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Over the past decades, the notion of "independence" has become an object of contention in EU politics in fields ranging from monetary policies to rule-of-law standards, to regulatory agencies. This article takes a broad socio-genetic approach to question the deep-seated, cross-sectoral entanglement between EU polity and the notion of "independence." It explains how the European Union has been a laboratory of the notion of "independence," transforming it from a negative institutional device (independence from) into a broad empowering technology of supranational government connected to notions of general interest, professional expertise, and discretionary powers (independence for). The article analyzes the emergence of this European style of independence in conjunction with the jurisdictional claims and legitimizing efforts of the European Court of Justice ("the Court"), the European Commission, and the European Central Bank. The article examines three major EU constitutional crises from the inaugural years of the mid-1960s to the creation of an uber-independent European Central Bank in the 1990s and the more recent debates on judicial independence, and it traces how a controversy on the meaning and scope of independence unfolded in each of these critical junctures. The article is meant to spark a productive debate about Europe's "independence wars" in view of framing a more robust, yet democratically open, notion of independence to which policymakers (whether European or national) could be held accountable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional regional trading arrangement landscape holds two primary models. One is the 'dynamically expansive supranational model' of the European Union (EU) that progressively enlarges its community beyond the constituent treaty through its evolving laws and institutions. The other is the 'static intergovernmental model' of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) where members strictly uphold obligations in the original agreement – no more and no less. A certain genre of Asia-Pacific regional trading arrangements (and beyond in the global South) sits uncomfortably within this bifurcated landscape. Sovereignty-centric, they seek a dynamic and ever-expanding community like the EU but, firmly rejecting supranationalism, insist on intergovernmental modalities as seen in the USMCA. Unsurprisingly, they have not been effective. Using post-2007 integration data from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, this article presents concordance legalization as a new explanatory framework in this landscape, demonstrating how one can regionalize successfully despite being simultaneously agenda expansive and intergovernmentally operational. Concordance legalization's four-pronged strategy – the constituent treaty explicitly entrenching intergovernmentalism to facilitate dynamic agenda expansion; the dual-step system of primary and secondary laws (with a carefully calibrated use of hard and soft instruments); the organizational hierarchy that expands, implements and exerts intra-regional accountability pressures through numerous meetings and monitoring mechanisms (rather than adjudication) that enforce compliance – has enabled this curious success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exceptional times call for exceptional measures—this formula is all too familiar in the domestic setting. Governments have often played loose with their state's constitution in the name of warding off an urgent threat. But after decades of increasing interconnectedness and emerging transnational governance, today one sees new forms of emergency politics that are cross-border in range. From the European Union to the World Health Organization, from supranational institutions to state governments acting in concert, the logic of emergency is embraced in international contexts, with Covid-19 the latest occasion. This Forum offers an entry-point into this emerging phenomenon. Taking as its point of departure two recent books, it examines the origins, forms, effects and normative stakes of emergency politics beyond the state. Among the matters discussed are the concept of emergency politics, the historical context of its contemporary forms, the patterns of decision-making associated with it, the implications for the legitimacy of transnational institutions, and the constitutional and political ways in which it might be contained. Transnational emergency politics seems likely to remain a central feature of the coming years, and our aim is to further its study in international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The approach of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights regarding the relationship between international and domestic law has evolved into a form of supranational law, which was not envisaged at the time of the ratification of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights. In its first decisions, the Inter-American Court accepted that it was for each state party to decide how its domestic legal system interacts with international law. However, in recent years the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has developed the theory of the "conventionality control," according to which domestic judges shall afford primacy to the Convention over domestic law and, in cases of a conflict of norms, may set aside domestic legislation. It is to be seen whether or not domestic tribunals will implement this "conventionality control" and how the legislative powers of Latin American states will respond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barber's recent book The Principles of Constitutionalism argues that state sovereignty is not subject to legal limits, from either domestic or supranational law. It further suggests that state sovereignty is not subject to moral limits either. This paper argues that this is an unsound view of state sovereignty and that Barber's work contains valuable resources for developing an alternative, sounder view. A sound account of state sovereignty will consider