How should political community be seen in the context of European integration? This book combines a theoretical treatment of political allegiance with a study of ordinary citizens, examining how taxi-drivers in Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic talk politics and situate themselves relative to political institutions and other citizens.
The author is presenting a broadly structured study about the first fifty years of European integration, its geopolitical context and academic reflection. His study is based on the two-fold thesis that since a few years, the European Union is going through a process of its Second Founding while simultaneously changing its rationale.
How can one convince potent nation-states to put their sovereignty at risk in common European policies? EU cohesion policy, now one-third of the EU budget, provides such a puzzle. Until 1988 the European Commission shared out money to national governments with few strings attached. Since the reform of 1988, national governments are required to negotiate with the Commission and regional authorities on how to use the money. Has this European-wide policy eroded national sovereignty in favour of a stronger role for the Commission and more power for Europe's regions? The first part of the book probes into the policy dynamics at the European level. In the second part, eight country studies evaluate the impact of uniform EU policy on territorial relations by comparing policy making before and after the reform. The concluding section explains persistent variation in EU cohesion decision making and implementation.
Debate about the theory underpinning the nature, workings, and development of the European (EU) has in many ways been hampered in recent years by an intellectual divergence in the two main ways that the EU is conceptualized. On the one hand is a political science and comparative government oriented strand that sees the EU as a political system in its own right. On the other is the international relations tradition which conceptualizes it as another international organization.Alongside this, the EU itself has developed a significant constitutional dimension. Indeed, the debate surrounding the 'Constitutional Treaty' presented several challenges to our capacity to grasp the normative change of this non-state polity. Despite the eventual contestation of the EU's 'constitutionalturn' through the French and Dutch no-votes and the cumbersome procedure of ratifying the Lisbon Treaty in their aftermath, debates about the EU's constitutional quality have not ceased. In the light of these developments, the editors of this volume, along with their distinguished contributors, have attempted to create a more decisively interdisciplinary theoretical approach to studying the EU within the wider world-political context. The volume brings together scholars in a range ofdisciplines across the social sciences to offer, not a complete theory, but rather a theoretical approach combining different stands of political and legal theory. The book's aim is to inspire further engagement with the central tenets of political authority and world order, sovereignty and constitutionalchange and democracy and justice, in the context of the EU's political development.
European politics has been reshaped in recent decades by a dual process of centralization and decentralization. At the same time that authority in many policy areas has shifted to the suprantional level of the European Union, so national governments have given subnational regions within countries more say over the lives of their citizens. At the forefront of scholars who characterize this dual process as Omulti-level governance,OLiesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks argue that its emergence in the second half of the twentieth century is a watershed in the political development of Europe. Hooghe and Marks explain why multi-level governance has taken place and how it shapes conflict in national and European political arenas. Drawing on a rich body of original research, the book is at the same time written in a clear and accessible style for undergraduates and non-experts.
