The corona recovery fund, now formally known as Next Generation EU, has been the European Union’s (EU) most important response to the economic and social damages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Unprecedently, the 27 member states entrusted the European Commission to borrow €750 billion and to allocate the money – in large parts in the […]

Who sets the European Union’s policy agenda? The complex nature of the EU’s legislative process, combined with the lack of a clear hierarchy among the core EU institutions, means that it is hard to disentangle the policy contributions of different institutions and determine which one is ultimately responsible for the legislative priorities of the Union. […]

Theresa May and the shaping of the Brexit process With the provisional entry into force of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), the dust is far from settled on the Brexit process. And yet the culmination of the formal stages of talks on the terms of withdrawal and the future relationship – however ‘thin’ […]

The eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis proved to be one of the most challenging tasks European policy makers had to face. Political-ideological, democratic, institutional and other constraints prevented the euro area governments from putting an abrupt end to it simply by increasing integration into the fiscal area. Instead, policy makers decided to “borrow” a crisis management […]

The negotiations and implementation of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union (EU) and the 79 countries forming the Organisation of the African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) – a group of developing countries largely sharing a colonial past with EU members – were conflict-ridden from the beginning. Transforming a decades-long system of […]

In the world economy, the European Union (EU) is often portrayed as a ‘market power’, able to leverage the large size of its internal market and its considerable regulatory capacity to influence international trade negotiations and shape global market regulation. Moreover, the EU often favours stringent regulation for products and production processes. In finance, after […]

Analyses of EU transparency traditionally focus on its legal development with little attention to informality. In such accounts, the Council of the EU is routinely understood as an obstructionist force blocking the expansion of transparency, only to be strong-armed into concessions by external pressure. However, in the Environment Council, a formation of the Council of […]