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This contribution introduces a selection of the best papers presented at the 2015 European Union Studies Association’s biennial conference. It uses these papers as a jumping off point to consider whether European Union (EU) studies suffers the same ‘gap’ with real-world problems that is seen to afflict some portions of the academy and to ask whether EU studies is at an inflection point. It argues that EU studies are closely linked to the substance of the European project. It identifies how the contributions to this collection speak to different aspects of the EU: closer co-operation; policy-making within a ‘normal’ political system; the implications of European integration for its member states. Given this link between the substance of the European project and the focus of EU studies, this contribution argues that the challenges currently confronting the EU – the lingering eurozone debt crises; the migrant/refugee crisis; the prospect of a British exit; and recent terrorist attacks – may mark an inflection point in EU studies. The reason is that for the first time ‘less Europe’ has emerged as a serious option in response to crisis. This possibility reignites questions of (dis)integration and calls into question the assumption the EU policy only accumulates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Implementation of EU law is vital for European integration. The EU implementation record however up until now shows that there are serious implementation deficits. Although the EU in response to these deficits has piled up strategies and instruments to improve the overall implementation, we still do not know how big the compliance problem of the EU is. The nature and seriousness of compliance deficits are until now the 'known unknowns'. This paper looks into two issues that are important if we want to improve implementation and compliance rates of EU law. First of all it addresses the question of how to gather infomation on implementation and compliance as a basis for enforcement policies and secondly is appraises the EU's enforcement policies, set up to improve the implementation of EU Law currently in place. The paper concludes that present EU strategies and tools to promote compliance broadly follow the enforcement-school approach with some management-school elements. It also concludes that the information basis for these strategies is quite weak and that they are not based on a deep understanding of what motives underlie noncompliant behaviour. The strategies and instruments rely strongly on repression by sanctions as well. A better understanding of the how and the why of non-compliance could improve the effectiveness of the present policies in place - more positive and communicative approaches to non-compliance could well complement present strategies and instruments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does EU funding to European regions affect sub-national parties’ support for European integration? This paper aims at analysing whether the EU regional development policy contributes to setting up support for EU institutions and European integration and thus strengthens the whole ‘European idea’ among political parties. To answer this research question, the article analyses election manifestos of parties acting on the regional level in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK for two EU programming periods: 2007─2013 and 2014─2020. The results show that sub-national parties are more supportive of European integration if regions receive more EU funding and if the parties represent regions that are dependent on EU funding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Standard accounts assume that representatives are authorised and held accountable through elections in territorially defined constituencies. In contrast, claims-making approaches hold that representation does not always depend on an electoral connection. This paper argues that the claims-making approach addresses some of the difficulties in the standard account, but remains itself theoretically underspecified. This becomes especially clear when applied to systems with exceptional institutional complexity like the EU. As an alternative to both those other approaches, the paper proposes a revised claims-making approach in which rights claims are used to specify representative claims. It then shows how rights claims do, indeed, play an important role in the representative claims that are made in the European Union arena, and how that, in turn, allows the Union to deal with some of the problems of applying standard forms of representation to its decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes to use the concept of empire for the analysis the European integration process. From a methodological point of view, this concept is an invitation to reintroduce in EU studies the comparative approach as well as long-term history. This paper also leads to a detailed reflection on the concept of empire itself and proposes a modernized definition of it. The use of this concept enables to shed a new light on the EU and some of its policies. If the EU cannot be considered an empire, it can nonetheless be said that it is undergoing a process of imperialization. This raises the question of the transformation of the European project and to the consequences of this transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical debate about the effects of politicisation on the democratic legitimacy of the European Union has tended to focus on the potential of conflict between European political parties or member state governments. At the same time, empirical sociological studies demonstrate that controversy about Europe continues to unfold primarily within national public spheres. There is as yet no genuine Europe-wide party system or public debate. This reveals a gap between the normative theoretical assessment of EU politicisation and empirical sociological analysis of this phenomenon. To reconcile this discrepancy, this paper develops three actually-existing trajectories of politicisation: the remote conflict, the international conflict and the domestic conflict. Each trajectory carries unique challenges and opportunities to the democratic legitimacy of the Union. It is argued that the domestic conflict trajectory is most promising from a normative democratic perspective. Paradoxically, this does not necessarily imply a renationalisation of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Referendums on issues of European integration have become more and more important in recent years, particularly after the failed referenda on the EU Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands. This paper examines the impact of direct democracy in national contexts on the decision of governments and parliaments to conduct EU referendums. The results of a qualitative–comparative analysis of 30 countries since 1945 show that this form of path dependency exists only in part: While some nation states with plebiscitary traditions also grant their citizens direct participation in major EU decisions, others do not convene EU referendums or call for EU referendums even though they have no experience with direct democracy in national politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the struggle for policy coherence between two EU policy domains: competition policies and public safety policies. We use the notion of ‘policy coherence’ to demonstrate the difficulty of reconciling divergent policy aims, both within the EU and between the EU and its member states. We analyze the question what caused policy incoherence and why it occurred at a certain time. We aim to contribute to a further development of this concept in two ways: first, we apply it, for the first time, to an empirical domain that deals with EU internal relations. Second, we seek to enrich existing literature on policy incoherence with added insight into the causes and timing thereof. We use the notion of ‘policy framing’ to explain the occurrence of policy incoherence. In this way, we provide policy-makers and area stakeholders with advance warnings of the likelihood of its occurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we re-examine early neofunctionalist concepts of spillover, spill-around and build-up, and apply them to the case of the Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) in education and training policy. We show that even an EU at ‘the end of integration’ can bind its Member States more closely together over time. In this way, we add to recent analyses of unanticipated spillover in ‘hard’ policies by showing that such can be the outcome of ‘soft’ policies too, and set out a hypothesis to guide future investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The work of Burley and Mattli, Alter, and Stone Sweet, taken together, provides the dominant political science explanation for the supremacy of European law. This review identifies a range of empirical and theoretical difficulties with this explanation, including the lack of a specified alternative outcome, an overemphasis on national constitutional rights, a limited understanding of the possible relationships between national law and ‘ordinary’ treaty obligations, ambiguity on the essential question of whether national political institutions could unilaterally legislate contrary to European law, and the failure to provide an explanation for state behaviour compatible with European law supremacy. The paper then sets out a research agenda, emphasizing the need to identify independent variables which could produce, depending on their values, outcomes like the EU which rely on states accepting the supremacy of treaty obligations or, alternatively, tit-for-tat regimes like the World Trade Organization which rely on bilateral reciprocity enforcement mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Europeanization literature assumes that European integration affects domestic policies, politics and polities; yet, the impact on domestic corporatist patterns, which characterize policy-making in small European states, has received little attention so far. While contradictory theoretical expectations exist, this paper argues that European market-making policies tend to weaken domestic corporatist policy-making by offering new opportunities to domestic actors, in particular the executive. This allows them to bypass policy concertation. However, the impact depends on the usage domestic actors make of the European policies and is mediated by domestic factors. A comparison across policy sectors in two countries – Belgium and Switzerland – largely confirms these arguments. This means that domestic institutions such as corporatist policy-making are not only mediating factors in the process of Europeanization, but themselves subject to change. This effect even goes beyond the borders of the European Union, affecting policy-making in Switzerland as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the effects of the Lisbon Strategy on the way in which national executives co-ordinate EU policy at the domestic level. Comparing seven countries (Denmark, the United Kingdom [UK], Austria, Slovenia, Spain, France and Poland) it finds evidence that the Lisbon Strategy has been advancing (further) centralization and politicization in national patterns of EU policy co-ordination, empowering core executives. The Lisbon Strategy's ideational elements ('grand' goals and politically visible targets) as well as organizational requirements (Spring Council, national programming and annual reports) are factors behind this phenomenon. These results have implications for the literature on Europeanization, international politics, and governance studies in what is eminently an empirical research agenda about how far and how changes in international governance architectures affect the redistribution of power within national executives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period since the early 1990s has seen a marked shift in the terms of Dutch European discourse, as dramatically highlighted by the country's 'No' vote in its 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty. The present paper examines the trajectory of this discursive shift, suggesting that a traditional 'federalist' referential has been replaced by an elite discourse focused primarily on defining the 'limits of Europe' in intersecting substantive and geographical terms. A general framework for the understanding of national discourses of European integration is first set out, highlighting the key role played by national elites as mediators between the European and the national political systems. The Dutch case is then examined against this background, chronicling the general terms of the 'critical turn' in national European discourse, the 2005 referendum campaign, post-referendum party positioning and discussions surrounding the 2007 Reform Treaty. Despite the persistence of strong, underlying support for Dutch EU membership, it is finally argued that The Netherlands has not (as yet) found a stable, cohesive national narrative of its 'fit' and 'place' in the contemporary (post-enlargement) project of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses whether EU compliance is still a ‘black hole’, reviewing two decades of research on this topic. It is argued that the first wave of scholarship was rather eclectic in nature, suggesting numerous legal and politico-administrative explanations. The second wave focused on the goodness of fit hypothesis. As the empirical support for this hypothesis has been rather disappointing, the consensus now seems to be that domestic politics needs to enter the equation in a more explicit fashion. The current challenge is to theorize and research the exact role and effects of domestic politics on processes of compliance. In doing so, scholars are advised to pay more attention to methodological issues, such as case selection. Finally, scholarship on compliance should shed more light on the actual size of the implementation deficit, especially when it comes to application and enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the implications of the 'New Media Order' for European identities in the light of European Union policy documents on the need for a European media industry. Examined are specifically the tensions between the prescriptions and the emerging realities of the "New Media Order' for a Europe in-the-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]