Nowadays China and EU share close investment relations. However, concerns have been raised over FDIs (Foreign Direct Investments) aimed at sensitive sectors, especially those from Chinese state-owned companies. In light of this, the European Commission in late 2017 proposed a FDI Screening Regulation. This proposal contains certain features, including cooperation mechanisms between Member States and the Commission to notify and give comments on FDIs, direct monitoring of FDIs by the Commission on the grounds of Union interests, and the illustration of instances to be considered when screening FDIs. However, the success of this proposal is in doubt. Its fate regarding being adopted as law through the EU’s legislative process is uncertain, due to the Member States’ divided attitude towards FDI screening. Its provision contains a lethal loophole, undermining the cooperation and exchange of information between the Member States and the Commission. The non-binding nature of the opinions and comments addressed to the FDI receiving Member State renders the mechanisms practically unenforceable. To establish an effective FDI screening framework for the EU, this proposal needs to be revised and amended.

The studies of human behaviour that foreground the explanatory role of exogenously given incentives and constraints give short shrift to the role of agency, or the behaviour(s) of actors, in attempting to shed light on both policy and behaviour. This article reverses the emphasis – with the example of ethnic politics in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia with respect to the preservation and/or erection of German-language and Slovenian-language inscriptions – by arguing that the behavioural strategies of vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, such as national minorities, can carry significant political consequences – and thus are worthy of study. Specifically, the article looks into a politics of consensus and a politics of (political) realism, as the latter are advocated by Carinthian Slovenes in Austria. The findings serve as a wake-up call for West European states in particular, which, arguably, have grown complacent about their own minority rights records.

This article paper aims to investigate the EU’s strategic partners using both theoretical and empirical analysis. Applying the technique of cluster analysis has allowed us, first, to demonstrate that not all of the EU’s ‘special ten’ are strategically sound for the EU; second, to investigate which regional organizations represent the best interest of the EU from a strategic standpoint; third, to find out the true potential of the EU’s strategic partners; and, finally, to prove empirically that the EU’s strategic partners are so heterogeneous as to represent a collective response to multilateralism and that a bilateral approach should be applied instead, taking into consideration the specific character of every strategic partner.

The main question this article seeks to answer is: who governs who within the EU? To provide an answer, we will analyse the relationship between national sovereignty and the ability to exercise independent economic policy within the EMU, as well as re-examine the development of this relationship regarding the process of European integration. This research offers a complementary study to understand better the relationship between European integration and national sovereignty.

This article studies the different scenarios for the fiscal union in the Eurozone beyond 2019. It explains the different alternatives that the literature has explored to ensure fiscal transfers within Eurozone states as well as for common debt issuance. It also describes the role that monetary policy has played as a backstop for sovereign defaults and highlights the limits that inflation and an anti-euro backlash impose on public debt sustainability.

The introduction of the euro has led to three dominant currencies in the financial markets, namely the euro, dollar and yen. The use of the euro as the single currency is a key element for economic and political unification in the EU (European Union). While some of the criteria for achieving monetary integration between the European Monetary Union (EMU) member countries in the euro area have been satisfied, some problems still remain. As the euro is not the currency of a single country like the dollar, the dollar still retains its dominant position in the international markets. After the Brexit referendum, apprehension regarding the collapse of the EU has reached a peak. Originally introduced in 12 EU member countries, and since extended to 19, the euro may potentially embrace 27 member countries. In this study, the economic impacts of the euro on the per capita income, inflation rate and foreign direct investment are analysed. The analysis will be performed on three countries participating in the EMU, namely, Germany, France and Italy.

In this article, we develop a framework for a comparative analysis of policy-making in the EU pre- and post-accession CEE countries (CEECs) in order to create generalized knowledge in some particular areas, such as quality infrastructure (QI). In order to find how public policy-makers perceive QI, we employ a triangulation methodology. The results show that policy-makers are not fully familiar with national QI concepts and seldom rely on experts’ opinion. Moreover, QI legislation is uncritically transferred from the EU.

Every year, Gallup Inc. surveys the societal relationships that EU countries have with the USA, Germany, Russia and the PRC as well as the EU itself. The respondents furnish information on Europeans’ views regarding designated international political entities as international community leaders. This article examines the attitude of the European Union’s citizens to the above indicated potential and real leaderships in 2014–2016.

This article explores the integration of the European Union (EU) as an institution after the 2015–2016 migrant crisis. Qualitative data from elite interviews in Brussels and policy analysis, in the framework of a bigger project about the impact of the migrant crisis on European integration, highlight EU learning about new integration modes as a key theme following the crisis. The article focuses on this theme and argues that EU integration has been happening through intensive learning after the migrant crisis, whereby the EU has been exploring a combination of certain integration modes: shaping the relationships with candidate countries by restraining from enlargement; shaping the relationships with (prospectively) exiting Member States by considering fuzziness at the borders; and exploring differentiation among the existing Member States, possibly through promoting a two-tier EU, instead of universal deepening. A key contribution lies in applying the notion ‘learning’ to understanding EU integration modes specifically after the migrant crisis.

This article was inspired by Atkinson and Brandolini’s work on the economic middle classes and deals with the evolution of the income share of the middle class compared with that of the extreme classes in the EU-15 (the EU’s first 15 member states) over the last two decades. Our research draws on the paradox of the EU officially assuming dominant ideas about rising inequalities and the squeezing of middle-class income produced by globalization and technological change while at the same time producing and disseminating empirical evidence contrary to this view. We first synthesize this evidence, also contributing some additional analyses of Eurostat data, confirming that the income share of the middle class has not changed in the past two decades, as could be expected from the invariance in income inequality. We finally put forward some considerations about the theoretical implications of these empirical results and the interaction between ideas and empirical evidence in political societies and organizations.

Since the establishment of the European Union, Member States do not have true free reign over their legislative activity. The influence from ‘Brussels’ on new national laws has become stronger with the passage of time. Over the years, the Contracting States and the Union legislature have established more and more obligations referring to national legislatures. The most common are the well-known duties to transpose directives into national law. These EU legal acts contain substantive law, rights and/or obligations for individuals, and thus encompass material provisions that can be subject to a transposition process. However, this is not the only way to influence national legal orders. There are also procedural obligations in EU law that do not contain any substantive requirements that national laws ought to foresee. This article deals with the kind of formal obligations that compel Member States to consult EU institutions on draft laws during their national legislative procedures (hereinafter: obligations to consult). These obligations are of a procedural nature, with the outcome of the consultation procedure resulting in substantive law. EU law has always contained provisions like the obligations of Member States to consult EU institutions on their own national legislative procedures. In this regard, EU law shapes national legislative procedures, and the EU institutions influence substantive national law. EU institutions have expertise concerning the impact of new national laws on the internal market, which they can estimate on a Europe-wide scale. A single Member State or its institutions cannot examine the effects of national law on other Member States’ legal orders or on Europe as a whole. That is why it is dependent on the know-how of EU institutions. Their expertise and ability to assess the Europe-wide effect of national law makes up the background of the great impact of those institutions on national draft laws. This article analyses the impact and possible consequences of a Member State’s violations of obligations to consult. It introduces new terms, such as obligations to consult EU institutions on national draft laws and the consultation act, that are necessary in order to reflect the great importance of this category. General comments on obligations to consult refer also to the new mechanism introduced by the Two-Pack Regulation.