the legitimate scope of a state's authority, over and above the authority the state claims. It will explain the foundations of state authority in terms of rules , rather than the mere say-so of someone mighty. And it will be continuous with influential legal accounts of state sovereignty that historically accompanied the very emergence of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the economic regulatory component of the current backlash against liberal democracy and supranationalism in the European Union (EU). I identify a style of economic regulation that seeks to govern markets in the interest of insiders who are framed as vulnerable to the challenges of economic globalization – what I call rearguard economic regulation. While such regulation may be useful to reinforce national cultural attachments and a sense of belonging, it also has an anti-pluralist character that threatens markets' emancipatory orientation. By identifying this challenge, the article seeks to defend a vision of markets as contributing to the promise of democracy, by fostering a plurality of options in each sphere of life. In the European context, I argue, EU economic law may be understood as advancing the realization of such a vision of markets. Viewed in this light, supranational and, specifically, EU economic law appear not so much as ordo- (or neo)-liberal straightjackets on national democracy but, instead, as providing mechanisms for democratization of the economy and society. Such democratizing potential is attributable to (i) the pluralist outlook of the law of EU integration, which forces member states to confront the plurality of forms of economic and social life existing within the polity and being further diversified by globalization as well as (ii) the deliberative and open-ended character of EU law adjudication, which may allow for progressive re-articulations of national market regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from the perspective of the recent extraordinary wave of populism in Europe. It argues that populism poses a serious and distinctive challenge to the ECtHR since supranational judicial review is at odds with the populist ideology. What makes the populist challenge distinctive is the combination of the ideological basis of populism, its wide appeal and capacity to reach ordinary people, and populists' tendency to remove limitations on their power. With respect to the last point, the article introduces a categorization of anti-court techniques and takes stock of the ECtHR's institutional setting. It concludes that although the situation is not perfect—the budget and judicial selection are especially problematic—the ECtHR is rather well insulated from eventual attacks targeting its structural features or the judicial personnel. However, including the ECtHR in the "narrative of blame," populism is very strong in another anti-court strategy—achieving gradual erosion of a court through delegitimization. That is particularly threatening for the ECtHR due to its vulnerability to legitimacy challenges manifested in the past decade. As a result, the populist challenge will likely require careful management of the ECtHR's social legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the supranational states in the postnational constellation in modern Europe. Topics include, absolutist state provided political form to societies shattered at their core by wars conducted in the name of religion; Treaty of Westphalia created an international system based on sovereign state; and transformation displaced the monarch from the seat of sovereignty.

The fact that highly educated individuals are significantly more likely to self-identify as Europeans than those with lower levels of educational attainment is one of the most robust findings in the scholarship on individual Europeanization. Previous work also shows that this cleavage in supranational identification varies cross-nationally and over time. We contribute to the existing literature by examining the country-level, socio-structural conditions that influence the education cleavage. Focusing on how the educational environment influences identity formation, we test two divergent predictions of how societal education—i.e. the average national level of educational attainment—shapes the cleavage between individuals of differing education levels with respect to their self-identification as European. According to Welzel's (2013) 'cross-fertilization approach', societal education should widen the education divide. By contrast, our alternative 'cross-attenuating approach' posits that societal education should instead help to close it. Using a cross-national time-series dataset that includes 28 EU member states and 28 Eurobarometers covering 1992–2015, as well as between–within multilevel models, we find a significantly narrower education cleavage in countries where societal education increased the most during the period of our study. This result provides strong support for the cross-attenuating approach presented here. We theorize that societal education helps to narrow the individual-level education cleavage through a discursive and a network mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article involves a systematic exploration of the European Court of Human Rights' decisions in cases involving the actual structure of the democratic process itself. These 'law of democracy' cases pose some of the most conceptually difficult and politically charged cases even for domestic courts, let alone for a supranational court tasked with enforcing democratic rights across the diverse ways the Member States have structured and institutionalized their democratic systems. In the court's doctrinal terms, the question is how much of a 'margin of appreciation' the court should recognize for the various Member States to interpret and apply democratic rights in differing ways across their different systems of democracy. Focusing on the court's decisions regarding regulation of political advertising, access to the vote, and the spending of money to influence electoral outcomes, the article concludes that