Negotiations between the EU and the candidate countries in the Western Balkans have been dragging on for almost two decades. Until an official decision has been made on who can join the EU and when, actors at different levels have been working together within various programmes with the aim of advancing content-related harmonisation and fulfilling requirements for accession. In one of these programmes, Interreg ADRION, transnational cooperation plays an important supporting role for the possibility of Western Balkan countries to learn the practices and rules within EU projects. This thesis deals with the experiences of the project participants within this programme. Furthermore, the experiences are examined in terms of possible learning effects as well as the potential impact of Europeanization within the institutions and organisations of the programme members.

During the last decade, the European Union has had to overcome several types of crises, for example, the economic crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, and Brexit. Currently, the EU is facing the Covid-19 pandemic. It is well known that there is a strong relationship between the multifaceted crises and the EU’s responses to them and increased Euroscepticism in the EU countries as a result. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the reasons why such crises result in increasing Euroscepticism. More specifically, the study explores the mechanisms that can be identified as causes for Euroscepticism. To test the hypothesis that the crises’ responses made by the EU created an opportunity for Eurosceptic actors to thrive, a process-analysis of the responses was conducted. Three legislative acts as main responses to the economic crisis and the migration crisis were chosen, to analyze a mechanism between the crises and increased Euroscepticism in the EU member states. The responses were then combined with data on the EU citizens’ trust for the EU to identify if the EU’s responses to these crises have been a major cause for increased Eurosceptic tendencies. The results show that even though some of the EU’s responses to the crises resulted in increased Euroscepticism, EU citizens do not seem to lose their trust in the EU or their institutions in the long run.

The aim of the Master thesis Liberal intergovernmentalism: The role of small states in the European integration process is to test the applicability of the theory of Liberal intergovernmentalism to cases of small Member States of the European integration. Furthermore, the thesis aims to clarify the role of this states in the evolution of the European integrative cooperation. In order to reach the research objectives, the thesis uses case studies of Belgium and the Netherlands and it examines their motives and behaviour during the negotiation of treaties of the European primary legislation. The thesis is divided into chapters based on a chronological succession. Each chapter describes a time period before one of the treaties of the primary legislation, from the foundation of the European Economic Community until the signing of the Treaty of Amsterdam. The chapters deal with the motivation of small states for new negotiations and their claims in concrete areas of diplomacy. These claims are further compared with results of the negotiations in the context of the significance of the arranged agenda. The final part of the thesis compares the negotiating power of small and large Member States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, taking into account the most significant issues of the agenda. The...

The thesis analyses the 2013 Cohesion Policy reform as a case of European integration. By revisiting neofunctionalism and combining it with the Multiple Streams approach, it is possible to provide a new angle to the phenomenon of the Cohesion Policy’s integration into the European economic governance framework. The thesis utilises qualitative content analysis to systematically analyse the dynamics that influenced the reform process and eventually lead to the establishment of new integrative linkages. It is revealed how the integration dynamics originated in the economic policy arena and spilled over into the Cohesion Policy reform. Consequently, the thesis concludes that the neofunctionalist concept of functional spillover remains a powerful analytical tool and it is shown in what way neofunctional mechanisms continue to materialise in the European polity.

This thesis examines national identity in the context of the empirical case of German foreign policy. In this way, the relationship between identity and foreign policy is analyzed. The thesis does not focus on a specific scenario but rather aims at illustrating the development of the relationship by comparing the time periods of 1990-1994 and 2017-2019. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to answer the presiding question of how we can understand the relationship between German foreign policy-making and the formation of national identity seen within the context of its evolution since 1990. Subsequently, this thesis will take on the discursive approach of post-structuralism as well as its non-fixed conceptualization of identity. Furthermore, it will put forward the argument that identity is relational and discursive by demonstrating its constitutive and discursively constructed relationship to foreign policy. As a result, this paper presents the underlying structures of German foreign policy discourse that do not only indicate shifts but also construct German national identity. At the same time, the identity perception influences the country’s discourse on foreign policy by legitimizing specific objectives as well as general directions. While the discourse shows shifts in cases such as Othering, new framings of leadership and the ideas towards Europe, a certain continuity in regard to the German conceptualization of identity can be observed.

European Politics and Society Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Programme MA Thesis Attitudes towards European Integration in the Western Balkans: Euroscepticism and Europhilia in North Macedonia Maria Paschalina Dimopoulou Abstract The progress in the integration of EU candidate member states is determined by the level of democratization they have achieved, the level of success in the transition to market economy, the rule of law development and the ability to fulfill the conditions obligatory for member states. The attitudes towards the prospect of membership range from fervent enthusiasm to severe skepticism, depending on the length of the process, the success or lack thereof in the institutional transformation, the compatibility of the European values with traditional norms and region-specific reasons. There have been many studies focusing on the Central and East European former candidate states, while contemporary research on the Western Balkan region is rather focused on the EU's enlargement fatigue and conditionality failure. This thesis attempts to examine the role of domestic media of a candidate state in shaping the public opinion and the possible role of the political parties using the media to project their agendas on integration. The case study of North Macedonia proves the positive connection...

The debate regarding a national parliaments’ opposition in EU politics is ambiguous andremarkably underdeveloped. Historically researchers argued that opposition in the context of national parliaments and European integration is decreasing at the national level. However, this idea has been challenged during the last few years by a few researchers when studying opposition in EU Member States and specifically Sweden. Even though the idea of a decreasing opposition at the national level has been challenged, researchers have primarily focused their studies on measuring opposition through quantitative approaches. Consequently, there is a shortage of research examining opposition through a qualitative lens which could grant there search field a more nuanced perspective of the opposition occurring in national parliaments.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if and how opposition takes place in the Swedish European Affairs Committee [EAC], through a theoretical lens of opposition and parliamentary transformations. The thesis offers a comprehensive qualitative analysis of opposition by usinga reflexive thematic analysis. The results show that opposition exist in the Swedish EAC. However, political parties repeatedly fail to present alternatives to EU proposals and fail to debate suggestions stemming from the EU. This thesis shed light of how domestic opposition in EU politics can be studied through a qualitative lens and provides a more nuanced depictionof opposition.

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Résumé : L’intégration européenne a changé profondément les dynamiques politiques en Europe. Parallèlement, on a vu un essor du nombre de mouvements régionaux tant politiques qu’économiques. En suivant la logique du principe de subsidiarité, ils ont réclamé plus d’autonomie face à leur État central. Au même moment, les États centraux voyaient leur souveraineté s’éroder par le haut et par le bas. À l’aide du cas de la Catalogne, nous expliquons comment l’Union Européenne offre sans cesse de nouvelles opportunités aux régions qui veulent plus d’autonomie tout en permettant d’éviter les conflits entre ces régions et leur État central en créant une dynamique triangulaire qui permet de voir d’une manière nouvelle la relation État-région. // Abstract : European integration has profoundly changed political dynamics in Europe. Simultaneously, there’s been an increase in the number of regional movement, be they political or economic. Following the subsidiarity principle logic, they asked more autonomy from their central state. At the same time, central states were seeing their sovereignty eroding from the top and the bottom. With the Catalan case study, we explain how European Union offers more and more new opportunities to the regions that want more autonomy while permitting to avoid conflict between these regions and their central states in creating a triangular dynamics that helps to see the state - region relation in a new way.