The European Citizens' Initiative: A First Assessment

Designed in order to enable the effective use of this new instrument and to guarantee equal access

The external action paradox of the Lisbon treaty: reconciling integration with delimitation

Ever since its creation the CFSP constituted a deliberately separate category of EU cooperation. The Lisbon Treaty largely undoes this and takes a significant leap towards integrating the CFSP and former Community elements in a streamlined external action system. It abolishes the pillar structure, accords a single legal personality to the Union and puts in place a common external action framework governed by a single set of principles and objectives. Yet, at the same time the CFSP remains overtly separate from the other external competences and is still governed by specific rules and procedures. This concurrent emphasis on integration and delimitation places the Union for a genuine paradox that may put the accountability of the Lisbon Treaty’s institutional novelties significantly to the test and force the EU judiciary as well as policy-makers to look for creative ways of adjudicating on and conducting external policy

The Treaty of Lisbon: A Second Look at the Institutional Innovations

This book examines the institutional innovations that are gradually being introduced as a result of the Treaty of Lisbon

The Proposal of Allocation of Seats in the European Parliament – The Shifted Root

AbstractThe issue of allocation of seats in the European Parliament among the Member States of the EU has been the subject of several studies and proposals of algorithms of allocation. The rejection by the Parliament of the Cambridge Compromise means that the issue is still pertinent. This article presents a new method of forming the composition of the EP based on the well-known algorithms of Pukelsheim and Ramirez, called the shifted root. The composition of the Parliament obtained with the use of this method is also given, followed by a discussion of the results

The European external action service: an opportunity to reconcile development and security policies or a new battleground for inter-institutional turf wars?

“There cannot be sustainable development without peace and security, and without development and poverty eradication there will be no sustainable peace”. The commitment to intertwine development and security policies of both the European Union and the Member States has increasingly been put forward in policy documents since the early 2000s. While the security-development nexus seems at first sight obvious and rather unremarkable, it has nonetheless become one of the main trouble spots of inter-institutional coherence in EU external action. The fuzzy boundaries between both policy domains and their impact on the distribution of competences turned the implementation of the nexus into a particularly complex and tense exercise. The rationale behind many of the Lisbon Treaty innovations is to address coherence issues by reducing the potential for conflict to a minimum. This paper focuses on the European External Action Service (EEAS) and analyses to what extent it could contribute to reconciling the distinct policies, strategies and institutional cultures of development cooperation and Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The new diplomatic service constitutes a functionally autonomous body with considerable policy discretion regarding both CFSP and development cooperation. Moreover, it assembles staff and resources from the Council, the Commission and the Member States that previously stood in sharp competition. Yet, the author argues that this integration has only been partial and without the necessary political will, the EEAS might become a new battleground for continued inter-institutional turf wars and thus undermine the EU’s international credibility

The allocation between EU member states of seats in the European Parliament

This note contains the recommendation for a mathematical basis for the apportionment of the seats in the European Parliament between the Member States of the European Union. This is the unanimous recommendation of the Participants in the Cambridge Apportionment Meeting, held at the instigation of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, on 28–29 January 2011

Council Decision Rules and European Union Constitutional Design

In the recent past, the choice of adequate voting weights and decision rules for the Council of the European Union (EU) has been a highly contested issue in EU intergovernmental negotiations. In general terms, the selection of a threshold for qualified majority votes (QMV) in the Council constitutes a trade-off in terms of decreased sovereignty for individual governments versus an increased collective ‘capacity to act’. This paper compares the effects of the proposal tabled by the Convention on the Future of Europe with the Nice Treaty provisions and the Lisbon Treaty, in terms of both the efficiency of decision-making and the distribution of relative voting power within the EU of twenty-seven member states. In addition, the paper shows how with the current size of EU membership, the EU risks being unable to reach intergovernmental agreement. Accordingly, a challenging issue for the future of the EU is to move towards reasonable provisions that allow its own constitution – if ever adopted – to get amended.Council of the European Union, decision rules, constitutional design, capacity to act, power indices

Information Guide: European Parliament

A guide to the European Parliament, with hyperlinks to sources of information within European Sources Online and on external websites