Product Description: Under what conditions does the internal cohesiveness of the European Union determine its external effectiveness on the world stage? This book asks this question, investigating the frequent political assumption that the more cohesive the EU presents itself to the world, the more effective it is in achieving its goals...read more

Product Description: How has the process of political representation changed in the era of globalization? The representation of interests is at the heart of democracy, but how is it that some interests secure a strong voice, while others do not? While each person has multiple interests linked to different dimensions of his or her identity, much of the existing academic literature assumes that interests are given prior to politics by a person's socioeconomic, institutional, or cultural situation...read more

European politicians often speak of their efforts to 'manage globalization.' At one level, this is merely a rhetorical device to make globalization more palatable to citizens and prove that policy-makers are still firmly in control of their country’s fate. This volume argues that the advocacy of managed globalization goes beyond rhetoric and actually has been a primary driver of major European Union (EU) policies in the past twenty years. The EU has indeed tried to manage globalization through the use of five major mechanisms: 1) expanding policy scope 2) exercising regulatory influence 3) empowering international institutions 4) enlarging the territorial sphere of EU influence, and 5) redistributing the costs of globalization. These mechanisms are neither entirely novel, nor are they always effective but they provide the contours of an approach to globalization that is neither ad hoc deregulation, nor old-style economic protectionism. The recent financial crisis may have seemed initially to vindicate the European efforts to manage globalization, but it also represented the limits of such efforts without the full participation of the US and China. The EU cannot rig the game of globalization, but it can try to provide predictability, oversight, and regularity with rules that accommodate European interests. This book was based on a special issue of  Journal of European Public Policy.

Fifty years ago, the leaders of six European states signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community and launching the process of European integration. From that starting point evolved today's European Union (EU), the most successful example of institutionalized political cooperation in history. The EU now encompasses a much broader array of responsibilities than originally planned, its membership has widened to 25 countries, and its legislation and jurisprudence has come to supersede national law. Contestation has accompanied success, however, and the intense debate in many European countries over the EU Constitution throughout the course of 2005 revealed deep divisions between and within European countries around issues such as EU institutions, the elusive European identity, a European economic malaise, and the role of the EU as a world power. Was the constitutional crisis a turning point for European integration? This volume argues that the EU today may be at a crossroads--not because of the failed referenda but rather because of the unresolved tensions in European governance not banished with the referenda's defeat. Meunier and McNamara's collection is the first to comprehensively examine these challenging issues using the tools of historical institutionalism to analyze the past and future political and institutional trajectory of the European Union across a wide variety of policy areas. Together, the volume's authors provide a remarkably coherent theoretical approach to the key questions facing Europe, drawing a portrait of the EU today that reveals a robust, but not invulnerable, set of institutions and practices.

The European Union is not an easy bargainer to deal with. This book talks about the politics of trade policy in the EU and the role of the EU as a central actor in international commercial negotiations. It explores how this pooling of trade policy-making and external representation affects the EU's bargaining power in international trade talks.

Product Description: In August 1999 a forty-six-year-old sheep farmer name José Bové was arrested for dismantling the construction site of a new McDonald's restaurant in the south of France. A few months later Bové built on his fame by smuggling huge chunks of Roquefort cheese into Seattle, where he was among the leaders of the antiglobalization protests against the World Trade Organization summit...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)