Making The European Polity

Today’s Europe is marked by an amazing pace of integration. The European Union now consists of twenty five member states, however there is confusion and disagreement about its future design. Making The European Polity investigates how the European Union should develop and organize itself and offers a reflexive approach to integration based on the theory of communicative action. It conceives of the EU as a law based supranational polity lacking the identity of a people as well as the coercive means of a state and argues that it is a polity with an organized capacity to act, but no sole apex of authority. Making an important contribution to the theoretical discussions on the EU, these contributors explore a range of issues including legitimacy, post-national democracy and integration and provide in-depth analyses of social and tax policy, foreign policy, identity formation, the reform process and the constitutional effects of enlargement. This book will appeal to all political scientists and particularly to students and researchers of European Politics.

Over the last twenty years, processes of pluralization, differentiation and trans-nationalization in the European Union have arguably challenged the centrality of law to European integration. Yet these developments also present opportunities to investigate new understandings of law triggered by European integration. The contributors to this book revisit one of the first academic projects to conceptualise and study European legal integration - the early 'Integration through Law' School. On this basis, they consider continuities and discontinuities in the underlying social and political landscape which the law is to integrate (the 'object' of integration), the forms and capacities of the law itself (the 'agent' of integration), and the way these two dimensions reflect on each other. Displaying different normative concerns and varied theoretical starting points, all contributors maintain that 'integration through law' remains of enduring significance to the European integration process. The volume provides a valuable reference for scholars in the field of European integration studies and European legal and political theory.

Using a wide range of material the authors aim to provide a thorough assessment of the European Council's work from 1975 to 1985. They explain its fluctuating performance, its impact on other European Community institutions and analyze it in the context of international and domestic issues.

Contributors to this volume outline how societal actors have been closely involved in European integration from the founding of the EU to the Maastricht Treaty. Based on newly accessible sources, the authors discuss the participation of political parties, business groups and civil society organizations in European polity-building and policy-making.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This cutting-edge book explores the practices and socialization of the everyday foreign policy making in the European Union (EU), focusing on the individuals who shape and implement the Common Foreign and Security Policy despite a growing dissension among member states.

The widening and deepening of the European Union have brought to the fore the question of democracy at the European level. The system of domination already in place at the European level requires and aspires to direct legitimation - from the citizens themselves and not merely indirect, derived from the Member Nation States. Such can only be achieved by making the EU into a democratic polity. But can democracy be disassociated from its putative nation-state foundation? A revised concept of democratic legitimacy based on discourse theory is developed. It is argued that post-national democracy requires a constitution but not necessarily a state. The Union amounts to less than a state but more than an international organisation and a system of transnational governance. In the political theory of the multilevel constellation that makes up the EU, it is conceived of as a regional subset of an emerging cosmopolitan order. The EU is a state-less government. As it is not premised on group identity, it is able to accommodate a high measure of variance with regard to territory and function. The book analyzes the reforms undertaken to bring the EU 'closer to the citizens'. It documents elements of democratization and reduction of arbitrary power. However, democracy requires that the citizens can approve or reject the laws they are subjected to. Since the institutional as well as the civic conditions under which a public justification process would be deemed legitimate are not in place, European post-national democracy remains an unaccomplished mission.

Over the last twenty years, processes of pluralization, differentiation and trans-nationalization in the European Union have arguably challenged the centrality of law to European integration. Yet these developments also present opportunities to investigate new understandings of law triggered by European integration. The contributors to this book revisit one of the first academic projects to conceptualise and study European legal integration - the early 'Integration through Law' School. On this basis, they consider continuities and discontinuities in the underlying social and political landscape which the law is to integrate (the 'object' of integration), the forms and capacities of the law itself (the 'agent' of integration), and the way these two dimensions reflect on each other. Displaying different normative concerns and varied theoretical starting points, all contributors maintain that 'integration through law' remains of enduring significance to the European integration process. The volume provides a valuable reference for scholars in the field of European integration studies and European legal and political theory.

This book provides a broad overview of the main trends in mass attitudes towards domestic politics and European integration from the 1970s until today. Particularly in the last two decades, the "end of the permissive consensus" around European integration has forced analysts to place public opinion at the centre of their concerns. The book faces this challenge head on, and the overview it provides goes well beyond the most commonly used indicators. On the one hand, it shows how integration's deepening and enlargement involved polities and societies whose fundamental traits in terms of political culture - regime support, political engagement, ideological polarization - have remained anything but static or homogeneous. On the other hand, it addresses systematically what Scharpf (1999) has long identified as the main sources of the democratic deficits of the EU: the lack of a sense of collective identity, the lack of a Europe-wide structure for political accountability, and the lack of recognition of the EU as a legitimate political authority. In other words, it focuses on the fundamental dimensions of how Europeans relate to the EU: identity (the sense of an "European political community"; representation (the perception that European elites and institutions articulate citizens' interests and are responsive to them); and policy scope (the legitimacy awarded to the EU as a proper locus of policy-making). It does so by employing a cohesive theoretical framework derived from the entire IntUne project, survey and macro-social data encompassing all EU member countries, and state-of-the-art methods. The IntUne series is edited by Maurizio Cotta and Pierangelo Isernia In a moment in which the EU is facing an important number of social, economic, political and cultural challenges, and its legitimacy and democratic capacities are increasingly questioned, it seems particularly important to address the issue of if and how EU citizenship is taking shape. This series intends to address this complex issue. It reports the main results of a quadrennial Europe-wide research project, financed under the 6th Framework Programme of the EU. That programme has studied the changes in the scope, nature and characteristics of citizenship presently underway as a result of the process of deepening and enlargement of the European Union. The INTUNE Project - Integrated and United: A Quest for Citizenship in an Ever Closer Europe - is one of the most recent and ambitious research attempts to empirically study how citizenship is changing in Europe. The Project lasted four years (2005-2009) and it involved 30 of the most distinguished European universities and research centres, with more than 100 senior and junior scholars as well as several dozen graduate students working on it. It had as its main focus an examination of how integration and decentralization processes, at both the national and European level, are affecting three major dimensions of citizenship: identity, representation, and scope of governance. It looked, in particular, at the relationships between political, social and economic elites, the general public, policy experts and the media, whose interactions nurture the dynamics of collective political identity, political legitimacy, representation, and standards of performance. In order to address empirically these issues, the INTUNE Project carried out two waves of mass and political, social and economic elite surveys in 18 countries, in 2007 and 2009; in-depth interviews with experts in five policy areas; extensive media analysis in four countries; and a documentary analysis of attitudes toward European integration, identity and citizenship. The book series presents and discusses in a coherent way the results coming out of this extensive set of new data.