EU law has known coordination since its beginnings. A careful study of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (in the following: Treaty or TFEU; see Official Journal No C 326 from 26 October 2012, pp. 0001– 0390) and numerous secondary law acts results in a variety of Member States’ obligations in connection with coordination. Through the years, relevant secondary legislation has been issued. In recent years, EU legislature has established new rules in sensitive – from Member States’ point of view – areas of national budget law. The coordination of budgetary policies constitutes both a new and a crucial instrument. Over the years, first the Contracting States and then EU legislature established tens of obligations to consult EU institutions on national draft laws. These mechanisms assume increasing importance. This very remarkable and at the same time under-discussed category deserves its own legal terms and definitions. The current article reviews legal uncertainties resulting from the application of procedural rules, suggests solutions, and coins new terms such as hybrid legislative procedures (Section 2) and effet utile du contrôle préventif (Section 3) that are crucial for a new dogmatic approach regarding the obligations to consult. Because national and EU legislative procedures overlap in the case of obligations to consult, many mistakes may occur at any stage. Current research tries to determine the consequences of violations of obligations to consult EU institutions on national legislative procedures (Section 4). In this respect, it deals with the settled case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereinafter: Court or CJEU). The current article argues that the control of EU institutions over national law drafts is preventive and that the violation of a procedural obligation to consult can thus have only an indicative effect with regard to internal market disruption. New barriers to the internal market should not arise with the coming into force of a new law. This article introduces a new dogmatic approach towards obligations to consult, with the aim of avoiding legal uncertainty for national legislatures and practitioners.

The fear of refugees and migrants that has flooded Europe in the last few years emphasises the threat posed to contemporary European culture by the supposedly radically different Islamic culture. However, the roots of European Islamophobia reach far beyond that, all the way back to the Crusades; while Central and parts of Eastern Europe have mostly been feeding these roots with memories of Ottoman invasions. After inspecting these roots, this article sheds light on the irrefutable Christian sources of European culture, but also exposes other influences without which the culture would not exist today – especially the antecedent Greco-Roman antiquity, and the subsequent Renaissance, Humanism and Enlightenment. This outlines modern European and Western culture, characterised mainly by secularity, which is the precondition for religious freedom of non-Christian, alternative, and ‘non-native’ religions as well. This article emphasises that it would be difficult to include Islam amongst these latter religions since it has been an important contribution to the shaping of European culture for centuries. The old antagonisms between European and Islamic cultures therefore do not stem from their irreconcilable differences but from their resemblances – in other words: in the West, we are not afraid of Muslims because they are so radically different but because they are strikingly similar. The real threat to European and Western culture is therefore not Muslim migrants but a demagogic fuelling of the fears of the supposed Islamic threat.

Has the eurozone (EZ) really gained from integration? This study applied two econometric frameworks, mGARCH and gMMPI, to test this hypothesis, using panel data that span 1996–2014, a total of 19 years, involving the EZ, EU, G8, G20 and some emerging economies. The empirical outcomes initially showed that the EZ economies experienced neither superior output growth nor a better capital market return than non-EZ economies or the pre-EZ period. They further suggested that each EZ country had a higher degree of risk bearing and, as a group, a greater risk linkage. Moreover, the results indicated that the EZ had a higher productivity gain if the risk premium was counted as part of productivity. Nonetheless, the EZ did not show a substantial productivity gain when the effect of the risk factor was controlled. The ratio of risk bearing to risk premium gain was shown to be 1 to 0.97. The general conclusion is that, other than the risk premium, there was no extra productivity gain for the EZ from taking the risk.

We explain why and how the governing parties, AKP of Turkey and PT of Brazil, converged on the same path of relying on the poor as the main strategy to stay in power. With the neoliberal reorganization and internationalization of their economies, the capacity of these governments to set up developmentalist alliances with big capital, the middle classes and the organized working classes was weakened. Based on a most-different-systems design and on descriptive statistical analysis, we argue that both PT and AKP failed to build multi-class bases and thus had to mobilize the poor by using various strategies, most importantly expanding social assistance policies, which accelerated the emergence of a new welfare state.