatment and mutual recognition. The analysis integrates the choice of a particular standard-setting alternative by governments into the model. The article provides a set of sufficient conditions for which mutual recognition emerges as one regulatory alternative that always improves welfare in both regions. Mutual recognition, being the default procedure if governments do not reach a unanimous decision, is the only possible equilibrium of the game.

This article reflects on the politics of European Union citizenship – and the ethical possibilities and limitations of a cosmopolitan or ‘normative power’ EU – via an analysis of the situation of the Roma in France, which was widely mediatized in summer 2010. It argues in a first step that during this period the French government ‘securitized’ the Roma, ‘extra-ordinarily’ casting them as collective threat and thereby justifying their deportation. The European Commission's outspoken response demanded that the French authorities refrain from discriminating against EU citizens on grounds of ethnicity; in so doing, the EU seemed to act as protector of minorities in accordance with its raison d'être as liberal peace project. However, in a second step, the article draws attention to the deportations perpetrated before these high-profile events, highlighting that conditionality within the law pertaining to EU citizenship allowed for the securitization of Roma. Thus, in a third step, it is argued that the invocation of citizenship may be a useful but limited strategy of political resistance by and with excluded groups such as Europe's Roma. Rather, it is the inherently ambiguous nature of a multi-level EU liberal or cosmopolitan government – and concomitant EU citizenship – which opens an important space for resistance.

In view of the decreasing levels of public support for successive European Union enlargements, this article examines how political elites attempt to bridge this growing gap. Drawing insights from discursive institutionalism, the article undertakes a systematic analysis of an aspect that has been widely neglected in the existing literature on enlargement: the relation between the discursive interaction among policy-makers at the EU level (co-ordinative discourse) and direct political communication at the national level (communicative discourse). Focusing on the case of Germany, the article argues that debates on enlargement at the EU and national levels have been growing apart since the 1970s, and discusses the implications of this discursive gap for the public legitimization of past and future enlargements.

The Constitutional Treaty's attempt to turn the peoples of Europe into a much more coherent citizenry, bound together by a common identity, was not successful. Moreover, its failure greatly damaged the federalist cause. Member States retain significant power to constrain supranational agendas in the post-Lisbon Treaty European Union.

The core argument of this article is to advocate the recognition of regional organizations as international actors. Conceptions of the European Union (EU) as an international actor are not new. However, a great deal of the literature regards the EU as sui generis in nature and lacking in external capabilities when compared to nation-states. Other regional organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) fare even worse. This article notes that we need to move beyond a state-centric view of world politics to assess the actor capabilities, nascent or advanced, of other players in the global arena, particularly regional organizations.

This article analyzes how the concept of ‘representativeness/representativity’ has been used by the European Union institutions to structure interest intermediation. It examines how the concept emerged and has been defined, and identifies its scope of application. ‘Representativeness’ is mostly used to refer to organizational features of the interest groups (organizational representativeness), but is occasionally used in relation to representative aspects of the overall system of interest representation (system representativeness). The focus is primarily on aspects of ‘descriptive representativeness’– in particular, territorial and thematic representativeness – rather than on ‘procedural representativeness’ that guarantees authorization and accountability. Originally applied to the social partners only, the White Paper on European Governance proposed to extend the use of representativeness to the wider category of civil society organizations. It will be shown that the application of the concept to these organizations proves more problematic than it does to the social partners. The European Transparency Initiative subsequently abandons representativeness, but it is argued that it contains the seeds for its re-emergence.

Jürgen Neyer has recently proposed replacing the European Union's ‘democracy discourse’ with a ‘justice discourse’. This article challenges his arguments. It points out the difficulties associated with Neyer's assertion that EU democracy is not theoretically possible. It then goes on to argue against his proposition that it would be unfair to judge the EU against democracy criteria. Finally it questions Neyer's assumption that EU policy contains an incontestable justice, arguing that democracy remains essential as the means by which a political community differentiates between justice and injustice.

While a growing number of studies have been conducted on European identification, very few of them have examined how children form their sense of European identity. This article investigates the impact of individual- and school-level characteristics on children's formation of a European identity. Multi-level analyses of data from 2,845 pupils (aged 10–14) in 68 Belgian primary schools revealed that family socio-economic status (SES), ethnicity, gender and the school's SES make-up influence the extent to which children identify as European; age, religion and school sector do not. The study clarifies the importance of examining how children form their European identity.

