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After coming into force in 2009, the Lisbon Treaty required the creation of new institutions and procedures. This article analyses the response by the General Secretariat of the Council to two key innovations which generated both opportunities as well as risks in terms of its institutional role: the establishment of full-time, fixed-term presidents for the European Council and the Foreign Affairs Council. The paper first examines the GSC's institutional preferences with regard to its role in supporting these new two players and successively identifies strategies and resources that were used. It argues that in both cases the GSC was successful in realizing its preferences even though in the case of the HR/VP, this was more challenging.

This article examines transnational expert mobilization within the context of the implementation of European technical assistance programs conducted far from Brussels. It shows the extent to which the Commission's subcontracting of expertise generates unintended consequences on the knowledge promoted in its external policy. By focusing the analytical lens on the weak field of expertise in border management, the investigation unveils how experts have established themselves as intermediaries for the tools of the Frontex agency in Turkey. These experts have nevertheless had to engage with the authority of the Turkish state to maintain their presence in the “field of intervention” and cultivate the acceptability of their expertise due to the imperative of “partnership” and the emphasis on “adapting to the field” in the domain of technical assistance. Consequently, the legitimacy, strategies and practices of these experts are also constructed through a system of exchange and relationships of collusion and collision with the security forces of the Turkish state. Thus, the chain-like delegation of European public policies prompts us to study how fields related to Eurocracy, distant from Brussels, exert effects on the (de)stabilization, weakening, or strengthening of the dominant actors and institutions of the EU.

For over thirty years, the European Union (EU) has been increasingly involved in crisis management in areas confronted with various forms of political violence (civil war, terrorism, piracy, organized crime). While European agents deployed on the grounds of operation mobilise considerable resources to “portray” the EU in action, this dimension has not received much attention in the field of European studies. Based on an ethnographic study of a mission sent under the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), this article seeks to describe the daily practices of representation of European agents and question their logic of action. Building on a constructivist perspective, we argue that conscious efforts are made locally to work as much as possible on the CSDP's image and to produce a political narrative around the intervention. These efforts of legitimation play a central role in the daily life of European agents in a context - such as that of Niger in the 2010s - where the EU's agenda enjoys little support beyond a small section of the governing elite.

Applying a qualitative analysis designed from Taggart and Szczerbiak's (2001), and from Kopecky and Mudde's (2002) theoretical frameworks on Euroscepticism, the article addresses the following research question: have Eurozone crisis and Geringonça changed the type of Euroscepticism of the Portuguese radical left parties? Contrary to our hypothesis, neither economic crisis nor the governmental support coalition Geringonça had a significant impact on the type of Euroscepticism of the Portuguese radical left parties. Findings suggest that ideology prevailed as an explanation for the qualification of Euroscepticism and that the salience (politicization) of Euroscepticism does not coincide with a harder position regarding the EU.

In this paper on Euro Central Banks and climate change, by analyzing the public discourse of Eurosystem central banks we seek to illustrate their behind closed doors debate on financial risks posed by the consequences of unmitigated climate change, along with the definition of their role and policies to adopt in dealing with these risks. To do so, we construct a database from available discourses pronounced by representatives of the French, German and Dutch national central banks, and the ECB, and classify them according to policy-type preference and motivation, revealing opposing interests and trends among Eurosystem banks' discourse on climate change.

The purpose of this research is to identify the main reasons for two odd results concerning the performance of the Spanish regional parliaments within the framework of the Early Warning System (hereinafter, EWS). First, the smaller number of subsidiarity complaints (or so-called reasoned opinions) authored by these subnational assemblies since 2010, as compared to some Austrian and German regional parliaments. Second, the greater submission of other kinds of opinions on EU draft legislative proposals under this subsidiarity mechanism by seven Autonomous Communities (i.e., Extremadura, Castile and León, Aragon, Catalonia, the Canary Islands, Castile-La Mancha, and the Basque Country), and as a result, in the country as a whole. For the independent variables, novel data have been obtained through interviews with a selection of senior officials, and questionnaires completed by the staff members in charge, among others, of EU affairs in each parliamentary administration. The findings of the study support that most Spanish subnational parliaments are disengaged from the EWS first and foremost due to the lack of any obligation for Las Cortes Generales to consider their opinions. Besides, administrative capacity has an impact on their submissions under the EU subsidiarity mechanism. Having an in-house expert on EU issues and/or benefiting from an ongoing cooperation with the administrative dimension of the regional executive increase their likelihood of delivering opinions on EU legislative proposals. Ultimately, this research reveals how Spanish regional assemblies are not embedded in the EU as a compound democracy, due to some flawed institutional arrangements of the Estado de las Autonomías.