During the chaos of the eurozone crisis, few mainstream commentators have stopped to question the purpose of the European Union itself, and whose interests it serves. Corporate Europe goes beyond the divisions between nation-states, focusing instead on the division between the corporate elite and the peoples of Europe.David Cronin spent a year investigating the privileged access that big business enjoys in Brussels. In this book, he reveals how the EU’s policies on health, climate change, armaments and food safety have been tailored to please an unaccountable elite. Making extensive use of previously unpublished documents, he explores how ideologically blinkered lobbyists have seized on the financial crisis of recent years to entrench the casino capitalism that caused the crisis in the first place.What emerges is a powerful exposé of how vested interests in the EU have manipulated opportunities to introduce ideologically-driven reforms.

In carefully crafted official statements, the European Union presents itself as an honest broker in the Middle East. In reality, however, the EU’s 27 governments have been engaged in a long process of accommodating Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.Journalist David Cronin interrogates the relationship and its outcomes. A recent agreement for 'more intense, more fruitful, more influential co-operation' between the EU and Israel has meant that Israel has become a member state of the Union in all but name. Cronin shows that rather than using this relationship to encourage Israeli restraint, the EU has legitimised actions such as the ill-treatment of prisoners and the Gaza invasion.Concluding his revealing and shocking account, Cronin calls for a continuation and deepening of international activism and protest to halt the EU's slide into complicity.