How successful was the EU's Lisbon Strategy? This volume provides the first comprehensive assessment of the Strategy and reflects on its key developments during its 10-year cycle. The volume contains both theoretical and empirical contributions by some of the leading scholars of EU studies across the social sciences.

The creation of the European Central Bank and the Euro have brought new challenges to EU integration and economic policy. This book looks into issues of monetary and factor market policies. The analysis presents new theoretical and empirical research on the current decline of the Euro. Issues regarding exchange rate policies and international economic relations are also addressed.

Escaping the economic and security-centered approaches, prevalent in contemporary U.S. debate the contributors explore political relations between the European Union (EU) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).Their inter-disciplinary perspectives touch on domains such as security, comparative integration, human rights, energy.

A tension between (richer) contributing Member States and (poorer) recipient Member States has always characterised the history of the budget of the European Union, the politics of which has often turned fraught. This volume evaluates the prospects for major change to expenditure and the structure of the budget for the period starting in 2014.

EU internal security concerns such as migration, police and judicial cooperation are today part of EU foreign policy. This book shows how those concerns dominate the EU agenda towards Mediterranean countries. Adopting a rational-choice institutionalist approach, it explores EU policy and the strategic choices made after the 2011 Arab revolts.

The Euro crisis catapulted the EU into its most serious political crisis since its inception, leaving it torn between opposing demands for more sovereignty and solidarity. This volume focuses on the key themes of disunion, sovereignty and solidarity. It assesses the main EU institutions: member states, civil society actors and policy areas.

The rapid ageing of societies in many industrialized countries threatens the stability of unfunded public pension systems. An immigration policy that accepts young workers would appear to be a simple solution to the challenge, by increasing the number of contributors to the pension system. Tim Krieger uses public choice analysis to investigate whether a majority of voters would pursue an active immigration policy in order to stabilize its unfunded public pension system. Public Pensions and Immigration is a thorough and rigorous treatment of pension policy and international labor migration based on public choice theory, including an extensive discussion of pension policy in Europe and the challenges arising from increased labor mobility between EU member states. Tim Krieger reveals that the voting outcome critically depends on such parameters as the type of pension system, migrant qualifications and the possibility of return migration. He argues that the EU institutional framework, with respect to pension policy, cannot prevent harmful migration between EU member countries which is, in part, induced by differences in pension systems. This book will appeal to researchers and scholars in the fields of economics, public choice, political science, European integration and migration. Policymakers involved in pension policy, immigration policy and European integration policy will also find this an illuminating book.

A comparative analysis of an old and new EU Member State's perceptions of and contributions to EU security and defence. This book focuses on change and continuity in both countries' defence policies and where convergence and divergence has occurred. This has important implications for the EU's effectiveness as an international security actor.

This study combines an account of Blair, Chirac, Schroeder and their attitudes towards European integration. It analyzes political discourses on 'national interests' and the EU, the frequently debated role of political discourse, the concept of national interest, and offers an alternative point of view on intergovernmental interaction.

With both transition dynamics and the EU integration process having shifted to the south-east of Europe, a region fairly marginalized in the literature, this book fills a gap by taking stock of where South-East Europe's economies and institutions stood in 2004. The authors evaluate the potential for investment and growth within the South-East European region, including the role of trade and FDI, and discuss the challenges associated with unemployment, poverty and 'brain drain'. The book also provides insights into the particular monetary and exchange rate policies applied, including cases of 'euroization', and finally makes an assessment, against this background, of the European perspective of the countries of South-East Europe. European Economic Integration and South-East Europe offers a unique collection of contributions, combining authoritative views from central bank officials and policymakers, topical empirical evidence from academia and refreshing practical insights from companies doing business in the area. It will be of great interest to economists as well as those generally interested in the future of the EU, the design of the enlargement process and the challenges of reform on the road to a stronger Europe.

Today Europe finds itself in a crisis that casts a dark shadow over an entire generation. The seriousness of the crisis stems from one core political contradiction at the heart of the European project: namely, that what urgently needs to be done is also extremely unpopular and therefore virtually impossible to do democratically. What must be done - and almost everyone agrees in principle on the measures that would be needed to deal with the financial crisis - cannot be sold to the voting public of the core member states, which so far have been less affected by the crisis than those on the periphery, nor can the conditions that core members try to impose be easily sold to voters in the deficit countries.

The European Union is therefore becoming increasingly disunited, with deepening divides between the German-dominated 'core' and the southern 'periphery', between the winners and the losers of the common currency, between the advocates of greater integration and the anti-Europeans, between the technocrats and the populists. Europe finds itself trapped by the deepening divisions that are opening up across the Continent, obstructing its ability to deal with a crisis that has already caused massive social suffering in the countries of the European periphery and is threatening to derail the very project of the European Union.

In this short book, Claus Offe brings into sharp focus the central political problem that lies at the heart of the EU and shackles its ability to deal with the most serious crisis of its short history.

