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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > International institutions
"Euro on Trial looks back - to the aspirations of the founders -
and forward - to the possibility of reform or splitting up. After
five years of experience with the new currency, new insights are
possible into the old arguments for and against union. Monetary
union is reversible in part or in whole and this book assesses the
costs and benefits. Brown examines several mainstream scenarios for
the future of the euro in these essential readings for market
practitioners as well as academics. For example, how long will the
euro survive? The author shows that the answer depends principally
on Germany. Any of the small or medium-sized economies could leave
monetary union without threatening its existence. But were Germany
to pull out it is highly doubtful whether there would be a core of
countries that would perserve inside. Germany's membership so far
has brought much disappointment. How many more years of disillusion
are required before the question of EMU reform or break-up enters
the mainstream of German political debate?
Do international bureaucracies have a meaningful influence on world politics? Using the UN Secretariat and the evolution of UN peacekeeping as an example, this book shows that even international bureaucracies with limited autonomy can shape international politics. Peace operations are the UN's flagship activity. Over the past decades, UN Blue Helmets have been sent all over the globe and have been performing an expanding set of intrusive tasks, while being supported by increasingly professional institutional structures. Silke Weinlich covers these operational, conceptual and institutional dimensions and focuses on three specific decisions that have been crucial to the evolution of UN peacekeeping: the establishment of the UN transitional administration in East Timor, the development of a peacekeeping doctrine, and the establishment of the Standing Police Capacity. With its integrative framework of analysis, this book makes a valuable contribution to the debate on the agency of international organisations.
Trade theories predict and explain the consequences of economic
integration. Generally, they show that freer international trade
leads to specialisation, technological convergence and faster
economic growth. This study compares the conclusions of the trade
theories with empirical observations of economic changes in the
European Union. These empirical analyses show that the main
conclusions also hold empirically. However, many detailed empirical
observations often contrast the theoretical expectation. Hence,
although the trade theories do predict the general changes
correctly, they are not capable of predicting the more specific
empirical outcomes.
This book investigates the EU's regional growth dynamics and, in particular, the reasons why peripheral and socio-economically disadvantaged areas have persistently failed to catch up with the rest of the Union. It shows that the capability of the knowledge-based growth model to deliver its expected benefits to these areas crucially depends on tackling a specific set of socio-institutional factors which prevents innovation from being effectively translated into economic growth. The book takes an eclectic approach to the territorial genesis of innovation and regional growth by combining different theoretical strands into one model of empirical analysis covering the whole EU-25. An in-depth comparative analysis with the United States is also included, providing significant insights into the distinctive features of the European process of innovation and its territorial determinants. The evidence produced in the book is extensively applied to the analysis of EU development policies.
Karen Alter's work on the European Court of Justice (ECJ) heralded
a new level of sophistication in the political analysis of the
controversial institution, through its combination of legal
understanding and active engagement with theoretical questions. The
European Court's Political Power assembles the most important of
Alter's articles written over a fourteen year span, adding an
original new introduction and conclusion taking an overview of the
Court's development and current concerns.
The problem-solving capacity, and hence the democratic legitimacy, of national governments is being weakened by the dual processes of legal and economic integration in Europe; and the loss is not fully compensated by the development of effective and legitimate problem-solving capabilities at the European level. Professor Scharpf supports his position by examining the normative underpinnings of democratic legitimacy and by a detailed analysis of the structural asymmetry between the effectiveness of the legal instruments of `negative integration' which prevents governments from interfering with the free movements of goods, services, capital, and persons and the political constraints impeding positive political action at the European level. This is particularly true for policies pertaining to the welfare state. Governing in Europe explores strategies at the national level that could succeed in maintaining welfare state goals even under conditions of international economic competition, and it also discusses the conditions under which European policy could play a protective and enabling role with regard to these national solutions. The author suggests that if these opportunities should be used, multi-level governance in Europe could indeed regain both effectiveness and legitimacy.
A freshly provocative look at the nexus linking EU security, trans-Turkey energy supply routes to Europe and Turkey's EU membership negotiations, this book argues that Europe's collective energy security prospects have become increasingly tied to Turkey's progress towards joining the EU.
For years the European Union has been looked on as a potential model for cosmopolitan governance, and enjoyed considerable influence on the global stage. The EU has a uniquely strong and legally binding mission statement to pursue international relations on a multilateral basis, founded on the progressive development of international law. The political vision was for the EU to export its values of the rule of law and sophisticated governance mechanisms to the international sphere. Globalization and the financial crisis have starkly illustrated the limits of this vision, and the EU's dependence on global forces partially beyond the control of traditional provinces of law. This book takes stock of the EU's role in global governance. It asks: to what extent can and does the EU shape and influence the on-going re-ordering of legal processes, principles, and institutions of global governance, in line with its optimistic mission statement? With this ambitious remit it covers the legal-institutional and substantive aspects of global security, trade, environmental, financial, and social governance. Across these topics 23 contributors have taken the central question of the extent of the EU's influence on global governance, providing a broad view across the key areas as well as a detailed analysis of each. Through comparison and direct engagement with each other, the different chapters provide a distinctive contribution to legal scholarship on global governance, from a European perspective.
