ABSTRACT Despite CFSP developments since Maastricht, EU foreign policy has often manifested via informal groupings of member states, acting through ad hoc initiatives without formal mandates. Seeking to explain adhocism’s articulation with EU foreign policy beyond EU-CFSP-centrism, this article expands the regime-based intergovernmentalist approach envisaging EU foreign policy as a regime and adhocism as a rational solution to collective action problems, to cover the framing and development of ad hoc initiatives and encapsulate the full EU foreign policy cycle. To illustrate this approach, it provides an analysis of the ‘E3’ initiative on the Iran nuclear crisis (2003–2022) and ‘Normandy’ initiative on the Russia–Ukraine conflict in Eastern Ukraine (2014–2022) based on document analysis, archival testimonies, secondary literature and 39 elite interviews, which allow to delineate adhocism’s role in EU foreign policy. This article counterbalances EU-CFSP-centred assumptions of adhocism as a (recurrent) anomaly to demonstrate it is a normal EU foreign policy feature.

ABSTRACT In times of crises, communicating citizen agency can stimulate engagement, support effective governance and legitimacy. Yet, little is known about how the European Parliament – as the only directly elected EU institution and a central site for contesting democratic legitimacy in the Union – constructs citizens’ roles in such moments. This article introduces a novel Actor’s Agency Model that maps agency along two dimensions and applies it to more than a decade of its crisis-related press releases and X/Twitter posts (2011–2025). Our findings show that while citizen visibility has grown, this has rarely meant attributing them a capacity to act in crises. Press releases overwhelmingly cast citizens as passive, instrumentalising them to sustain institutional self-legitimation. X posts more often assign active roles, but primarily through forms that do not amount to substantive participation. Such patterns risk undermining EU legitimacy by sidelining those whose involvement is essential to democratic crisis governance.

ABSTRACT The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is widely seen as accelerating the ‘return of geopolitics’ in EU policy-making, including in enlargement towards the Western Balkans. This article examines whether this geopolitical shock affected enlargement politics in the European Parliament by analysing written questions from the 9th parliamentary term. Adopting an actor-centred perspective, it assesses changes in issue salience, the actors involved, and the framing of enlargement. Across these dimensions, we find only limited evidence of geopoliticisation. The invasion did not significantly change the level of attention to the Western Balkans or the composition of actors engaging with the issue. Most strikingly, explicit geopolitical or security justifications did not increase. Instead, MEPs placed greater emphasis on candidate states implementing reforms and complying with accession criteria. The invasion is thus reflected less in geopolitical discourse than in a renewed focus on conditionality as a vehicle for advancing the Western Balkans’ accession trajectory.

ABSTRACT The article argues that dynamics of politicisation and de-politicisation in foreign policy can be fruitfully analysed from a two-level perspective. This perspective highlights the interplay between domestic and international drivers of politicisation and de-politicisation as well as the strategic agency of governments in shaping the two counter-processes. The article illustrates its argument with a case study on the politicisation and (failed) de-politicisation of German military support for Ukraine. The case study demonstrates how the politicisation of the issue in German domestic politics was driven by a diverse range of domestic politicising agents (‘inside-out’ politicisation) who were able to tie in with international sources of politicisation (‘outside-in’ politicisation). In this highly politicised two-level context, the Scholz government tried, but largely failed, to de-politicise its decision-making by securitising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in German political discourse. These dynamics critically shaped the Scholz government’s often criticised approach to delivering weapons to Ukraine.

ABSTRACT We provide a comparative analysis of how European radical left parties (RLPs) politicise the Israel – Palestine and Russia – Ukraine conflicts. Examining the positions of 25 RLPs, we test four hypotheses examining variation in Israel-hostility, Russia-related stances, cross-conflict coherence, and the dynamics of war fatigue. Patterns of politicisation are complex and there is no unified party family response. We show that while no RLP is Israel-friendly, levels of Israel-hostility vary substantially and tend to intensify as the Gaza war persists. By contrast, positions on Russia – Ukraine remain deeply divided, with no linear shift towards Russia-friendliness. Ideological subtype shapes, but does not determine, party responses, while broader contextual factors, most notably the ‘Trump effect’, repoliticise questions of European security. However, further politicisation is limited by the weakness of cross-conflict coherence. Several parties express consistent anti-imperialist logic in their response, but most disaggregate their critiques. RLP foreign policy emerges as ideologically-driven but contextually responsive.

