While there may be consensus on the broader issues of the core objectives of the health care system, expectations differ between EU countries, and European national policy-makers. This book seeks firstly to assess the impact of the enlargement process and then to analyse the challenges that lie ahead in the field of health and health policy.
The book provides the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the development of EU enlargement conditionality across four different enlargement waves - the first (2004) and the second (2007) phase of the Eastern enlargement, the EU enlargement to Croatia (2013), and the ongoing enlargement round involving Turkey and the Western Balkans.
In A Community of Europeans?, a thoughtful observer of the ongoing project of European integration evaluates the state of the art about European identity and European public spheres. Thomas Risse argues that integration has had profound and long-term effects on the citizens of EU countries, most of whom now have at least a secondary "European identity" to complement their national identities. Risse also claims that we can see the gradual emergence of transnational European communities of communication. Exploring the outlines of this European identity and of the communicative spaces, Risse sheds light on some pressing questions: What do "Europe" and "the EU" mean in the various public debates? How do European identities and transnational public spheres affect policymaking in the EU? And how do they matter in discussions about enlargement, particularly Turkish accession to the EU? What will be the consequences of the growing contestation and politicization of European affairs for European democracy? This focus on identity allows Risse to address the "democratic deficit" of the EU, the disparity between the level of decision making over increasingly relevant issues for peoples' lives (at the EU) and the level where politics plays itself out—in the member states. He argues that the EU's democratic deficit can only be tackled through politicization and that "debating Europe" might prove the only way to defend modern and cosmopolitan Europe against the increasingly forceful voices of Euroskepticism.
This open access book explores the new complexities and ambiguities that epitomize EU-Turkey relations. With a strong focus on the developments in the last decade, the book provides full access to a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted relationship through three entry points: (1) Theories and Concepts, (2) Institutions, and (3) Policies. Part I brings together complementary and competing analytical approaches to study the evolution of EU-Turkey relations, ranging from traditional integration theories to novel concepts. Part II investigates the institutional machinery of EU-Turkey relations by analyzing the roles and perspectives of the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament. Part III offers analyses of the policies most relevant for the relationship: enlargement policy, trade and macroeconomic policies, foreign and security policy, migration and asylum policies, and energy policy. In Part IV, the volume closes with a systematic survey of the conditions under which cooperative trends in EU-Turkey relations could be (re)invigorated. The systematic setup and the balanced combination of distinguished experts from EU- and Turkey-based institutions make this book a fundamental reading for students, researchers, lecturers, and practitioners of EU-Turkey relations, European integration and Turkish foreign policy. Wulf Reiners is Senior Researcher and Head of the Managing Global Governance (MGG) Program of the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut fur Entwicklungspolitik (DIE). Ebru Turhan is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Turkish-German University in Istanbul, Turkey.
This text reviews a variety of approaches to the study of the European Union's foreign policy. Much analysis of EU foreign policy contains implicit theoretical assumptions about the nature of the EU and its member states, their inter-relationships, the international system in which they operate and the nature and direction of European integration. In many instances such assumptions, given that they are not discussed openly, curtail rather than facilitate debate. The purpose of this book is to open up this field of enquiry so that students, observers and analysts of EU foreign policy can review a broad range of tools and theoretical templates from which the development and the trajectory of the EU's foreign policy can be studied.
Approaches democratization of the European neighbourhood from two sides, first exploring developments in the states themselves and then examining what the European Union has been doing to promote the process.
This book fills a significant gap in recent literature on European Union politics by examining the EU’s ‘other’ eastern enlargement, completed in 2007 with the accession of Bulgaria and Romania. It focuses on both the process and the effects of the 2007 enlargement within the wider context of the post-communist countries’ accession to the EU, and, more broadly, within the context of the history of EU enlargement. The book brings together in-depth analyses of a wide range of issues, both from a comparative perspective and through single case studies. Individual contributions shed new light onto EU enlargement through a theoretical re-evaluation of the ‘strategic action’ paradigm, as well as through historical analyses of the 2007 enlargement and of its implications for future EU enlargements. Further insight into the process of EU enlargement is gained through systematic exploration of the impact of accession on policy-making and institutional structures in Bulgaria and Romania. Altogether, the contributions exemplify the multi-faceted nature of EU enlargement and accession, as well as the extent to which the process of acceding to the EU is not completed with membership, either for the EU or for the candidate countries. This book was published as a special issue of Perspectives on European Politics and Society.
Integration in Europe has been a slow incremental process focusing largely on economic matters. Policy makers have tried to develop greater support for the European Union by such steps as creating pan-European political institutions. Yet significant opposition remains to policies such as the creation of a single currency. What explains continued support for the European Union as well as opposition among some to the loss of national control on some questions? Has the incremental process of integration and the development of institutions and symbols of a united Europe transformed public attitudes towards the European Union? In this book, Matthew Gabel probes the attitudes of the citizens of Europe toward the European Union. He argues that differences in attitudes toward integration are grounded in the different perceptions of how economic integration will affect individuals' economic welfare and how perceptions of economic welfare effect political attitudes. Basing his argument on Easton's idea that where affective support for institutions is low, citizens will base their support for institutions on their utilitarian appraisal of how well the institutions work for them, Gabel contends that in the European Union, citizens' appraisal of the impact of the Union on their individual welfare is crucial because their affective support is quite low. This book will be of interest to scholars studying European integration as well as scholars interested in the impact of public opinion on economic policymaking. Matthew Gabel is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Kentucky.
The book analyses how political parties compete and strategise on the issue of territorial reform using case-studies that include countries from both Western (Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain) and Central-Eastern Europe (Poland, Slovakia and Romania). Each case-study in the volume considers the different drivers of decentralization, such as territorial identities and the demands of regionalist parties for territorial autonomy or independence, efficiency concerns related to issues of uneven economic development and economic competitiveness, the pressure from supra-national organizations (especially the EU), as well as different combinations of these drivers. They also consider how the ideology and organisation of state-wide parties and the institutional context in which they compete shape their responses to these drivers and their strategy towards the question of territorial reform. This collection investigates the logic of the actions that guide political parties’ strategy to highlights trends that are apparent across the case-studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of West European Politics.
