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Active and engaged citizens are the backbone of a strong democracy and a vibrant civil society. Yet recent trends of low electoral turnout in Europe and decreasing levels of civic engagement have called into question the legitimacy of governments and the stability of democracy in the long term, particularly in Europe. Against the background of such developments this research sets out to provide a comparative study of civic engagement and analyse the variations in civic engagement between countries. The study is mainly based on the analysis of the European Social Survey 2002, covering 35,000 individuals from 19 European countries and applies advanced statistical modelling techniques including Multiple Correspondence Analysis MCA) and Multi-level modelling. Although there is a good deal of research examining civic engagement using individual level data or aggregate level data, very few studies have combined both approaches. This study addresses this gap and applies multi-level modelling to examine the relative importance of an individual’s socio-demographic characteristics and his/her country in determining levels and types of civic engagement. Thus, it has the advantage of identifying whether civic engagement is significantly affected by country characteristics or the converse, whether a person’s characteristics (age, education, social class etc.) are all that is needed in order to account for the variations in civic engagement. The innovative application of MCA to explore indicators of civic engagement has led to the identification of three dimensions of civic engagement; political activities, political consumerism and associational involvement. Moreover, by projecting all activities on a two-dimensional map it become evident that citizens who tend to carry out ‘individual’ types of political consumerism such as ‘buycotting’, boycotting and signing petitions are also more likely to be involved in New Social Movement organisations. These significant results shed new light on activities usually regarded as ‘individualistic’ type of activities and suggest viewing them in the context of a wider array of collective actions. Furthermore, in addition to the standard contextual measures such as economic development, welfare regime, income inequality, and levels of democracy, this study introduced two innovative policy measures. To consider the impact of government policies on levels of civic engagement measures of governments’ support of the voluntary sector and civic education at school (comparing the education policies of 19 European countries from 1945-2002) were developed. The results confirmed the importance of both individual level characteristics as well as country level characteristics in explaining civic engagement in Europe. However, differences between countries were reduced to a greater degree when contextual factors were introduced. Particularly the welfare state, showed the greatest effect. This implies that socio-economic conditions and in particular social policy and the degree to which it reproduces egalitarian structures determine to a great extent citizen involvement. In other words the results of this study suggest that the national context matters and that governments can and do shape the nature and levels of civic engagement.

This PhD thesis seeks to establish a multi-layered definition of the principle of loyal cooperation in EU law in its current form. It focuses on four fundamental ways of describing this principle. The first one is a linguistic analysis of the term "principle of loyal cooperation" itself. The thesis looks at its equivalents in all official languages of the EU and applies various linguistic (etymology) and non-linguistic research tools and findings from the study of history, social psychology and philosophy to understand and delimit the principle of loyal cooperation in EU law. In a second step, the principle is examined at three separate levels. At the first level the situation and significance of the actors bound by loyalty is explored. At the second level the paper focuses on the differences between the principle of loyal cooperation, the way commitments are met in international public law, and the mechanisms of ensuring loyalty in countries with a federal structure. Lastly, the third level of analysis looks into the ways the principle of loyal cooperation and its operation vary according to the area of competence. Keywords: principle of sincere cooperation, European Union law, theory of federalism, European studies

After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina erupted into ethnic conflict and ultimately genocide. Nearly 100,000 people, mainly Bosniaks, died in the Bosnian War. Two decades later, the violence has ended but the conflict is still present in Bosnia; the societal segregation of the 1995 Dayton Accords, intended only as an immediate solution to the violence, still stands. Population and language distribution are evidence of this segregation. Bosnia’s two entities are home to two different ethnic majorities: Serbs in the Republika Srpska and Bosniaks in the Federation of BiH. In an environment so sensitive that the government recently feared that merely releasing statistics on ethnic populations might cause violence, the languages that represent these populations are important indicators of social presence and power. In order to evaluate the presence of the Serbian and Bosnian languages, as well as the English language, in Bosnia, signage on the main streets in the country’s capitals were photographed in great detail. It was hypothesized that linguistic majority would match ethnic majority on both main streets, and that English would appear frequently in advertisements. The number of photographs in which each language appeared was tallied up in order to determine how often the languages are typically used. Analyses of these results demonstrated that the English language is the second-most ubiquitous on both streets, after Bosnian, and the comparatively small presence of the Serbian language on both streets indicated that the linguistic environment in Bosnia is not conducive to peace and reconciliation.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Government and Public Administration

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Government and Public Administration

My argument about NATO’s future is a combination of both neo-realist and constructivist thought, an adaptation of both neo-realist power struggles and constructivist institutional structures. Due to a lack of a significant threat, NATO will collapse as a military alliance. However, due to the longevity of the Trans-Atlantic Relationship, the similarities in the governmental structure of its members and the history of peaceful interactions between the allies on both sides of the Atlantic, the current “security community” will remain despite the collapse of the military aspects of the Alliance. NATO has been held together through organizational inertia and shifting the unifying threat to a variety of lesser threats. Nevertheless, the weakness of the new threat will be insufficient in maintaining the Alliance. This argument is supported through three different period analyses of NATO. The first is an analysis of NATO in the Cold War and an overview of its creation as an answer to the threat of the Soviet Union. The second delves into the Alliance after the Cold War and the reasons for NATO’s continuation. The third section outlines NATO’s current missions, issues, and tensions within the Alliance. The paper concludes that NATO will fall apart in the future, with a slow but sure break down of the military structures of the Alliance. It will, however, remain a political entity due to the strength of the security community created between the allies.