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A perfect companion to European politics today, written by the same authors, this book presents past events, prominent personalities, important dates, organisations and electoral information in an accessible, easy-to-read format. The book is split into five sections for ease of use: a dictionary of significant political events, a chronology of major events in Europe since 1945, a biographical dictionary, a dictionary of political organisations and electoral data. In addition to being a comprehensive reference tool, this book is intended to provide a sound historical background to the development of Western European politics.
. A significant lacuna in discussion of the EU external relations is any serious consideration of these from a non-European perspective. (Moxon-Browne 2015 : 276) Therefore I argue that there is a need to define the role and limits of multilateralism (Álvarez 2000 ), taking into account different perceptions of the process beyond Latin American or European “eyes”. The chapter divides into three sections which study the European political dialogue from
There has been a lot of talk about the European Union's so-called 'democratic deficit', by which is meant its lack of legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. This book provides a critical analysis of the democratic stalemate in European politics. It argues that the root of the 'democratic deficit' has more to do with the domestic political fields of the Union's member-states and the structure of the evolving European political field than with the relationships between supranational institutions. The book analyses the complex ways 'Europe' is integrated into domestic politics and shows how domestic political fields and cultures have prevented deepening integration. As a result of the formation of a European political field, political resources in European 'postnational' and 'postabsolutist' polities are being redistributed. The theory of structural constructivism proposed fuses French structural theories of politics and a 'bottom-up' approach to European integration. The book examines the relationship between French political traditions and the construction of a European security structure from the point of view of identity politics and the French post-imperialist syndrome. The educational and social homogeneity of French civil servants provides a political resource that certain individuals can use in Brussels, influencing the direction and form of European integration. Studying legislative legitimacy in the European Parliament elections, the book highlights that intellectuals are important players in French politics: the politics of the street has always been a key part of French political life.
assert that supranational structures determine the nature of European integration. In reality, national and European interests merge, as sometimes vehemently chauvinistic policies have been at the same time fundamentally pro-European. A closer look at both national and European politics reveals that it is misleading to examine one without examining the other because of their increasing fusion (Mény 1996; Wessels 1997; Rosamond 1999; Chryssochoou 2001). The traces of the dichotomy between national and international politics can be seen in the most knowledgeable studies
Conclusions In this work, I set out to study the democratic stalemate in European politics through an examination of European integration as a general transformation of practices, norms and identities. I conceptualised this process as that of the structuration of an evolving, multilevelled European political field - a common space for political action composed of a relatively heterogeneous supranational level and more established national political fields - that is reinforcing specific mental and objective structures of political domination. In this process
Introduction We are not in business at all; we are in politics. (Former President of the EEC Commission Walter Hallstein, quoted in Swann 1990, vii) There has been a lot of talk about the European Union's so-called 'democratic deficit', by which is meant its lack of legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. This book provides a critical analysis of the democratic stalemate in European politics. In contrast to most studies, however, this book argues that the root of the 'democratic deficit' has more to do with the domestic political fields of the Union's member
many policy areas, and it has become, unlike the elitist Commission, the voice of European peoples more than that of European governments (Nugent 2003). The European Parliament is a dominated element in the evolving European political field (see Chapter 1). The European Parliament is integrated into national political fields following the two modalities exemplified by the Finnish and French cases: annexation that extends political parties' power into European elections and differentiation that applies a different political logic to national and European elections
into the evolving European political field has had a significant impact on public debates concerning not only the politics of Europe but also concerning France as a whole and its political and intellectual heritage. Since the French revolution, French intellectuals have played an important role in the shaping of European and global political discourses that centre on democracy and public debate. It is crucial to understand the links between French intellectual traditions and the broader European trends that partake in the symbolic structuration of the evolving
evolved. They frequently highlight the gap between what the member states formally aspire to in the realm of European political cooperation (EPC)/CFSP and what decision-making capacity they actually give to EPC/CFSP as a policy process. What is often missing from such accounts, however, is a reflection upon how EPC or its successor CFSP thus related to the process of European integration more broadly and what such cooperation
nationalist nature the radical right has had existential and practical difficulties in accepting a transnational agenda. Consequently, radical right parties are split between several relatively small TNPs, and it is common for both the radical right's parliamentary groups and European political parties to be overhauled and renamed after every election. In mid-2016, there were no fewer than five groups: the Mouvement pour une Europe des Nations et des Libertés (Europe of Nations and Freedom), led by the French National Front; the Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe, led