This thesis investigates relations between five Russian energy companies – RAO UES/Inter RAO (electricity), Minatom/Rosatom (nuclear energy), Lukoil (oil), Transneft (oil pipelines) and Gazprom (gas) – and the Russian state from 1992 to 2012, with particular regard to state-company interaction over Russian foreign policy and companies’ activities in the post-Soviet region. The argument is that, due to the institutional legacies of the Soviet system, state-company interaction over foreign policy and energy operations abroad was part of their interaction over the Russian state’s institutional development. The study is based on the conceptual framework of social orders developed by North, Wallis and Weingast (NWW). State-company relations are seen to vary according to their informality and formality, and how closely the companies, and their rent streams, are tied to the state and the ruling coalition, or regime. The thesis concludes that the institutions that structure companies’ relations with the Russian state at home make them more or less available as foreign policy tools. In particular, domestic state-company relations influence the companies’ role in maintaining post-Soviet energy dependence on Russia. The thesis highlights the energy companies’ importance for state infrastructural power, and for the durability of Russia’s authoritarian regime.

The European Union (EU) has set itself ambitious objectives in order to transform its neighbourhood. It aims to induce domestic reforms in order to promote democracy, good governance and prosperity. Theoretical-oriented empirical analyses on the impact of the EU’s attempts to trigger institutional, regulatory and normative changes in domestic policies remain scarce. It is necessary to increase our understanding of the EU’s potential, limitations, and the conditions under which it may have an impact. This thesis contributes to closing this empirical and theoretical gap by examining the impact of the EU on Georgia, a country included in the Eastern dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). This evaluation is derived from original empirical research of four different modes of EU governance in the context of the ENP: Governance by conditionality (access to the single market regarding economic issues); intergovernmental governance (cooperation in foreign and security policies); external governance (energy security); and cooperative governance (Security Sector Reform). This thesis suggests that we can explain the responses to EU policies in neighbouring countries if we use a synthetic ideational/rationalist analytical framework which takes into account additional variables in the EU–neighbour relations in the domestic and regional context. The findings indicate that the impact of the EU is slowly increasing, even in areas dominated by geopolitics such as energy security. Although the impact has been uneven at policy level, the EU has become an important external influence in Georgia. The thesis argues that, although important, EU incentives and geopolitical pressures are less decisive than the existing literature would predict. In contrast, the role of ideas in bilateral relations has had a crucial role across the case studies, showing in some instances the limitations of the alluring power of the EU as a ‘normative power’. Thus, EU impact is based on the existence of a coherent institutional framework of relations; embedded in social, political and economic links that are locked into favourable path-dependence processes and where ideational convergence is present.

This thesis combines two burgeoning fields – New Institutionalism and migration studies – to explain the process of institutional change. It tests six hypotheses drawn from a hybrid theoretical framework drawn from Historical Institutionalism, Rational Choice Institutionalism, and Sociological Institutionalism, identifying concrete mechanisms of reproduction and sources of endogenous and exogenous change. It applies this framework to changes in access to citizenship in the form of citizenship and naturalisation policy in the United Kingdom and Germany between 2000 and 2010. Its greatest contributions lie in a more comprehensive explanation of endogenous factors and incremental changes, two aspects of institutional change that have received inadequate theoretical attention and empirical investigation. Testing economic, power-based, and ideational explanations for change, it concludes that each of the New Institutionalisms makes an important contribution to a complete understanding of the process of change and the dynamics of this policy area in two very different European countries.

The European Union is now facing with the enormous enlargement processes, which comprise thirteen new countries. Different from the European Union member states, these candidate countries are suffering significant socio-economic problems and have to face with the need for adjustment of their regional policies, administrations and institutions. In this process, the EU is intervening actively into the development of the Central and Eastern European Countries&rsquo / regional policies and institutional structures. While twelve of these countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia) will be definitely the member states until the year of 2007, Turkey is not currently negotiating her membership and is highly backward status in comparison with the other candidate countries. In this context, the thesis study is composed of four main parts: 1. the changing system of the European Union regional policy, 2. the realized applications of the candidate countries in the field of regional policy after the year 1989, 3. the developments of the candidate countries&rsquo / institutional structures on regional policy, and 4. the position of Turkish regional policy and institutional structure. Basically, the thesis investigates how the European Union is following a similar system for the candidate countries in the field of regional policy and institutional structure and tries to provide significant outputs in Turkish case.

