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Slovakia's accession to the EU: A return to the west or a seized opportunity?
Salíni, Michal ; Földes, Kristián (advisor) ; Kubátová, Hana (referee)
This year, 18 years have passed since the moment Slovakia became a member of the European Union. Currently, Slovakia is a long-time member of the Union, however, this status has not always been self-evident. At the turn of millennia, Slovakia was in the middle of an accession process, which was marked with success, as well as problems. This bachelor thesis focuses on the accession process of Slovakia to the European Union in the years 1994-2004. Using theoretical principles of constructivism and post-structuralism, the author is analysing nominalisation and predicalisation of the European Union in Slovak public discourse based on two logical principles - logic of expected consequences and logic of appropriateness. Furthermore, this thesis focuses on which of these logical approaches was prevalent in the public discourse. Author works with materials from political and media sphere from a given period. The first part of the thesis focuses on the theoretical and methodological background necessary for the analysis. In the following part, author describes historical context of the period. In the empirical chapter, author analyses chosen relevant materials. In the last part of the thesis, author provides answers to research questions.
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European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) - problematic issues and reform
Havel, Matej ; Karlas, Jan (advisor) ; Karásek, Tomáš (referee)
The thesis assesses the development of ENP since the introduction of the policy in 2004 in sectors: cooperation in justice and home affairs and trade liberalisation. The main objective of the work is to outline main problematic issues which are common for both sectors and the whole region under ENP umbrella. The analysis of both sectors is based primarily on data retrieved from official EU documents that evaluate what progress has been made so far. Clear-cut indicators and structure of the thesis divided into two parts representing each sector demonstrate their shared characteristics. Both sectoral analysis provide partial conclusions identifying weak and strong points of the policy. Each sectoral analyses consists of first phase describing the character of the sector in regard to actors, instruments and balance of the policy; and the second phase evaluating progress in the framework of the sector. The conclusions summarises the main problematic issues.
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The influence of the coordination of the foreign policy on economic diplomacy of the member states of the EU
Pavlová, Pavlína ; Weiss, Tomáš (advisor) ; Šlosarčík, Ivo (referee)
The aim of this bachelor thesis was to critically examine the impact of the EU membership on the economic diplomacy of Slovak Republic. The research is based on the analysis of strategic documents of economic diplomacy of SR and official statements of its main representatives. The analytical part of this thesis was preceded by a theoretical section that explained and fixed the meaning of the terms such as Europeanisation and economic diplomacy. This was followed by a short introduction to the economic diplomacy of SR. In the selected documents, the changes in terms of the economic diplomacy of SR were examined on three different levels. Firstly, the exploration of the strategic level of the economic diplomacy was conducted, which elucidated the trends of the development of the economic diplomacy. Subsequently, the tasks of the economic diplomacy were clarified. Last but not least, the pressure on the institutional changes in the organisation of the country's representatives of the economic diplomacy was monitored. The thesis examined changes in the selected areas in chronological order with the emphasis on the period of the EU membership of SR. The impacts of the Europeanisation of the economic diplomacy of SR were tracked on the basis of the typology introduced by Tanja Börzel. As a result of this...
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The estimation of country - level production function aimed at understanding the role of human capital
Mačorová, Simona ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Průša, Jan (referee)
Our goal is the estimation of country - level production function aimed at understanding the role of human capital. We analyze the effect of education, especially the effect of the share of college graduates in prime-age population (between 25 - 54 years) on the European Union (EU) countries' labor productivity. Here, an important issue is efficiency of tertiary education institutions. We split the ratio of human capital to observe it from different aspects. We compare an effect of lower and upper tertiary educated, by specializations and by gender. The relationship between human capital and labor productivity was found positive though not significant or significant only on 10 % confidence level. The influence of human capital on labor productivity was found very low, in some cases even negative. Assuming that one of the main reasons behind these contra-intuitive results is the problem of unobserved heterogeneity, we also run instrumental variable estimation. We found positive and significant on 5 % confidence level relationship between human capital and labor productivity. The influence of larger share of tertiary educated people on labor productivity is more evident after some period of time, in our example after two years. Keywords: human capital, labor productivity, European Union, production...
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Europeanisation of Criminal Law: European Union and Criminal Law
Pevná, Eva ; Herczeg, Jiří (advisor) ; Gřivna, Tomáš (referee)
1 Abstract - Europeanisation of Criminal Law The Europeanization of criminal law is a convergent process of national criminal orders. This paper focus on a progress made within the political hybrid - the European Union that had no competences in this field in the beginning. Firstly, I present the evolution of the primary law up to the present situation. Next there is an overview of the EU Agencies. The core of this work is to present the newest changes set up by Lisbon Treaty and Stockholm Programme and to chart the evolution of the cooperation that I try to evaluate in the conclusion. The Criminal Law represents a highly particular area of the international cooperation because this legal subject is considered to be one of the most basic elements of the state sovereignty. Thus, any external intervention to the national criminal law presents a hit to the state sovereignty. Another obstacle to the international cooperation in the criminal affairs is the diversity of national criminal orders. Besides, this diversity is believed to be an expression of national peculiarities and any attempt to unify anything in this area is considered to be an effort to repress national differences. We can not deny the symbolic value of the national codifications. Anyway, the biggest problem to the international cooperation is...
