The aim of this essay was to study the European Union’s (EU) role as a democracy promoter and its impact on Croatia’s democratization process. Croatia is a candidate country for membership in the EU which creates a possibility for impact and democracy promotion. The aim is met by studying the following questions:  In what way has the EU promoted democracy in Croatia? How did Croatia respond? To what extent has the EU contributed to Croatia’s democratization process?   Croatia is treated as a case study of the EU’s democracy promotion and the method used was qualitative text-analysis. The result of the study shows that the EU has considerably contributed to the consolidation of democracy in Croatia. However the EU’s democracy promotion is characterized by conditionality and Croatia’s interest in becoming a part of the EU has been essential for influence. Finally a discussion of to what extent the EU has contributed to the democratization of Croatia is provided.

State Aid policy has been an integral part of competition policy and the European Commission is responsible for controlling aid, which distorts competition in the internal market to be granted by Member States. State Aid is usually defined as advantages given by the State to undertakings in the form of financial contributions, support, or other forms of special treatment. This thesis will examine state aid policy and regulation in the European Union. The research aims at critically analysing the implementation of the rules that compose the European state aid framework and conclude on whether the system for the control of state aid is set in an effective way to achieve the objectives of protecting competition and therefore the internal market by limiting aid levels and streaming aid towards more beneficial aid. This research is important because it can reveal the particular benefits and problems caused by state aid and help by making recommendations for the future application of the rules.

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This thesis examines the role of the European Community in the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. From their first dealings up until 1968 – when official relations were established – and beyond, the Community and Yugoslavia never achieved a stable relationship that would have come into its own with the outbreak of the Yugoslav crisis in the early 1990s. In this respect, economic, political and social dimensions characterizing cooperation between the EC and the SFRY are analyzed to illustrate the developments between the two parties. The outbreak of the Yugoslav crisis was a completely new phenomenon for Brussels. Although admittedly unprepared, EC officials stated that ‘the hour for Europe has come’. This eleventh-hour intervention, however, opened the door to certain non-state actors who became involved and, more importantly, affected the decision-making at EC level leading to the policy of recognition of Slovenia and Croatia as independent states, and thus the demise of the Yugoslav federation. The thesis focuses on the activism of diaspora communities, the media and the Catholic Church. As far as the diaspora communities are concerned, their activism was most significant in Austria, a country that enjoyed an outstanding reputation within the European Community at the time. The Carinthian Slovenes used their position within Austrian politics to promote the independence of Slovenia and Croatia. As to the Western media, their reporting of the Yugoslav crisis, with its sympathy for the independence of the two republics, was accepted as a reliable source of information, a view confirmed by statements from Brussels. Finally, the Catholic Church also expressed sympathy for Slovenia and Croatia: the fact that the two SFRY republics were Catholic was reason enough for the Vatican to campaign for their independence at EC level.

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In this paper I would like to raise the question at which extent the Union's cohesion policy can promote convergence within the Union. I will discuss major aspects of an analysis on the justification and of the design of the Union's cohesion policy. For this purpose recent empirical data and policies will be investigated. The paper will focus on the weaker Member States of the European Union. (author's abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

By ‘bringing in' the global dimension, this thesis aims to explain the main reasons for Turkey's failure to comply with EU conditionality. Existing studies in the field either look at the hardships in Turkish-EU intergovernmental bargains or at the ‘cultural mismatch' that triggers opposition in the conservative circles of both Turkey and Europe. Such tendencies mislead many students to miss the ‘bigger picture'; in other words, the global legitimation processes underlying Turkey's interactions with the EU. By introducing World Polity theory, an innovative sociological institutionalist theory developed by a Stanford University sociologist, John W. Meyer, since the 1970s, this thesis promises a fuller analysis of the difficult relations between Turkey and the EU through the study of three key sectors where EU-led reforms prove particularly problematic: foreign land ownership, ombudsmanship, and Turkey's Cyprus policy. Benefiting from original interview and survey findings, the thesis demonstrates that the likelihood of EU-led reform depends on the extent to which it is perceived as globally legitimate in the candidate country, Turkey. The main argument is that Turkey-European Union relations should be considered within the context of a wider global cultural environment in which they are deeply embedded and which constitute their agency. This argument is innovative in three ways. First, it adds the global context, which is severely neglected in the prevailing studies on EU-Turkey relations, as a constitutive element to the analysis. Second, it offers new analytical tools to rethink the EU as an ‘organizational carrier' of world models and better explain the domestic motivations behind compliance with EU conditionality. Finally, it contributes to World Polity research that is increasingly criticized for having a top-down approach and lacking in-depth case studies on how world models spread.

This thesis examines the EU arms embargo on China as a case-study, analysing the apparent paradox of the EU’s foreign and economic external policy mechanisms internally and the American involvement in the EU’s foreign and economic external policy with regard to China. The thesis firstly introduces the uniqueness of the Chinese arms embargo in contrast to the other 22 arms embargoes issued in EU’s history. In terms of the case-study, the EU’s arms embargo on China did not become a key contentious issue until the initial moves by the EU Commission to lift it surfaced in 2004. The analysis of the EU foreign and economic external policies towards China and the arms embargo focuses on the political, legal, and economic foundations of EC/EU policy and seeks to offer explanations of the evolution of events at EU institutional level, the EU member states’ level, and the wider international level. The thesis examines the evolution of the EC/EU – Chinese relationship. It also examines how the key political issue of the embargo eventually came to become a technical matter, which lost some of its importance to the Chinese. In this evolution, the thesis picks up on Chinese scholars’ fascination with the EU – the relationship between its institutions, and the member states relationship with each other and the EU institutions with regard to the arms embargo. It notes that some Chinese scholars have seen the EU as a potential role model for the developments in China and the region of Asia. The thesis notes the role of the outsider player, the United States of America, which influenced the making and implementation of foreign and economic external policy of the EU. The thesis proves that China is fully aware of the continuous influence exerted by the US onto the EU-Chinese relationship. In sum, the arms embargo is an ideal test case to examine: a) the evolution of the EU’s coherence, consistency and independence and b) the evolution of Chinese thinking about the EU model.