This book examines the role of the historical development of the Western European Union in regards to the evolving pan-European security environment.

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For many observers, the European Union is mired in a deep crisis. Between sluggish growth; political turmoil following a decade of austerity politics; Brexit; and the rise of Asian influence, the EU is seen as a declining power on the world stage. Columbia Law professor Anu Bradford argues the opposite in her important new book The Brussels Effect: the EU remains an influential superpower that shapes the world in its image. By promulgating regulations that shape the international business environment, elevating standards worldwide, and leading to a notable Europeanization of many important aspects of global commerce, the EU has managed to shape policy in areas such as data privacy, consumer health and safety, environmental protection, antitrust, and online hate speech. And in contrast to how superpowers wield their global influence, the Brussels Effect - a phrase first coined by Bradford in 2012- absolves the EU from playing a direct role in imposing standards, as market forces alone are often sufficient as multinational companies voluntarily extend the EU rule to govern their global operations. The Brussels Effect shows how the EU has acquired such power, why multinational companies use EU standards as global standards, and why the EU's role as the world's regulator is likely to outlive its gradual economic decline, extending the EU's influence long into the future.

The Cold War was not only about the imperial ambitions of the super powers, their military strategies, and antagonistic ideologies. It was also about conflicting worldviews and their correlates in the daily life of the societies involved. The term “Cold War Culture” is often used in a broad sense to describe media influences, social practices, and symbolic representations as they shape, and are shaped by, international relations. Yet, it remains in question whether — or to what extent — the Cold War Culture model can be applied to European societies, both in the East and the West. While every European country had to adapt to the constraints imposed by the Cold War, individual development was affected by specific conditions as detailed in these chapters. This volume offers an important contribution to the international debate on this issue of the Cold War impact on everyday life by providing a better understanding of its history and legacy in Eastern and Western Europe.

What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. While the mobilization of the losers in the processes of globalization by new right populist parties is seen to be the driving force of the restructuring of West European politics, the book goes beyond party politics. It attempts to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups and social movement organizations, and how the new conflicts are framed by the various actors involved.

Why are traditional nation-states newly defining membership and belonging? In the twenty-first century, several Western European states have attached obligatory civic integration requirements as conditions for citizenship and residence, which include language proficiency, country knowledge and value commitments for immigrants. This book examines this membership policy adoption and adaptation through both medium-N analysis and three paired comparisons to argue that while there is convergence in instruments, there is also significant divergence in policy purpose, design and outcomes. To explain this variation, this book focuses on the continuing, dynamic interaction of institutional path dependency and party politics. Through paired comparisons of Austria and Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands and France, this book illustrates how variations in these factors - as well as a variety of causal processes - produce divergent civic integration policy strategies that, ultimately, preserve and anchor national understandings of membership.

The quasi-federal European Union stands out as the major exception in the thinly institutionalized world of international politics. Something has led Europeans—and only Europeans—beyond the nation-state to a fundamentally new political architecture. Craig Parsons argues in A Certain Idea of Europe that this "something" was a particular set of ideas generated in Western Europe after the Second World War. In Parsons's view, today's European Union reflects the ideological (and perhaps visionary) project of an elite minority. His book traces the progressive victory of this project in France, where the battle over European institutions erupted most divisively. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews with French policymakers, the author carefully traces a fifty-year conflict between radically different European plans. Only through aggressive leadership did the advocates of a supranational "community" Europe succeed at building the EU and binding their opponents within it. Parsons puts the causal impact of ideas, and their binding effects through institutions, at the center of his book. In so doing he presents a strong logic of "social construction"—a sharp departure from other accounts of EU history that downplay the role of ideas and ideology.

This volume investigates the challenges confronted by the European Union (EU) as an international actor deeply influenced by migration. This has been a key phenomenon in recent years and holds great political, economic and social importance for the future of the whole European continent. The book focuses on specific aspects related to East-West migration, such as the importance of migration for economic development and the multi-faceted impact of migration on sending countries, as well as recipient countries. It also includes an overview of the myriad of reasons which stand for the fundamental decision whether to emigrate or not. The collection offers a novel Eastern European perspective on contemporary migration, a hotly debated topic inside the European Union, which is far from being fully recognised and understood, and it also provides valuable, complex and comprehensive insight into the issue of South Eastern migration to Western Europe.

As the French Presidential elections clearly demonstrated in the Spring of 2002, the popularity of far right parties is gaining ever more strength. From the National Front in France to the British National Party, anti-immigration, anti-European Union platforms are winning more voters. The numbers alone are striking: the National Front in France received nearly eighteen percent of the nationwide vote in 2002 Presidential run-off between Chirac and Le Pen; the Swiss People's Party received 23 percent of the popular vote in a 1999 election; and Jorg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party moved from near collapse to second place in the 1999 election. The essays in Shadows Over Europe explore this growing presence of extreme right political parties in governments throughout Europe. These parties can no longer be dismissed as anomalous or temporary. It is clear that they have established an enduring presence in European politics. The contributors to this volume explore the origins of this trend, why they have gained such support, and where these parties might be headed. They explore the policy orientations of these parties and their role in electoral politics across the continent. Together, these essays provide a significant contribution toward understanding the rise and impact of the far right in Europe.