the court has recurringly in recent decades entered into these areas with bold initial decisions, only to be forced to back down in response to the powerful political backlash such interventions have spawned, particularly in certain Member States. This pattern suggests that a supranational court has trouble mobilizing the political legitimacy required to sustain acceptance of its decisions involving such morally powerful issues such as how different countries structures their systems of self-governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union's ambition to create a harmonized reception system for asylum seekers differs from the realities on the ground. We address how differences in national reception conditions stimulate the secondary migration that challenges the creation of an effective common migration regulation in Europe. We base our analysis on the Dublin Regulation (DR) and the secondary movement of Eritrean asylum seekers from Italy to Norway. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with civil servants, NGO representatives, and Eritrean migrants in Milan and Rome, and Norwegian civil servants. Recently developed models of migration destination selection were used to analyse the interaction between individual aspirations and structural constraints. We found that the Eritrean informants remained highly motivated to apply in a second country but were to some extent held back by the DR. Supranational regulations were challenged by the migrants' actions and by national differences in reception and welfare standards. Both the migrants' aspirations to move on and the challenges to a harmonized regional regulation of migration increased during times of economic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Litigation concerning domestic restrictions on Holocaust denial has produced a 30-year-long jurisprudence of the European Court and European Commission of Human Rights. In spite of solemnly declared principles on free speech, the Strasbourg organs have progressively developed an exceptional regime in this regard based on the 'abuse clause' envisaged under Article 17. Had this detrimental treatment remained confined to its original sphere, it could have perhaps been considered as a negligible issue. However, the scope of the abuse clause was extended to encompass a growing class of utterances, including the denial of historical facts other than the Nazi genocide. This piece begins by examining the Strasbourg case law on Holocaust denial, with a view to enucleating the effects, scope and conditions of applicability of the special regime based upon Article 17. Once the shortcomings implied by this detrimental discipline have been exposed, it shall be argued that all expressions should be dealt with under the ordinary necessity test, in which the abuse clause ought to operate as an interpretative principle. In the alternative, and as a minimum, the Court should pay due regard to the political and social context of the country where restrictions on free speech were enforced, setting aside the uniquely harsh treatment reserved for Holocaust denial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of regional strategy has been imported from the field of strategic management without reflecting on its specificities. This paper offers a holistic approach, which integrates all the elements a regional strategy should take into account around three core questions regarding: the strategy objectives (‘what for?’); the strategic positioning and its bases (‘what?’); and the process of formulating the strategy (‘how?’ and ‘who?’). This framework is applied to identify and analyse the strategies developed in the Basque Country over the last 30 years. The Basque Country is of great interest as it epitomizes the experience of old industrialized European regions that were ravaged by the economic crisis of the 1970s and have since achieved a considerable economic success. It is also a good example of the dual process that has taken place in Europe, involving top-down decentralization and the transfer of powers from national to supranational institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International investment tribunals have not yet developed a coherent approach to the standard of review in relation to disputes involving the exercise of public power by host states. In particular, tribunals have generally not approached the question of deference to host state authorities in a principled manner. Some tribunals have employed strict standards of review, resulting in state liability in respect of measures adopted to promote public welfare. However, an increasing number of tribunal decisions show a measure of deference to host states. They have done so on the basis of two key factors: in recognition of the desirability of regulatory autonomy and host state authorities’ proximity to their populations, and by taking account of authorities’ greater institutional competence and expertise. This emerging approach to deference echoes the jurisprudence of other international and supranational courts and tribunals performing similar functions. Future investment tribunals should, cognizant of the desirability of deference in certain circumstances, exercise restraint in their assessment of matters that are more appropriately the province of national authorities. Such an approach would achieve a more balanced relationship between the protection of foreign investment and host state regulatory autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the regional integration process, analyzing the possibility of creating a supranational entity to transfer the decision-making power traditionally reserved for the State deserves attention. Natural gas has the essential characteristics to be the catalyst of regional energy integration as well as being a fuel-bridge to a possible energy transition to renewable fuels. Although natural gas is cleaner than other fossil fuels, and is cheaper and abundant in the region, the potential synergies that can flow from natural gas developments have not been exploited by South American countries. This paper aims