Modes of external governance: a cross-national and crosssectoral comparison

Contrary to the wide majority of studies that try to characterise EU external governance by looking at the macro structures of association relations, our comparative analysis shows that overarching foreign policy initiatives such as the EEA, Swiss-EU Bilateralism or the ENP have little impact on the modes how the EU seeks to expand its policy boundaries in individual sectors. In contrast, modes of external governance follow sectoral dynamics which are astonishingly stable across countries. These findings highlight the importance of institutional path-dependencies in projecting governance modes from the internal to the external constellation, and question the capacity to steer these functionalist patterns of external governance through rationally planned foreign policy initiatives

Energy Governance: EU-Russia Gas Exchanges

International audienc

Accounting for the dominance of control : inter-party dynamics and restrictive asylum policy in contemporary Britain

This paper charts the development of restrictive asylum policy since New Labour came into power in 1997, and assesses party political responses to asylum during this period. It considers how far a discourse of control has become dominant across the political spectrum over recent years, and develops an account of the flourishing of restrictive asylum policy in contemporary Britain. In so doing, the paper challenges conventional interpretations that perceive restrictive policies to be a direct result of rising numbers of asylum applications and ‘abuse’ of the asylum system. It also challenges interpretations that perceive restrictive policies to result directly from popular pressures to intensify controls. Instead, the paper argues that restrictive policy is conditioned by inter-party dynamics, which need to be understood in relation to a wider discourse of control. This discourse of control, the paper suggests, has become increasingly dominant both in political and also in public or popular discourse, and is evident both at the domestic as well as the European levels

Beyond design: the evolution of Europol and Eurojust

Prominently figuring in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, the European Police Office (Europol) and the European Union's Judicial Cooperation Unit (Eurojust) are tasked with facilitating the exchange of information and providing support to the EU member states in coordinating operational activities. This article investigates the evolution of these agencies, focusing on their actual autonomy, the extent to which they have been able to harness and expand upon the powers granted by formal design, as well as the accountability arrangements in place to hold them in check and ongoing practices in this regard. It shows that, for a long time, Europol and Eurojust have developed in different ways, both with regard to autonomy and accountability, and that the relationship between these phenomena has been anything but straightforward. Moreover, it demonstrates that design has been a necessary but not a sufficient condition for both agencies' evolution, thus putting recent formal-legal changes to the agencies' design (most notably Europol becoming a full-fledged agency) into perspective