The Diminishing Returns to Trade Policy in the European Union

The notion that the EU is a trade power is central to studies of the Union’s international presence. Credible threats to withhold access to Europe’s markets are said to provide the Union with leverage in respect of other trade partners. This paper queries the continuing ability of the European Union to act effectively this way. The current Doha malaise is a symptom of deeper changes in the international trade system. As emerging markets become more affluent and participate in foreign direct investment, their interest in market access per se become less important relative to other areas of regulation.

The institutionalisation of the European Internal Cross-Border Co-operation Policy: A first appraisal

In the space of just 20 years, internal cross-border co-operation (CBC) has transformed from a marginal issue for European integration into an important strand of the third objective of European Union's (EU's) regional policy. How might this process of transformation be explained? This study intends to reconstruct the chronology of its development through interviews and use of archival material. The emergence of the current CBC policy was not, we argue, an inevitable solution to the problem of border management but, rather, the result of a struggle between the actors of that policy sub-system. The dramatic rise of CBC is the result of a series of factors that originated with the signing of the Single European Act in 1986. The construction of CBC as a set of problems and solutions by a network of policy actors at the margins of the EU through a series of technical reports, together with the policy window opened by the appointment of the Delors Commission, allowed the launching of an innovative CBC policy which has consolidated over time.

Politics without the Vernacular: Liberal Culturalism and the Language Policy of the European Union

Will Kymlicka's liberal culturalism presents a tension between the idea that linguistic diversity in multilingual polities should be protected and the claim that democratic debate across linguistic boundaries is unfeasible. In this article, I resolve that tension by arguing that trans-lingual democratic deliberation in multilingual polities is necessary to legitimise those measures aimed at the protection of linguistic diversity. I conclude that my account provides a coherent normative response to the challenges faced by the European Union (EU) in the field of language policy and that an EU-wide deliberative forum is not as unfeasible as Kymlicka suggests.