An exploration of what drives party-based Euroscepticism and why some parties are Eurosceptic. This book looks at what makes mainstream opposition parties careful not to appear Eurosceptic and asks whether Euroscepticism is an aberration of politics, an extreme populist ideology, or just politics as usual.

A seminal text in European studies, which addresses issues of research design and causal analysis. The chapters draw on different methodological traditions, notions of causality, and methods and use strong research design to address substantive problems in public policy, party politics, foreign policy and legislative studies.

Many of the central issues faced by EU Foreign Policy - such as state fragility, illegal migration and environmental degradation - are challenges of global development. For European policymakers the increasing importance of development as an external relations priority will demand the refinement of existing instruments and the testing of new approaches. This book addresses debates on how the EU manages various modes of governance in development policymaking, its engagement with other global actors and the effectiveness of its policy formulation and implementation. Given the restrictions of policymaking in an environment characterised by uncertainty, difficulty and complexity, the contributions to this volume explore decision-making and implementation across a wide range of issue-areas with the objective of highlighting choices that could improve the coherence, and thus the effectiveness, of European policy for global development.

An interdisciplinary approach to the study of the EU in UN human rights and environmental governance which addresses the legal and political science dimensions. With contributions from academics and policy-makers, this volume is a comprehensive analysis of how the challenges it faces impact on the EU's position in UN fora.

Increasingly flexible labour markets and reforms of old-age pension systems are still ranking high on the political agenda of European countries. This volume investigates whether, and to what extent, the interplay between pension reforms and the spread of 'atypical' employment patterns and fragmented careers has a negative influence uponeconomic security in old age. The volume, therefore, analyzes the flexibility-security nexus by focusing on the post-retirement phase, thus extending the conventional narrow concept of 'flexicurity'. The book also questions whetherreforms of public and private pension schemes compensate or aggravate the risks of increasingly flexible labor markets and atypical employment careers after retirement? Around this overarching research question, the various contributions in the volume employ the same analytical framework in order to map, and then compare, the developments in seven European countries - Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK - which present different labour market arrangements and various degrees of flexibility, as well as diverse pension systems.

An exploration of how the EU is influenced by multilateral institutions. There has recently been a dramatic increase in interaction between the EU and multilateral institutions. This book shows that international institutions shape EU policies, as well as acting as a source of preferences and strategies for EU stances internationally.

Moving from the birth of Europe to the current crisis, this text questions the relevance of the Union today. Will Europe sink back into instability and rivalry? Is the sovereign debt crisis merely the beginning of intractable economic challenges? These pressing issues are addressed in a topical portrait of a Europe in decline.

The contributors to this edited volume analyze and compare different kinds of citizens' initiatives, including both full scale initiatives and agenda initiatives, in eleven European democracies and the EU. The book provides a comprehensive account of the practices of citizens' initiatives in each case, including a description of the historical background of the citizens' initiatives and the political system in which they operate. Particular attention is paid to the institutional design of citizens' initiatives which largely explains how they function in different political contexts. Citizens Initiatives in Europe sheds light on issues relevant to democracy, for example, how citizens' initiatives influence patterns of political agenda-setting in representative democracies and how they contribute to the aspirations of participatory democracy.

In 2000, the European Union set out to shape itself into the world's most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy within a decade. But how great is the capacity of the EU to orchestrate 'competitiveness'? Can common policy instruments produce consistent effects across diverse varieties of capitalism? Has substantial policy learning taken place in response to the successes and failures of the Lisbon agenda? Europe and National Economic Transformation identifies the nature and limits of the transformative capacities of the EU's push for economic gains. The book does so by examining the consequences of the decade-long Lisbon process and its successor, Europe 2020. It explores a broad range of economic outcomes and consequences for an array of policy areas, including innovation financing, employment services, labor migration policy and pension reform.

This volume is a holistic assessment of six decades of European integration as seen through a gender lens. It features the insights of scholars from nine countries, who analyze new and old barriers to gender equality in all realms of EU activity. The first part of the volume offers a critique of mainstream integration theories and situates women across core institutional settings. It traces women's roles as formal actors, as participants in expert networks, and as creative conceptualizers introducing paradigm-changing frameworks and strategies. It also recognizes women as policy innovators contributing to the larger integration project. In the second part the contributors pay special attention to the development and effects of gender mainstreaming. They explore 'gendering' dynamics and outcomes in EU policy domains, including agriculture, the employment and social policy fields, the research, science and technology sector, and the emergent EU migration and citizenship policy arena.

An exploration of European integration as seen through a gender lens. This book looks at integration theories, institutional relationships, enlargement, the development of gender law and the role of formal actors, scholars and expert networks in the EU policy-making process. With a focus on gender mainstreaming as a new approach to gender policy.

What does political representation in the European Union look like? This volume argues that the transformation of representation in the EU is characterized by diversification processes, albeit with an uncertain ability to re-configure the link between representation and democracy.

An engaging assessment of the theoretical debates on the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The contributions to this volume bring together sophisticated theoretical frameworks and extensive empirical research. Pluralistic in its approach, the volume emphasizes the role of conceptual diversity for better explaining the EU's CSDP.