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Cooperation and trust were increasingly scarce commodities in the inner councils of the EU. This book explores why the boldest initiative in the sixty-year quest to achieve a borderless Europe has exploded in the face of the EU. A close examination of each stage of the EU financial emergency that offers evidence that the European values that are supposed to provide solidarity within the twenty eight-member EU in good times and bad are flimsy and thinly distributed. The book aims to show that it is possible to view the difficulties of the EU as rooted in much longer-term decision-making. It begins with an exploration of the long-term preparations that were made to create a single currency encompassing a large part of the European Union. The book then examines the different ways in which the European Union seized the initiative from the European nation-state, from the formation of the Coal and Steel Community to the Maastricht Treaty. It focuses on the role of France and Germany in the EU. Difficulties that have arisen for the EU as it has tried to foster a new European consciousness are discussed next. The increasingly strained relationship between the EU and the democratic process is also examined. The book discusses the evolution of the crisis in the eurozone and the shortcomings which have impeded the EU from bringing it under control. It ends with a portrait of a European Union in 2013 wracked by mutual suspicions.
This book takes up traditional approaches to political science. It aims to offer a mixture of conventional and specific analyses and insights for different groups of readers. In view of the European Union's multi-level and multi-actor polity, the book highlights the complex procedural and institutional set-up of nation states preparing and implementing decisions made by the institutions of the European Community (EC). In looking at the emerging and evolving realities of the European polity, it shows how European institutions and Member States (re-)act and interact in a new institutional and procedural set-up. It explores how governmental and non-governmental actors in different national settings adapt to common challenges, constraints and opportunities for which they are mainly themselves responsible. The book discusses the Belgian policy toward European integration as a significant demonstration of its commitment to multilateralism and international co-operation in security and economic affairs. Attitudes to European integration in Denmark, Germany, Finland, Greece, and Spain are discussed. Tendencies towards 'Europeanisation' and 'sectoralisation' of the ministerial administration during the process of European integration and the typical administrative pluralism of the Italian political system seem to have mutually reinforced each other. Strong multi-level players are able to increase their access and influence at both levels and to use their position on one level for strengthening their say on the other. German and Belgian regions might develop into these kinds of actors. A persistent trend during the 1990s is traced towards stronger national performers, particularly in terms of adaptations and reactions to Maastricht Treaty.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the European Union (EU) stands out as an important regional organization. This book focuses on the influence of the World Bank on the EU development cooperation policy, with special emphasis on the Lomé Convention. It explains the influence of trade liberalisation on EU trade preferences and provides a comparative analysis of the content and direction of the policies developed towards the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP), the Mediterranean, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It looks at the trade-related directorates and their contribution to the phenomenon referred as 'trade liberalisation'. This includes trends towards the removal or elimination of trade preferences and the ideology underlying this reflected in and created by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organisation (GATT/WTO). The book examines the role of the mass media because the media are supposed to play a unique role in encouraging political reactions to humanitarian emergencies. The bolting on to development 'policy' of other continents, and the separate existence of a badly run Humanitarian Office (ECHO), brought the lie to the Maastricht Treaty telling us that the EU really had a coherent development policy. The Third World in general, and Africa in particular, are becoming important components in the EU's efforts to develop into a significant international player. The Cotonou Agreement proposes to end the preferential trade margins accorded to non-least developed ACP states in favour of more liberal free trade agreements strongly shaped by the WTO agenda.
, usually impelled by a creative President such as Roy Jenkins (Economic and Monetary Union) and, most spectacularly, Jacques Delors (the setting up of the single European market in 1993, the European Union and the Maastricht Treaty). Under weaker Presidents, however, the Commission was revealed to be perhaps the least accountable European institution of all, and this caused periodic crises of legitimacy as well as policy, most strikingly in 1999 under Jacques Santer. In the Treaty of Rome, the presence of the kernel of what was later to become a development policy was
period when the EU saw an unprecedented growth in its powers following the 1991 Maastricht Treaty; down from 56.8 per cent in 1994 to 49.8 per cent in 1999. But the voters may not have been terribly missed. The authors of the first social-scientific study of the integration process – Ernst Haas and his neo-functionalist school – thought the challenge for those building a common Europe was how to make ‘Europe without Europeans’. 64 Unlike new states where the need to create national citizens from inhabitants who often possessed a local consciousness was seen as
of the single market) and of a new co-operation procedure upgrading (under certain conditions) the legislative role of the EP, can be said to correspond to what neofunctionalists originally had in mind: the regional centralisation of authoritative decision-making driven by the expansive logic of integration and, eventually, the emergence of a new European ‘political community’. Reflections on the TEU This section considers the state of theorising European integration in the 1990s in relation to the political and constitutional physiognomy of the Maastricht Treaty
unconstitutional to some extent. At the very least a confusing picture is presented: the Land representatives in the German delegation in Brussels receive a double status; to the outsider they are representatives of the federal government, but internally they are representatives of the Länder.20 The negotiation and ratification of the Maastricht Treaty (TEU) The Maastricht Treaty on the EC and EU, which we will refer to as the Treaty on European Union (TEU), represents a new stage in the process of European integration.21 It was designed not only to adapt the EC to a new Europe
. Under the Maastricht Treaty, it now had the power to dismiss a Commission by a two-thirds majority. In light of the parliament’s own ‘luxurious allowances and expenses’, the political scientist Mark Gilbert called it ‘one of the most egregious examples of the pot calling the kettle black in modern political history’. 32 Santer played for time by agreeing to allow a commission of independent experts to look into the accusations. The investigating committee had few of the independent voices that Jens-Peter Bonde, a tireless campaigner as an MEP against abuses of
Challenges currently facing European labour movements are novel, yet a rich literature bears witness to the historic manner in which labour has responded to European integration. In this chapter, so as to root later analysis in relevant debates, I conduct an in-depth survey of this literature. I commence with an examination of historic attempts by labour to respond to European integration. Though prominent political economists writing after the Maastricht Treaty emphasized processes of competition (Rhodes, 1998a ; Scharpf, 1999
Its fruits came in the Maastricht Treaty (the Treaty of European Union) of 1992. Article B TEU declared one of the objectives of European Union to be ‘to strengthen the protection of the rights and interests of the nationals of its Member States through the introduction of a citizenship of the Union.’ Article 8 (EC) stated: 1. Citizenship of the Union is hereby established. Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union. 2. Citizens of the Union shall enjoy the rights conferred by this Treaty and shall be subject to the duties