The European Union of today cannot be studied as it once was. This original new textbook provides a much-needed update on how the EU's policies and institutions have changed in light of the multiple crises and transformations since 2010. An international team of leading scholars offer systematic accounts on the EU's institutional regime, policies, and its community of people and states. Each chapter is structured to explain the relevant historical developments and institutional framework, presenting the key actors, the current controversies and discussing a paradigmatic case study. Each chapter also provides ideas for group discussions and individual research topics. Moving away from the typical, neutral account of the functioning of the EU, this textbook will stimulate readers' critical thinking towards the EU as it is today. It will serve as a core text for undergraduate and graduate students of politics and European studies taking courses on the politics of the EU, and those taking courses in comparative politics and international organizations including the EU.

An original new textbook providing an up-to-date, critical perspective of how the EU works, and what issues it faces, in the post-crisis era.

An introduction to the European Union from a comparative politics perspective, systematically analysing its functioning through comparison with national political systems.

An analysis of the repeated existential crises affecting the resilience of the European Union in the twenty-first century.

This book makes a distinctive contribution to the crucial debate on the European Union (EU)’s present and future development. It systematically examines how the range of crises and challenges over the last decade have transformed the EU and relates those findings to the discussion of an increasingly differentiated EU. It argues that the post-crises EU shows clear signs of becoming a segmented political order with in-built biases and constraints. The book spells out the key features of such an order in ideational and structural terms and shows how it more concretely manifests itself in the EU’s institutional and constitutional make-up and in how member states constrain and condition EU action. Different states impose different types of constraints, as is underlined through paying explicit attention to the Visegrád countries. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU politics/studies, European integration and politics, East European politics and foreign policy.

Europe is in crisis, but the European Union just gets stronger. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland have all been told that they must submit their budgets to EU-appointed bureaucrats. The 'soft coup' that put EU officials in charge of Greece and Italy shows that the Union is opposed to democracy. Instead of weakening the European Union, the budget crisis of 2012 has ended up with the eurocrats grabbing new powers to dictate terms. Over the years the forward march of the European Union has been widely misunderstood. James Heartfield explains that the rise of the EU is driven by the decline in political participation. Without political contestation national parliaments have become an empty shell. Where once elites drew authority from their own people, today they draw authority from the European Union, and other summits of world leaders. The growth of the European Union runs in tandem with the decline in national politics. As national sovereignty is hollowed out, technocratic administration from Brussels fills the void. This account of the rise of the European Union includes a full survey of the major schools of thought in European studies, and a valuable guide to those who want to take back control. ,

Provocative and timely examination of European integration and the specific methods that lead to a hazardous monetary union. Includes a deeper investigation of the specific crisis of monetary integration and argues how integration might be more effectively achieved with inter-jurisdictional competition.

The debate on law, governance and constitutionalism beyond the state is confronted with new challenges. In the EU, confidence in democratic transnational governance has been shaken by the authoritarian and unsocial practices of crisis management. The ambition of this book, which builds upon many years of close co-operation between its contributors, is to promote a viable interdisciplinary alternative to these developments. “Conflicts-law constitutionalism” is a concept of transnational governance which derives democratic legitimacy from the supranational control of the external impact of national decision-making, on the one hand, and the co-operative responses to problem interdependencies on the other. The first section of the book contrasts Europe's new modes of economic governance and crisis management with the conditionality of international investments, and reflects upon the communalities and differences between emergency Europe and global exceptionalism. Subsequent sections substantiate the problématique of executive and technocratic rule, explore conflict constellations of prime importance in the fields of environmental and labour law, and discuss the impact and limits of liberalisation strategies. Throughout the book, European and transnational developments are compared and evaluated.

This book is the first to be dedicated entirely to the European Semester -- a new framework for policy coordination across European Union (EU) member states. The Semester represents a major advancement in EU governance. Created in 2010 in the wake of the financial and sovereign debt crises and revamped in 2015, it was intended to provide a new socio-economic governance architecture to coordinate national policies without transferring legal sovereignty to EU level. The papers in this collection are written by authors who have already contributed to this literature and have conducted original research for their studies. The book offers an empirical and theoretical assessment of the European Semester, examining its implications along three critical axes, running respectively between the economic and the social, the supranational and the intergovernmental, and the technocratic and democratic poles of EU governance. The book concludes that the European Semester challenges established theoretical understandings of EU governance, as it is a prime example of the complexity that supersedes simple polar oppositions. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

Providing a comprehensive and authoritative analyses of the impact of the Eurozone crisis on the European social dimension since 2010 - understood as the European Union’s (EU) competence in employment and social policy - this book focusses on developments in five policy areas (employment, poverty and social exclusion, pensions, wages and healthcare), all of which form part of the EU’s economic reform strategy, Europe 2020. It combines original empirical material and uses a unique theoretical approach to analyse the issue of EU governance and reveals that ‘progress’ under Europe 2020 has its consequences; notably a strengthened Brussels-led neoliberal prescription for EU social and employment policy problems. By drawing insights from political sociology and the strategic-relational approach to actors/institutions, this book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in EU politics, EU governance, political sociology, public policy and European integration.