Analysis of some of the most controversial aspects of the European Union's Lisbon Treaty.

The book contains a collection of high-quality academic and expert contributions dealing with the central question of whether the Lisbon Treaty needs further revision. Due to the difficulties European Union actors have encountered in implementing the Lisbon Treaty’s reform and the inadequacies of the current legal framework brought to light by post-Lisbon practice, the volume focuses on possible innovations and functional approaches to improve the Union’s response to the challenges confronting it. In doing so, the volume first takes a horizontal approach to the Treaty’ revision and considers some constitutional features showing the interaction between the EU and its Member States (namely, the parameters of constitutional developments, the allocation of competences, the principles of solidarity and loyal cooperation). Then, the focus shifts to the question of fundamental rights within the EU’s constitutional framework, one of the most relevant innovations of the Lisbon Treaty being the incorporation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights into the Union’s primary law. The last part of the volume is devoted to another domain significantly reshaped by the Lisbon reform, namely, the Union’s external dimension. ECJ Advocate General Paolo Mengozzi’s conclusions highlight the common themes emerging from the various contributions, stressing the need for a more general supranational approach to the political crisis the Union is going through. The content of this book will be of great value to academics, students, judges, practitioners and all others interested in the legal discourse on the progressive development of the European Union legal order.

The European Parliament in the Contested Union provides a systematic assessment of the real influence of the European Parliament (EP) in policy-making. Ten years after the coming into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, which significantly empowered Europe’s only directly elected institution, the contributions collected in this volume analyse whether, and under what conditions, the EP has been able to use its new powers and shape decisions. Going beyond formal or normative descriptions of the EP’s powers, this book provides an up-to-date and timely empirical assessment of the role of the EP in the European Union, focusing on key cases such as the reforms of the EU’s economic governance and asylum policy, the Brexit negotiations and the budget. The book challenges and qualifies the conventional view that the EP has become more influential after Lisbon. It shows that the influence of the EP is conditional on the salience of the negotiated policy for the Member States. When EU legislation touches upon ‘core state powers’, as well as when national financial resources are at stake, the role of the EP – notwithstanding its formal powers – is more constrained and its influence more limited. This book provides fresh light on the impact of the EP and its role in a more contested and politicised European Union. Bringing together an international team of top scholars in the field and analysing a wealth of new evidence, The European Parliament in the Contested Union challenges conventional explanations on the role of the EP, tracking down empirically its impact on key policies and processes. It will be of great interest to scholars of the European Union, European politics and policy-making. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

The implementation of the Lisbon Treaty is profoundly changing many areas of EU law and policy. This volume gathers leading specialists in the field to analyse the implementation process and the directions of legal reform post-Lisbon, situating the Lisbon reforms in the broader context of on-going policy programmes.

Decision-making in the European Union before and after the Lisbon Treaty aims to assess what the changes the Treaty of Lisbon envisaged and whether these ambitions have materialised since the Treaty entered into force. It offers analyses of the past, as well as what might be the future (because some provisions will only enter into effect in the years to come). To what extent has the current decision-making process been able to address the shortcomings and challenges of the past? What has been the impact of aspects of the Lisbon Treaty that clarified pre-existing norms and structures, in some cases formalizing them, rather than introducing new changes? The authors in this book look at the interaction between formal rules and informal practices seeking to point to the interaction between the two. They find that informal practices to date typically still dominate formal rules. This book was published as a special issue of West European Politics.

This is a collection of works which considers the many different facets of the EU’s increasingly important engagement with the world beyond its borders. The Treaty of Lisbon marked a change in the powers and competences endowed on the EU - the contributions to this collection consider both the direct and indirect impact of the Treaty on the contemporary state of EU external relations. The authors are drawn from legal, political science and international relations disciplines and consider innovations or changes brought about by the Treaty itself: the European External Action Service, the roles of the High Representative and President, the collapse of the ‘pillar’ structure and new competences such as those for foreign investment. Other chapters cover developments which reflect the latest incremental changes upon which the post-Lisbon Treaty arrangements have some bearing, including the COREU network, the transatlantic and neighbourhood relations and the external dimension of ‘internal’ security. Useful for academics working in the field of EU external relations law and foreign policy, as well as the EU law/politics/European studies market more generally.

A few years have passed since the Lisbon Treaty came into force but the question still remains of what the Lisbon Treaty has actually brought about. Was it just 'relatively insignificant' as some scholars have claimed, or was it 'something' more? This book sets out to look at this question and it does so by applying a classical division: polity, politics and policy. One of the book's conclusions is that the Lisbon Treaty might have been 'plan b' compared to the aborted Constitutional Treaty, but it is certainly a substantial step forward on the European path of integration. The Lisbon Treaty strengthened the EU both as a polity (its stateness), and in its politics (the rules and procedures) and in spite of the fact that the treaty was not really a 'policy treaty', it has extended the Union's field by federalizing most of the policies within the area of Justice and Home Affairs. This anthology brings together scholars from four European countries each of them a specialist within the fields they are analyzing. Each scholar adds insights from their area of competence to the book, leaving it an important contribution to the study of today's European Union.