Abstract. European cooperation in the foreign policy domain is changing decision making in a broad number of issues. The analysis of the action taken by two legislatures – the British and the Italian Parliaments – as regards two foreign policy initiatives – the EU/E3 negotiations with Iran and the debate over lifting the European Union (EU) arms embargo against China – provides important insights on the strategies adopted by national legislatures to deal with cooperation in this field. The analysis confirms that a democratic deficit exists at the national level; yet, it highlights that scrutiny performance is undermined not only by a lack of information from national governments and expertise on EU procedures but also by new political dynamics generated by the growing intergovernmental cooperation. In particular, the long chains of delegation and the accountability dilemma generated by the multilevel system of governance undermine both the capacity and willingness of parliaments to perform an adequate oversight. Parliaments wanting to reaffirm their role and the principle of EU democratic legitimacy at the national level need to recognize these limits and to loosen their traditional images as repositories of the sovereignty of single and separated nation-states.
In recent years, rapid advances in technologies have allowed significant positive changes within the field of satellite observations of the global ocean. This paper reviews the available global scientific literature that focuses on the study of salinity by remote sensing, tracking its evolution and trends by combining social network analysis and bibliometrics. Furthermore, the study shows the relationships and co-occurrences between authors, countries and keywords retrieved from the abstracts and citations database provided by Scopus. An analysis of 581 publications has been carried out. The achieved results, which highlight a worldwide increase in scientific interest in this field over the last decade, may constitute a useful tool for a global vision and for a potential improvement in the international efforts employed in the study of salinity from remote sensing.
Since the 1990s, the expansion of the European Union's competences to new policy fields and the entrance of new member states with recent histories of religious repression have increased the exposure of European Union institutions to issues having a potentially high impact on religious sensitivity. Because the differentiation between the religious and the political in Europe has never been complete, national laws and regulations have always reflected different forms of compromise between states and majoritarian religious churches. The involvement of supranational institutions could be a challenge to this variety of situations. The approach developed by EU institutions to deal with issues of religious diversity, however, severely minimizes the chances of any active intervention in country-level compromises, thereby leaving the resolution of contemporary challenges concerning religion in Europe to the national level. This situation points at the persistent absence of shared principles and values concerning a core component of a common European identity.
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