ABSTRACT Amid growing Sino-American competition, we would expect the US and China to deploy ‘binding’ and ‘wedging’ strategies to encourage Europe to align with it against the other. As this article shows, however, in the realm of trade, their behaviour has been less strategic – and more haphazard, volatile and contradictory – than theories of great power competition would predict. Driven primarily by domestic political considerations, the US and China’s actions on trade have alienated, antagonized and repelled Europe rather than encouraging it to align with either of them. Instead, external threats from the US and China have served to strengthen EU unity and resolve to maintain its strategic autonomy. Navigating threats from both sides, the EU has charted its own course, seeking to defend the rules-based multilateral trading system, while also developing new tools to better defend its interests, including ones specifically designed to promote internal binding and counter external wedging.

ABSTRACT The Single European Railway Area (SERA) is an ambitious political project aimed at liberalising domestic passenger networks and fostering cross-border traffic. Yet, even after a legislative and regulatory process that spanned over 25 years, the liberalisation of domestic markets remains shallow when compared to other utilities that have undergone a similar treatment. Regulatory bodies (RBs) were instituted by the legislator as the new enforcers of market liberalisation. Although previous research has shown a positive correlation between the creation of RBs and the liberalisation of railway markets, this article argues that the challenges faced by RBs bar further progress towards the establishment of SERA. Using an innovative theoretical framework that includes the ‘infrastructure’ as an institution generating path dependencies in policy-making, the research compares the actions of RBs in France, Poland and within the Independent Regulators Group-Rail to show the misfit between pre-existing infrastructural commitments, national policy choices and EU regulation.

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the role of stakeholder organisations in decision-making in an area of limited EU competence. Our case is a rather fast process of development of the European Universities Initiative (EUI), from a passing reference in a speech by Macron in September 2017 to the publishing of the first call for proposals in October 2018. The study relies on a resource exchange perspective, identifying various types of legitimacy and knowledge stakeholder organizations can exchange for gaining access to EU decision-makers. Utilising interviews, documents and EU Transparency Register data, we reconstruct the process and identify which European stakeholder organizations were involved, how and why. We show how the European Commission takes an active role in selecting stakeholder organisations, and how that selection reflects the level of competences EU has in this policy domain, as well as the Commission’s preferences concerning the decision at hand.

ABSTRACT This article investigates to what extent the European Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) have contested evaluations by the European Court of Auditors (ECA). Adopting a constructivist framing approach, the article investigates key diagnostic and prognostic frames in ECA performance audits through a qualitative content analysis. The empirical findings point to a strongly critical engagement of the ECA with the EU’s development policy interventions, particularly on their efficiency. In turn, there is a strong pattern of contestation observable in the responses by the Commission and the EEAS to diagnostic frames. In contrast, the findings point to little contestation over prognostic frames, although the analysis also reveals that the institutions often engage with recommendations provided by the ECA only superficially. Overall, the analysis suggests that the acceptance of the validity of findings of ECA performance audits in EU development policy by the Commission and the EEAS is limited.

ABSTRACT Since the invasion of Ukraine, EU enlargement is back on the agenda. Nevertheless, there are conflicting clues about the political and economic factors that shape public EU support in Western Balkan (WB) candidate states. This is remarkable as public opinion will shape the enlargement process and eventually the EU. To explain public EU support, we build on theories of benchmarks and proxies and study how citizen perceptions of national circumstances affect their assessments of the EU. Does appreciation of national politics and the economic situation generate EU support, following the proxy argument, or Euroscepticism, following the benchmark theory? We analyze 2023 Eurobarometer survey data from five WB candidate states. We find that positive perceptions of national political, but not economic, circumstances translate into higher EU support. This finding suggests that citizens do not necessarily benchmark EU support against the national circumstances. Instead, they transfer their attitudes towards national context to the EU level.