This thesis explores the European Parliament's construction of European identity in enlargement discourse between 1962 and 2004. It focuses on the idea of "Europe" a constructed by the European Parliament over the past 50 years, analysing both the way which MEPs discuss the idea of Europe and European identity and also looking through the lens at the development of what has so far been a largely neglected institution in the historiography of European integration. The European Parliament is a common subject of political science studies, which often focus on the dynamics of party politics and elections. European identity is also a ubiquitous subject of many political science, sociological, and historical works. Historians of European integration, however, have dedicated little attention to either. This work thus places itself at the intersection of the literature on the idea of European identity, the European Parliament, and European enlargement. The thesis makes a contribution to the understanding of the historical development of a European identity discourse with the enlargement context, showing how one amongst the Community institutions attempted to legitimise the expansion and continuation of the process of European integration through the discursive construction of a European idea. It traces the main themes that emerge over the years out of this construction, from political identity to historical narratives and cultural elements, analysing how MEPs develop these different bases if identity in different enlargement contexts. It then looks at Turkey as a special case study of an enlargement that is still underway and explores the identity themes that emerge from the discourse surrounding this open-ended process. Ultimately, the thesis also shows that the European Parliament, thus far overlooked in the historiography of European integration, is in fact worthy of closer scrutiny as an institution in its own right.

Greece's accession to the EEC represents a fascinating case-study of the history of enlargement, of European integration and finally of the Cold War in the late 1970s.This thesis is the first detailed archivally-based study of the second enlargement. It is based on an extensive multi-archival and multinational research, including records of the Greek, American, British, French and German governments, of the EEC institutions (Commission, Council of Ministers) and a collection of personal papers. The conventional account of the second enlargement focuses solely on Greece and its policy towards the EEC. In contrast, this thesis casts new light on the way in which the Nine as a whole responded to the challenges posed by the Greek accession. Through this Community-based approach, this thesis challenges traditional views of the reasons that led Greece to apply for EEC membership, the rationale behind the Nine's acceptance of the Greek application, and generally casts new light on the way in which the Nine thought and finally acted regarding Greece's membership during the actual accession negotiations. Looking at these actors can tear down common misconceptions or, indeed, confirm existing beliefs about the communautaire behaviour of the Nine in the second enlargement. It also allows new conclusions to be drawn about the internal development of the Community in the 1970s, especially in relation to the perennial dilemma of widening versus deepening, while highlighting important aspects of the mechanics of the enlargement process. Last but not least, this thesis aims to place the details of the Greek negotiations within the context of regional and international considerations dominated by the realities of the Cold War, thus underlining the linkage between the two parallel developments of European integration and the Cold War. This thesis provides a detailed analysis of a vital chapter not only in post-war Greek history but, most importantly, in the process of European integration and Cold War in the 1970s.

The widely accepted external incentives model of conditionality (EIM) argues that the rewards promised by the EU need to be credible for target states to comply with costly EU conditions. Accordingly, compliance should come to a halt or decline significantly in countries where the credibility of accession – the most powerful reward used by the EU – is very low. The case of Turkey appears therefore to present a puzzle, since the current AKP government is still complying with costly EU conditions despite the negative signals from the most powerful member-states and the EU general public. This thesis first establishes that there is indeed a puzzle. The quantitative and qualitative data gathered on formal and behavioural compliance demonstrates that credibility is not a necessary condition for compliance. There are absolutely no signs of decline in compliance, which challenges the EIM’s credibility assumption. The second part of this thesis moves to consider why the Turkish authorities continue to comply under diminished credibility. It finds that the AKP makes strategic use of EU conditionality. Firstly, compliance with EU conditions serves to curb the powers of the Kemalist/secularist establishment and thereby to secure the party’s continued presence. Secondly, compliance helps the government to appear as a Western, reformist, moderate and neo-liberal party to the electorate so as to widen its domestic support. Moreover, lock-in effects of Turkey’s already established pro-European foreign policy, together with issue-specific costs/benefits, also inform the AKP’s decision to comply, albeit to a lesser extent. Finally, this thesis analyses the role of the EU-related bureaucracy as a separate, but limited, actor in the compliance process. In contrast to the political leadership, strong organisational lock-in effects and a high level of social learning motivate bureaucratic agents’ further compliance, which suggests there is a specific bureaucratic politics of compliance at work in Turkey.