Europeanization has become a key topic in analysis of the politics of the new Europe both in terms of increasing influence of the EU as a decision-making body and in terms of policy convergence between European states. This broad-ranging new text focuses centrally on the impact of the EU on its member states but also on the way in which states 'up-load' their policy priorities to the European level.
Many of the most controversial areas of reform initiated by the Lisbon Treaty were not negotiated in the Treaty itself, but left to be resolved during its implementation. Since the Treaty's entry into force, the implementation process has already had a profound impact on many areas of EU law and policy, and consolidated new areas of power, such as over foreign investment. This collection gathers leading specialists in the field to analyse the Treaty's implementation and the directions of legal reform post-Lisbon. Drawing on a range of expertise to assess and comment on the Treaty, the contributors include both academics and practitioners involved in negotiating and implementing the Treaty. Focusing on the central issues and changes resulting from the Lisbon Treaty, the contributors examine the Treaty in the broader background of how the EU, and EU law in particular, has been developing in recent years and provide a contextual understanding of the future direction of EU law in the post-Lisbon era.
The gradual legal and political evolution of the European Union has not, thus far, been accompanied by the articulation or embrace of any substantive ideal of justice going beyond the founders' intent or the economic objectives of the market integration project. This absence arguably compromises the foundations of the EU legal and political system since the relationship between law and justice-a crucial question within any constitutional system-remains largely unaddressed. This edited volume brings together a number of concise contributions by leading academics and young scholars whose work addresses both legal and philosophical aspects of justice in the European context. The aim of the volume is to appraise the existence and nature of this deficit, its implications for Europe's future, and to begin a critical discussion about how it might be addressed. There have been many accounts of the EU as a story of constitutional evolution and a system of transnational governance, but few which pay sustained attention to the implications for justice. The EU today has moved beyond its initial and primary emphasis on the establishment of an Internal Market, as the growing importance of EU citizenship and social rights suggests. Yet, most legal analyses of the EU treaties and of EU case-law remain premised broadly on the assumption that EU law still largely serves the purpose of perfecting what is fundamentally a system of economic integration. The place to be occupied by the underlying substantive ideal of justice remains significantly underspecified or even vacant, creating a tension between the market-oriented foundation of the Union and the contemporary essence of its constitutional system. The relationship of law to justice is a core dimension of constitutional systems around the world, and the EU is arguably no different in this respect. The critical assessment of justice in the EU provided by the contributions to this book will help to create a fuller picture of the justice deficit in the EU, and at the same time open up an important new avenue of legal research of immediate importance.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. It has been widely acknowledged that the process of European integration and unification was started and is still pursued as an elite project, designed to put an end to debilitating conflicts and rivalries by consolidating a common power base and by pooling Europe's economic resources. Nevertheless elites have remained the known unknowns of the European integration process. The present volume is designed to change this. Based on surveys of political and economic elites in 18 European countries, it is a comprehensive study of the visions, fears, cognitions and values of members of national parliaments and top business leaders underlying their attitudes towards European integration. It also investigates political and economic elites' embeddedness in transnational networks and their ability to communicate in multicultural settings. The book strongly supports the view of an elitist character of the process of European integration on the one hand, while challenging the idea that European national elites have merged or are even merging into a coherent Eurelite on the other. As the 11 chapters of this book show the process of European integration is much more colourful and even contradictory than concepts of a straight forward normative and structural integration suggest. In particular this process is deeply rooted in, and conditional on, the social and political settings in national contexts. The empirical basis for this book is provided by the data of the international IntUne project, which has for the first time created a comprehensive database combining coordinated surveys of Europe-related attitudes at the elite and general population level.
Are diplomats agents of international co-operation or transmission belts for states? Traditional theories of international relations seriously underestimate the ability of diplomats as a collective to impact outcomes in the international environment beyond initial state preferences. The European Diplomatic Corps argues that diplomats comprise a transnational network of experts or 'epistemic community' which has been critical in determining co-operation or non-co-operation among European states. The cases considered are the congresses of Westphalia (1648), Berlin (1878), Paris (1919) and Maastricht (1992).
Making European Citizens examines the forms of transnational citizenship developing in Europe. Previous discussions have focused on the construction of a European identity and the granting of common European rights, but rarely explore whether citizens have developed the capacity for self-rule. Active citizenship involves more than simply voting. Citizens must be able to organize socially and politically as well. Achieving such mobilization at a transnational level may involve new democratic techniques and skills. The volume explores how far European citizens have acquired the requisite methods and qualities.
Interpreting Convergence in the European Union introduces the idea of collective action as a prerequisite for achieving convergence and cohesion in the European Union. Institutional networks and social capital play a crucial role in influencing actors' preferences and shaping institutional interactions through the process of political exchange and socialization. Although the main focus of the book is on policy-making processes and governance structures in EU regional policy, its core theoretical hypotheses and conclusion are drawn from empirical research into the response of Greek regions to the challenges of Europeanization. This framework is applicable to almost all areas of EU public policy-making.
