Negotiating European Union

The EU policy process is dependent on negotiations as a mode of reaching agreements on, and implementing, common policies. The EU negotiations differ from traditional international negotiations in several respects and this book presents a detailed analysis of the processes while examining their distinguishing features. The authors explore the variety of negotiation processes, the continuity and institutionalization of negotiation processes as well as the involvement of a variety of actors besides governments, often linked in informal networks. Going beyond the common distinctions based on issue-areas or the EU as negotiation arena as opposed to negotiating actor externally, the authors explore the impact of different stages in the policy process and the nature of the external negotiating partner.

This title was first published in 2002: Offering a new and challenging perspective on how the European Union (EU) sought to structure its relations with Central and Southeast Europe after the Cold War, this volume draws upon key debates in both politics and international relations. A historically and theoretically informed examination of the EU's engagement in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989, the book combines conceptual rigour with clear empirical analysis, firmly grounding the study of the European Union's current enlargement process in established theoretical perspectives. The book is written in an engaging and accessible way, which will appeal to academics, students and practitioners alike.

This book explores how the European Union has been responding to the challenge of diversity. In doing so, it considers the EU as a complex polity that has found novel ways for accommodating diversity. Much of the literature on the EU seeks to identify it as a unique case of cooperation between states that moves past classic international cooperation. This volume argues that in order to understand the EU’s effort in managing the diversity among its members and citizens it is more effective to look at the EU as a state. While acknowledging that the EU lacks key aspects of statehood, the authors show that looking at the EU efforts to balance diversity and unity through the lens of state policy is a fruitful way to understand the Union. Instead of conceptualising the EU as being incomparable and unique which is neither an international organisation nor a state, the book argues that EU can be understood as a polity that shares many approaches and strategies with complex and diverse states. As such, its effort to build political structures to accommodate diversity offers lessons to other such polities. The experience of the EU contributes to the understanding of how states and other polities can respond to challenges of diversity, including both the diversity of constituent units or of sub-national groups and identities.

The book explores the promotion of Europeanness, which aims to arouse feelings of belonging to the European Union. It demonstrates that the promotion of Europeanness at the EU level does not constitute an overarching identity policy that imposes a homogenous interpretation of European identity. Rather, it is a process of negotiation in which various entrepreneurs of Europeanness within and outside the EU institutions invent and communicate representations of Europe. Both the negotiation and the multilayered representations of Europe that it produces are investigated through three case studies: the academia and the historians, European heritage, and the iconography of the euro.

Providing a comprehensive and definitive account of the negotiations that led up to the agreement on Economic and Monetary Union at Maastricht in December 1991, this book examines the dynamics of the treaty negotiations.

The European Union can be perceived as an enormous bilateral and multilateral process of internal and external negotiation. This book examines negotiations within member states, between member states, within and between the institutions of the Union and between the EU and other countries. It also analyzed processes, actors and interests. This book is, therefore, a unique probe into the relatively unknown arena of negotiation processes in the European Union.