This thesis scrutinizes &ldquo / flexible integration&rdquo / as an evolving concept within the European Union. It aims to understand the framework in which the debate on flexibility has taken place before the institutionalisation of the mechanism with the Treaty of Amsterdam through examining the different conceptualisations, past examples and the political debate associated with these examples. After analysing the Treaty provisions on flexible integration, the thesis attempts to answer the question whether this mechanism can be perceived as a tool for managing diversity in economic and political sense.

Part of a new cohort of diplomatic actors, sub-state governments represent a particularly complex challenge for our understanding of international relations. These actors are both territorially constituted and governmental; they look and sound very similar to states. Crucially, however, they are not states at all. When paradiplomatic relations are conducted on the part of sub-state governments with a strong regional identity, in particular ‘stateless nations’, there can sometimes be challenge – implicit or explicit – to the authority of the state to speak for, or represent, its people. This thesis takes three such stateless nations: Wales, Scotland and Bavaria, and analyses their paradiplomatic activities. The unique political context in each of these case studies is used as a frame within which to understand and interpret both the motivations and implications of such activities. Using a conceptual toolkit less familiar to traditional paradiplomatic analysis, including sovereignty games, performativity and mimicry, the study explores the ways in which sub-state governments acquire international agency, and the extent to which this agency is contested by other actors. Despite the range in political ambitions in each of the stateless nations considered, the paradiplomatic activities they conducted were often remarkably similar. What differed, however, was the way that these activities were interpreted, depending on the political context and the tenor of inter-governmental relations within the state. The paradox of paradiplomacy is that in many ways it remains unremarkable in its day-to-day practices. Yet, at other times, sub-state governments use their international relationships to make important claims about their status and position within their state, the currency of exchanges becoming that rarefied concept: sovereignty. Using a marginal site of international relations such as paradiplomacy, this thesis explores the heterogeneity of the field and the variety of relationships that exist and persist within it.

Student mobility policies have become a high priority of the European Union since they are expected to result in private and social returns. However, at the same time these policies risk leading to unwanted geographical consequences, particularly brain drain from lagging to core regions, as formerly mobile students may not return on completion of their studies. Accordingly, this thesis focuses on both the private returns to student mobility and the determinants of return migration. It is important to note that, currently, the literature about the mobility of students is scarce and provides mixed evidence regarding both these issues. We contribute to the current academic debate in this field by doing a case study on the Master and Back programme, which was implemented since 2005 by the Italian lagging region of Sardinia. The programme is co-financed by the European Social Fund and consists of providing talented Sardinian students with generous scholarships to pursue Master's and Doctoral degrees in the world's best universities. Concerning the private returns to migration, we evaluate the impact of this scheme on the odds of employment and net monthly income of the recipients. Moreover, we assess whether the scheme has been able to improve their job matching. To perform this analysis we access unique administrative data on the recipients and a suitable control group, complemented by a purpose-designed web survey. In addition, we enquire into the determinants of return migration and the underlying decision-making process by using a mixed-methods approach, which is particularly well-suited for very complex phenomena like the one at hand.

