Jan Werts brings a unique perspective to the European Council. As a journalist, he has reported on the spot from virtually every European Council meeting since the start in the 1970s, a witness to countless episodes of last-minute arm-twisting and creative compromise. As a scholar, he wrote the first ever doctoral dissertation on the European Council, published in 1992. In 2008 another book carried the story forward to the verge of the start of the permanent presidency. In this latest book, against the background of the broad sweep of the history of the European Council, he focuses especially on the sequence of crises that began around the time of his previous book the Greek debt and broader euro crises, the migration and refugee crisis, Brexit and Covid among them.
This book assesses the many changes that have occurred within the European Parliament and in its external relations since the Lisbon treaty (2009) and the last European elections (2014). It is undoubtedly the institution that has evolved the most since the 1950s. Despite the many crises experienced by European integration in the last years, the Parliament is still undergoing important changes in its formal competences, its influence on policy-making, its relations with other EU institutions, its internal organisation and its internal political dynamics. Every contribution deals with the most recent aspects of these evolutions and addresses overlooked topics, providing an overview of the current state of play which challenges the mainstream intergovernmental approach of the EU. This project results from research conducted at the Department of European Political and Governance Studies of the College of Europe. Individual research of several policy analysts of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) have contributed to this endeavour.
This handbook comprehensively explores the European Union’s institutional and policy responses to crises across policy domains and institutions – including the Euro crisis, Brexit, the Ukraine crisis, the refugee crisis, as well as the global health crisis resulting from COVID-19. It contributes to our understanding of how crisis affects institutional change and continuity, decision-making behavior and processes, and public policy-making. It offers a systematic discussion of how the existing repertoire of theories understand crisis and how well they capture times of unrest and events of disintegration. More generally, the handbook looks at how public organizations cope with crises, and thus probes how sustainable and resilient public organizations are in times of crisis and unrest.
This work traces the development of the European decision-making process in the European Community in minute detail, from the Summit Meeting in Paris (1957) to the most recent European Council meeting. Special account is taken of the momentous and at times controversial changes brought about in this process, in particular by the Single European Act. As well as consulting numerous well-known and respected sources on European affairs, the much-travelled author draws on his personal experience as a journalist, presenting new and original conclusions on, for example, the legal status of the European Council's communiques and decisions. The issues touched upon afford much food for thought and are all the more stimulating when seen against the background of the internal market heralded for 1993 and the ever-changing events in Eastern Europe.Following a description of the roots of the European Council, the author deals with: # the organizational rules and functioning of the European Council, emphasizing the importance of European Political Cooperation # the legal nature and form of the European Council and its relations with the Community institutions # the meetings and their results # the progress made in decision-making over the years # the future of the European Council. The book is completed with relevant documentation, a comprehensive bibliography, a table of cases of the Court of Justice of the EC, a table of articles (EEC Treaty and SEA), a subject index and an index of names.
In recent years, and more specifically, since the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis in 2010, the model of integration has changed. The rising political power of the strongest Member States and the political segmentation of the European Union into separate circles of integration have become the new reality. These processes have been accompanied by a range of related changes, such as the growing politicisation of the European Commission, increasing institutionalisation of the euro area and petrification of the geographical and political division into central and peripheral states in the EU. At this point, it is difficult to predict whether these changes will prove temporary or permanent, and what will be their systemic consequences (or, in other words, how will they impact Europe’s political system). It is similarly difficult to judge how the changes will influence specific EU policies. An attempt to answer these difficult but compelling questions is the objective of our book. Tomasz Grzegorz Grosse Professor of Political Science and Head of Department of European Union Policies at the University of Warsaw; author of In Search of Geo-economics in Europe and coeditor of The Aspects of a Crisis The authors of this volume offer a comprehensive analysis of conditions and results of EU policies in the context of European integration. The ambitious scope of the project required the knowledge of economics, history, political science, international relations, law and even sociology. The authors fulfill their promise to the readers: the volume contains a comprehensive and detailed elucidation of the influence of the crisis on the integration practice, and on the contemporary conditions of EU integration, including both its structure and functioning. Zbigniew Czachór author of The Crisis and Disrupted Dynamics of the European Union The volume edited by Tomasz G. Grosse promises to be a very valuable contribution to Polish European studies. It belongs to the broader field of critical reflections on European integration and as such, it opens new possibilities of constructive debate about the present and the future of the European Union. Janusz Ruszkowski coauthor of Euro: Common Currency of the United Europe The Authors: Paweł J. Borkowski, Jacek Czaputowicz, Tomasz Grzegorz Grosse, Krzysztof M. Księżopolski, Justyna Miecznikowska, Jadwiga Nadolska, Artur Nowak-Far, Kamila Pronińska, Małgorzata Smutek, Krzysztof Szewior, Jolanta Szymańska, Joanna Ziółkowska.
Based on interviews with some of the EU's most important leaders, this book is designed to probe and elucidate what they think. The goal of the book is to find out whether they believe that the current period in the history of the European Union constitutes a 'crisis,' and if so, what kind of crisis is it?.
When EU member states signed the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007, they did not anticipate the manifold crises in store for them over the following years. Instead of the intended consolidation of a Union which had just gone through its most profound modernisation and biggest round of enlargements, the EU has since then had to weather a wide range of political, economic, social, legal, health and even military crises with major repercussions within and beyond its own territory. Indeed, this time of polycrisis has induced change on many levels: Across the continent and its many fora of European supra-, trans- and international collaboration, established institutions, rule systems and normative frameworks have been put into question and power balances have been shifting. Against this background, actors from social, political, economic and cultural life have sought new ways to overcome the manifold pressing problems of their time, be it through intensified collaboration or attempts to increasingly resolve issues at the national level. This volume offers a compilation of case studies on EU crisis responses, covering the most impactful of the various crises the EU has had to face in recent years. It provides theoretical and conceptual guidelines for the study of political actors’ responses to crisis at all levels of the EU multilevel governance system and beyond.
European integration is in a time of multiple crises, which has a profound impact on different EU policies. This book presents a major collaborative research project uniting international colleagues in the quest for developing a theory: when and how will crisis induce policy breakthrough as opposed to stalemate? In this volume, a team of renowned authors compare the effects of the recent financial, economic and neighbourhood crises on the EU’s main policy domains, including financial market integration, trade, health, migration, research, energy, foreign and state aid policies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.
The EU views itself as an important actor on the world stage, a perspective supported by the role it plays in global politics. This collection presents a true reflection of the EU as an international actor by exploring how it is viewed externally and the impact that events like the Eurozone debt crisis have had on external perceptions of the EU.