Awareness of agricultural climate impacts is growing. In the European Union (EU), the agricultural sector is responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions while continuing to receive considerable EU budgetary support. A large share of agricultural emissions is linked to livestock husbandry, a sector the direct and indirect climate impacts of which the EU's ‘green’ agricultural policies have historically ignored. This blind spot extends to the sizeable global deforestation footprint from EU livestock feed imports that remains unaddressed, despite the EU's aspired status as a global climate leader and major global agricultural market player. This article benchmarks the evolution of EU agri-climate legal and policy developments, using livestock emissions as a case study to highlight the importance of learning from the successes and failures of the EU experience, to realize future attempts to tackle global agricultural emissions.

This article analyzes the patriotic turn in Holocaust memory politics, exploring the processes through which the narrative of a morally upright national majority has been pitted against transnational entities such as the European Union. The EU is considered to foster multiculturalism, leading to interpretations of what some perceive as national guilt. The article investigates invocations of shame and pride in Czechia and Slovakia, two countries that are often overlooked in works on Holocaust memory politics yet are symptomatic of larger changes in the region and history appropriation in general. Building on research into emotional communities, it traces how and why political actors across the ideological spectrum have adopted notions of pride to mobilize domestic audiences against “accusations” of local guilt and complicity in the Nazi genocides of Jews and Roma. By doing so, our article demonstrates how Holocaust memory has become entangled with Europeanization and highlights the role of emotions in shaping national identity and belonging.

This introduction develops a theoretical framework for understanding authoritarian backsliding against the backdrop of existing historical and European socio-legal scholarship. It introduces a number of key distinctions to better understand socio-legal variance among autocratisation. Specifically, it highlights the distinction between authoritarian backsliding and complete breakdown of judicial independence and human rights

Authoritarian backsliding is an aggravated form of rule of law decay, where functioning of key rule of law institutions comes under direct threat and it is mostly observable in the contemporary Central and Eastern European context. This differs from historical instances of authoritarian turn referring to the complete breakdown of judicial independence and human rights, characterised by the politicisation of courts as a mainly historical phenomenon. The differentiation and their socio-legal implications is crucial for developing a roadmap to identify different forms of autocratisation and their different contexts (actors, institutional and political context) that need to be considered when addressing rule of law decay in Europe, both at the national and supranational levels. Ultimately, this general overview also offers the possibility to identify and address latent discontinuities in rule of law development at both the supranational and national levels. Identification of such latent discontinuities is of importance when assessing the risks involved in the introduction of emergency measures to combat perceived threats to the state and the society.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the research question: How may methods of Benefit–Cost Analysis (BCA) influence policy decision-makers? The new research is a continuation of the previous research, and it is updated with new data and new examples. As it is well-known by BCA experts and practitioners, BCA is a relatively simple and widely used technique for deciding whether to make a change. BCA is very important in political and governmental decisions. Governments are policy creators, and Governments are usually formed of politicians. How much do experts inside Governments influence the policymakers? Do politicians allow enough experts to influence policymaking? The research regarding the work of the Croatian Government’s Office for Legislation and its Unit for the system and coordination of the Assessment of the Effects of Regulations (Unit) showed that the analysis of that Unit was not very good in some very important laws. These laws were changed very often because in practice was seen that the application of some laws was not good, and had caused some problems for the citizens, caused legal uncertainty for them, and in some cases had caused a lot of damage.

Industrial policy is back on the agenda of policymakers at a global level. In the EU, industrial policy has a very controversial history: it has been not only conditioned by the multilevel competencies shared between the EU and the Member States, by the different national priorities and the varieties of economic cultures, but also by the crucial problem of resources. Based on archival sources and relevant multidisciplinary literature, the paper traces the emergence of European initiatives in industrial policy from the 1960s until the launch of the Europe 2020 strategy (2010). Following this, the role of the Juncker Plan (2014) in promoting EU industrial policy is examined, highlighting the potential contradiction between ambitious goals and limited resources. Subsequently, an analysis is conducted to determine whether the launch of the new EU industrial strategy in 2020, coupled with the adoption of the Next Generation EU, could offer a blueprint for establishing an ambitious EU industrial policy and represent a potential Hamiltonian moment for the Union.

Several disciplines, such as economics, law, and political science, emphasize the importance of legislative quality, namely well-written legislation. Low-quality legislation cannot be easily implemented because the texts create interpretation problems. To measure the quality of legal texts, we use information from the syntactic and lexical features of their language and apply these measures to a dataset of European Union legislation that contains detailed information on its transposition and decision-making process. We find that syntactic complexity and vagueness are negatively related to member states’ compliance with legislation. The finding on vagueness is robust to controlling for member states’ preferences, administrative resources, length of texts, and discretion. However, the results for syntactic complexity are less robust.

Although the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the USA and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada have elicited considerable domestic contestation in Europe, several other agreements have been negotiated into public and media indifference. What explains this difference? In this article, I put forward a number of arguments on the structural causes of the politicization of European Union (EU) trade policy over the past 30 years and test them against a newly collected dataset covering 19 preferential trade agreements. The qualitative comparative analysis suggests that the politicization of EU trade negotiations is determined by the co-occurrence of several, well-defined conditions. More specifically, it tells us that: (1) the Lisbon Treaty's reform of EU trade policymaking is the main driver of politicization, (2) the level of public support for the EU is of particular relevance when it comes to ‘deep and comprehensive’ agreements that touch on sensitive domestic issues, and that (3) high adjustment costs expected from trade liberalization can lead to the politicization of trade negotiations.

