Evaluating Democratic Governance: A Bottom Up Approach to European Union Enlargement

Global Governance and European Identity

The peaceful and democratic integration of the European countries, including the Eastern enlargement of the Union, cannot be completed if the EU does not become a true, though not federal, polity. Making the European institutions fully legitimate and accountable requires the development of political identity in a shape which is different from both national and cultural identity, but is not oppo...

Reaching Outside the Comfort Zone: Realising the FCTC’s Potential for Public Health Governance and Regulation in the European Union; Comment on “The Legal Strength of International Health Instruments – What It Brings to Global Health Governance?”

In their paper, Nikogosian and Kickbusch show how the effects of the adoption by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) and its first Protocol extend beyond tobacco control and contribute to public health governance more broadly, by revealing new processes, institutions and instruments. While there are certainly good reasons to be optimisti...

Europe’s Democratic Deficits through the Looking Glass: The European Union as a Challenge for Democracy

Despite widespread disagreement about democratic deficits in the European Union (EU), most critics begin by conceiving democracy as a problem for the EU. Seeing the EU as undemocratic or insufficiently democratic, they devise institutional innovations to democratize it. These innovations seem to require breaking the traditional link between democracy and the nation-state, which in this context ...

Report from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on the Eu Support for Democratic Governance, with a Focus on the Governance Initiative

The European Union and State Building in the Western Balkans

This paper examines the feasibility of network governance in the context of the EU's expansion in the Western Balkans. The EU is formally committed to promoting network governance but the realities of enlargement require the creation of effective states, in other words of the primacy of hierarchy over network. Networks are created in enlargement and reflect the complexities of public policy but...