An in-depth case study of the evolution of one of the most important EU's institutions.

This title examines the nature and functions of the EU Commission and analyses how it is has evolved from an international organisation to a political executive and the way in which executive relationships have been 'normalised'.

Against the backdrop of combating the financial and economic crisis in the European Union for the past decade, this volume strives to explore the manifold impacts the prevailing crisis management has on the further alignment of European Integration. The efforts targeted at overcoming the financial and economic crisis evoked far-reaching consequences on the societal, economic, and political level within European member states, which in turn challenge the institutional alignment, democratic legitimacy and economic coherence of the European Union. Taking into account current developments in the EU, the contributions presented in this volume focus on the ‘fault lines’ in the integration process, i.e. questions of policy coherence, democratic accountability, financialization, militarization, migration, gendered social and economic asymmetries as well as the rise of populist and extreme right-wing parties. The volume focuses on how these different developments come together by relating aspects of transdisciplinary research to uncover the fault lines in the European integration project in the subsequent chapters. ContentEconomic and Democratic Governance • Right Wing Populism and Right Extreme Parties • Financialization and Militarization • Social Exclusion, Welfare and Migration Policies EditorsProf. (FH) Dr. Stefanie Wöhl, University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna. Prof. (FH) Dr. Elisabeth Springler, University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna. Mag. Martin Pachel, University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna. Dr. Bernhard Zeilinger, University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna.

This article contributes to the research on the normalization of European Union (EU) studies by presenting an analysis and assessment of the EU-US comparative literature. Using an original and comprehensive data set of 104 publications, it shows not only that these comparisons have grown considerably since the early 1990s, but also and more interestingly that EU-US scholarship itself has increasingly conformed to mainstream political science by becoming more diverse, causal in nature and empirically inclusive. Unlike other accounts of normalization, however, it is argued here that these transformations are only partly desirable, and that a better direction for the future is to develop EU-US research as a distinct programme within EU studies, centred on a 'dual mission' - theoretical and empirical - that accepts political science's scope and explanatory objectives, but at the same time sees the two cases as worthy of being studied in isolation owing to their importance and the political value of their comparison.

This book is the result of the PhD project I started four years ago at Europa-Kolleg Hamburg. I had the great opportunity to work on it for one year at the European University Institute in Florence and to finalise the oeuvre during my stay with the European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies in Seville. The subject matter of the book is intellectual property rights, patents in particular, and their process of harmonisation in Europe. At the beginning of the work, the intention was not to focus immediately on one narrow field in the huge realm of intellectual property rights but rather to open my mind in order to capture a broad variety of new ideas and concepts in the book. The work at three different institutes in three different European countries over the period of four years naturally exposed the work to diverging ideas and the exchange of views with many people. This is one reason for the wide spread of topics ordered around the given leitmotif, such as epistemological foundations, political background information,. the protection of biotechnological inventions and the building up process of intellectual property right systems in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In chapter two I take up Polanyi's differentiation of codifiable and tacit knowledge. Applying these concepts to my own work I realise that this book is only the visible and codified part of knowledge I was able to capture.

Drawing on up-to-date sources, both academic and journalistic, this book sets out to explain what the European Commission does, how it does it, and why.

A guide for constructing and using composite indicators for policy makers, academics, the media and other interested parties. In particular, this handbook is concerned with indicators which compare and rank country performance.