The book uses an innovative theoretical framework to explain how the EU social dimension has taken its present form. It presents and applies a political economic framework to the European labour market integration process and offers new tools for analysing the dynamics of regional integration. The theory is applied to case studies of the EU's approach to social protection, health and safety protection at the workplace, and maternity leave. The topical issues around the future of welfare provision in Europe, how a 'Social Europe' may develop and the political and economic consequences of this are discussed.
"A Democratic Audit of the European Union" provides a systematic
assessment of democracy in the EU against clearly defined criteria.
Christopher Lord offers a double challenge to generalizations about
a democratic deficit in the EU. On the one hand, it shows that
standards of democratic performance in the EU may vary across Union
institutions and decision-making processes. On the other hand, it
shows that they can vary across key dimensions of democratic
governance, including citizenship, rights, participation,
representation, responsiveness, transparency and
accountability.
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.
The control of corporations is a subject that will appeal to a broad readership. How are the giant corporations that affect our lives controlled? Which individuals and institutions command the vast proportion of economic resources controlled by corporations? How do patterns of corporate control differ across European countries? This book answers these questions by providing a detailed analysis of corporate control in nine European countries - Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
Dealing with Conflict in Africa analyzes the roles of the various organizations involved in conflict resolution in Africa. The first section of the book deals with the overall issues associated with cooperation between regional organizations and the United Nations, as well as how the United Nations has approached this issue in Africa. In the second section, six case studies examine the major conflicts in Africa, such as the Congo War. For each case study, the author looks at what responsibilities and tasks were taken on by different organizations, the relationship between the organizations, and which ones are most effective in working towards successful conflict resolution. The contributors also examine the effectiveness of coalitions or leaders in comparison to the UN and regional organizations. The contributors are an international group of scholars and consultants, all of whom are well positioned to analyze these issues.
Much more than a simple examination of EU-Asia relations, this book examines the idea that the EU may constitute a 'model' for East Asian regionalism. It challenges specialists on the EU to understand the EU's impact on Asia and Asia's impact on the EU whilst illustrating that there is a commonality of interests in both Europe and Asia.
The Birth of the New Justice is a history of the attempts to instate ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international criminal laws from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Cold War. The purpose of these courts was to repress aggressive war, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide. Rather than arguing that these legal projects were attempts by state governments to project a "liberal legalism" and create an international state system that limited sovereignty, Mark Lewis shows that European jurists in a variety of transnational organizations derived their motives from a range of ideological motives - liberal, conservative, utopian, humanitarian, nationalist, and particularist. European jurists at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 created a controversial new philosophy of prosecution and punishment, and during the following decades, jurists in different organizations, including the International Law Association, International Association for Criminal Law, the World Jewish Congress, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, transformed the ideas of the legitimacy of post-war trials and the concept of international crime to deal with myriad social and political problems. The concept of an international criminal court was never static, and the idea that national tribunals would form an integral part of an international system to enforce new laws was frequently advanced as a pragmatic-and politically convenient-solution. The Birth of the New Justice shows that legal organizations were not merely interested in ensuring that the guilty were punished or that international peace was assured. They hoped to instil particular moral values, represent the interests of certain social groups, and even pursue national agendas. At the same time, their projects to define new types of crimes and ensure that old ones were truly punished also sprang from hopes that a new international political and moral order would check the power of the sovereign nation-state. When jurists had to scale back their projects, it was not only because state governments opposed them; it was also because they lacked political connections, did not build public support for their ideas, or decided that compromises were better than nothing.
The Treaty on European Union introduced specific objectives for the Development Co-operation Policy of the Community. The inclusion of Articles 130u--y marks an important stage in the emergence of the Community's Development Co-operation Policy. It affords the Community an opportunity to eliminate the inconsistencies of the past which have arisen through the gradual and patchwork development of that policy. It also affords the Community a much-needed opportunity to adopt an integrated and coherent policy which will promote the economic and social development of all developing countries and their gradual integration into the world economy and which should make a significant contribution to the campaign against poverty in developing countries. The general scope of the objectives set for the Development Co-operation Policy are examined in Chapter One, which provides an overview of the development of the general outline of that policy up to 1992. Chapters Two to Five concentrate on the region-specific application of the Community's Development Co-operation Policy by examining the relationships established through the Lome Conventions with the countries of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, and through other agreements with the countries of the Mediterranean, Latin America and Asia. In each chapter, the focus of attention is the trading relationship established with the Community. Chapter Six is an examination of two problems of co-ordination; between the Development of Co-operation Policy and other Community policies; and between the Community Policy and those of the Member States. The conclusion emerging from the discussion is that one very important area of co-ordination was omitted from the provisions of Articles u--y, namely the co-ordination of the instruments of development co-operation themselves. The final chapter proposes a new Development Co-operation Policy for the Community to meet new objectives set by Articles 130u--y.
This fresh look at the 1963 crisis in the western alliance following de Gaulle's veto of the British EEC application uses much new unpublished source material to offer a fascinating insight into the personal relationships of the western leaders. It challenges the orthodox view, showing that the ultimate breakdown came after Anglo-German and Anglo-American cooperation to ensure that de Gaulle was made the sole scapegoat, in order to isolate France within the EEC. |
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