Historical-institutionalist perspectives on the development of the EU budget system

The EU budget has only recently started to feature in theories of European integration. Studies typically adopt a historical-institutionalist framework, exploring notions such as path dependency. They have, however, generally been rather aggregated, or coarse-grained, in their approach. The EU budget has thus been treated as a single entity rather than a series of inter-linked institutions. This paper seeks to address these lacunae by adopting a fine-grained approach. This enables us to emphasize the connections that exist between EU budgetary institutions, in both time and space. We show that the initial set of budgetary institutions was unable, over time, to achieve consistently their treaty-based objectives. In response, rather than reform these institutions at potentially high political cost, additional institutions were layered on top of the extant structures. We thus demonstrate how some EU budgetary institutions have remained unchanged, whilst others have been added or changed over time

The EU and Central and Eastern Europe: the absence of inter-regionalism

In contrast to its relations with many other areas of the world, the EU's relations with Central and Eastern Europe are not 'interregional'. The EU has developed intensive bilateral relations with the Central and East European countries, which has allowed it to use economic and political conditionality to encourage them to undertake reforms — and successfully so. It has promoted sub-regional cooperation, but not consistently or extensively, and strong sub-regional groupings have not evolved in Central and Eastern Europe. The 'big-bang' enlargement of 2004 extended the EU's regional model to much of the European continent, but is not an example of interregionalism. The shadow of enlargement has also created considerable challenges for the EU in its relations with its new neighbours

Dynamics and Countervailing Pressures of Visa, Asylum and Immigration Policy Treaty Revision: Explaining Change and Stagnation from the Amsterdam IGC to the IGC of 2003-04

The objective of this article is to account for the varying, and sometimes puzzling, outcomes of the past three Treaty revisions of EU/EC visa, asylum and immigration policy. The article focuses on decision rules and the institutional set-up of these policies, subjecting the results of the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations leading to the Treaties of Amsterdam and Nice and the Constitutional Treaty to causal analysis. The article maintains that four factors can explain the various Treaty outcomes: (i) functional pressures; (ii) the role of supranational institutions; (iii) socialization, deliberation and learning processes; and (iv) countervailing forces. Copyright (c) 2008 The Author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.