This article addresses the controversial impact of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union (EU) and its former colonies in Africa. The policy turn of the EU goes along with a sharp debate in which the EU portrays itself as a friend of the development countries while NGOs depict the Union as a wolf in sheepskin. Both sides defend strong arguments in favour and against EPAs. But how do the ACPs themselves look at the EPAs? By scrutinizing the images of ACP representatives we go beyond the polarised EPA debate. More specifically, the article deals with the question whether EPAs will stimulate or hinder regional integration in Eastern Africa. First, we summarize the diverging positions in the academic debate on this issue, structured around three dimensions: the impact of the EPA negotiation process, the consequences of implementation of these agreements, and the EU’s putative normative objectives in this area. Second, we explore each of these dimensions by analyzing the perception from Eastern African policy-makers on the basis of semi-structured interviews and a survey questionnaire. Researching the external perception of the EU’s policies provides an alternative way to gauge the possible consequences of EPAs on regional integration in Eastern Africa. The final section contains some tentative conclusions, which suggest that the view of East African diplomats is largely in line with the more ‘positive’ EU discourse, while parliamentarians make a more ‘negative’ assessment of the impact of EPAs for regional integration. In addition, members of the East African Community are more convinced of beneficial effects of EPAs on regional integration. The article ends with some explanations for these findings and some orientations for further research.

Although subnational entities play an important role in governance for sustainable development, they are often not recognized as decision-making actors in multilateral bodies, where an important part of the policy debate takes place. Adopting a Multi-Level Governance perspective, this article presents four alternative routes they can use to be involved in multilateral decision-making. It further zooms in on inter-subnational networks, an application of one particular route, called the direct route. Inter-subnational networks are associations between subnational entities based upon common interests. They have both external and internal objectives. On the one hand, they want to represent their members at multilateral organizations and influence decisionmaking. On the other hand, they are aimed at fostering cooperation between their members and at stimulating policy learning. This article focuses on the participation of Flanders in two networks in the area of sustainable development: nrg4SD and ENCORE. Flanders is an interesting case because of its exceptional degree of autonomy. The analysis concludes that Flanders is mainly (but not exclusively) interested in the internal dimension of the networks. It further reveals a low political involvement, which seems due to the subject of sustainable development itself.

In the Netherlands, the rise of new parties such as the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, the Partij voor de Vrijheid, lead by Geert Wilders and the movement Trots op Nederland, lead by Rita Verdonk, have attracted much attention. In an attempt to interpret and explain the (temporary) advance of these parties, both commentators and political scientists have often used the notion of populism. In most commentaries however, it remains unclear what the term exactly means and whether it has any explanatory value. The aim of this article is to investigate whether Rita Verdonk and Geert Wilders and their movements may actually be labelled as populist. By discerning the presence of the features of an ideal-typical populism in discourse and performance of both politicians their ‘degree of populism’ is measured. The differences in degree of populism also helps to explain why Geert Wilders and his party proved (thus far) more successful and durable.

This article examines the impact of the Flemish municipal decree on the administrative power of Flemish municipalities. The general goal of the Flemish municipal decree was the strengthening of administrative power by changing political-political relations, political-administrative relations and the supporting policy and management cycle. This article shows the limited meaning of the political component for this strengthening. Changes in the administrative organization of Flemish municipalities on the other hand are looking more promising, although scale and different types of municipalities continues to stay an important factor.

This article addresses the impact of intermunicipal cooperation on the administrative power of municipalities. It focuses on a specific form of intermunicipal cooperation in the Netherlands, which is called ‘WGRplus’. This concerns the intermunicipal cooperation in the major urban regions in the Netherlands. In this article administrative power is not used as a fixed and quantifiable concept, yet as a process that might contribute to the performance of individual municipalities. It is argued that intermunicipal cooperation strengthens the possibilities of municipalities to address social challenges. The cooperation is considered to be successful and rewarding. It also stimulates the cooperation with relevant social organisations. Yet this form of intermunicipal cooperation has a weak democratic and political profile. Next year the Dutch government will conduct a thorough evaluation of this specific form of intermunicipal cooperation. This is still necessary because the evidence that the administrative power of the municipalities benefits from this specific form of intermunicipal cooperation is not absolutely convincing.

