The European Union’s stalled expansion, the Euro deficit and emerging crises of economic and political sovereignty in Greece, Italy and Spain have significantly altered the image of the EU as a model of progressive civilization. However, despite recent events the EU maintains its international image as the paragon of European politics and global governance. This book unites leading scholars on Europe and Empire to revisit the view of the European Union as an ‘imperial’ power. It offers a re-appraisal of the EU as empire in response to geopolitical and economic developments since 2007 and asks if the policies, practices, and priorities of the Union exhibit characteristics of a modern empire. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of the EU, European studies, history, sociology, international relations, and economics.
This book offers a strikingly new perspective on EU enlargement. Basing his findings on substantial empirical evidence, Zielonka presents a carefully argued account of the kind of political entity the European Union is becoming, with particular reference to recent enlargement.
The acclaimed historian and author of Caesar presents “a first-rate popular biography” of Rome’s first emperor, written “with a storyteller’s brio” (Washington Post). The story of Augustus’ life is filled with drama and contradiction, risky gambles and unexpected success. He began as a teenage warlord whose only claim to power was as the grand-nephew and heir of the murdered Julius Caesar. Mark Antony dubbed him “a boy who owes everything to a name,” but he soon outmaneuvered a host of more experienced politicians to become the last man standing in 30 BC. Over the next half century, Augustus created a new system of government—the Principate or rule of an emperor—which brought peace and stability to the vast Roman Empire. In this highly anticipated biography, Goldsworthy puts his deep knowledge of ancient sources to full use, recounting the events of Augustus’ long life in greater detail than ever before. Goldsworthy pins down the man behind the myths: a consummate manipulator, propagandist, and showman, both generous and ruthless. Under Augustus’ rule the empire prospered, yet his success was constantly under threat and his life was intensely unpredictable.
The Soviet Union is often characterised as nominally a federation, but really an empire, liable to break up when individual federal units, which were allegedly really subordinate colonial units, sought independence. This book questions this interpretation, revisiting the theory of federation, and discussing actual examples of federations such as the United States, arguing that many federal unions, including the United States, are really centralised polities. It also discusses the nature of empires, nations and how they relate to nation states and empires, and the right of secession, highlighting the importance of the fact that this was written in to the Soviet constitution. It examines the attitude of successive Soviet leaders towards nationalities, and the changing attitudes of nationalists towards the Soviet Union. Overall, it demonstrates that the Soviet attitude to nationalities and federal units was complicated, wrestling, in a similar way to many other states, with difficult questions of how ethno-cultural justice can best be delivered in a political unit which is bigger than the national state.
Rethinking Europe's Future is a major reevaluation of Europe's prospects as it enters the twenty-first century. David Calleo has written a book worthy of the complexity and grandeur of the challenges Europe now faces. Summoning the insights of history, political economy, and philosophy, he explains why Europe was for a long time the world's greatest problem and how the Cold War's bipolar partition brought stability of a sort. Without the Cold War, Europe risks revisiting its more traditional history. With so many contingent factors--in particular Russia and Europe's Muslim neighbors--no one, Calleo believes, can pretend to predict the future with assurance. Calleo's book ponders how to think about this future. The book begins by considering the rival ''lessons'' and trends that emerge from Europe's deeper past. It goes on to discuss the theories for managing the traditional state system, the transition from autocratic states to communitarian nation states, the enduring strength of nation states, and their uneasy relationship with capitalism. Calleo next focuses on the Cold War's dynamic legacies for Europe--an Atlantic Alliance, a European Union, and a global economy. These three systems now compete to define the future. The book's third and major section examines how Europe has tried to meet the present challenges of Russian weakness and German reunification. Succeeding chapters focus on Maastricht and the Euro, on the impact of globalization on Europeanization, and on the EU's unfinished business--expanding into ''Pan Europe,'' adapting a hybrid constitution, and creating a new security system. Calleo presents three models of a new Europe--each proposing a different relationship with the U.S. and Russia. A final chapter probes how a strong European Union might affect the world and the prospects for American hegemony. This is a beautifully written book that offers rich insight into a critical moment in our history, whose outcome will shape the world long after our time.
This handbook comprehensively defines and shapes the field of Critical European Union Studies, sets the research agenda and highlights emerging areas of study. Bringing together critical analyses of European Union politics, policies and processes with an expert range of contributors, it overcomes disciplinary borders and paradigms and addresses four main thematic areas pertaining to the study of the European Union and its policies: • Critical approaches to European integration; • Critical approaches to European political economy; • Critical approaches to the EU’s internal security; • Critical approaches to the EU’s external relations and foreign affairs. In their contributions to this volume, the authors take a sympathetic yet critical approach to the European integration process and the present structures of the European Union. Furthermore, the book provides graduate students and faculty with ideas for future research activity and introduces critical analyses rooted in a broad spectrum of theoretical perspectives. The Routledge Handbook of Critical European Union Studies will be an essential reference for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners interested and working in the fields of EU politics/studies, European integration, European political economy and public policy, EU foreign policy, EU freedom of movement and security practices, and more broadly in international relations, the wider social sciences and humanities.
This book looks at Poland at the time of the war in Ukraine with an emphasis on the pertinent political philosophical reflection of its public scholars regarding the problem of the country’s moral rearmament—a major axiological challenge for the West and its member states in dangerous times. After initially looking at the sociopolitical context of the question in Poland, that is, the country’s response to the early phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as presenting the aggressive Russian empire together with the European Union as a normative empire, the main question is examined in the context of the Polish national community. Thus Poland is studied from several aspects of cultural and political philosophy, augmented by political theology, which provide potentially relevant resources to confront the challenge. From this perspective reflection on existing historical memory in Poland is presented that explains the survival of a tragic sensibility and can act as a counter to the historical amnesia that has been determined as a deterrent of the axiological task of moral rearmament, and plays an important part in a deeper reflection of the present dangerous times.
In contemporary history, a much-debated issue has been whether European nations have a common identity and what relevance the European Union has for a shared definition of Europeanness. The present book examines the link between historical conceptions of Europe and the contestations over Turkey’s compatibility with the European Union during the 2000s.
The European Union plays an increasingly central role in global relations from migration to trade to institutional financial solvency. The formation and continuation of these relations – their narratives and discourses - are rooted in social, political, and economic historical relations emerging at the founding of European states and then substantially augmented in the Post-WWII era. Any rethinking of our European narratives requires a contextualized analysis of the formation of hegemonic discourses. The book contributes to the ongoing process of "rethinking" the European project, identity, and institutions, brought about by the end of the Cold war and the current economic and political crisis. Starting from the principle that the present European crisis goes hand in hand with the crisis of its hegemonic discourse, the aim of the volume is to rescue the complexity, the richness, the ambiguity of the discourses on Europe as opposed to the present simplification. The multidisciplinary approach and the long-term perspective permits illuminating scope over multiple discourses, historical periods, and different "languages", including that of the European institutions. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Union politics, European integration, European History, and more broadly international relations.
