Palgrave Studies In European Union Politics

Scholars and policymakers in EU foreign policy lament the EU's inability to assert itself on the world stage. This book explains this weakness by arguing that EU foreign policy is burdened by various internal functions, and systemizes the analysis of internal functionality, pushing the study beyond the concern with effectiveness.

This book explores how the European Commission faced the challenge of enlargement. Based on extensive interviews, the work provides a lively and readable picture of life within the Commission, exploring how thousands of newcomers were recruited and socialized and how they changed the organization, including its gender balance.

An exploration of what drives party-based Euroscepticism and why some parties are Eurosceptic. This book looks at what makes mainstream opposition parties careful not to appear Eurosceptic and asks whether Euroscepticism is an aberration of politics, an extreme populist ideology, or just politics as usual.

This handbook comprehensively explores the European Union’s institutional and policy responses to crises across policy domains and institutions – including the Euro crisis, Brexit, the Ukraine crisis, the refugee crisis, as well as the global health crisis resulting from COVID-19. It contributes to our understanding of how crisis affects institutional change and continuity, decision-making behavior and processes, and public policy-making. It offers a systematic discussion of how the existing repertoire of theories understand crisis and how well they capture times of unrest and events of disintegration. More generally, the handbook looks at how public organizations cope with crises, and thus probes how sustainable and resilient public organizations are in times of crisis and unrest.

The post-Cold War period is coming to an end. After a decade of foreign policy integration Europe faces multipolarity internally divided and externally weak. Toje argues that due to the lack of a workable decision-making mechanism the EU is destined to play the limited but distinct role of a small power in global politics.

An interdisciplinary approach to the study of the EU in UN human rights and environmental governance which addresses the legal and political science dimensions. With contributions from academics and policy-makers, this volume is a comprehensive analysis of how the challenges it faces impact on the EU's position in UN fora.

This open access book provides an in-depth look into the background of rule of law problems and the open defiance of EU law in East Central European countries. Current illiberal trends and anti-EU politics have the potential to undermine mutual trust between member states and fundamentally change the EU. It is therefore crucial to understand their domestic causes, context conditions, specific processes and consequences. This volume contributes to empirically informed theory-building and includes contributions from researchers from various disciplines and multiple perspectives on illiberal trends and anti-EU politics in the region. The qualitative case studies, comparative works and quantitative analyses provide a comprehensive picture of current societal, political and institutional developments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Through studying similarities and differences between East Central European and other EU countries, the chapters also explore whether there are regional patterns of democracy- and EU-related problems.