The European Union (EU) is a voluntary organisation based on the Treaties which have been democratically approved by the Member States (MSs). The MSs have willingly committed themselves to progressive integration by eliminating barriers to fundamental freedoms in order to build an ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. However, in order to address other strong conflicting interests and commitments at the national level, the governments of the MSs have raised barriers to fundamental freedoms called Golden Shares (GSs). Due to conflicts of supranational and national interests, the MSs have resisted removing GSs, so the matter has been brought to the highest legal authority of the EU – the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The CJEU has assessed the compatibility of GSs with EU law on a total of sixteen occasions, which has resulted in fifteen condemning judgments. Following the Court’s ruling, the MSs are obliged to comply, as non-compliance with a judgment is a serious infringement which signifies that the MSs are crossing the red line by severely disregarding the limits of their discretion under their voluntarily supranational commitments. Despite the significant compliance obligations and the growing GS case-law, little is known about whether the EU enforcement system succeeds in ensuring timely and effective compliance with GS-related judgments. This study seeks to close this gap. It evaluates national post-judgment compliance procedures in order to demonstrate how and under what conditions MSs comply and whether a decision to keep GSs post-judgment could be seen as an unsuitable compliance strategy leading to non-compliance. This study is a fact-finding mission aimed at solving the empirical puzzle about whether the MSs deliberately resort to post-judgment actions and strategies aimed at limiting or containing the effects of the GS rulings. It seeks to reveal whether such a compliance strategy is in line with supranational obligations or whether it could trigger obstructionist protectionism.

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The Court of Justice of the European Communities produces a multilingual jurisprudence, consisting primarily of collegiate judgments drafted by jurists in a language that is generally not their mother tongue. That jurisprudence undergoes many pennutations of translation into and out of up to 20 different languages and is - necessarily shaped by the dynamics within the Court and by the linguistic cultural compromises at play in the production process. The, main difficulty in the production of that multilingual jurisprudence is reconciling the notions of 'law' and 'translation'. The Court aims to produce statements of law that can be understood in exactly the same way in every language in which they are published. That aim does not sit easily with translation theory, which claims that the act of translation is an approximation. The actors at the heart of the dilemma are the Court's lawyer-linguists, whose job it is to translate the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice into all of the official languages of the EU. The result of their efforts and struggle to reconcile the two sets of nonns (of translation and law) is a compromise, the existence of which is widely acknowledged and widely accepted within the small legal community of the Court. It is precisely because everyone in this community is aware of that compromise that the institution is actually able to function. The present thesis is a detailed study of the process behind the production of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice and the role of language and translation in that process. The multilingual nature of that jurisprudence has implications for the development of EU law, and the approximation inherent in the production and translation of such jurisprudence is illustrative of the limitations of a multilingual legal system. The thesis makes explicit that which the majority of actors at the Court, and indeed at the EU level in general, already know - that EU law is a multicultural, multilingual construct which functions by way of approximation, and that its continued effectiveness is dependent upon its hybrid nature.

The thesis analyses the development of the concept of flexible integration in the 1996-97 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) of the European Union (EU) and outlines an array of ideas, interests and issues at stake for the actors in the negotiations. The thesis has two objectives: (1) to explain the 1996-97 IGC process of negotiation which led to the institutionalisation of flexible integration in the Amsterdam Treaty and (2) to analyse the substance of the flexibility debate from the early 1970s to the present day. The research aims to show that flexibility comes to the fore whenever at least one of the following five issues is debated on the European level: (1) economic and monetary union, (2) free movement, (3) defence, (4) enlargement and (5) the exclusion of recalcitrant member states. The 1996-97 IGC was exceptional in that it met all the five criteria which have a tendency to trigger the flexibility debate. The thesis has three basic lines of argumentation. The first relates to the ICC process, the argument being that the 1996-97 IGC negotiations on flexibility were m incremental learning process where the basic positions of the member governments illustrated some continuity, but the specific positions of the negotiators fluctuated with the dynamics of the negotiations. The second line of argumentation relates to the concept of flexibility itself (substance), the argument being that one of the main difficulties with the flexibility negotiations was that flexibility meant different things to different people. Member governments did not necessarily agree about its purpose. The final strand of argumentation relates to the key players in the flexibility debate. Although all member states, large and small, played an important role in the IGC process, the most influential actors in the 1996-97 IGC were the civil servants of the respective Presidencies and the Council Secretariat.

