Volume 3, Issue 1

Decision makers do not act in a policy vacuum. As they develop their programs, they are aware of and influenced by available historical examples. If we look closely at the European Commission's education policy (measures as well as discourses), we notice the existence of similarities in the strategies that it deploys in this field and dynamics deployed much earlier by states engaged in nation building (that is, the redefinition of peoples' spatial representation of their community of belonging; the creation of a framework of shared values; and the process of "detemporalization-naturalization").This observation leads us to believe that if the European Commission decided to become involved in the field of education at an early stage in the integration process, it was not only—as most people believe—to ensure an effective implementation of the Common Market in 1957 or the Single Market in 1987. Rather, through its education policy, the Commission also hoped to create and foster an EU identity that the founding fathers and subsequent "Europeans" considered necessary for achieving their goals of creating "an ever closer union."

In this article Relevance Theory, a variety of cognitive linguistics, is applied to televised political advertising, extending the theory to cover audiovisual communication besides its traditional use in studying verbal communication. According to Relevance Theory signification in any communicated message is more complicated than the standard semiotic theory claims. More profound mental processes must take place prior to the moment of perceiving the message as composed of coded elements. With examples drawn from the Finnish campaign for the 2004 European Parliamentary elections, the article shows how these prior mental processes operate to produce the appearance of coded messages. To understand how relevance works, it is important to pay close attention to strategies applied by campaign teams in creating TV spots. It is also argued that relevance theory, better than semiotics, can be used in bridging political advertising and political practice and upgrading the status of political advertising as a serious art of politics.

During the last two decades European cohesion policy exercised a considerable impact on sub-national institutions. In Italy, structural funds provided regions with new opportunities of participation in the European policy-making making them acquire a brand new role in the planning and management of local development policies. However, these opportunities required regions to be able to play an active role towards Brussels, to develop new administrative and organizational procedures and to put in place new mechanisms of territorial governance. This work, which examines the strategies carried out by four Italian regions to respond to such a threefold challenge, individuates the legacy of the past and the characteristics of political and administrative elites as the key factors which, if combined, are able to explain the timing and scope of regional responses.