Scholars have proposed and investigated a view of social relations as social networks and therefore the role of public policy in creating new networks and new social and economic relations. Are different incumbent institutional settings a relevant variable to explain different regional policies responses to Regionalization and Europeanization? I will address this question with regard to the regional policy that was initiated in Italy in 1950 and that represented the country’s attempt to improve its economic and geographic cohesion. The hypothesis is that, within a devolution process, different adaptation to regionalization and Europeanization pressures are correlated to “path dependence” from incumbent institutional settings. Specific attention is dedicated to the role of “paradigms” in the processes analysed. This, in turn could generate different devolution outcomes, in terms of discrepancy between formal and effective outcomes. Devolution is analysed in terms of institutional change and policy (regional policy) change. Institutional change is operationalized in terms of changes in polity and administrative variables, and policy change is investigated through variables representing formal (policy issues, i.e. design and responsibility) and effective (financial, i.e. uses and sources) dynamics under the two different pressures for change identified: regionalization and Europeanization of regional policies. The research proposed is pertinent and important in the context of European integration where national policies have been restructured due to, on the one hand, regionalization—i.e., the transfer downward to the sub-national level—of policies formerly handled at the national level and, on the other, “Europeanization” or the transfer of policies upwards to the European level. This thesis investigates the dynamics of the “paradigm and policy shift” that took place within Italian regional policy between 1950 when the policy began and 1992 when the policy was officially terminated due to a dual transfer of the policy upward to the European level with the co-financing of cohesion policy and the transfer downward to the role of the regions as management authorities for the operational programmes that were responsible for the bulk of Italian regional funds.

This thesis explores the moral implications of watching suffering on the media. In particular, it addresses the question of how audiences construct their moral agency vis-à-vis the suffering of distant others they witness through television news. Theoretically, the thesis takes as a point of departure the concept of mediation as media practices. Based on an underlying assumption of moral agency as discursively constructed and articulated, I have drawn an analytical framework which employs the discursive practices of media witnessing and media remembering to explore the ways audiences talk about distant suffering and position themselves in relation to it. The thesis is empirically grounded in the context of Greece and based on focus group discussions with members of the Greek audience. The empirical analysis indicates that viewers engage with distant suffering in a multiplicity of ways that are not exhausted in feelings of empathy or compassion and their diametric opposites of apathy and compassion fatigue. These forms of engagement are filtered through both the nature and extent of media reports of suffering, and discourses about power and politics entrenched within the national culture. In this context, the analysis demonstrates that viewers position themselves as witnesses vis-à-vis news reports of distant suffering in four different modes, which are described as “affective”, “ecstatic”, “politicised” and “detached” witnessing. The exploration of the practice of media remembering illustrates the construction of a moral hierarchy in the way viewers remember distant suffering, where some events are constructed as banal and others become landmarks in audience memory. Finally, the viewers’ positioning as public actors with regard to media stories of human pain is shown to be, on the one hand, conditional upon the media staging of humanitarian appeals, and, on the other hand, embedded within and limited by frameworks of understanding civic participation in public life. The thesis contributes to a growing body of literature on the mediation of distant suffering. It especially addresses the largely neglected empirical question of audience engagement with media stories of human pain, offering both empirical evidence and an analytical framework for the study of this engagement.

This thesis is comprised of three papers, each making a distinctive theoretical and empirical contribution to our understanding of interest representation within the European Parliament (EP). The papers are unified by two assumptions: first, the strategic behaviour of organised interests is significantly determined by the distribution of legislative influence, and second, the opportunity to become influential is a function of the EP’s decision-making rules. Each paper addresses a different aspect of this opportunity structure, which together provides a coherent explanation of the link between lobbying and the EP’s decision-making process. In so doing, insights are provided into the distribution of legislative influence within the EP and the legitimacy of the European Union’s policy process. The first paper explains how organised interests’ strategic behaviour is considerably altered in response to changes in the political opportunity structure afforded by each phase of the committee process. The second paper presents and tests a theory of indirect lobbying of the rapporteur. Here the institutional context is shown to be such that rapporteurs come to rely upon officials from their committee’s secretariat for relatively independent policy advice. But the policy expertise required by officials to carry out this role turns out to be endogenously derived from amongst the same lobbyists whose informational submissions the rapporteur seeks to verify. The final paper draws on longitudinal survey data to assess the impact of institutional rules and European party group membership, in the context of uncertainty amongst lobbyists as to whether their most closely aligned large party group will form part of a given legislative majority. This uncertainty provides an incentive for organised interests to lobby MEPs from opposing party groups in addition to more natural allies. But crucially, in performing this action lobbyists defer to their hard-wired principle and lobby the most closely aligned members from the otherwise unfriendly party.

