The following are the latest essays, review articles and notes published on Perspectives on Federalism, which will be collected in next issue. You can download also previous issues from the archive.
Essay
Published on 2013 Apr 28
It is not easy to see and to foresee how the European Union is moving forward. There are good and bad perspectives, both stemming from the global crisis, both with an unpredictable outcome. The goal to be ac...
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Essay
Published on 2013 Apr 03
UN Security Council resolutions lack direct effect, as they are not intended to oblige States in terms of means but just of results. This statement by the ECJ in the Kadi judgment has recently been used by t...
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Essay
Published on 2013 Apr 01
Since 2010 the Italian central government has embarked on a challenging program of fiscal consolidation, which is hugely affecting sub-central government finances. Sub-national governments are involved in reach...
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Essay
Published on 2013 Apr 01
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Essay
Published on 2013 Feb 12
On 30 March 2007, Italy signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and ratified it by Law 18/2009. Through this, Italy has committed itself to reforming the structure of its...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Oct 24
The eurozone crisis has made budgetary issues the focal point of political and public debates about the European Union. Besides the pessimistic context and conflictive nature of the ongoing negotiation of th...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Oct 06
This paper aims to analyse a specific dimension of the progressive transformation of the territorial/nation-state law by using the particular lens of cross-border cooperation as regulated under EU law.
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 07
In this paper I will focus on the role of national common judges (“giudici comuni”) in systems that are not characterized by a dual court system (one of the elements indentified by Gardner as peculiar to fu...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 07
Foreign affairs have been traditionally seen as an exclusive competence of central governments. However, over the last 30 years, European paradiplomacy has been progressively developing not least because of the...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 07
Even though there have been some revaluations of the Länder in the last two decades German debates on federalism hardly take subnational constitutional politics into account. For example, textbooks on federali...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 07
Not a single federation has been successful in demarcating the territorial matrix of the federation into ethnically pure subnational units. This includes federations that are primarily designed to accommodate e...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 07
The article aims to underline firstly the trend towards the homogenization of the subnational forms of governments, at regional level, across regional States, focusing on Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 07
This paper analyses the process of reform of the Statutes in Spanish Comunidades Autonomas, which began in 2006, in order to stress the role that an identity narrative takes in it. Almost every Statute inserts ...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 06
Regional legislative power carries the same title as national legislative power. However, it is obviously different in nature. If Acts are general and impersonal – characteristics that distinguish them from r...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 06
Macau and Hong Kong Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China enjoy, via a complex web of constituent legal instruments (international treaties, norms of the PRC Constitution and, last ...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 06
Argentine federalism and sub-national constitutionalism is a very interesting case study for anybody trying to establish a federal system in any country around the world. Not because of its success, but precise...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 06
Which is the meaning of constitutional review for a proper assessment of subnational constitutionalism? The essay tries to answer this question by means of comparative analysis. To do so, it considers both fede...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 05
Comparative constitutional scholarship identifies sub-national constituent power as one of the defining features of federal systems. Moreover, according to public choice theory, devolutionary federal systems ar...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Jul 05
This special issue of the journal is entirely devoted to subnational constitutionalism. To do so, it tries to adopt a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective and to identify constitutional patterns in tho...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 10
This article is the result of an ongoing research into a variety of features of Spanish local government . It aims, in particular, at providing a profile of the tools implemented by local authorities to improve...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 10
This article focuses on the analysis of the regulatory framework of citizen participation in the local government, which organises direct and participatory democracy at the local level, and identifies the laws ...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 10
The increasing complexity of our society requires mechanisms of democratic innovation that enrich the system of representative democracy to increase citizens’ knowledge and experiences, thus improving the qua...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 10
In the Bill of Rights of the Andalusian Statute of Autonomy, right to participation is extremely well-developed and is not restricted to the traditional rights to political participation, but rather is extended...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 10
Participatory democracy is a theme of growing interest in Italy, in both cultural debate and administrative practice. Some Regions have felt a need to provide a legislative framework in order to facilitate and ...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 10
This study offers a reflection on the current developments in participatory democracy at the regional level. Besides providing a descriptive analysis of the instruments put into practice through different legal...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 09
The homogeneity of the regulations governing the electoral systems of autonomous communities derives from their desire to imitate the system adopted for the Spanish Chamber of Deputies, and from their...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 09
The referendum is a poorly used mechanism for direct participation in the Spanish system, at both state and regional level. The discussion on the feasibility of this system at regional level has been examined b...
