Mutual recognition is a cornerstone of European integration. Famously associated with the Court of Justice’s ruling in Cassis de Dijon, it has expanded beyond the free movement of goods into fields such as criminal justice, services, and risk regulation, enabling regulatory diversity. While often characterised as a general principle of Union law, this account has been questioned in the literature. This contribution reframes mutual recognition not as a free-standing legal principle guiding legal reasoning, but as a judicially developed mode of governance arising from the application of Union rules and principles. The paper traces mutual recognition’s judicial development in the case law of the Court of Justice, and then examines its advancement by the Union’s political institutions and its operationalisation in secondary legislation, with services law as a key case study. The article next links these judicial and legislative strands through their shared doctrinal foundations. Finally, it develops a governance-based account, drawing on political science and EU governance literature, to reconceptualise mutual recognition as a mechanism through which law structures and coordinates public power across the Union.

The mood amongst workers in Western Europe as the 1960s ended was one of frustration and anticipation. From the streets of Paris in May 1968 to the factory floors of Turin in the autumn of 1969, social movements of workers and students demanded a real say over their daily lives and the institutions that shaped them. These calls for economic democracy were picked up by trade unions, national politicians and, eventually, the European Commission. In 1973, having published proposals that included plans for ‘worker participation’, the Commission wrote that if employees did not have a voice, the Commission’s proposals would not ‘satisfy the requirements of society today’. However, the Commission’s interpretation of industrial democracy was criticised by trade unions and socialist politicians, buoyed by the militancy of the workers, for not going far enough. As the Commission tried to persuade labour representatives that the European project was taking their demands seriously, another critique of worker participation crystallised on the right. As Keynesianism lost credibility in Member States, and a neoliberal discourse emerged around the need for Europe to be ‘competitive’ and ‘flexible’, employer groups pushed back against worker participation and undermined a labour movement that had posed a genuine threat to capital’s interests. This paper tells the story of one component of the Commission’s plans: the proposed Fifth Company Law Directive. Using archival material from EC institutions and employer lobby groups, it argues for an understanding of company and labour law harmonisation that takes seriously the political economy of Western Europe during the ‘Long 1970s’.

Mutual recognition is a cornerstone of European integration, enabling cooperation across diverse policy fields while allowing the Union to pursue unity without uniformity. Yet, the Posted Workers saga – widely framed as a tale of tension between social rights and economic freedoms – exposes some of its limits. This paper uses the Posted Workers saga as a case study of mutual recognition. Empirically, it draws on the legislative negotiations behind the 1996 and 2018 Directives and case law from Rush to Laval, to examine legislative intent. The analysis shows that the 1996 Directive was not primarily concerned with protecting workers but with regulating the cross-border provision of labour via the freedom to provide services, through a mutual recognition mechanism. The mechanism was asymmetrical by design: it privileged certain Member States’ labour rules over others to address social dumping. The Directive was intended to create a ceiling – rather than a floor – of standards under Article 3(1), subject to narrow exceptions. Conceptually, the paper argues that mutual recognition operates as a generative yet fragile mode of integration. It is generative, fostering coordination between Member States and enabling free movement. Yet it remains fragile where the interpretations of the ‘content’ of such rules diverge. In the Posted Workers context, such divergence is evident via the conflicting understandings of ‘minimum rates of pay’. The paper concludes that while mutual recognition can facilitate diversity, it cannot indefinitely substitute for substantive political engagement in defining the content and scope of shared rules.

While European integration has transformed national parliaments, its long-term impact on conflicts between governments and opposition parties remains insufficiently understood. This study addresses that gap by analysing how Sweden’s accession to the European Union (EU) in 1995 altered the patterns of parliamentary opposition. Using longitudinal data on government proposals in the Swedish parliament, 1970–2022, we apply a difference-in-differences design to compare opposition intensity before and after accession. Our findings reveal two major transformations. First, we identify a sustained decline in opposition in internationally embedded economic and tax policies, supporting the view that the EU political system structurally depoliticises economic governance. Second, we observe a gradual but pronounced politicisation in policy areas tied to national identity and social welfare, where EU competences are limited and domestic discretion remains. We thus find that European integration reshapes parliamentary conflict by dampening opposition in economic policymaking while intensifying contestation in policy areas related to national identity and social protection. Rather than reducing opposition overall, EU membership redirects it across issue areas. Taken together, the results show that the distribution of national and supranational competences conditions parliamentary opposition. As Sweden is a most likely case of EU-induced cleavage transformation, similar dynamics are likely across other member states as well. The study advances parliamentary research by shifting attention from formal powers and debates to observable opposition behaviour over time. It also adds to theories of modern-day cleavage formation by providing evidence that European integration reduces conflict in economic policy while intensifying identity-based divides.