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The analysis of framing as part of the EU's actorness: Case of Poland's climate politics
Talpasová, Alexandra ; Weiss, Tomáš (advisor) ; Šlosarčík, Ivo (referee)
The main topic of this bachelor thesis is actorness of the European Union in climate politics. Concept of EU actorness is quite popular in social sciences since 1970s. That is because EU is not a typical political entity a therefore her conceptualization became challenging for some. The result of this long lasting dispute was recognizing the EU as a unique entity of its own, the so called entity sui generis. This paper is therefore based on a theoretical model developed by Petr Kratochvíl (2013) in his book The EU as a political actor. The analysis of four dimensions of EU's actorness. In the book, Kratochvíl introduces four dimensions by which we can measure the scale of EU's actorness in chosen area. Those are: recognition, attractiveness, internal legitimacy and framing. For the purpose of this paper, the dimension of framing was chosen, as it enables us to analysis EU's ability to frame the internal debate in its member states. For the EU to be a successful framing actor, the member state has to 1) consider the EU as a main actor in the given area, 2) discuss the same topics and 3) consider the same solutions as the EU. The aim of this paper is to analyse the EU's ability to frame the internal debate about climate politics in the polish parliament Sejm. The paper is based as a case study of...
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International legal framework for foreign political missions of the European Union
Faix, Martin
1 Abstract One of the proclaimed goals of the European Union is to contribute to an "effective multilateral system leading to a fairer, safer and more united world". In order to enable itself to achieve these goals, the EU implemented a number of changes in the field of its common foreign and security policy. One of the most apparent elements of this process became its crisis management operations (CMOs). The progressive development of the ESDP, creation of capabilities enabling the EU to conduct military operations, and continuously raising number of military CMOs, point more and more urgently to the need to analyze these developments through the prism of international law. Out of these facts arises also the main question of the thesis: Has the EU's increasing military emancipation been paralleled by the definition of a clear international legal framework? The thesis is divided in five parts. The first chapter provides an overview of the basic characteristics and present status of the ESDP. We argued that the EU in order to achieve its goals has currently a wide range of instruments at its disposal, including an emergency a crisis response system. This system enables the EU to respond to whole spectrum of crisis situations and conflicts, including peace enforcement operations. The EU established respective...
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The European Union as a normative power in relation to Russian Federation?
Klanicová, Viktória ; Karlas, Jan (advisor) ; Kučerová, Irah (referee)
The aim of this thesis was to examine the extent to which the European Union can be considered a normative power in relation to the Russian Federation. The European Union has evolved into one of the most important global actors in the international arena and this development has, consequently, sparked series of debates trying to define the role of its actorness in relation to third parties. On one hand, scholars have emphasized the normative and value-driven features of the European Union as a whole, especially in the area of foreign policy cooperation where there exists enhanced emphasis on the importance of values and norms in comparison to other traditional actors in international relations. On the other hand, structural realists provided alternative interest-driven vision under which the member states are expected to follow common approach of the European Union only in cases that do not conflict with their national interests that are claimed to always prevail. These two alternative perspectives to the research have provided thesis with criteria of expected behaviour that the thesis examined on the specific case of the visa policy of the European Union towards Russia. The accuracy of the two theoretical frameworks was analysed by following three criteria - development of the policy over time,...
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On its way to membership? EU-Moldova relations after the Association Agreement
Kráľová, Diana ; Martinková, Viera (advisor) ; Földes, Kristián (referee)
The European Union is one of the most significant international actors whose institutional character and specific conduct of foreign policy make it an interesting object of study. It creates robust policies and programmes to frame relations with both the Member States, as well as with neighbouring countries. The European Neighbourhood Policy, and the Eastern Partnership specifically, is one such example. Even though the ENP was formally designed as a policy of non - membership, the communication of the EU's stance tends to refrain from framing it that way. Consequently, this creates a situation in which the neighbouring state continues to aspire to become a member of the EU, despite lack of reform progress, in hope of a "membership delay". The thesis addresses this discrepancy on the example of the relationship between the EU and the Republic of Moldova after the signature of the Association Agreement by interpreting its development and by assessing how the EU uses its normative power to Europeanize Moldova. Keywords Normative power, Europeanization, EU-enlargement, the European Union, the Republic of Moldova
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