Paper Titles & Abstracts

Among the new member states, Cyprus stands out as the only one that has failed to set up a permanent EU coordination mechanism. Europeanisation theory alone cannot explain this deviating case. Even more, the socio-political specificities of Cyprus (its troubled history, small size and the Cyprus problem) have cultivated a sense of national unity and thereby a culture of consensus, which do not cohere with its failure to set up such a mechanism. In trying to understand the Cyprus case, we thus turn to neo-instutionalist explanations and, more specifically, inter-institutional conflict, juxtaposing historical and rational choice approaches. In order to allow for a nuanced understanding, which hypothesizes the possibility that each of the two approaches explains different aspects of the puzzle, we devise a framework of analysis that: (i) traces how the relevant actors have reacted to pressures stemming from the EU level when such pressures were more intense; (ii) explores the capacity of the relevant actors in influencing developments; (iii) shows how the relevant actors perceived, and reacted to, each other's viewpoints and positions. The capacity of actors to shape developments has been accumulated through time and for reasons particular to Cyprus's history. Similarly, the perceptions of actors about their "opponents' arguments" have a historical justification. Subsequently, historical institutionalism is relevant. At the same time, the attempts of certain actors to gain further competencies and their implicit refusal to surrender competencies undermines a 'logic of national interest', highlighting the relevance of rational choice institutionalism. Our findings challenge those studies that treat different institutionalist approaches as explicitly competing and suggest that leaving space for combining them in future frameworks of analysis, may lead to more refined conclusions about the conceptual relationship between them, as well as about the complexity of inter-institutional conflict.