The subject of this study comprises how Turkey’s EU membership is seen by HDP-supporter Kurdish voters in Turkey, as a non-EU country that has on-hold negotiations but still an ostensible vision for membership. There is a dearth of literature regarding Kurdish voters’ views on the EU, and this study, employing the focus group method, aims to address this gap by providing insights into the perspectives of Kurdish voters who support the HDP on Turkey-EU relations and their attitudes toward the EU. The study employs focus group methodology to assess whether the independentist demands that began to spring in Europe are also becoming popular among Kurdish voters. The primary finding derived from the focus group study indicates that the interviewees exhibited limited interest in both the EU negotiations and the EU’s handling of the Kurdish issue, and that the EU accession process failed to evoke significant enthusiasm among the interviewees. Meanwhile, developments pertaining to the Kurdish population in Syria and Iraq have generated a significantly higher level of enthusiasm when compared to the negotiations with the European Union.

Having long shied away from proactively politicizing issues of European integration, the past crisis decade has put generally pro‐European mainstream parties under pressure to spell out more clearly which kind of Europe they support. We distinguish two such fundamental ideas of Europe: the redistributive polity, organizing transnational solidarity and the regulatory polity, strengthening national self‐reliance. Both notions are integrationist, but they come with distinct policy implications. What determines mainstream party support for either of these polity ideas? We investigate this question on data provided by the ‘EUandI’ voting advice application, which contains party positions on core issues of integration for all EU member states for the four European Parliament elections between 2009 and 2024. Mainstream party support for redistribution, we find, is generally driven by their ideological placement on the economic and cultural dimension. While progressive and left parties tend towards EU‐level redistribution, conservative and right parties are wedded to the idea of a regulatory European polity. This general dynamic, however, interacts with parties’ domestic considerations, that is, the public salience of an issue and a country's net‐payer status in the EU. We further find that the effect of mainstream parties’ ideological positioning differs across policy domains. While cultural and economic positions drive support for redistribution in fiscal and taxation policy to a nearly equal extent, support for redistribution in migration policy is driven by cultural factors alone, while in matters of security and defence right mainstream parties are more supportive of European solidarity than parties of the mainstream left. Our analysis demonstrates that mainstream parties now compete visibly over EU‐level redistribution, but that their stances on transnational solidarity differ depending on the domestic situation and the policy domain in question.

What explains the variation in public support for European integration? While the existing literature has predominantly focused on economic, cultural and political factors, the influence of geography has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by examining the impact of residing in the European Union (EU) border regions on voters' perceptions and attitudes towards the EU. Contrary to previous research, our study reveals a remarkable pattern, indicating that individuals living in border regions exhibit a higher propensity to vote for Eurosceptic parties and hold negative views on the EU. Through the utilization of both behavioural and attitudinal indicators in years ranging between 1999 and 2021 and employing statistical matching, our analysis robustly supports this finding. Moreover, we delve into the underlying mechanisms driving these negative attitudes in border regions, highlighting the significance of institutional factors. A mediation analysis reveals an interesting and previously unexplored theoretical twist: We find that residing in a border region is associated with lower trust in national political institutions, which translates into distrust in the EU. These findings suggest that it might be policymakers residing in the capital of the country rather than people on the other side of the border that make borderland inhabitants' attitudes distinctly negative.

How do mainstream political executives cue their politicised constituencies on European integration? Moving beyond static expectations that EU politicisation induces executives to either undermine, defuse or defend integration, this article theorises executives’ incentives under different configurations of public and partisan Euroscepticism in their home countries. Expectations are tested on the sentiment and complexity that executives attach to European integration in almost 9,000 public speeches delivered throughout the Euro Crisis. It is found that national leaders faced with sceptical public opinion and low levels of partisan Euroscepticism rhetorically undermine integration, whereas European Commissioners faced with similar conditions are prone to defend it. These responses intensify disproportionally with growing public Euroscepticism, but are moderated by Eurosceptic party strength in surprising ways. When such challenger parties come closer to absorbing the Eurosceptic potential in public opinion, executive communication turns more positive again but also involves less clear rhetorical signals. These findings move beyond existing uniform expectations on mainstream responses to Eurosceptic challenges and highlight the relevance of different domestic configurations of EU politicisation.