This thesis argues that European Union law can serve as an instrument for the extension of the values of justice beyond the nation state. Approaching the question of justice from this perspective, however, presupposes three things: it challenges us to think beyond the contractarian reflex that equates justice with political self-determination by a demos; it demands that we allocate legal authority between the national and European level in accordance with their respective capacity to 'do' justice; and it requires that we construct transnational ideas of solidarity that integrate the different elements into a single, coherent, ethics of justice. This thesis offers all three. It argues that the ethics of justice that is emerging in the European Union focuses on allowing its citizens to live a 'good life', which both requires access to the positive entitlements that emerge from the national welfare states and depends on the capacity of the free movement rights to enlarge the range of available choices for citizens in deciding how to live that life. The stability of this tiered conception of justice, however, presupposes the careful incorporation of the normative assumptions that bind and connect individual citizens in Europe within the reciprocal structures that sustain the national welfare state. This thesis suggests that transnational solidarity can serve as a device for such incorporation. The first part describes a theory of transnational solidarity that distinguishes between the rights that Union citizens accrue under market solidarity, communitarian solidarity, and aspirational solidarity. The bulk of the thesis offers a critical in-depth comparative analysis of the incorporation of the demands of transnational solidarity by the Union legislator and the Court of Justice within the particular context of healthcare, education, social security and social assistance, and labour law.

Examining the case law of the ECJ reveals that the multilingual nature of the EU presents numerous problems, such as the relative rather than absolute equality of languages, and translation errors that lead to non-uniform law due to the impossibility of perfect translation. This directly limits the application of the legal certainty aspect of the Rule of Law, thus putting into question the EU’s democratic viability. Democracy is dependent on communication opportunity, something which the Union is lacking due to its multilingual nature. To solve these legitimacy problems created by the EU’s multilingual nature, it is necessary to understand the force of language as a concept in its own right. Western linguistic theory tells us that each language encodes a particular experience of the world and that its use might predispose its speakers to see the world according to the experience encoded in it. Not only this, but that language holds such power due to the significant role of a common language collective identity formation. In order to solve, or at least mitigate the democratic legitimacy issues which arise due to the EU’s multilingual nature, we must forge a European identity which is not dependant on the feature of a common language. Accepted beliefs and archetypes of identity are deconstructed and then reconstructed in a way which uses alternate features which allow for democratic participation without the precondition of a common language. Rather than trying to solve the language problem with a language solution (as has been done before), this thus provides new and original theoretical solutions to a practical language problem by suggesting that it can be overcome if we redefine our accepted notions of identity in the post-national sense and look at the problem through a wider lens.

Over the last two decades the shape of the European public administration has changed considerably; the EU has become much more strongly involved in the regulation of very dynamic and fluid market activities. One of the consequences of that has been an increasing reliance on EU regulatory agencies to perform the novel administrative tasks. While agencies can be beneficial for the EU, they also generate new problems. In particular, these bodies have limited resources and have to rely on (national and sector) external capacities to a significant extent. There is a risk here that if the important issues are mainly capacity-related and „liquid‟, it will be very difficult to ensure „checks and balances‟ in these institutional systems. The thesis examines this through case-studies (EU regulatory agencies) in medicines, chemicals, financial services and aviation. It finds that the problems in each EU agency are different and unpredictable. In such a context, having more external and static controls on the agencies will hardly improve things. An alternative „framework‟ (that of fluid administrative law) should be considered to deal with the challenges of the new administrative state. It promotes constant administrative law principles (internal process, external justification, commitment to pluralism and policy effectiveness) to coordinate the operation of the agencies, and offers institutional tools for the dynamic application of such principles. As the „solutions‟ for each agency should have to vary, the review of these bodies (which usually occurs every three years) could be used to address the required heterogeneity of the controls. In order to make the best use of that exercise, the creation of a new European agency to review the regulatory agencies and make proposals for each of them (according to the fluid law principles) might be envisioned.

Turkey’s European Union (EU) membership aspirations form a critical junction on the road to further European integration. During the past decade, the role of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) as facilitators of the accession process has grown exponentially in relevance. In Turkey’s case, specific policies have emerged to support this element of the pre-accession process. By targeting NGOs, these policies aim to Europeanise and democratise Turkish civil society and in so doing prepare Turkey for eventual EU accession. This logic draws on the liberal democratic tradition that anticipates democratisation to be a key outcome of NGO support. The thesis questions the appropriateness of such assumptions, since Turkish NGOs respond to EU policy in a variety of locally meaningful ways that may circumvent the stated policy outcomes. The wider the gap between policy and reality, the more space there is for NGOs to exercise their agency, and more uncertain the Europeanisation processes become. The thesis starts out by juxtaposing the European and Turkish perspectives in turn. The EU approach suggests that NGOs behave similarly across different cultural contexts and can be called upon to perform a variety of roles deemed useful for the overall policy process. However, civil society in Turkey has developed along a different trajectory, fostering NGOs that are highly politicised in their activities and cultivating social debates that are essentialist rather than compromising in nature. The latter part of the thesis explores different aspects of this disconnect. The relationships NGOs construct with each other and with governmental bodies are politicised and lack the culture of cooperation expected by EU policy. NGOs exhibit different reactions to EU funding: some embrace it while others pursue it unsuccessfully and grow resentful, or even reject any external funding outright. These differences lead NGOs to generate a variety of survival strategies that minimise the impact of EU policy on changing NGO behaviour where the change is unwelcome by the NGO, or maximise the impact where NGO and EU interests are mutually advanced. The thesis examines how the Europeanisation of Turkish civil society unfolds through a policy process that both affects and is shaped by NGO actors, where the eventual outcomes of EU policy remain uncertain.

