The Influence of Flexibility on the Institutional Balance of the European Community and the European Union.

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c43184) has announced the addition of "Flexibility in Constitutions - Forms of Closer Cooperation in Federal and Non-Federal Settings" to their offering.

The Treaty of Amsterdam's closer co-operation paragraphs had the merit of putting a long standing practice of diversity not only into a new straightjacket but also into a new perspective. However it also created new sources of confusion. The Treaty of Nice brought some modifications but no great clarification, leaving the latter to legal practice and, in its absence, to scholarship.

This is the challenge picked up by the present book. Its specific approach is to find analogies for these novel EU techniques of flexibility in past of existing but experienced constitutional systems, either confederate or federal. The book combines legal analysis with historical detail. In this book, you will find a presentation of the numerous contexts of flexible co-operation.

The main topics to come out of the debates were 1) the necessity of leadership or dominance in closer co-operation projects; 2) the usefulness of the flexibility provisions; 3) the control and transparency of enhanced co-operation forms; 4) the way they lead to unity or diversity. These issues come together in the epilogue by W.T. Eijsbouts, (European Law, University of Amsterdam) who, notwithstanding all complexity, detects a model of 'balanced constitution'.

About the G.K. van Hogendorp Centre for European Constitutional Studies

Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, 1762-1834, is the auctor intellectualis of the Dutch Kingdom's first Constitution (1814). To his honour, the G.K. van Hogendorp Centre was founded in 1996 to promote research and teaching of European constitutional studies, thereby combining the disciplines of European and comparative constitutional law as well as legal and political theory. The Centre is supported by the faculties of Humanities and Law of the University of Amsterdam and by the European Union through the Jean Monnet project. Presently, the Centre's chairman is W. H. Roobol (emeritus Professor of European History), its director is W.T. Eijsbouts (Jean Monnet Chair in European Constitutional Law and History). The Hogendorp Centre hosts yearly international conferences on various topics, such as EMU (1997), Flexibility (1998), Ambiguity in the Rule of Law (1999), Europe's Constitution (2000) and Direct Effect (2001).

Key Chapters Covered Include:

- Problematic Possibilities.
- Unity and Diversity: Flexibility in a Historical Perspective
- Flexibility in German Constitutional Law.
- Switzerland: From Confederation to Federation through Flexibility.
- The Ubiquity of Asymmetrical Government
- Flexibility in the American Context.
- Differentiation or Enhanced Co-operation?.
- Flexibility from Amsterdam to Nice
- The Influence of Flexibility on the Institutional Balance of the
  European Community and the European Union.
- Flexibility and the Acquis Communautaire.
- Sovereignty Revisited.
- Authority or Stability: Flexibility in the Union in the Light of
  Constitutional History.

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c43184