European Union

Citing national security risks, the US government is forcing AI developer Anthropic to block access to its most powerful models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, for all non-US users. In response, the company has temporarily deactivated the two models entirely. Europe's media discuss the implications of Washington's decision in the debate about digital sovereignty.

Details of the framework agreement to end the war, which the US and Iran intend to sign in Geneva on Friday, have not yet been made public. The two sides have presented slightly different versions of the content. There are open questions regarding the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran's nuclear programme and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon. The press sees numerous pitfalls.

The government in Prague has decided to scrap licence fees for Czech Television (ČT) and Czech Radio (ČRo). In future, the two broadcasters are to be financed by the state budget, but will receive less money than before. The opposition says the government is seeking to gag these key media outlets. Commentators are also critical of the move.

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2026 - EP

On Thursday 2 July, the Committee on Foreign Affairs will hold a workshop on 'A new EU approach to the Sahel region'. The event aims to enrich the EP's debate and oversight of the 2025 'renewed' EU approach for the Sahel region, focusing on its central part (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger).
The workshop will provide current insights into the rapidly evolving challenges, such as security threats, political instability, and humanitarian crises, and foreign interference in a geopolitically challenging environment, following a recent wave of military coups d'état, violent jihadism and separatism.Prof. Nina Wilén will present a study on the topic, including policy options for EU cooperation with the region, in support of regional stability, peace, good governance and potentially improved relations. A debate between her and MEPs, representatives of other EU institutions, and other experts will follow suit.
Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Context is a critical component of business and management research, shaping organisational behaviour and influencing outcomes. In management literature, it is widely acknowledged that “context counts” and “context matters”. Yet it is often present only implicitly, as a backdrop – an afterthought or a control variable – limiting the development of context-sensitive theories and marginalising indigenous perspectives on local phenomena. The field is thus regularly criticised for inadequate contextualisation of emerging economies’ studies, resulting in calls for researchers to “practise more context”. All this was truly relevant to me, as I faced this challenge in my PhD study. My PhD project focuses on the strategies of wineries from Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine – three post-Soviet countries aspiring to join the EU.

As a phenomenon to be understood and explained – an explanandum – eurointegration is best studied not in management research but in EU studies, a field that has spent decades building specific knowledge about it. This led me to engage directly with the context, by turning to the field in which it is most explicitly theorised. So, I had no excuse: I immersed myself in studying that context in depth.

However, for the core phenomena of management and business studies – firm strategy, internationalisation, sectoral adaptation, and so on – eurointegration plays the role of context, or explanans, in which such phenomena are embedded. For these firms, eurointegration is not simply a background condition; it structures the strategic environment in which they operate.

Yet eurointegration, even though it plays distinct roles in EU studies and management research (explanandum versus explanans), is what connects the two fields. You would expect them to talk to each other. But in practice, they rarely do and have mostly grown up in isolation. EU studies theorise integration in depth but seldom follows it down to the organisational level where it takes effect. Meanwhile, management research tends to label the entire process ‘eurointegration’ and move on, treating it as context without spelling out the mechanisms that make it matter.

Thus, in my PhD project, I tried to overcome this limitation by bridging the two fields – and the paper I presented at the forum explains how.

My approach rests on a distinction from accounting research – between domain theory and method theory – to which I add a third, missing constituent – context theory. Together, they split any study into clear jobs. Domain theory says what we are explaining – a firm’s strategy. Method theory says how we study it. And context theory, the missing element of the puzzle that I added, says what shapes the phenomenon: here, what eurointegration does to it. The three depend on each other: domain theory sets the question, context theory supplies the conditions that answer it, and method theory ties them together, and none is asked to do everything – which is what usually goes wrong when one field borrows from another. I do not prescribe any particular domain, method, or context theory. That choice is the researcher’s, to be made according to what best fits the study and explains it most powerfully.

That leaves one question: where does the context theory come from? This is where EU studies come in – that is where I found suitable candidates. The easiest route is to borrow: take an EU theory off the shelf and apply it to firms unchanged. But pure borrowing leaves eurointegration vague, the theory never quite fits, and the two sides stay disconnected. I suggest translation instead. By translation I mean reworking an EU theory’s core explanatory logic for the level of firms and sectors while keeping it recognisably tied to the original – the idea, long familiar in organisation studies, that concepts are transformed as they travel between fields. Translation preserves a theory’s core mechanism, its source of variation, and the conditions under which it holds, so it still does real work as context theory.

Done this way, five EU traditions become five context theories that management research can use. EU-induced domestic change becomes a regulatory adaptation context; differentiated integration becomes a heterogeneity context, since a diversified firm faces not one European market but several; conditionality becomes an anticipatory alignment context, explaining why some firms align before any legal obligation, drawn by the prospect of future market access; multi-level governance becomes a multi-principal context; and politicisation becomes a legitimacy and uncertainty context, where contested integration turns the durability of the rules themselves into a strategic risk.

My wineries sit exactly here. In EU-aspiring countries the institutional environment is neither fully domestic nor fully EU-internal: conditionality drives domestic reform, which generates firm-facing pressure long before membership, and firms respond not with automatic compliance but with a range of options – acquiescence, compromise, avoidance, defiance, or manipulation. To explain why one Moldovan or Georgian producer aligns early with EU standards while its neighbour waits, generic management theory is not enough, and macro-level EU theory is not enough. We need both, to bridge the macro–micro divide in research.

So this is my claim, and my call: to treat eurointegration as the complex context in which our phenomena are embedded – something that must be specified and theorised properly, and that is best understood through EU studies. The way to do our own work well is to translate rather than merely borrow, and to fold that translation into frameworks of our own. Built that way, eurointegration context becomes a bridge the two fields can cross toward each other – a vote for interdisciplinarity, not as a fashionable label, but as the most relevant way to study organisations whose strategic world is shaped by eurointegration and to co-create and share knowledge across two fields.

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