This article examines the relations between local government and the private welfare sector in Flemish municipalities. It argues that because of important transformations in society local governments are dependent on the activities of the private sector to solve social challenges. Within the welfare sector Flemish local governments still have an important role. The question is how municipalities are able to withstand and cope with the power and strength of these private organisations. Maybe the answer lies within professional network management.

This article investigates the cross-national prevalence of five news frames in quality papers’ coverage of the Treaty of Lisbon (EU Constitution). Three frames were identified in earlier studies: economic consequences, conflict, and human interest. Two additional frames were identified and composed: power and nationalization. During the seven-month period leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Lisbon (December 2007), we analyzed 341 articles from four quality papers: Le Monde (France), De Volkskrant (The Netherlands), De Standaard (Dutch speaking community of Belgium), and Le Soir (French speaking community of Belgium). Our results show that although significant differences between newspapers were found in the amount of framing, overall they reflected a similar pattern in the adoption of the news frames. The economic consequences frame, followed by the power frame, appeared most prominently in all of the newspapers’ coverage. However, the conflict and nationalization frames recurred in a significantly lesser degree. These findings indicate that the meaning behind the Treaty of Lisbon as a symbol of supra-national unity could have led to a shift from a domesticated, conflict oriented coverage as found in previous studies to a more unified portrayal of the EU within and between the quality papers under study.

This article presents an analytical framework to advance the comparative study of regional integration processes and to give a proper place to the EU within the field of regional integration studies. It is argued that a single theory of regional integration is not possible and that in order to compare different integration processes a distinction needs to be made between three generations of regionalism: i) integration by removing (economic) barriers; ii) integration by building a supranational structure and (iii) integration by building a geopolitical identity. This framework allows to better situate the EU towards other integration schemes in the world: as an exponent of first generation regionalism, the EU can be studied as one of many hundreds integration schemes; as a form of second generation integration the EU can only be compared to a limited number of cases and with regard to third generation regionalism the EU is a N = 1 case.

This paper focuses on the European Security and Defense Policy and tries to answer the question why the member states have deviating deepening preferences in this field. After discovering the supranational-intergovernmental divide, we will determine its possible causes. The Qualitative Comparative Analysis helps us to distillate the most valuable independent variables and reveals ‘institutional culture’ and ‘balancing’ as most important. Finally, we match our findings with the initial theories, used to derive the causal variables, and verify their explanatory power.

Since the nineties of the last century, there has been a modest rise of local referendums in the Netherlands. This article describes the important role played by independent local referendum committees, one of the most remarkable characteristics of the recent Dutch referendum experience. Their task is among others to advice about the wording of the question, to supervise the organisation of the referendum and the campaign and to handle complaints. The need to use an independent body to support the referendum process is missing in countries as Switzerland and the United States. The lack of referendum experience and the lack of confidence in Dutch local authorities forced them to introduce independent local referendum bodies. The role of these institutions fits in the traditions of the Dutch consensus democracy to engage experts to depoliticise delicate political problems.

Direct democratic participation through referenda is often contested, because one faces the problem of determining referendum questions which avoid confusion or subjectivity. However, detailed knowledge concerning socalled ‘question wording effects’ is available within the domain of survey research. In this body of literature, several wording effects such as the use of suggestive wordings, the ambiguity of yes/no questions etc., have been well documented. Yet, despite the similarities between referendum and survey questions, knowledge from survey methodology is rarely employed within the literature on referenda. The present study discusses a number of question wording effects studied in survey research and shows their relevance in referendum settings. In addition this article explores these effects in twelve local referenda in Flanders, Belgium. Building on this empirical evidence, we conclude with a number of precise guidelines regarding the quality of referendum questions.

Belgium did not organise a referendum on the European Constitution, like the Netherlands, even though there were some initiatives to make it legally possible. In the Netherlands there is also more experience with referenda at the local level. For decades there has been a debate about how to make it legal at the national level, but after many attempts, there is still no law that makes referenda possible at that level. The aim of this article is to compare Belgium and the Netherlands in order to identify similarities and differences. Some explanation can be found in the past, which clarifies why Belgium is reluctant to referenda and why at the local level this tool is not as often used as in the Netherlands. The main conclusion is that in spite of the referendum on the European Constitution in the Netherlands and the more frequent use of local referenda in that country, the political classes in Belgium and the Netherlands are comparable in their reluctant attitude towards this consultation of their citizens. Both countries continue to evaluate referenda as not in accordance with the system of representative democracy.