On the "Social Deficit" of the European Integration Project and its Perpetuation through the ECJ Judgements in /Viking/ and/ Laval/

Christian Joerges and Florian Rödl
The December judgments of the ECJ in Viking and Laval on the compatibility of national collective labour law with European prerogatives have caused a quite heated critical debate. This paper
seeks to put this debate in constitutional perspectives. In its first part it reconstructs in legal categories what Fritz W. Scharpf has characterized as a decoupling of economic integration from the various welfare traditions of the Member States. European constitutionalism, it is submitted, is bound to respond to this problématique. The second develops a perspective, within which such a response can be found. That perspective is a supranational European conflict of laws which seeks to realize what the Draft Constitutional Treaty had called the "motto of the union": unitas in pluralitate. Within that framework the third part analyses two seemingly contradictory trends, namely first, albeit very briefly, the turn to "soft" modes of governance in th realm of social policy and then, in much more detail, the ECJ's "hard" interpretations of the supremacy of European freedoms and its strict interpretation of pertinent secondary legislation. The conflict-of-law approach would suggest a greater respect for national autonomy in particular in view of the limited EU competences in the field of labour law.

Researching Gender Democracy in the European Union - Challenges and Prospects
Yvonne Galligan and Sara Clavero
This paper outlines a reseacrh programme for the study of democracy in the European Union (EU) from a gender perspective. It takes as its point of departure the recent turn to deliberative democracy in the field of EU studies, and more particularly, the claim that these theories can provide a response to current debates on the problem of the democratic deficit within this complex polity. The paper then discusses the relevance of deliberative democracy to research on gender in the EU and the main challenges that arise in trying to operationalise its main theoretical tenets. Drawing on feminist revisions of deliberative democracy theory, as well as on previous applications of these theories to empirical research, the paper proposes a set of indicators that ca be used for an assessment of gender and democratic deliberation in this supranational arena.

European Identity Formation in the Public Sphere and in Foreign Policy 

Thomas Risse and Jana Katharina Grabowsky
While in political debates identity is often considered as given, scholars of social sciences concentrate on the formation of new and particularly transnational identities. Insights from nationalism
reveal mechanisms of identity formation but European integration has taken its own way. We introduce different concepts of identity formation on the European level arguing that multiple identities are common and may take different forms. To observe identity formation, it is not only useful to look at elite and mass surveys but also to consider the public sphere. Though media are predominantly national, different studies show that their coverage Europeanizes. We think that valuable empirical evidences of European identities can be gathered from comparative media
analyses focusing on common European frames and references made to a European imagined community. These identity formation processes take place in different policy fields. We argue that foreign policy is particularly appropriate to witness identity narratives at work. In search for a role in world politics, the EU has to revisit its fundamental values thereby contributing to European identity formation.

Public Accountability and the Public Sphere of International Governance
Jens Steffek
In the literature on European and global governance there is a trend to conceptualize 'public accountability' as accountability to national executives, to peers, to markets, to ombudsmen, or to courts. While the empirical  analysis of multiple accountability relations within governance networks has its merits the creeping re-conceptualization of 'public accountability' as an umbrella term
tends to obfuscate one crucial dimension of it: the critical scrutiny of citizens and the collective evaluation of governance through public debate. This paper critically discusses the advance of managerial and administrative notions of accountability into international governance and advocates a return to a narrow conception of public accountability as accountability to the wider public. It then proceeds to investigate the public sphere of European and global governance, its actors, achievements and shortcomings, in order to assess the prospects for public accountability beyond the state. Evidence is found to support the claim that the transnational public sphere is capable of putting pressure on governance institutions in case of massive maladministration, and of generating and promoting new political concerns and demands that in turn are taken up by the institutions of governance.

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