The degree to which European Union (EU) policy-making is representative of citizens’ preferences is a central contested issue in the debate over the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’. Previous studies have demonstrated that in many cases political representatives share their voters’ attitudes to the EU. However, this research has rarely considered the substance of actual legislative policy-making in the EU institutions. Scrutinising the popular image that EU policy-making is unresponsive to public demands, the thesis investigates EU-level representation along the ‘domestic route’, on which citizens’ preferences intrude policymaking through their national governments in the Council of the EU. Using a range of original and existing datasets, the four papers investigate three classic assessment criteria of representation (mandate fulfilment, responsiveness, congruence) with methods ranging from mixed effects regressions to quantitative text analysis. Three central findings emerge: first, national governments are responsive to their domestic public opinion when negotiating and voting on legislative acts in the EU. Regarding legislative conflicts over left-right issues, responsiveness is stronger with majoritarian than proportional electoral systems and peaks when national elections are imminent. When it comes to pro-anti integration conflicts, responsiveness is conditional on the salience of EU issues in national political arenas. Second, executive coordination and parliamentary oversight in EU affairs limit the discretion of national ministers in EU negotiations and help governments to deliver their electoral mandates. Third, final EU policy output is most responsive to and congruent with the views of those national publics that have clear-cut opinions on a policy issue and care intensely about it. These findings are evidence of surprising patterns of citizen representation in EU policy-making. They suggest that politicisation of the EU and the diffusion of executive coordination and parliamentary oversight in EU affairs could strengthen representation. Yet, evidence remains scarce that better representation will end the EU’s legitimacy crisis.

Berceau de la démocratie, l'Europe en serait-elle aujourd’hui le tombeau ? L’Union européenne n’est pas un nouveau souverain politique et multinational, superposé à ses États fondateurs. Laboratoire de l’ordre juridique global naissant, son système hybride la programme non à produire un « vouloir politique » européen, mais de la norme supérieure et immédiate au service de l’extension illimitée du commerce et des droits individuels. Une norme qui pénètre l’ordre juridique national, l’intériorise et en décompose la hiérarchie. Européanisé et mis en réseau, l’État demeure un rouage essentiel de cette « machine à gouverner » : seul détenteur du titre de la souveraineté, du monopole de la contrainte et des moyens d’agir, il prête sa propre légitimité et le bras séculier qui manquent à l’Union. Mais en destituant l’État nation et en neutralisant la souveraineté, l’Europe a rompu avec deux conditions d’existence de la démocratie politique. Les dirigeants de ses vieilles nations ont consenti à une mutation douce de leur régime : du gouvernement représentatif à la gouvernance en réseau, de la légitimité née du suffrage universel au consensus des experts, de la loi poursuivant le Bien commun à la déréglementation générale. Traduit-elle l’achèvement naturel, annoncé de Platon à Tocqueville, du cycle démocratique ? Un simple désir de paix ou un mouvement de panique devant la sortie du Politique ? Il en résulte en tous cas une rupture inédite entre l’autorité et le pouvoir : les gouvernements politiquement responsables ont perdu l’autorité de la décision tandis que l’autorité décisionnaire demeure irresponsable. Le lien vital entre la volonté populaire et la loi se dissout. Sans cette légitimité qui permet de percevoir la loi comme juste, qui voudra encore lui obéir ? / Cradle of democracy, will Europe today be its grave ? The European Union is not a new political and multinational Sovereign, superimposed on its founding States. As the laboratory of an emerging global legal order, its hybrid system is not programmed to produce a European « political will » but a system of superior and immediate regulation to serve unlimited expansion of trade and individual rights. A standard that penetrates the national legal order, internalizes it and decomposes its hierarchy. Europeanized and networked, the State remains an essential part of this «machine to rule» : as the only holder of the title of sovereignty, of the monopoly of coercion and means to act, the State lends its own legitimacy and its secular arm that the EU lacks. By dismissing the nation State and by neutralizing that sovereignty, however, Europe has broken two conditions of political democracy's existence. Leaders of its old nations agreed to a soft mutation of their political systems : from representative government to network governance, from legitimacy born from the universal suffrage to experts consensus, from Law pursuing the common Good to general deregulation. Does it express the natural completion, announced from Plato to Tocqueville, of the democratic cycle ? A simple desire for Peace or a panic reflex before exit of the Political ? In any case, the split between Authority and Power is unprecedented : politically accountable Governments have given up the authority to decide while the decision-making authority remains unaccountable. The vital link between popular will and Law is being dissolved. Without this legitimacy - which allows Law to be perceived as fair - who will remain obedient ?