This thesis examines the effect of the Euro crisis on the construction of European identities in three case study countries- Germany, Ireland and Poland. Combining a social constructivist approach to European identities with the constructivist and discursive institutionalist literature on ideational change and crisis, it investigates the extent to which the crisis constituted a 'critical juncture' for European identity discourses. Through extensive qualitative frame analysis of political and media discourse at key moments of the crisis, it examines how European identities are constructed through the debates about the crisis. The central argument is that the Euro crisis has had little effect on European identities because actors construct the crisis in their respective national contexts. In doing this, they draw on existing identities and ideas which then 'endogenises' the crisis into the existing national discourses. Where identity change is possible, it is subtle rather than a dramatic shift. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the EU has remained completely unified. Because the crisis generally serves to reinforce, rather than challenge, existing identities, attachments to national sovereignty and old national stereotypes have created or reinforced divisions particularly between northern and southern Europe and core and periphery.

This study examines the role of economic structure in explaining the different trajectories of social order development across the post-socialist region. Social orders are shown to differ according to the extent to which competitive tendencies contained within them – economic, political, social and cultural – are resolved according to open, rule-based processes. Social orders are also assumed to exhibit a ‘double balance’ between political and economic systems in which political systems will tend to reflect the prevailing economic system within a society. The focus of this dissertation is placed on tracing which economic conditions facilitate increased levels of political competition. Principally, it will test the hypothesis that the nature of a country’s ties with the international economy, and the level of competition within a country’s economic system, will shape the nature of political competition within that society. After several decades of relative ‘bloc autarky’, the ongoing process of reintegration across the post-socialist region has resulted in varying patterns of interaction with the international economy. This study will focus primarily on the links with the international economy that are formed through export sectors.

When compared to the other candidate states of Central and Eastern Europe, Romania emerged as a laggard of transition. Its integration into the European Union has been marked by much uncertainty and setbacks, as well as profound delays in fulfilling the EU's entry conditions. As a difficult case, the dynamics of Romania's EU accession provide insight into the potential and limits of the EU's leverage, revealing how domestic factors can be decisive in constraining external influence. Focusing on the reform trajectory in the fields of judiciary reforms, anti-corruption and external border policies between 1989 and 2007, this study assesses the interaction between EU politics and domestic politics and the role of domestic factors in slowing down internal reforms. By identifying the domestic conditions under which conditionality is likely to more, or less, successful, this study contributes to the Europeanization and enlargement literature. By assessing the preparations for accession in the field of Justice and Home Affairs, this research also fills a major lacuna in the existing specialised literature.

The thesis investigates the role of public actors in private rule-making processes at the example of the European Commission’s interventions in private industry standardization in the mobile telecoms, high-definition television, digital broadcasting and intermodal transport industries. It demonstrates that, far from having replaced public rule-making or representing a form of ‘better’ regulation, the private development of technical standards is constrained by the same collective action and decision-making problems that constrain conventional policy-making processes. Without the facilitating interventions of public actors, private standard setters often struggle to overcome these constraints. The ability of public actors to facilitate the private development of technical standards, however, depends on a number of conditions. First they need to rely on entrepreneurial rather than conventional policy instruments based on hierarchical authority and the power of hard law. Hierarchical interventions—in addition to the well-known information problems—only tend to have the unintended effect of exposing technical standardization processes to political contestation, exacerbating the inherent decision-making problems. Entrepreneurial interventions, by contrast, may facilitate the private development of technical standards without exposing the standardization process to political contestation. While such interventions may raise serious legitimacy concerns, they also depend on a number of conditions, such as early intervention, the presence of industry crisis, and the availability of positive feedback mechanisms that drive compliance with the developed standards. With its focus on technical standardization, this thesis seeks to contribute to wider debates on self– and co–regulation and the transforming role of government in the governance of advanced market economies more broadly.

This thesis is about broadsheet coverage of the European Parliament (EP). More precisely, it studies the amount and content of news referring to the EP as well as the professional attitudes of their producers. The main purpose of the thesis is to explain variation in the press coverage. Thereby it combines political communication research with the European integration literature discussing the legitimacy of the EP. It argues that cross-country and inter-temporal variation cannot be explained by factors internal to news production alone. Instead, national parliamentary traditions impact profoundly on the way EU parliamentary affairs are reported. The thesis employs a mixed-methods research design. It conducts a quantitative content analysis of 18 broadsheets published in six European countries – Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria – over three time periods: one is a routine period of two years; the remaining two datasets are oriented at key issues and events over time. In total, 3956 newspaper articles are analysed. In addition, 18 in-depth interviews with the respective Brussels correspondents and a director at the EP Directorate-General for Communication complement the findings. While the EP receives regular coverage, the thesis finds that news are selected and presented according to the interest of the audience. Hence the domestic angle prevails in the news coverage and the EP’s own prominence and potential to generate conflict attract media attention more often when major issues are at stake. However, domestic relevance is not the only explanatory factor. While newsmakers also respond to varying levels of public support for EU membership, the thesis identifies national parliamentary traditions as a strong external driver of EP news coverage. Here, procedural characteristics and public expectations shape the amount and content of EP news as well as newsmakers’ attitudes – and more significantly so with the rising powers of the Parliament.

