What is the European Union (EU) and which countries should be part of it in the future? These questions became topical during the first part of the 21st century when political and geographical changes hasten the need to decide the nature of the European cooperation. In the European Constitution, that never come into force, the European values that a key role but was taken away in the succeeding Lisbon Treaty. Nevertheless EU continues to expand, recently to the East and non-European countries asTurkey are now on the ?waiting-list?.

Today Europe is faced with an identity crisis concerning its borders. Turkey stands at the threshold for an EU-membership while the EU-Commission is trying to formulate what constitutes a European identity. This identity seeking process will determine the future not only for Turkey, but also for immigrants now living in Europe.In this thesis a discourse analysis, underpinned by socialconstructionist theory, is conducted to explore how the European identity has been constructed throughout history up until today. A starting point is that identity always is defined through a dialectical relationship to "otherness". Therefore the analysis is focused not only on what a European identity consists of but also what and who it excludes.

This thesis analyses the scope of the treaty articles 43 and 48 concerning the freedom of establishment of companies. The interpretations of these articles made by the Commission and the European Court of Justice are analysed to see whether they are consistent. The analysis encompasses the provisions and directives in the field of EC Company Law as well as the essential case law from the ECJ regarding these issues. The conclusion that must be drawn from this thesis is that the Court of Justice adds the momentum in these issues whilst the Commission is held up by political considerations..

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the European Union (EU) is one of the oldest fields of cooperation within the European Union. During the past decades the different Commissioners have made several proposals about changes in the CAP and many of them have not been passed but renegotiated. The present Commission has however published a report in 2011, which emphasizes that the CAP has three alternative ways to go in the future. This study aims to predict which one of these three alternative ways it is most likely that the CAP will take according to the historical institutionalist theory. When to be able to predict this text analysis is used.

The starting point of this thesis is the debate surrounding the two referenda?s in France and the Netherlands in May and June 2005, regarding the proposal of a European constitution. The aim of this study is to analyse how democratic legitimacy and the role of the citizens portrays within the democratic discourse of the European Union. The empirical material is based upon both speeches from the European Commission and news articles from the French newspaper Libération and the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Discourse analysis is used as a theoretical frame of reference combined with models of democracy.

The transport sector is one of the biggest pollutants in the European Union. In relation to transport policies and environmental policies, intermodal transportation solutions are of high relevance to establish a sustainable transport sector for the future. Intermodality which is defined as smooth transition between transport modes is a key figure for how modal shares are divided between the modes of transportation. The aim of this bachelor?s thesis is to examine the research gap whether policies intended for a specific transport mode affects each other in relation to EU policies intended for intermodality.

The so called democratic deficit and the lack of legitimacy have been at the core of the EU-debate in the last decades. Low turnouts in the elections for the European parliament and disapproval in the ratification processes of the latest changes of the treaties are examples of the citizens lack of confidence for the EU and continuous integration. In Nice 2000 the heads of the member states governments agreed to try to improve the democratic legitimacy in the EU and initiated a public debate aiming at proposals for changes in the decision making processes in the EU. In July 2001 the commission published a white paper with their view. A fundamental presumption in discourse theory is that language and language usage not just is a way to deliver information about ideas and behaviours.

The purpose of the essay is both to bring forward the threats images, sectors, actors and referents that can be found at the European border between 2007-2010 and to explore whether they change during this period. Furthermore, the essay also intends to review the Copenhagen School?s theory of securitization. The analysis of the essay will be done on the European Commission?s ?Enlargement Strategy and Main Challenges?, a rapport that focus on the European border and its enlargement.

Sweden is a member of the European Union since 1995. The European Union issues directives that cover different areas. Member states must implement these directives into their national legislation. The European council issued in 1993 a directive that took action on the organization of working time, also known as the working time directive. The full name is: Council directive 93/104/EC of 23 November 1993 concerning certain aspects of the organization of working time.

The decision of the European Commission to block the merger between Volvo and Scania in the late 90?s became the starting point to the debate of the possible discriminating effects of the European merger regulation. Especially since the Commission a few years earlier had approved of the merger between Mercedes-Benz and Kässbohrer on the German bus market, where the conditions for competition had been similar to those at hand in the Swedish case. The issue that was and still is in focus is whether the European merger regulation is more difficult to pass for large companies situated on a smaller domestic market than is the case for their competitors of corresponding size but situated on a larger domestic market.This thesis aims at examining what the judgement of the geographical relevant market means for the application of the Merger act. This is being done from two perspectives.

The aim of this issue is to study how Swedish public libraries deal with the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of information in connection with public use of the Internet. The authors intention has been to find out whether the public use of the Internet has caused ethical problems for library workers and how the libraries solve situations when they consider their principles violated by library users. The authors study the debate on the issue in a couple of Swedish library magazines published during the late 1990s and they also give a few examples from the USA during the same period. They study the ethical principles and directives for schools published by the Swedish Board of Education as they claim that many of the public library users are students who bring along their ethical conceptions and thereby affect the ethical climate of the libraries. In their study the authors refer to ethical rules given to librarians by their trade union DIK and to the conclusions drawn from the hearing Good Ethics on the Net held by the Swedish IT Commission in 1998.

In February 2002 the European commission put forward a proposal for a new directive on The patentability of computer-implemented inventions, but which during my work on this essay has not been decided on yet. The directive has divided the decision-makers in the union, the commission and parliament, into two different positions regarding by which range computer-implemented inventions should be patentable. The parliament has amended the commissions proposal in a substantial way and the legal process has caused a heated debate both within the unions administration and among various interest groups both in favour of and against a patent on computer-implemented inventions. The loudest protests have come from a group that feels threatened by a possible software patent: Open Source. In this study I examine both the arguments by the decision-makers and by the lobbying for and against the proposal.

The free movement of the Roma minority has become questioned within the European Union. This study seeks to understand why this question has reached disproportionally importance in comparison to the number of Roma migrants within the union, and to understand the great attention given to the question. Based on the Copenhagen?s school of securitization, the purpose of this study is to show how this magnification of the question occurs due to the framing of the Roma migrants as a security problem. Focusing on the speech act of the securitization theory, this paper contains a study of political actor?s statements concerning Roma migrants.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to study the discourses on culture as developed by EU Commission. The method applied is a discoursebased historical analysis, where analysis of arguments and metaphors are functional to the enlightening of the construction of discourses within EU cultural policy. EU official documents constitute the empirical material studied. The theoretical framework of the thesis draws upon cultural public sphere theory as well instrumentalist cultural policy research.

The Commission can investigate infringements of the competition rules on its own initiativeor after a complaint from a third party when it suspects the existence of a cartel under Article81 or abuse of dominant position under Article 82. The EC Commission has extensiveinvestigatory powers under Regulation 1/2003 Articles 18 and 20. The visits by theCommission are made unannounced and that?s why they are popularly known as ?dawnraids?. The surprise arrival is essential in the fact-finding process because the Commissionlooks for information, which the undertaking subject would rather not give to the Commissionand takes measures to hide.The Commissions powers during a ?dawn raid? have been subjected to criticism.