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Note
Published on 2012 May 09
The mechanisms of citizen participation in lawmaking can be considered as mechanisms of participatory democracy. These institutions enable citizens to submit proposals or opinions in the process of decision-...
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Note
Published on 2012 May 09
Participation is a fundamental principle of the Italian Constitution (art. 3). Nonetheless its enforcement was rather weak in the first decades of Italian Republic. Only from the nineties on – especially afte...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 09
Up to 15 years ago the Constitution entrusted State law with the task of regulating the election system of regional councillors. Since the nineties there have been radical changes in the provisions (constitutio...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 09
The right to petition is an instrument of popular participation whereby citizens are allowed to apply to an authority for the purpose of representing certain needs or to seek the adoption of specific actions. W...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 09
The Spanish Constitution has strict regulations regarding direct and participatory democratic mechanisms (referendum, popular legislative initiative). The Constitution has adopted the most restrictive popular l...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 05
The instruments of people’s participation found in the “first generation” Statutes (1971) were initially perceived as a further possible link between politics and civil society, in line with the overall f...
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Note
Published on 2012 May 05
The Author analyses the normative framework and the use of the referendum in Italy, at regional and local level. According to the Author, this level of the analysis could even be used as a preliminary phase for...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 05
The new ordinary statutes of Italian Regions attempt to reconcile the more traditional instruments of representative and direct democracy with the new instruments of participatory democracy. While no original a...
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Essay
Published on 2012 May 05
This article reviews the new approaches to citizen participation introduced by the statutes of autonomy reformed from 2006 onwards. The reform process included the introduction of participatory values and princ...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Apr 16
This paper assesses European cooperation in counter-terrorism, which was prompted by the terrorist attacks at the beginning of this century. The first part of the paper will provide a description of the main fe...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Apr 02
The paper endorses a dynamic rather than a static analysis of the EU at super-systemic level of analysis. It sketches a toolkit to analyse the actors and contents of constitutional politics, exploiting the insi...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Mar 31
The goal of this paper is to draw attention to a critical issue regarding the decline in the traditional doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty in the United Kingdom. Devolution has proven to be a serious threat...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Mar 02
This paper analyses the regulation of standard costs in Legislative Decree No. 68/2011. It begins with an examination of some concepts that are often confused in the scientific and political debate, such as f...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Feb 17
According to the ‘Defense Strategic Guidance’ (2012), the growing military capabilities of US allies will create new opportunities for sharing responsibilities in world affairs. The US strategic document co...
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Review article
Published on 2012 Feb 16
What should the European Union do to challenge the Eurozone crisis? Examining the recent debate, one can identify the following options to overcome the EU’s institutional crisis:
1. reform of...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Feb 16
After the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights has found a place among the formal sources of EU law, and has become a standard of review for the validity o...
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Essay
Published on 2012 Feb 16
The aim of this article is to analyse one of the main features of asymmetry in the EU legal order: enhanced cooperation. After the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, two enhanced cooperation schemes (on div...
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Review article
Published on 2011 Nov 26
This special issue of Perspectives on Federalism offers a multidisciplinary collection of pieces dealing with some (selected) issues in the field of citizenship studies.
In order to investigate how citizen...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Nov 13
This essay discusses the dubious premises of ‘repressive liberalism’ underlying the policies of cultural ‘integration’ that have been adopted by a number of otherwise liberal democracies around the worl...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Nov 10
The wide range of disasters that has recently hit third countries has shown that not even the Member States with the widest network of consular and diplomatic representation can ensure on their own the protecti...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Nov 01
The concept of ‘citizenship’ has significantly evolved since the work by Thomas Marshall in 1950: the emergence of various kinds of ‘identity/difference’ politics, the transformation of political rep...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Oct 26
This paper critically assesses the EU’s anti-piracy operation Atalanta in the light of the protection of Union citizens. The main question is to which extent a Union citizen threatened by pirates off t...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Oct 16
This paper aims to provide a brief analysis of the Ruiz Zambrano judgment (Case C-34/09). Traditionally, the EU citizenship has been mainly construed as a status of integration into the Membe...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Aug 02
The financial crisis revealed the inadequacy of the European Economic and Monetary Union. The response of the EU and of the countries of the Eurozone has been slow and weak, due to the substantially confederal ...