The thesis aims to explain the role played by opposition nationalisms in the overthrow of two distinct regimes in early twentieth century Portugal – the Constitutional Monarchy in 1910 and the First Republic in 1926. After identifying a gap in the existing literature on Nationalism – namely, the importance of political opposition nationalisms in explaining the overthrow of ruling regimes in homogeneous, but ideologically divided, nation-states – this research project presents a three-phased theoretical framework devised with the objective of explaining the political events that led to the demise of both regimes. Accordingly, this thesis argues that in the case of Portugal, the demise of the Constitutional Monarchy and of the First Republic were preceded by the emergence of two opposition nationalisms, a left-wing and anti-clerical republican nationalism and a reactionary and Catholic integralist nationalism, respectively. Both opposition nationalisms were anti-systemic and revolutionary. They unfolded in three phases, which are common in both cases. Phase One, an opposing intelligentsia created a new nationalist ideology that contested the official rule of the governing regime. During the Constitutional Monarchy, this opposing intelligentsia was embodied by the 1870 Generation (1870-1876), whereas during the First Republic it was best articulated by Integralismo Lusitano (1910-1916). Phase Two, the ideological movement gave rise to a political opposition movement that competed at the electoral level, albeit with little success, and disseminated an alternative definition of who and what constituted the nation. Once again, intellectuals of the 1870 Generation created the Portuguese Republican Party (PRP) in 1876 while the integralists created the Junta Central do Integralismo Lusitano in 1916. Finally, Phase Three, the political opposition movement, barred from exercising power, formed a civilian-military coalition with the explicit aim of overthrowing the ruling regime from power. Between 1903 and 1910, an alliance was gradually built between the lower ranks of the military, the PRP, the Masonry and the Carbonária. In the final years of the First Republic (1922-1926), a civil-military alliance was formed between the higher ranks of the military and moderate and radical conservatives, including the integralists. As this thesis argues, these civil-military coalitions succeeded in overthrowing the regime when a series of economic and political crises put in question the legitimacy of the ruling institutions, and the defensive forces, loyal to the regime, ultimately adopted a neutral position vis-àvis the belligerent attacks of the opposition nationalists.

This thesis examines contemporary jurisdictional arrangements and how new and shifting forms of them impact the ability to map political and socio-political configurations, including the analytical and disciplinary tools used to examine them, into explicitly defined locations. More specifically, it asks how the jurisdictional arrangements found in modern Europe affect mainstream International Relation’s core enabling conditions – most critically, that an international realm exists, that it is jurisdictionally different and clearly separable from domestic realms, and that it therefore requires its own conceptualization. The thesis contends that IR’s ability to assume those things rests on a particular resolution to a “jurisdictional problematique” – on a specific answer to a “Who decides what, where, how, and over whom” question. While that resolution normally comes in a sovereignty-based form, sovereignty is determined to be merely one possible resolution and therefore simply one jurisdictional type. In that regard, the thesis challenges IR’s answer based on a thick examination of the European Union’s (EU) political structures (e.g. its institutional rules, programs, policies, and the like) as well as its socio-political relationships (e.g. European citizenship). It considers four potential changes, and therein four jurisdictional possibilities in their own right – breakdown, maintenance, stratification, and blurring. The thesis determines that blurring best captures the complexities, variability, and the potentially conflicting and overlapping arrangements constitutive of Europe’s jurisdictional environment. It also demonstrates that blurring is a distinct, jurisdictional alternative to sovereignty – a complex, process-based, but nonetheless operationalizable answer to the “Who decides what, where, how, and over whom” question. Those European findings are then placed into a wider perspective to illustrate global, jurisdictional variability. The thesis concludes by developing what blurring specifically and jurisdictional variability more generally entail for how one descriptively, analytically, and disciplinarily approaches modern political and socio-political life and thought. It determines that the question based, empirically sensitive foundations underpinning jurisdiction offer better ways to approach those issues than those typically used by IR – ways that better bring together theory and practice, that offer more appropriate and useful analytical procedures, and that help rethink disciplinary divisions in more sensible and efficacious ways.

