This book analyses the political legitimacy of the European Union, taking democratic citizenship seriously.
Developing a distinctive normative theory of political association, it evaluates the project of European integration in terms of democratic values. It argues that the goods of democratic citizenship have been advanced by European integration in many respects, including environmental policy. In other respects, including social policy, democratic citizenship is best advanced by keeping primary political authority at the level of the nation-state. Weale develops these arguments through...

Investigating the influences on Germany's policy-making resulting from the East Central European states' negotiations to join the European Union, this text looks in depth at German European policy. It then moves on to consider domestic policy, the European Union and its relations with Germany and finally the negotiations of East Central European states with German bureaucracy. Stephen Collins studies the bureaucratic decision-making processes of the Federal Republic, which have evolved over time and have remained generally consistent, irrespective of the government in power. He also examines...

The changing faces of federalism is an extraordinary book that provides a rigorous and original view of what will be the future of the European Union. It describes and discusses the tradition and the institutions of federalism in the Eastern, Central and Western European countries and deals thoroughly with many innovative issues about federalism such as multi-level-governance, network government, devolution, subsidiarity, asymmetry and functionalism.
A fundamental assumption of the book is that the European enlargement and the new European constitution could result in two major evolutions...

This book examines the two main dimensions of the European Union's enlargement to eight central and eastern European countries (CEECs) in 2004. Why did the EU agree to enlargement, despite the costs for some incumbents who have veto-power? How can we explain the (uneven) pattern of accommodation of the CEECs' preferences in concrete policies?
Combining in-depth empirical analysis with an original theoretical framework, which draws on insights from constructivism and historical institutionalism, this book focuses on the EU's discursively constructed role-identity vis-a-vis the CEECs. This...

This book is about the transformation of Germany's security and defense policy in the time between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 war in Iraq. The book traces and explains the reaction of Europe's biggest and potentially most powerful country to the ethnic wars of the 1990s, the emergence of large-scale terrorism, and the new US emphasis on pre-emptive strikes.
Based on an analysis of Germany's strategic culture it portrays Germany as a security actor and indicates the conditions and limits of the new German willingness to participate in international military crisis management that...

How do parties adopt and change positions on the European question? How do they balance the demands placed upon them by ideology, voters and participation in coalition government? What are the sources of Euroscepticism, and how widespread is it among the parties and the public? This book addresses these questions by examining the politics of Hungary's accession to the European Union, from the early 1990s to 2004. The book provides a conceptually grounded yet accessible analysis of the way questions related to EU membership, and European integration in general, are channelled into political...

This book deals with the scope and nature of the EU's external influence over South-Eastern Europe in the present enlargement. By elaborating on the Europeanisation of the Western Balkans in a systematic, theory-oriented and comparative way, the book provides rich insight into the dynamics of the current enlargement and offers a comprehensive analysis of the EU's avenues of external leverage in the field of justice and home affairs, a key sector of cooperation in the EU-Western Balkans relations.
The book is an important contribution towards a better understanding of how the EU's use of...

How does the European Union affect devolution and nationalist conflict in member states? Does the EU reduce the scope of regional self-government or enhance it? Does it promote conflict or cooperation among territorial entities? These are pressing questions in Spanish politics, where devolution has been an important tool for managing nationalist disputes, and for the Basque Country, where protracted and sometimes violent nationalist conflicts persist. Addressing these issues, this book, available in paperback for the first time, explores prospects for an autonomous Basque role in EU politics;...

This book analyses the multiple ways in which the European Union affects industrial relations. Traditionally, the institutional framework for industrial relations has nearly exclusively been provided by the nation states, and the study of the role of trade unions and employers' organisations has prioritised the comparison of such national systems. However, the EU has gradually played an increasing role also in the field of industrial relations, providing for a unique transnational framework in which management and labour operate. This book places the EU center stage of industrial relations....