Elaine Fahey

The rising significance of the European Parliament to the post-Lisbon structural landscape of EU-US relations has self-evidently resulted in a new constitutional equilibrium. The European Parliament is now involved increasingly in global affairs and international agreements now require the consent of the European Parliament, pursuant to Article 218 TFEU, as outlined above. Thus [...]

Marie Vincent

How can the trend of “Euro-estrangement” that seems to be affecting most citizens today be reversed? For all the progress achieved with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, European decision-making has appeared ever more obscure, with a confusion of roles between the Presidents of the European Council and Commission, a chaotic start [...]

Yuksel Alper Ecevit

‘Who has the right to vote?’ is an essential question for democracy. The history of democratic regimes provides a complexity. Gender, class, age and citizenship status have been the primary barriers for voting qualification over time across regions. Suffragist movements seem to have partially succeeded in abolishing these barriers. However, increasing mobility [...]

Paolo Ponzano
The Treaty of Lisbon has introduced into the primary law of the European Union for the first time a mechanism of participatory democracy : the right of any one million European citizens, providing they represent at least seven of EU Member States, to ask the European Commission to submit a proposal for European legislation [...]

Martin Westlake

It is worthwhile recalling where ‘Lisbon’ began; not in Portugal, but in Laeken, in December 2001. Following the ill-tempered Nice Inter-Governmental Conference, a collective cry of ‘never again!’ went up. It was decided that Europe had to decide its future differently. Hence, in their Laeken Declaration of December 2001, the Heads of State or [...]

Graham Watson

Little has been written about political parties and ideology at EU level. Why?
Because the formation of EU-wide political parties, in any real sense, is so recent. Though transnational federations of parties in Europe’s (and indeed latterly, the democratic world’s) main political families existed for most of the twentieth century, these parties had little real [...]

Wojciech Gagatek Centre for Europe University of Warsaw

In June 2009, EU citizens elected a new European Parliament for 2009-2014. However, while the centre-right claimed overall victory, the whole event stood in a shadow of a continuously declining turnout, low-profile and dull election campaigns and not to mention a general lack of interest on the [...]

Daniel John Hannan Member of the European Parliament for South East England
While urging its member nations to constrain their expenditure, the EU is simultaneously demanding that they cough up more in order to proselytise for the deeper integration. A new million-euro fund has been established to “develop a sense of active European citizenship” .
Politicians [...]

Professor Richard Rose
University of Aberdeen
The tension created by forces pushing and pulling in opposite directions can lead to equilibrium or disequilibrium. The growth of problems requiring collective action above the level of national governments is creating pressures to upload more decisions to the EU level. Simultaneously, EU institutions face demands to download decisions to national [...]

Dorothee Bohle
Central European University, Budapest
Perry Anderson once called the European Monetary Union a revolutionary project. This is for two reasons. First, by making price stability the single obligation of the European Central Bank, and committing members to budget discipline, the Union puts pressure on states to dismantle their inherited systems of social protection, and on [...]