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.
The High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy was first established by the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999 to enhance the effectiveness and credibility of EU foreign policy. Since its creation, this body has played different roles vis-a-vis varies policy dossiers. In some cases, the High Representative has successfully coordinated the positions of Member States and enhanced the worldwide visibility of EU foreign policy. On other occasions, the High Representative played a more proactive role by identifying and operationalizing common European interests.
The varying role of the High Representative in different policy dossiers reflects the ambiguity of the EU political system. Unlike in most European states\where the executive and legislative powers are linked through the same parliamentary majority\within the EU supranational and intergovernmental sources legitimacy coexist. It is the
ambiguity deriving from it that permitted the High Representative to adopt different roles in response to different external challenges.
This research investigates the reasons that led the High Representative to play sometimes the role of mediator and at other times that of policy entrepreneur by examining the influence of security culture on EU foreign policy processes. Security culture is defined as the convergence of socially transmitted norms shared by the majority of political actors belonging to the EU security community. The norms constituting security culture concern the identification of security threats, the definition
of the appropriate instruments to deal with them, and the interaction with the international community.
The comparison of the cases of the 2001 Macedonia crisis and the negotiations over Iranfs nuclear programme reveals that shared norms.and thus the emergence of a shared culture.with regard to a given threat had an impact on policy processes
involving the High Representative. In particular, the emergence of a shared security culture created a positive context which enabled the High Representative to adopt the
role of policy entrepreneur, rather than simply mediating among Member States.
In order to address the capability-expectations gap emerged among citizens' expectations, and EUfs ability to deliver in the field of foreign policy, scholars have long stressed the need to build stronger institutions able to constrain the powers of Member States. However, this research identifies the development of a shared vision about common security as a factual pre-condition for the empowerment of central institutions and, thus, for further integration in this field. In addition, even though the existing literature has mostly identified diverging norms on the use of force in the international arena and on the alliance with the US as the major obstacles to an effective EU foreign policy, this study suggests that another major obstacle in this regard lies in diverging norms concerning the role of international cooperation and the relation between national and international security vis-a-vis external threats.
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.
Governments have always been more reluctant to accept parliamentary oversight in foreign policy than in any other domestic policy field. This examination of the recent performance of the Italian Parliament in Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) scrutiny and control in the two case studies of the EU's arms embargo against China and negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program shows that institutional arrangements concerning parliamentary control in this field have significant shortcomings. Although limited, the reforms under discussion in the new intergovernmental conference could contribute to improving the performance of parliaments and to creating a common awareness of the problem of democratic deficit in CFSP among the parliamentarians of EU member states.
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