The European integration process has fundamentally changed the system of governing in Europe. No longer is European governance confined to the nation-state level, but rather involves a variety of supranational, national and sub-national actors. Nowhere has this shift been witnessed more than at the sub-national level. Sub-national authorities (SNAs) have come to play a significant role in the European Union (EU), actively engaging at various levels of the European policy-making process. Thus, any adequate understanding of European governance requires an examination of sub-national government. However, existing research fails to place SNAs at the focal point of its analysis, viewing SNAs as passive and/or reactive political actors. As a result a research space exists in which to ask the question of why and how SNAs involve themselves in EU policy-making. This is undertaken via an analysis of the Vienna city administration and Greater London Authority in the highly under-researched trans-European networks – transport (TENT) policy area. In taking such an approach, this thesis develops a new institutional understanding of multi-level governance (MLG). It is argued that the strength of MLG lies in its ability to encapsulate the reconfiguration of policy-making space in the EU. The EU’s institutions are critical to this reordering of policy-making space in that they undertake the role of ‘honey pot sites’, attracting actors and facilitating the processes of interaction that so mark MLG. By applying the analytical tools of new institutionalism to MLG, this thesis proposes a framework for understanding MLG as existing in three distinct types, varying in accordance to its rational choice, historical and sociological institutionalist guises. The three institutional types of MLG are clearly identifiable in the experiences of Vienna and London, presenting different perspectives on the emergence or not of an MLG form of policy-making in Austria and the United Kingdom. As such, attention is drawn to the key role played by SNAs in the formation of polycentric forms of governance. In doing so, this thesis highlights the importance of a SNA having a European self-identity in order to facilitate the consistent and dynamic engagement with the EU level required in order to achieve policy influence.

The thesis discusses how patriotic education is openly promoted by the government in contemporary Russia through a series of programmes, entitled the ‘State Programme for the Patriotic Education of the Citizens of the Russian Federation’, promoted since 2001. However, this thesis presents the argument that patriotic education cannot fully be understood through examination of these formally organised initiatives. Instead, the thesis contributes towards a rethinking of patriotic education as a communicative process whereby multiple ideas of the nation are delivered to young people, both in formal and informal settings. The thesis argues that this promotion of patriotic education is connected to long-standing debates on nations and nationalism in Russia, but also places these within the more general discourse on nations and nationalism, in particular Anderson’s (2006) definition of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. The thesis is positioned within, and contributes to, more recent arguments surrounding the need to examine everyday ideas of the nation, but maintains a sense of the role played by elites in producing ideas of the nation by intercepting state-produced ideas represented within the education system. Importantly, the three-stage research design maps not only the delivery of these state ideas, but also accesses how these ideas are received and articulated by young people themselves, thus contributing to an understanding of cultural production. This is achieved through triangulation of three qualitative methods: analysis of textbooks, classroom observation, and semi-structured interviews with teachers and students, conducted in St Petersburg. The data generated demonstrates that young people articulate both a sense of local and national belonging, cultivated just as much through their surroundings (historic buildings etc.) as through formal education. The thesis contributes to studies of (Russian) youth by demonstrating that young people negotiate with formal and informal ideas of belonging as they formulate their own understandings and expressions of belonging.

The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that the EU accession to the European Convention on Human Rights is a promising way to improve the legitimacy of the supranational regime, provided that accession is organised in a well-considered and effective manner. My work tries to find, at least partial, resolution to the problem of the erosion of the EU authority, and is based on the underlying presumption that human rights substantially contribute to the successful functioning of the European polity. Understanding of the human rights environment in the EU is therefore crucial to find remedies to the lack of credibility in its exercise of power. For this reason the EU Human Rights Policy, in its internal realm, in particular the normative-judicial, monitoring, enforcement, and promotion components of the Policy, are examined in great detail. The identified flaws and insufficiencies, regarding both the design and implementation of the Policy in question, lend weight to the view that only a serious, comprehensive, and feasible plan for the reform of the Policy on human rights can provide an answer to the legitimacy problem at the supranational level of governance. But how is this objective best achieved? In this context, the proposal for the EU accession to the ECHR should be understood as a plausible means to rectify the shortcomings of the EU Human Rights Policy, and thus improve its image of the Union as a credible and powerful actor in European affairs. The proposal put forward in this work outlines principles which should govern the human rights reform of the EU and how they should be translated into practical terms. My research is therefore an invitation to a discussion about the role of the European Union, its orientation towards human rights, and its aspirations for the future.