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This substantially updated and revised edition offers a comprehensive overview of the challenges confronting the political system as well as the international politics of the European Union. It draws from a spectrum of regional integration theories to determine what the Union actually is and how it is developing, examining the constitutional politics of the European Union, from the Single European Act to the Treaty of Nice and beyond. The ongoing debate on the future of Europe links together the questions of democracy and legitimacy, competences and rights, and the prospects for European polity-building. The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the emerging European polity and the questions that further treaty reform generates for the future of the regional system. The authors also assess the evolving European security architecture; the limits and possibilities of a genuine European foreign, security and defence policy; and the role of the EU in the post-Cold War international system. Common themes involve debates about stability and instability, continuity and change, multipolarity and leadership, co-operation and discord, power capabilities and patterns of behaviour. The book traces the defining features of the ‘new order’ in Europe and incorporates an analysis of the post-September 11th context.
and that its students will be better equipped to deal in a more insightful and systematic manner with such intricate issues as the impact of less formalised arenas of 50 Theory and reform in the European Union governance on integration outcomes, the role of institutional values in everyday policy-making and, crucially, the normative context within which the constitutive actors and governance arrangements of the European polity operate as norm-setting forces. Multilevel governance In stark contrast to state-centric approaches to European integration like liberal
European governance. Indeed, the dynamism of EU polity-building over the 1990s has provided some of the necessary infrastructure for the emergence of a ‘constitutive’ European polity that derives its legitimacy both from the component polities and the member demoi, emphasising the need for greater civic deliberation and participation. It is not so much the actual provisions stemming from successive treaty reforms or for that matter the way in which they will be carried out that warrant our closer attention, as are the new European polity dynamics, in that questions of
constitutional debate in any case because of the intrinsic significance of this particular policy area to the constitutional foundations of the European polity. The compromises that have been proposed – the creation of the posts of EU President and an EU ‘foreign minister’ to represent the Union externally, the dual competence of Commission and Council in this area and the tentative moves towards the greater use of qualified majority
international behaviour and, on the other, the assertion of a new core set of values and principles of what might best be described as ‘political co-determination’: the forging of new co-operative arrangements for jointly managing the internal and external affairs of the nascent European polity. The perennial question to ask The theoretical setting 3 here is whether such a composite polity will strike a balance between its becoming the main locus of collective, binding decision-making for the constituent governments and the dominant focus of popular political
of the European polity. Fundamentally, this is linked to the issue of whether there is a European demos or a European public sphere and how this might affect EU foreign policy (Guénno 1998 , 2000 ; Hix 1998 ; Peterson 1998 : 3). Here is an issue where much more research from a discourse perspective is needed, research which cannot, of course, be limited to EU foreign policy. POLICY PRACTICE The
3 The Amsterdam reforms Partial offsets and unfinished business Introduction As a result of the IGC 1996/97, the member governments of the Union signed in Amsterdam, in June 1997, the Treaty which partially reformed the Maastricht Treaty. All those who linked the outcome of the review conference with the construction of a democratically organised European polity, or even regarded it as an opportunity for a more or less permanent clarification of the physiognomy of the Union, have no real grounds for celebration as realism, in the end, seems to have had its way
supranational unions are thus structurally similar, since in both cases the “source citizenship” is that of an independent state and the derivative citizenship is activated through internal mobility, while the source citizenship remains unaffected (Jackson 2001 ). This similarity is also suggested by the very term “region” that applies both to substate political territories and to unions of states. Although in the European polity there are four levels of
very existence. ‘Kosovo’ and the European security discourse have discursively framed the diverse meanings of ‘Europe’, fixing its geopolitical boundaries by locating its practices and by speaking as if a stable European polity already exists. The ‘enemy’ of Europe’s volatile identity has been defined as the ‘unknown’, the ‘unpredictable’ and the ‘unstable’. The challenge for the EU has been to prevent a