Europe beyond laws and treaties: my co-editor Lennaert van Heumen (Radboud University Nijmegen) and I are very excited that our volume ‘The Informal Construction of Europe’ has been published with Routledge, as part of the UACES Contemporary European Studies series. Big thanks to our wonderful authors! Get it here: https://goo.gl/syHePH
Continue ReadingThis weekend (17-21 October), 300 young people from all over the world met at the ‘War or Peace’ Festival in Berlin, organised by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) and the Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin. 100 years after the end of World War One, the participants investigated in…
Continue ReadingThe academic association for Contemporary European Studies UACES and the Journal of Contemporary European Research (JCER) have announced the winners of this year’s Luke Foster Prize for the best article by an early-career researcher published in JCER. My article ‘Far Beyond the Treaties’ Clauses: The European Parliament’s Gain in Power,…
Continue ReadingThe global data collection project ‘Varieties of Democracy’ (V-Dem) has published a huge new dataset with data on the development of democracy in more than 200 countries worldwide, covering for the first time a period of over 200 years (1789-2017). This is also the first dataset to which I contributed…
Continue ReadingThis article examines the inner unity of the European Parliament’s (EP) party groups prior to its first direct elections in 1979, at a time when such unity was technically not necessary, given the EP’s dominantly consultative role, according to the Treaties; and when no electoral incentives and few disciplinary tools…
Continue ReadingOur Second Annual Graduate Conference on the History of European Integration will take place on 10-12 September 2018 at the European University Institute in Florence. You can submit an abstract until 31 March 2018. The Annual Graduate Conference on the History of European Integration is a joint initiative between the…
Continue ReadingNow it is official: I am very happy to take over the roll as country coordinator on Luxembourg at the great data collection project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), which aims to provide a new approach to conceptualising and measuring democracy worldwide. It compiles “a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects…
Continue ReadingBig step for our project on ‘The Informal Construction of Europe’: today, my co-editor Lennaert van Heumen and I signed a contract with Routledge for an edited volume. Our authors are working on their contributions concerning ideas, actors and procedures which had an impact on European integration through informal processes.…
Continue ReadingThis special issue, which I guest-edited with Prof. David Howarth, introduces the concept of ‘activism’ to the study of EU supranational institutions and their role in EU policy making and European integration. While long present in studies of the European Court of Justice, ‘activism’ has rarely been examined systematically in…
Continue ReadingThis post draws comparisons between the socioeconomic situation the EU faced in the 1970s with that of today. Both periods followed extreme economic crises and were defined by rapid technological transformation. Looking to the past as a guide, the article argues that there is a potential for today’s socioeconomic crisis…
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