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Review article
Published on 2011 Jul 20
According to many scholars, the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty and the disappointment caused by the contents of the Lisbon Treaty –- defined by Somek (2007) as a mere post-Constitutional Treaty – ma...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Jul 19
This essay proposes that the emergence and failure of the debate on the EU constitutional reform depends, amongst other things, on the rise of what it calls ‘publicity’ as public policy and governance fun...
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Note
Published on 2011 Jul 19
The judgment of the Court of Justice of the EU in the El Dridi case clarifies the scope of application of the Returns Directive, in particular with regard to the difference between criminal detention and pre...
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note
Published on 2011 May 23
In a union of states such as the EU or the US, should immigration policy be decentralized or should it be a federal policy? Experience and economic logic offer a simple argument against decentralization. Beca...
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Economics is based on the assumptio...
Note
Published on 2011 Apr 08
In June 2010 the Spanish Constitutional Court rendered a very important judgment on the constitutional legitimacy of the new fundamental charter (Estatut) of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia. Faced with a ...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Apr 08
Most of the existing literature on judicial interpretation of federal constitutions focuses either on individual federations or on comparative studies of specific judicial techniques and/or specific fields. Thi...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Feb 22
For decades the US has had a hegemonic position in the Middle East. A key country in this respect has been Egypt. However, in recent decades the EU has made itself increasingly felt in the region. Due to enlarg...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Feb 22
The article argues that regionalism in East Asia since the end of the Cold War has been largely shaped by the interactions of China-US relations, influencing and determining the development and transformation o...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Feb 22
The article looks at federalism as applied in Africa in the dual sense of a devolution of power from what would otherwise be unitary and centralised states to lower levels of governance and a transferral of aut...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Feb 22
Sub-national regions (micro-regions) and supra-national regions (macro-regions) appear as disconnected concepts in the academic literature. They are studied by distinct academic communities between which there ...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Feb 22
The purpose of this article is to propose a draft for an analytical frame for analyzing regional integration consisting of federalism theory and neo-functionalism. It starts out discussing the concept of region...
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Essay
Published on 2011 Jan 06
Federalism, neo-functionalism and realism-intergovernmentalism offer different visions of European unity, evident in different European organizations such as the Council of Europe to the ECSC, EEC/EC/EU, and EF...
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Essay
Published on 2010 Dec 13
The present article examines the process concerning the transfer of State Property to Regions and Local Authorities, recently introduced in Italy pursuant to Decree 85/2010. The transfer of State owned assets a...
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Essay
Published on 2010 Nov 01
Antonio Mosconi
The wars in western Asia and the financial crisis of 2007-2008 spelt the end of the American attempt to global suprema...
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Essay
Published on 2010 Oct 16
This paper aims to analyze comparatively EU’s, China’s and India’s diverging designs for the governance of Africa. The paper addresses one fundamental research question: to what extent do the Chinese and ...
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Essay
Published on 2010 Oct 16
There is barely any agreement in the literature on the way one should compare the political parties defending the interest of a specific community on a particular territory – the ethno-regionalist parties ...
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Note
Published on 2010 Oct 01
The International Court of Justice gave its Advisory Opinion on the “Accordance with international law of the unilateral declaration of independence in respect of Kosovo” few months ago. It found no prohibi...
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Note
Published on 2010 Sep 25
In Kücükdeveci judgment, the European Court of Justice declared that national judges must set aside national norms that are at variance with the general principle of non discrimination on grounds of age, by v...
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Note
Published on 2010 Sep 02
Dominic Heinz
Recently Germany experienced yet another federal reform shortly after a previous modification to the German federal sys...
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Essay
Published on 2010 Jul 09
If one looks at the rapid growth of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) since the Blair-Chirac meeting of Saint-Malo in 1998 and in particular at the launch of several crisis management missions it is...
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Essay
Published on 2010 Jul 04
What impact did Europeanization have on the governmental capacity of Italian regions? Are the regions successful in addressing the challenges and the opportunities of European integration? Is the participation ...
