<div><p>The EU combines supranationalist and intergovernmentalist features. Today more than ever, it finds itself in a state of structural tension between these two dynamics. On the one hand, we observe calls for more integration between member states on issues that impact all European citizens equally, such as climate change or digital transition, and on the other, there are demands for greater autonomy for each member state in terms of determining what should be prioritized as well as the implementation of policies. The aim of this chapter on the future of the EU is to explore this tension and to study these dynamics across the five main challenges facing the EU today: climate change, digital transition, Europe's role in the world, Europe's unstable neighbourhood, and a phenomenon that cuts across all of these challenges, the rise of populism and authoritarianism.</p></div>

Constructivism and agenda-setting have an intimate, but very often, implicit relationship. The aim of this chapter is to analyse this relationship more precisely. Starting from the central question in agenda-setting approaches, that is why do issues become a problem that political actors perceive to be necessary to address, this chapter presents specifically constructivist views that frame the answer to this enquiry. Constructivist approaches argue that it is only when we concentrate on the ideational context in which policy actors identify, frame and legitimise the information available as a way of getting an issue on the political agenda – or, on the contrary, keeping it off – that we best understand why some issues make it on the agenda while others don’t. The chapter outlines the main elements of the agenda-setting process under a constructivist perspective and shows how constructivism has aimed to answer the limitations of other approaches in the analysis of the agenda setting process. It develops a discussion of strengths and weaknesses of constructivism related to the policy process as a theoretical framework and suggests further developments.

Why is soft law followed if it is non-binding? This question is addressed theoretically by highlighting that an instrument that is non-binding in the legal form can nevertheless contain enforcement mea- sures, which make it ‘binding’ on a different level. These enforcement measures can be causally linked to national-level usage of EU soft law by drawing on three behavioural logics: enforcement, management and persuasion. Empirically we proceed in two steps. First, we systematically catego- rise a large number of EU soft law instruments and find that despite being non-binding, EU soft law instruments frequently contain hard and soft enforcement measures. Second, a survey experiment among national civil servants shows that instruments with enforcement measures are indeed per- ceived as more binding at the national level. Three case studies complement this data by illustrating how soft enforcement can play out through persuasion or management while hard duties push soft law usage through an enforcement logic

This chapter studies the way constructivism informs our understanding of public administration research in the context of European Union (EU) studies. Constructivist approaches help us to understand the emergence and the impact of individual and collective ideas, values and ways-of-doing-things on policy-making in general. These terms, however, have not a universally accepted definition and, beyond the fact that they do, there is no agreement on how these central notions of constructivism affect policy or decision-making in constructivism. Due to this definitional conundrum, constructivism has been used in EU public administration research in several ways. At the most general level, constructivism has informed the study of the EU’s public administration when analysing the system as an organization based on values and standard operating procedures that strongly influence the outcomes.