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the financial crisis as it played itself out in the UK. The onset of the crisis provoked multiple diagnoses and interpretations of the crisis. Pre-dominant economic understandings of the crisis minimised its significance, suggesting that the natural operation of market mechanisms would enable the economic system to self-correct spontaneously and rapidly. As the economic situation worsened, however, other interpretations gained ground. From this perspective, the crisis was an event that exposed the limits of the highly financialised status of our economy, presenting policy makers with the opportunity to roll back the financialisation. The eventual non-realisation of this financial ‘roll-back’ is the starting point of many studies, and my thesis can be said to contribute to this literature in a modest way. Its main focus is the battle of economic ideas in elite policy-making circles in the UK. What is often missing from critical narratives of the crisis period is a detailed account of the dynamic interplay of competing interpretations of the crisis at crucial conjunctural moments by key agencies and figures animating the crisis drama in the UK context. These battles are ‘battles of ideas’ in the sense that they refer to competing characterisations of the unfolding events, as well as competing policy and regulatory proposals designed to manage the crisis, rooted in competing economic doctrines, espoused by different actors occupying hegemonic positions of the UK elite finance and media establishment. Although these battles were often fought with great intensity and urgency, there was an internal complexity to the dynamic of these battles that often gets glossed over in accounts of this period. I suggest that ‘reactivating’ this period in detail and with nuance is helpful in showing not only the manner in which ‘neoliberal finance’ has managed to survive the crisis largely intact despite the general expectation of its end but also in pointing to the challenges faced by those who wish its end. Three key conjunctural moments are chosen as the focus of my empirical analysis: the Great Crunch in the Summer of 2007, the Run on the Rock in the Autumn of 2007, and the Lehman Shock in the Autumn of 2008. I articulate a novel theoretical approach and research strategy, drawing on poststructuralist discourse theories. I deploy this approach in a close and systematic analysis of UK elite narratives on economic management, my corpus comprising the discourse produced by official political and economic institutions and agents, including professional economists, as well as narratives found in the broadsheet press more generally. Qualitative interpretative techniques are used to probe the justifications informing a range of bailout and regulatory policy proposals, in order to characterize in a unique and original manner the discursive battles at each one of the conjunctures. My empirical investigation reveals how the battle of economic ideas played itself out politically and ideologically in such a way as to leave neoliberal finance largely unperturbed. While anti-interventionist and interventionist proposals were frequently thematised and debated, these exchanges did not end up challenging the neoliberal finance character of our economy. Moreover, while my findings reveal a clear shift of emphasis in the centre of gravity of elite policy debates when moving from the Great Crunch to the Rock Run (the focus shifting from bailouts to regulation), the legal reforms announced following the Lehman Shock were understood to be largely temporary measures designed to calm and stabilise the markets rather than challenge neoliberal finance. More radical proposals were not taken seriously in the mainstream policy making community, and I argue that this is in part due to the hegemonic sway of neoliberal finance within this context. In order to contribute to the broader question of why neoliberal finance survived the crisis, it is essential to have a clear picture of how the detail and dynamics of the battle of ideas in the early period of the crisis unfolded, including a clear picture of the main actors, the discursive coalitions within which they operated, and the economic doctrines they appealed to when debating the scale of the crisis and the state management of the crisis. It is at this level that my thesis contributes to an overall account of the ‘non-death’ of neoliberal finance.

Based on 10 months’ qualitative fieldwork and the filming of a documentary conducted on the islands of Lampedusa and Fuerteventura, this thesis examines ground-level Europeanisation, concentrating on two well-established Communitarian policy frames -- the Common Fishery Policy (CFP) and the management of the external border of the Schengen space of free movement of people – and two populations of artisanal fishers who were exposed to them. It analyses how governmental logics operated on the ground through individuals’ engagement with Communitarian policies, and it reconstructs the major transformations that the two islands’ fishing industries underwent in the duree of more than fifty years of European integration. While until less than thirty years ago the economy of the Italian island of Lampedusa was centred on bluefish fishing and canning industries, on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura most islanders lived from agriculture for centuries. Following the European integration of Italy and Spain, both islands turned into major tourist destinations and the centres of frequent European migration crises. By focusing on these two territories, this investigation explores how EU governance contributed to transforming the local sociocultural and economic fabric and the islanders’ everyday life. Following the overview of how both policies were played out on the ground, I analyse the effects that the CFP produced on the two islands, and those that the management of the European external border generated in Lampedusa. Giving centrality to the marine element, I push the study of Europeanisation towards the sea and reveal how European policies had reconfigured the islanders’ relation with the seawaters surrounding them. Concurrently, by exploring the ways in which individuals interacted with EU governmentalities, I also unearth the several unintended consequences of Communitarian governance – as conservation policies aiming at recovering overfished fish stocks actually generated the conditions for increasing and uncontrolled overexploitation, while border policies for the securitisation of the European space de facto de-securitized life in Lampedusa.

In this study, administrative reform in the EU accession process was analysed with reference to the cases of Hungary and Turkey. The main goal of this study is to show that both objective (economy) and subjective (politics) factors are important and acceding countries to have room to manoeuvre in the context of the social-liberal framework of the EU. To this end, necessary causality between neoliberal administrative reform and EU accession, and determinism in the enlargement process, which leaves no room to manoeuvre for candidate countries, are denied. In conclusion, it is seen that since there is no public administration model, candidate countries are free to determine the content of the administrative reforms within the framework of general principles set by the EU. Moreover, it is found that the EU accession process is closely related to modernisation of the public administration system in the candidate countries and administrative reform has been overlapped and equalized to EU accession. Finally, it is understood that administrative reform with its extensive content, caused centralisation.