The thesis investigates under what conditions the European Employment Strategy (EES) can influence the domestic employment policy of European Union member states. It aims to answer the question by examining two critical or ‘least likely’ cases: Greece and Portugal by focusing on three key areas of employment policy: public employment services, gender equality policies (mainstreaming, reconciliation and pay gaps) and ‘flexicurity’. The thesis employs the ‘Europeanization’ approach and tests the hypothesis that ‘if the EES altered Greek and Portuguese employment policy at all, it did so through one of three main Europeanization pathways: (i) policy learning; (ii) the domestic empowerment of policy entrepreneurs; (iii) financial conditionality.’ In examining the domestic impact of the EES the thesis does not presume an Europeanization effect a priori. Rather, the research begins from the domestic level (in a process-tracing method) and investigates whether, how and to what extent the EES had a role in the Greek and Portuguese domestic policy. The possibility of other variables, either external or internal, being pre-eminent is examined. The empirical study sought to triangulate a wide range of methods and sources. Although Greece and Portugal share a number of characteristics that may inhibit Europeanization in this type of area, empirical evidence largely supported the research hypothesis and suggested that two key conditions were conducive to the EES having a domestic impact in these cases: the existence of successful policy entrepreneurs who would actively use the EES as a policy window to promote their agenda and -when these were absent or lacked access to power and resources- the existence of the European Social Fund financial conditionality. Thus, soft power can be wielded in the world of neglect without policy learning which is considered the main ‘soft’ mechanism of domestic change in the literature.

The thesis analyses the phenomenon of party-based Euroscepticism with specific reference to radical right parties. It provides a bridge between the literatures on party behaviour, radical right parties and the study of Euroscepticism. Challenging the notion that parties belonging to the same party family display similar positions on European integration, it argues that radical right parties do not adopt a uniform EU stance. By putting forward a typology of radical right Euroscepticism, the thesis establishes that radical right European positions differ in terms of content, strength and motivation. In explaining this divergence, the thesis adopts a framework of party strategic behaviour and argues that party positions on Europe are related to the endogeneity of the party system and the dynamics of inter party competition. In particular, the thesis shows that a radical right party’s position on European integration as well as the way in which it accommodates the European issue in its discourse is a function of the party’s wider agenda in the national party system. The latter is developed with reference to (1) party type and (2) its predominant aims and objectives at the domestic level. The thesis demonstrates that the European issue is integral to the radical right’s discursive toolkit but the ways in which the party chooses to debate the issue and/or politicise it largely depend on the national context. This thesis employs a nested research design as a mixed methods strategy joining the study of the wider universe of European radical right parties with intensive case study qualitative analysis. It commences with an overview of the general patterns and dynamics of radical right Euroscepticism both across Europe and within the political arenas where the three party case studies operate. It proceeds by providing an in depth study of three radical right parties during the period 1999-2009, including the French National Front, the Greek Popular Orthodox Rally and the Italian National Alliance.

Germany’s support for the Eastern enlargement of the European Union was a key factor in the successful completion of this idea in 2004. Germany’s policy towards the enlargement was, however, ambivalent and for this reason perceived as controversial. This thesis examines and explains the reasons of this paradox. German policy makers endorsed the idea of the Eastern enlargement of the EU for the reasons deriving from the national identity, based on a history-related narrative, and from the fact of the successful unification of Germany. As Chancellor Helmut Kohl captured it — the unification of Germany and the unification of Europe were two sides of the same coin. Eastern enlargement was, however, a novel idea and was changing the existing European order and concepts of the European integration. It faced therefore powerful constraints both in the shape of still existing, though declining, Cold War structural grip, as well as of the conflicting with the enlargement interests of other member state of the EU and domestic economic preferences and interests. It caught German policy makers between powerful and mutually conflicting challenges and faced them with a need to choose strategic priorities for the foreign policy. The choice was continuity of multilateralism, the principle of the foreign policy of the West Germany. This choice turned the enlargement policy into one of the premises of the grand strategy of the German Europapolitik. Examining the ambivalence in the enlargement policy allows not only to explain its causes but also to observe a process of changing the concept of the European integration. This doctoral thesis is a result of the research conducted at the London School of Economics and Political Science under the supervision of Prof. William Wallace and Dr. Ulrich Sedelmeier.

When the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was launched in 2004 expectations of its potential were low because it lacks the ability to offer EU membership as an incentive, which was found to be pivotal for the EU to have influence in the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs). Nevertheless, progress reports have demonstrated that some convergence toward the EU standards has taken place in the neighbouring countries. This research seeks to understand under which conditions compliance takes place, what explains the variation in (non)compliance with the EU standards in the area of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and what influence does the EU have. It examines formal and behavioural compliance with the EU action plan recommendations in the area of border guard reform, readmission agreement, asylum and refugee protection, and criminalisation of human trafficking in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The three states have all expressed interest in EU membership, but they vary in their potential to be considered as candidates and in their identification with the EU. Rather than assuming that the EU’s influence is low in the neighbourhood because it cannot offer a certain membership incentive, this research studies the problem by focusing on a combination of explanatory factors drawn from rational choice and sociological/constructivist institutionalism both at the macro level (strength of membership prospect and identification with the EU) and at the issue-specific levels. The research demonstrates that the EU’s influence is differential and dependent on domestic, external and issue-specific conditions. The results indicate that the EU is capable of eliciting influence in the JHA area without a certain EU membership prospect. However, when the country perceives that there is a possibility to accede to the EU, compliance with the EU standards has been more even across the four issue areas and at the formal and behavioural levels.