Bart Van Vooren – författare

For years the European Union has been looked on as a potential model for cosmopolitan governance, and enjoyed considerable influence on the global stage. The EU has a uniquely strong and legally binding mission statement to pursue international relations on a multilateral basis, founded on the progressive development of international law. The political vision was for the EU to export its values of the rule of law and sophisticated governance mechanisms to the international sphere.Globalization and the financial crisis have starkly illustrated the limits of this vision, and the EU's dependence on global forces partially beyond the control of traditional provinces of law. This book takes stock of the EU's role in global governance. It asks: to what extent can and does the EU shape and influence the on-going re-ordering of legal processes, principles, and institutions of global governance, in line with its optimistic mission statement?With this ambitious remit it covers the legal-institutional and substantive aspects of global security, trade, environmental, financial, and social governance. Across these topics 23 contributors have taken the central question of the extent of the EU's influence on global governance, providing a broad view across the key areas as well as a detailed analysis of each. Through comparison and direct engagement with each other, the different chapters provide a distinctive contribution to legal scholarship on global governance, from a European perspective.

The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) is a recent example of an external EU policy drawn up explicitly with the objective of achieving coherence in the external policies of the EU and its Member States. Positioning the ENP in the legal-historical context of political union, this book explains why coherence has become a substantive issue in EU external relations, and why law is integral to attaining the ever-enigmatic single voice of the European Union. The text examines the role of EU external relations law in attaining a coherent neighbourhood policy and goes on to undertake an in depth analysis of the ENP, arguing that the innovative nature of the ENP in regard to coherence lies beyond the narrowly defined legal sphere, and stems primarily from its hybrid composition of hard legal, soft legal and non-legal policy instruments. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach by integrating elements of law, history and political science, EU External Relations Law and the European Neighbourhood Policy is unique in its approach to the subject.This book will be of particular interest to academics and students of EU Law, Political Science, History and International Relations as well as to practitioners engaged in the process of drafting coherent external policy.