An examination of the industrial restructuring in small countries facing increased competition after European economic integration. It focuses on four countries, and argues that "Europe 1992" will benefit insiders more than outsiders.
European integration is not a priori positive or negative: it results from the interaction between various interests. During the past few years, however, it has been impossible to ignore increasingly strident claims that the European Union is in the midst of a crisis. According to this perspective, European institutions do not function well, democracy in the Union is flawed, eurozone problems have reached a critical point, and inward migration, which European institutions seem incapable of handling, is escalating. This book demonstrates that public choice theory can be a suitable analytical tool to examine the European integration process. It is based on the assumption that consumers, politicians and even nations are similarly concerned with their own interests (economic, political, and so on). Public choice theory enables us to ‘de-idealize’ the European integration process and see the interests of individual actors in the process more realistically. European integration does not occur because the actors are altruistic; rather, it comes about due to their rational pursuit of individual or group self-interests. European integration and other forms of globalization are not irreversible. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It remains a possibility that, after several decades of European integration, we are now entering an era of disintegration. This book will serve as a source of edification for academics, politicians, students, and experts, as well as the general public. It is designed to capture the interest of both graduate and postgraduate students of economics, political science and international relations.
What explains differences in the lobbying behaviour of interest groups? And what consequences do these differences have for the access that interest groups can gain to decision-makers and the influence that they can exert on policy outcomes? Building on an unprecedented amount of empirical evidence on lobbying in Europe, this book puts forward a distinction between lobbying insiders and lobbying outsiders. Lobbying insiders, most prominently business interests, try to establish direct contacts with decision-makers, enjoy good access to executive institutions, and manage to shape policy outcomes when mobilizing the public on an issue is difficult. Lobbying outsiders, in particular citizen groups such as consumer, environmental or health non-governmental organizations, put greater emphasis on mobilizing the public or changing public attitudes, find it easier to gain access to legislative decision-makers, and have the greatest impact on outcomes on issues that are amenable to an outside lobbying campaign. The book shows that a single argument, building on group type as the main variable, can explain variation across interest groups in their choice of strategy, their access to decision-makers, and the conditions under which they can exert influence. The existence of lobbying insiders and lobbying outsiders has important implications for both our understanding of political decision-making and the normative appraisal of contemporary democracy.
This is a key reference text presenting the latest first-rate approaches to the study of European enlargement. Developed and significantly expanded from a special issue of the leading Journal of European Public Policy, this new volume draws on the insights from the recently emerging theoretically-informed literature on the EU's eastern enlargement and complements these studies with original articles that combine a theoretical approach with comparative analyses. These expert contributors focus on the broader theoretical debates and their implications for the enlargement of the EU, as well as placing the enlargement of the EU within the broader context of the expansion of international organisations and the study of institutions in international relations.
On January 1 1995, Austria and Sweden joined the European Union (EU). This book examines why these two countries joined at such a moment and studies their accession against the structural background of globalization. In this cutting-edge analysis, Andreas Bieler argues that conventional neo-functionalist and intergovernmentalist theories fail to explain such structural change as they take existing power structures as given. Therefore, he develops a neo-Gramscian perspective as an alternative approach to European integration.
Pre-financial crisis, EU citizens were 'overlooking' Europe ignoring it in favour of globalisation, economic flows, and crises of political corruption. Innovative focus group methods allow an analysis of citizens' reactions, and demonstrate how euroscepticism is a red herring, instead articulating an indifference to and ambivalence about Europe.
The Oxford Handbook of the European Union brings together numerous acknowledged specialists in their field to provide a comprehensive and clear assessment of the nature, evolution, workings, and impact of European integration.
The European Union's foreign policy is full of paradoxes. The Union aspires to be a powerful international actor without becoming a super-state. It hopes to prevent and manage conflicts, but refrains from acquiring the military means to do so. It embarks on the project of widening its borders, but continues its deepening project which makes the entrance hurdles for applicant countries ever higher. It wishes to maintain strong transatlantic links, but continues to build institutions that make the EU more independent from - if not competitive with - the United States. In this stimulating book, distinguished European and American intellectuals offer solutions to imperative but unanswered questions: How can the Union's enormous normative `power of attraction' combined with its operational weakness be explained? Can the Union remain a `civilian power' when coping with an `uncivilized' world? Can a European foreign policy get off the ground without prior emergence of a European demos? Are national policies within the Union increasingly convergent or divergent? And how can the Union's international performance be assessed?
This book outlines the possibilities and perspectives of an intertwining of European integration historiography with the history and concept of capitalism. Although debates on capitalism have been making a comeback since the 2008 crisis, to date the concept of capitalism remains almost completely avoided by historians of European integration. This book thus conceptualizes ‘capitalism’ as a useful analytical tool that should be used by historians of European integration and proposes three major approaches for them to do so: first, by bringing the question of social conflict, integral to the concept of capitalism, into European integration history; second, by better conceptualizing the link between European governance, Europeanization and the globalization of capitalism; and thirdly by investigating the economic, political and ideological models or doctrines that underlie European cooperation, integration, policies and institutions. This analytical encounter between European integration history and capitalism allows for a better understanding of how today’s "Europe" resulted from a complex social, economic and political conflict that took place in part at the European level. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, the European Review of History.