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Essay
Published on 2010 Jun 02
The view prevailing among legal scholars - and endorsed in this paper - is that the coming into force of the reform of Title V, Part 2, of the Constitution introduced a multi-polar institutional framework in ...
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note
Published on 2010 May 13
The debate on federalism in Iraq is interrelated with the identity conflict which has dominated Iraqi politics since the regime change in 2003. Federalism was proposed and became constitutional in 2005 as a way...
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note
Published on 2010 May 13
This short note aims at providing an analysis of the Schuman Declaration focused on the following points: 1) the genesis of the Schuman Declaration; 2) its federalist content; 3) its topicality
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note
Published on 2010 May 13
The author questions the influence of the creation of a single currency on the formation of European citizenship. Whereas the transnational dimension of such citizenship (which affects the citizen of one Member...
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Essay
Published on 2010 Feb 05
This article investigates some of the causes of the financial crisis – global imbalances and unsatisfactory regulation of world liquidity – and supports the need to reform the present asymmetric internation...
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note
Published on 2009 Dec 23
This note analyses the legal reasoning and the motivations of the recent judgment of the German Constitutional Court on the Lisbon Treaty and considers the possible impact of this ruling on the future of ...
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Note
Published on 2009 Dec 14
This note provides a brief comment on the Lisbon Urteil of the German Constitutional Court. The author points out the ambiguities of the judgment and its possible impact on the European integration process
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Note
Published on 2009 Dec 14
This brief note provides an overview of some recent documents regarding the Indian position in the current world economy and its key role in a context of international cooperation.
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Note
Published on 2009 Dec 14
This note deals with the Chinese proposal for a new international monetary architecture. The Chinese proposal was the last of a series which suddenly appeared on the international diplomatic scene last March: s...
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Review article
Published on 2009 Oct 28
In the latest years, the Spanish constitutional system has been characterized by a proliferation of sub-national fundamental charters (“Estatutos de las Comunidades Autónomas”, hereinafter CAs): in fact, m...
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Essay
Published on 2009 Oct 08
This article examines law no. 42 of 2009 which, in accordance with art. 119 of the Constitution, opens the way to the introduction of “fiscal federalism” in Italy. The new law falls within the sphere of the...
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Note
Published on 2009 Sep 28
These are hard times for fiscal federalism. Although many political parties consider it a sort of flag, despite always being present on the political agenda, the implementation of article 119 of the Italian Con...
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Essay
Published on 2009 Jul 07
From a “formalistic” point of view the Regions are and have been neglected (especially in the past) in the EU law context. To express such a situation the German constitutional lawyers used the formula "Lan...
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Essay
Published on 2009 Jun 15
This essay aims at giving an overview on the role of the European and national Parliaments in the dynamics of integration. After resuming the main issues that such a subject present, the author analyses the ...
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Essay
Published on 2009 Jun 15
The reaction of the European Union to the financial crisis consisted mainly in uncoordinated national plans. A real European recovery plan would have been more effective, but it was not possible because the ...
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Review article
Published on 2009 May 12
The aim of this paper is to offer a brief overview of the international literature regarding the European Constitutional Law.
It is possible to identify five groups of studies which will serve as guid...
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Note
Published on 2009 May 11
With the order of April 15, 2008, the Constitutional Court of Italy requested, for the first time, the intervention of the Court of Justice of the European Communities, enabling the mechanism of preliminary def...
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Note
Published on 2008 Dec 19
This note analyses the new Charter of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, adopted in 2008.
link: http://www.oic-oci.org...
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Essay
Published on 2008 Nov 11
After the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping operations have increasingly been launched by new actors (such as regional organizations and ad hoc coalitions) despite the continued and important role of the United...
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Note
Published on 2008 Jul 30
On the fourth of July, an initiative presented by the Nayarit State Congress proposing the addition of a second paragraph to Article 135 of the Mexican Constitution was published in the Senate Gazette. The purp...
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Note
Published on 2008 Jul 10
The Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano, and former Minister Tommaso Padoa Schioppa recently urged for the re-launch of the European unification process.
This short note analyses and comments their i...
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Review article
Published on 2008 Jun 26
The article analyses the issue of monetary integration in Asia taking into account the most recent literature and the main contributes of the last decades both in economics and IR.
It locates the deba...
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