to discuss the process of energy integration in South America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European Patent Office (EPO), the executive branch of the intergovernmental European Patent Organisation (EPOrg), enjoys considerable administrative autonomy. Its tacit policy-making practices have important effects on European patent integration. Considering agencification and the relationship between autonomy and control, and then epistemic communities and their role in policy-making, this paper explores the supranational autonomy of the EPO, and analyses the core mechanisms for the adjustment of substantive patent law to new technological fields. The analysis assesses how the biotechnology patent directive (98/44/EC) was transposed from the EU to the EPOrg system, and how synchronization between the EU and the EPO has occurred. After identifying various deficits in the democratic legitimacy and the accountability of the EPO system, some effects of this transposition on formal and substantive legitimacy issues are discussed. Finally, several normative and practical suggestions for a more comprehensive and accountable co-evolution of the European patent system are made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have argued that globalization involves the emergence of a global elite, who are attached more to supra-national identities than others, who remain more local. Two variants of the global elite can be found in the literature: cosmopolitan and capitalist. This literature suggests more broadly that cross-nationally stratification has a consistent influence on attitudes pertinent to globalization such as support for global economic institutions. Using a social stratification approach, we examined nine developed societies from the World Values Survey to test whether stratification is related to attitudes towards globalization, and find only modest support for the contention that the upper strata become more cosmopolitan and more capitalist, or in a word, more global. The evidence suggests that the attitudinal globalization of the upper strata in developed economies is temporary and does not occur simultaneously in all countries, and that it does not increase consistently over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the European integration process the two concepts of citizenship and of civil society have been introduced by the EU institutions and policy-makers in order to build support for the new supranational polity. However, the concepts have emerged at different moments in time and have been defined in such a way that they appear nearly exclusionary. Only during the recent constitutional debate has an attempt been made to make “European civil society” and “European citizenship” more complementary. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article argues that since 1997 the Labour governments have practised a European policy of 'utilitarian supranationalism'. Their strategy has been characterised by a preparedness to embrace European policy solutions in line with Labour's 1997 manifesto commitment to pursue a constructive diplomacy in the European Union (EU). This policy, it is argued, has led to a stronger British imprint on the character of the EU. However, this (upstream) stage of utilitarian supranationalism has been accompanied by efforts in the downstream stage to reduce the domestic electoral salience of the EU. Consequently, the government's diplomacy shows no sign of garnering additional domestic support for the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is the crown jewel of the world's most advanced international system for protecting civil and political liberties. In recent years, however, the ECtHR has become a victim of its own success. The Court now faces a docket crisis of massive proportions, the consequence of the growing number of states subject to its jurisdiction, its favourable public reputation, its expansive interpretations of individual liberties, a distrust of domestic judiciaries in some countries, and entrenched human rights problems in others. In response to this growing backlog of individual complaints, the Council of Europe has, over the last five years, considered numerous proposals to restructure the European human rights regime and redesign the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This article argues that these proposals should be understood not as ministerial changes in supranational judicial procedure, nor as resolving a debate over whether the ECtHR should strive for individual or constitutional justice, but rather as raising more fundamental questions concerning the Court's future identity. In particular, the article argues for recognition of 'embeddedness' in national legal systems as a deep structural principle of the ECHR, aprinciple that functions as a necessary counterpoint to the subsidiary doctrine that has animated the Convention since its founding. Embeddedness does not substitute ECtHR rulings for the decisions of national parliaments or domestic courts. Rather, it requires the Council of Europe and the Court to bolster the mechanisms for governments to remedy human rights violations at home, obviating the need for individuals to seek supranational relief and restoring countries to a position in which the ECtHR's deference to national decision-makers is appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue of measurement by undertaking a comparative evaluation of the measures of identity that have been deployed in the major, repeated comparative surveys of social and political attitudes since the early 1980s. The features of operationalization of national and related identities in mass public opinion includes the object of identification, the nature of the relationship between the respondent and the subject, the nature of the response demanded by the question, and the nature of the scale used in measuring the response. It indicates that the best available measure of identity at the national, subnational or supranational level is an identification question and a scale that rates the importance of the identification involved.