After the endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) by the Human Rights Council on 16 June 2011, 15 March 2024 marked another milestone for transnational corporate governance. That day, a qualified majority of the member states of the European Union (EU) voted in favour of the Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence (CSDDD) setting human rights and environmental obligations for large companies in their global value chains.1 The CSDDD is the first region-wide due diligence legislation, yet it is also a political compromise among EU member states, which civil society and business have been watching closely. This piece explains the main elements of the CSDDD and outlines some of its implications beyond the EU.

In the wake of Brexit, how has the framing of the EU and independence evolved among regionalist parties in the devolved regions of the UK? The effects of a multilevel structure such as the EU on regionalist parties has been examined, yet European disintegration is novel and thus yet to be fully explored. Has the framing of the EU by these parties shifted, and if so, how? In this article, I analyze 19 regionalist party manifestos between 2011 and 2022 through the lens of rational choice and discursive institutionalism to examine the effects of Brexit on the framing of the EU. At a rhetorical level, these parties have engaged in the subsuming of the EU, rhetorically tying their independence or enhanced autonomy to Brexit. Sinn Féin, Scottish Nationalist Party, and Plaid Cymru have used the critical juncture of Brexit to incorporate the EU into their regionalist rhetoric. By examining the effects of European disintegration on regionalist political parties, we can better understand the role that current events play in the fluidity of party positions as presented in manifestos.

Trust between constituent actors within the European Union (EU)’s multilevel regulatory regimes is decisive for regulatory success. Trust drives information flows, increases compliance, and improves cooperation within these regimes. Despite its importance, systematic knowledge regarding the drivers of trust within regulatory regimes is limited. This paper inquires whether trust in regulatory agencies is influenced by their affiliation with the national or EU governmental level, as well as by their performance. While existing literature predominantly focuses on why citizens place their trust in governments or regulatory agencies, this paper presents original insights regarding the formation of trust among elites within the regulatory regime, including politicians, ministerial officials, agency officials, interest groups, and regulated entities. We employ data obtained from a large-scale vignette experiment conducted in six countries involving 752 decision-makers from relevant organizations. The experimental results suggest that both public and private elite actors’ trust assessment of regulatory agencies does not hinge on cues associated with the governmental level, but rather depends on agency performance. Accordingly, belonging to the national or EU governmental level does not create a difference in trust assessment of regulatory agencies in itself. It, however, shows that particularly elite actors are rather sensitive in terms of the performance of a regulatory agency.

Who is held responsible when international organisations (IOs) fall short of public expectations? Scholarship on IO blame avoidance assumes that member states can hide behind IOs. As clarity of responsibility is assumed to be lacking in IOs, public responsibility attributions (PRA) will usually target the IO rather than individual member states. We argue, by contrast, that even in complex IOs such as the European Union (EU), clarity of responsibility is not always lacking. Therefore, whether the IO in general or individual member states become the main target of public blame attributions depends on the type of IO policy failure. In cases of failures to act and failures to comply, the responsibility of individual member states is comparatively easy to identify, and they thus become the main blame target. Only in cases of failures to perform clarity of responsibility is lacking, and the IO will become the main target of public blame attributions. To assess the plausibility of this‘failure hypothesis’, we study public blame attributions in two cases of EU foreign policy failures and two cases of EU environmental policy failures.

Belarus willingly uses migrants as a tool for political pressure, sending them into forests bordering the EU. This prompted Poland to secure its territory with additional troops and, first, to build a razor wire fence, and, second, to build an entire wall made of steel and concrete. The humanitarian situation of migrants stuck in the Białowieża forest has been dire. An underexposed theme is how not only people were hurt by the border policies, but non-human animals were also affected. As the effects of fencing ‘fortress Europe’ on wildlife are widespread (spatial behaviour, movements and gene flow), this paper uses the Polish–Belarusian border as a case study of a conflict between human border policies and non-human interests. We argue that the plans for the Polish wall are illegal, politically unjust and unethical, also from a more-than-human perspective. The wall is illegal because requirements under EU environmental law, in particular Article 6 of the Habitats Directive, were not met. The wall is unjust because it painfully demonstrates how animals’ communal or even liminal status is far from being recognised. Finally, the wall is unethical because it fails to account for the vulnerability of both humans and non-humans.

The past decade has seen the rise of the semi-authoritarian regimes within the European Union. EU law scholars are rightfully concerned that, in the absence of a meaningful response, this leads to an existential crisis for the Union, as these regimes threaten respect for the Union’s foundational values. The Union did respond to what it has framed as a rule of law crisis by means of a constitutional transformation, asserting Union power to protect judicial independence within the Member States even in areas previously thought beyond the reach of Union law. This paper contends that the Union’s response to the authoritarian threat is flawed for its legalist faith in law and courts. In institutional terms, it was the Court of Justice of the European Union, rather than the Union’s political branches, that took the lead in this transformation. In substantive terms, the Union has transformed its constitutional framework to protect the organisational infrastructure of the judiciary, but it failed to do the same in response to various other strategies in the authoritarian playbook. By framing the authoritarian threat as, above all else, a threat to the judiciary, the Union’s response contributes to the reification of political debate at Union level and risks the alienation of the European polity.