This article examines the ‘SWIFT affair’, whereby United States security authorities acquired access to financial data of European citizens, and argues that it is a powerful lens through which to understand current shifts in European security governing. The affair demonstrates the institutional challenges produced by the deployment of private, commercial data for security, and analyzes the ad hoc innovations produced in European Union (EU) governing as a result. Furthermore, the SWIFT affair has allowed the EU to position itself in the global security landscape as a normative power that promotes the values of privacy and data protection. However, the development of a European Terrorism Financing Tracking System, coupled with the way in which the EU itself is keenly implementing risk-based and data-led internal security measures, means that critical attention to the EU's own security practices remains urgent.

This article analyzes the productivity of the service sector within the countries of the European Union during the period 1994–2005. After disaggregating the sector into 11 branches, the article quantifies the relative contribution of each branch to the growth of service sector aggregate productivity. The main conclusion is that the structure of the industry is increasingly dependent on those branches which have lower growth in labour productivity. This conclusion reveals that the EU service sector suffers from ‘Baumol's disease’, which helps to accentuate the slow productivity growth that characterizes this sector.

In the last decade the European Union (EU) has been negotiating with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries to establish Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). In this article, EPAs are located within the context of the wider shift in EU trade policy towards bilateralism. This is done with reference to recent work in International Political Economy (IPE) emphasizing the ‘domestic-societal’ and ‘systemic’ drivers of preferential liberalization. Although these pressures are not necessarily sufficient to explain the EPAs, they do account for why they have gone beyond the original remit of ‘World Trade Organization (WTO) compatibility’ and why aspects of the agreements bear close similarity to the EU's supposedly more commercially oriented bilateral agreements.

This article reviews the evolution of subsidiarity as a constitutional principle within the case law of the European Court of Justice. It argues that, to date, discussion of subsidiarity as a judicial principle remains narrowly focused on its impact as a restraint on the Union legislature. In an effort to steer debate in another direction, this article revisits and supports arguments in favour of applying subsidiarity as a brake on the Court's own interpretative functions. Thereafter, it isolates the Court's interpretation of the Treaty free movement provisions as an empirical example to test this underdeveloped dimension of subsidiarity.

The post-2007 financial crisis created an opportunity for reforms that could close the regulatory gap between transnational banks and national bank resolution regimes. During the decade before the crisis, the European Union tried to develop a cross-border bank resolution regime relying on voluntary agreements and complex governance networks. However, these arrangements failed to commit national authorities to multilateral resolution as was exemplified by the case of Fortis. The crisis experience provided the Commission with an opportunity to propose legislation that would either deepen the pre-crisis co-ordinated regime, or replace it with an integrated resolution regime for systemically important cross-border banks. The Commission considered the more ambitious reforms, but after the experience with negotiations over the powers of European Supervisory Authorities, postponed the proposals for an integrated regime until after 2014. The initial round of post-crisis reforms thus remained limited to minimal improvements of the pre-crisis status quo.

In this article, it is pointed out that the European Union does not have a harmonized practice when it comes to trade procedures, implying that countries in the rest of the world face different trade barriers depending on which EU country they ship their goods to. Estimating the impact of trade procedures on exports from non-EU countries, a highly statistically significant and negative effect is found. Simulating what the effects would be of harmonizing trade procedures to the level of the most efficient EU countries, it is found that aggregated exports to the EU would increase by 20 per cent for the average exporter.

The changes in the European financial architecture in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis have highlighted the tension between the need for greater centralization of financial regulation at the EU level and the reluctance of some Member States to give up national regulatory autonomy. This article analyses the attitudes of new EU Member States toward the EU financial regulatory reforms. It investigates whether the extent of foreign ownership in the domestic financial sector, Euroscepticism, government support for deregulation and recent experiences of a severe financial crisis have an impact on countries' reservations. According to the results of the analysis, the higher the foreign ownership of a country's financial sector, the more reservations it expresses. The Eurosceptic attitude of the political parties in government matters as well. The more the governing political parties are opposed to EU integration in general, the more reservations one finds in a country's official position on the new EU financial architecture.

The European Employment Strategy (EES) emerged in the early 1990s under the influence of an acute rise in unemployment and the introduction of economic and monetary union (EMU). Its purpose is to foster convergence towards lower unemployment and higher employment. This article considers these outcomes over a longer time frame and in a broader geographical context than previous studies have done. Overall, outcomes in the EU-15 improved and converged since the introduction of EES. Comparisons suggest that these developments do not merely reflect long-term or international trends. The recent crisis, with deteriorating and divergent outcomes, might signal the start of a new EES cycle.