This article challenges the view, implicit in much current research on EU migration and asylum policy, that supranationalization is a self-evident antidote to the exclusionary and securitized migration policy that has been enacted through inter-governmental cooperation. It does so by treating supranationalization as an open question in need of empirical scrutiny. To develop this thesis, it undertakes not only a critique of the current developments towards supranational policies, but also of the inter-governmental policy-making system, pursuing a broad brush historical assessment up to and beyond Amsterdam, with the aim of bringing fresh and further insights into the future development of EU asylum policy. It concludes that the current aims are less to do with the establishment of a common European asylum system and more to do with reducing immigration pressure and compensating for the perceived losses of internal security in the wake of full freedom of movement inside the Union. Communitarization will not necessarily occur simply because the European Union is intent upon instituting ever stricter immigration controls. Communitarization is dogged by the legacy of intensive trans-governmentalism. In particular, the British, Danish and Irish governments have only been prepared to support communitarization so long as they could have separate protocols that legitimized their non-participation. The UK and Ireland have opted into all proposals on asylum, illegal migration and civil law but have opted out of practically all proposals concerning visas, borders, and legal migration. The securitarian frame still predominates and trans-governmentalism refuses to die. In January 2005, following the agreement on The Hague programme, there was change in decision-making rules from unanimous voting to Qualified Majority Vote (QMV) in the European Council and co-decision with the European Parliament. Yet, there is no guarantee this will bring about more liberal asylum rules, as is clear from the ‘Schengen Borders Code’ which was agreed in June 2005. This is because European migration policy has always been fraught with internal contradictions, which have yet to be resolved. Accordingly, the emergence of a rights-respecting model of asylum law based on the Geneva Convention 1951 remains a distant dream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union Qualification Directive is the first supranational instrument to seek to harmonize complementary protection (termed ‘subsidiary protection’ in the EU). Though it has shifted complementary protection beyond the realm of ad hoc domestic practices to a codified regime, it entrenches a protection hierarchy that unjustifiably differentiates between the rights and status accorded to Convention refugees vis-à-vis beneficiaries of subsidiary protection. This article traces the development of the Qualification Directive by examining preparatory documents and drafting records. It discusses changes to the categories of persons granted subsidiary protection as well as to the substantive rights attaching to that status. In particular, it criticizes the narrowing-down of originally-proposed categories of persons eligible for subsidiary protection, arguing that omitting to provide for known groups of extra-Convention refugees does not eliminate them, but simply creates new categories of unprotected persons. It also highlights the absence of any international legal basis on which to base distinctions between the rights granted to Convention refugees vis-à-vis beneficiaries of subsidiary protection. It concludes that the Qualification Directive represents a regional, political manifestation of the broader legal concept of complementary protection, and as such does not provide a model for emulation at the international level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the relationships among communications, international public opinion, and problems of international order and conflict. It begins by describing the historical role of communication in the definition of communities. It then extrapolates how global communications will play a similar role in the definition of supra-national entities which will structure the relations among nations. Hypotheses are derived which test how discourse conventions in international media provide clues to the relevant entities in the post-Cold War era. These hypotheses follow primarily from a theory of global opinion processes and the emergence of an international community (Rusciano et al. 1998); they are counterposed to Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ theory and the emergence of communities based upon primordial ties of ethnicity and religion (Huntington 1996). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolution of supranational institutions and empirical data on the democratic performance of governance networks in Great Britain and Europe. It outlines research strategies for democratic analysis that do not presuppose representative democracy. It is concluded that bureaucratic actors in the European Union and in subnational governance networks operate as political principals to a large extent, which in the representative democracy theory promote and in some cases determine public policy.

The author focuses on the growing system of supranational governance in Europe. He stresses the need for concerted action to address threats to peace, security and well-being worldwide. According to him, the concept of health impact assessment is one way of articulating the interconnected nature of both challenges and prosperity. He adds that the acceleration of European integration has been paralleled by an advancement of supranationalism throughout the world.

Behind the international political planning and rhetoric of future alliances and force design lie the very practical questions about who will volunteer for armed forces in the liberal democracies and whether or not they will display the expected traditional virtues. We know so little about the motivation of present servicemen and women, let alone of those we expect to join in the future. Military identity, however, has hitherto reflected national identity, which has assisted with unit cohesion, particularly among those who take the greatest personal risks. The author of this article assumes that within a generation there is a strong likelihood of mixed-nationality and multi-identity armed forces down to and within the smallest ‘unit’ of military power, the ten-man infantry section. There is another danger: these ‘specialists’ may develop the characteristics of mercenaries or militarists with extreme tendencies. The possibility of escalation from humanitarian intervention to intense military conflict is always present, even if the mission is one that starts off as benign. The credibility of military action and future effectiveness of force structures currently being planned are by no means assured. Missions that in theory should succeed may in practice fail spectacularly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]