scholarly journals Involvement of Asian Actors in the European Commission’s Online Consultations in Comparative Perspective

Author(s):  
Petya Alexandrova ◽  
Gert-Jan Lindeboom ◽  
Anne Rasmussen

In order to examine the involvement of Asian interests in European Union politics, we develop a preliminary framework for studying the involvement of external interests in EU policy -making. Using data on the online consultations of the European Commission from 2001 till 2010, we aim at explaining both the level of engagement, the types of active actors and policy areas of involvement of different regions. We find that that external representation is partly but not fully accounted for by economic ties and possession of resources. Moreover, we find variation in which areas and by which actors different regions are represented suggesting that variation in national-sectoral structures between them affects differences in the character of representation between them.

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-456
Author(s):  
Alan Hardacre

The interaction between organised interests and the European Union institutions has been subject to increasing study and analysis in recent years, and the relevance of this increasingly important research agenda has been highlighted by political scandals and developments in 2011.


Policy-Making in the European Union explores the link between the modes and mechanisms of EU policy-making and its implementation at the national level. From defining the processes, institutions and modes through which policy-making operates, the text moves on to situate individual policies within these modes, detail their content, and analyse how they are implemented, navigating policy in all its complexities. The first part of the text examines processes, institutions, and the theoretical and analytical underpinnings of policy-making, while the second part considers a wide range of policy areas, from economics to the environment, and security to the single market. Throughout the text, theoretical approaches sit side by side with the reality of key events in the EU, including enlargement, the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon, and the financial crisis and resulting Eurozone crisis, focusing on what determines how policies are made and implemented. This includes major developments such as the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism, the reform of the common agricultural policy, and new initiatives to promote EU energy security. In the final part, the chapters consider trends in EU policy-making and the challenges facing the EU.


Author(s):  
Mark A. Pollack ◽  
Christilla Roederer-Rynning ◽  
Alasdair R. Young

The European Union represents a remarkable, ongoing experiment in the collective governance of a multinational continent of nearly 450 million citizens and 27 member states. The key aim of this volume is to understand the processes that produce EU policies: that is, the decisions (or non-decisions) by EU public authorities facing choices between alternative courses of public action. We do not advance any single theory of EU policy-making, although we do draw extensively on theories of European integration, international cooperation, comparative politics, and contemporary governance; and we identify five ‘policy modes’ operating across the 15 case study chapters in the volume. This chapter introduces the volume by summarizing our collective approach to understanding policy-making in the EU, identifying the significant developments that have impacted EU policy-making since the seventh edition of this volume, and previewing the case studies and their central findings.


Author(s):  
Simon Bulmer ◽  
Owen Parker ◽  
Ian Bache ◽  
Stephen George ◽  
Charlotte Burns

This chapter examines the European Commission’s functions and structure, along with its role in policy making. The Commission initiates legislation, may act as a mediator, manages some policy areas, is guardian of the Treaties, is a key actor in international relations, and the ‘conscience of the European Union’. The chapter proceeds by discussing the debate on the extent to which the Commission is an autonomous political actor or simply an agent of the member states. Finally, it analyses the increasing challenges faced by the Commission in securing effective implementation of EU policies and its response to concerns over its financial management of EU programmes.


Author(s):  
Fiona Hayes-Renshaw

This chapter examines the inhabitants of, and working visitors to, the Council of Ministers’s headquarters in Brussels. The Council of Ministers has always occupied an important position among the European institutions and in European policy-making. As a European Union institution, it is involved in all areas of EU activity, both by legislating in tandem with the European Parliament (EP) and by coordinating the member states’ policies in particular fields. The chapter first traces the origins of the present-day Council of Ministers before discussing its hierarchy and what the Council does. It then considers how the Council deals with the other EU institutions such as the European Council, the EP, and the European Commission. It shows that the Council embodies the enduring tension between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism as explanatory tools for understanding the construction of the EU.


Author(s):  
Ralf Drachenberg ◽  
Alex Brianson

This chapter examines the process of policy-making in the European Union. It first considers how the EU originally made policy decisions before tracing the evolution of the formal balance between the EU institutions over time, with particular emphasis on the increasing legislative power of the European Parliament. It then describes the Community method, which remains the core of the EU policy process but is now complemented with a range of ‘new governance tools’ designed to produce coordinated member state action through iterated processes of standard-setting, best practice identification, and knowledge transfer. One of these processes is the open method of coordination (OMC). The chapter concludes with an analysis of the implementation of EU policy decisions by and in the member states, along with current trends in EU decision-making after the EU enlargements of the 2000s and the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.


2020 ◽  
pp. 096977642097061
Author(s):  
George Petrakos ◽  
Alexandra Sotiriou

Almost 30 years since the Maastricht Treaty and 20 years since the introduction of the euro, it is clear that the European Union (EU) has lost its appeal to wider constituencies and citizen groups that realize that the promises for convergence and prosperity have not been delivered. Rising dissatisfaction and Euroscepticism (expressed both in the ballot box and in Eurobarometer reports) is evident even in traditional pro-EU countries of the European core. As this long decade comes to an end, incidents (or accidents) like these ones, either in the form of open discontent, or in the form of rising populism, will exert pressure on the EU policy agenda that will either increase the frequency of deadlocks and inefficiency in policy making or will eventually lead to an honest effort to address the roots of these phenomena. This paper examines the drivers behind these two incidents (and the ones that may follow) and the limits of the current market and policy integration arrangements in the EU, arguing that a new policy agenda addressing the real weaknesses of the Union is inevitable if disintegration is to be avoided. Luckily enough, some elements of this new policy agenda may already be here.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 493-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Dewandre ◽  

In this article, I argue that Hannah Arendt’s well-known but controversial distinction between labour, work, and action provides, perhaps unexpectedly, a conceptual grounding for transforming politics and policy-making at the EU level. Beyond the analysis and critique of modernity, Arendt brings the conceptual resources needed for the EU to move beyond the modern trap it fell into thirty years ago. At that time, the European Commission shifted its purpose away from enhancing interdependence among Member States with a common market towards achieving an internal market in the name of boosting growth and creating jobs. Arendt provides the conceptual tools to transform the conceptualisation of relations and of agents that fuels the growing dissatisfaction among many Europeans with EU policy-making. This argument is made through stretching and re-articulating Arendt’s labour-work-action distinction and taking seriously both the biological and plural dimensions of the human condition, besides its rational one. By applying this shift in an EU context, EU policies could change their priorities and better address the needs and expectations of plural political agents and of European citizens.


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