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This chapter points out strength and weak elements of the gender mainstreaming strategy. On the one hand it represents one of the few attempts of installing a transnational strategy for gender equality proposing shared values and standards.Such a strategy boosted the development of a formal recognition of gender equality rights in institutions, workplaces and individual opinions. However, itentailsalso controversial aspects. For example, it still faces missteps in the conceptualisation of gender equality, with relevant consequences in the achievement of results. Furthermore, gender-equality policies have been marginalised progressively in the past decade as a result of political and institutional choices implemented at the European level and today risk being even more overlooked by the political debates at the national level. The future of gender equality depends by the awareness that establishing a legal basis for it is only the first step of a broader process that, to be effective, needs to promote a substantial cultural change within political, economic and social institutions, as well as public opinion.

This chapter revisits an old question—what does it mean for something to be musical?—through the lens of repetition, one of music’s most distinctive features. The kinds of experiences made possible through musical repetition—especially the sense of feeling (rather than explicitly knowing) future events within the sound of the current note, and the practice of moving down and up through an event’s temporal structure across repeated hearings—are put forth as fundamental components of what it means to attend musically to a stimulus. The speech-to-song illusion is reconsidered from this perspective, and several borderline cases, such as infant-directed speech and some types of ordinary conversation, are shown to yield new insights when recast as examples of musical attending.

This chapter examines plurality as a category of natural language, arguing that its fundamental semantic value on nouns is to express the property of having a complex part structure. First, it documents values of plurality that depart from the simple ‘more-than-one’ reading. Examples from typologically diverse languages show that plural often leads to a conceptualization of lexical nouns as denoting continuous masses, or granular substances, or entities defined by their spatial or temporal extension. In all such cases the denotational domain has a complex part structure, possibly grounded in that of the spatial or temporal context. Secondly, the chapter relates the observed non-canonical plural readings to recent syntactic analyses, and offers a structural interpretation. Finally, this analysis is placed within an internalist approach to semantics, with the claim that the properties expressed by plurality determine a conceptualization, rather than directly reflecting the part structure of the nouns' referents.

This chapter brings all the findings of this volume together. The point of departure was the finding of a de jure–de facto discrepancy regarding peacebuilding activities carried out under the CSDP: while the formal institutional and procedural features of EU peacebuilding are fundamentally intergovernmental, its administrative and operational realities have become Europeanized. This development prompts the question to what extent the transfer of powers by Member States to Brussels-based EU civilian crisis management structures has been matched with the establishment of appropriate accountability mechanisms at the European level. With a view to answering this interrogation, the chapter provides a concluding overview of existing accountability arrangements—political, legal, and administrative in nature—from both a de jure and a de facto perspective. The core finding is that while there is a considerable accountability deficit existing in law, this deficit has incrementally been countered by practice. As a result of this de facto readjustment of accountability, checks and balances are stronger at the EU than at Member State level, and individuals have de facto better—even though not perfect—judicial and administrative redress options at the supranational level. The conclusions further sketch out lessons learned, both for theory and practice, and provide an outlook on accountability in (civilian) CSDP.