Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics

This book proposes that the European Union should craft a grand strategy to navigate the new world order based on a four-pronged approach. First, European decision-makers (both in Brussels and across EU capitals) should take a broader view of their existential interests at stake and devote greater time and resources to serving them within the wider cause of the liberal order. Second, Europe needs to help reinvigorate the West by restoring a sense of solidarity through fairer distribution of benefits and burdens. Third, it should develop separate strategies for parts of the world, such as Russia and China, where liberal values are not likely to be attainable in the foreseeable future yet order is still necessary. Fourth, Europe needs to clarify its core interests elsewhere and help stabilize the Middle East and Africa. With this book, the author seeks to lay the essential building blocks for developing a European strategy, which is a complex process involving multiple decision-makersand institutions.

Political responses to climate change are shaped by beliefs and ideas. How does discourse on climate action and its contestation affect policy-making? Addressing this question, the book compares EU and US policy-making since the Paris Agreement and its framing by key political institutions. The empirical part analyses the structure, linkages and contestation of frames to evaluate the contrasting spaces of climate politics in both systems. As the first direct comparison of EU and US climate governance since the Paris Agreement, the book advances current research on the politics of climate change, the politicization of multi-level governance and the role of discourse for policy change.

This open access book provides the first ever authoritative collection of scholarly insights, based upon original research, into the political groups of the EP tackling the fundamental changes since the Lisbon Treaty and the upsurge of radical right parties.  It analyses political groups and their importance from multiple perspectives critically assessing their role and significance in EU politics. Each chapter is authored by leading scholars in the field, working on key topics in relation to political groups: political group formation and function, their role in parliamentary and EU policy-making, the way that Eurosceptic MEPs influence (or not) the Parliament, and the nature and form of interactions with external actors. In doing so, each chapter opens hitherto unexplored ‘black boxes’ in the political work of the EP, such as the internal practices of, and power relations within the political groups, and informal arenas of intra-group decision-making.

This book examines the effects of personnel turnover in European Union institutions. Individuals enter and exit EU institutions with remarkable frequency, and questions involving institutional personnel lie at the heart of populist and feminist critiques of the EU. Are these critiques accurate? How do personnel dynamics affect the EU’s legitimacy? Will changing patterns of turnover help to redeem the EU? Personnel Turnover addresses these issues by considering turnover’s effects on three aspects of legitimacy (input, throughput, and output). Authors use a common framework to explore various questions: Does turnover affect the ways that EU citizens see the EU or the likelihood that citizens will participate in EU elections? Does turnover affect the efficiency of the EU decision-making or the EU’s ability to promote its interests abroad? In tackling these contemporary subjects, the authors throw light on a classical question—what difference does it make when political leaders are replaced?

This book, which is aimed at scholars, practitioners, advanced under-graduate and post-graduate students, seeks to contribute to the understanding of the EU as an international negotiator by analysing a number of external policy areas where the EU to a great extent engages internationally through negotiations, including development, trade, enlargement, and withdrawal.

This open access book focuses on the importance that EU politicization has gained in European democracies and the consequences for voting behaviour in six countries of the EU: Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Most of the studies which research the way the EU is being legitimised focus on the European Parliament elections. In this book we argue that to understand how EU accountability works, it is necessary to focus instead on national elections and the national political environment. Through a detailed, multimethod analysis this book establishes rigorously the paths of European accountability at the national level, its propitious contexts in the media and parliamentary debates, and whether the paths are similar from Greece to Germany. The findings have implications for both national and European Union democracy, underlining the importance that national institutions have in enabling citizens to hold the EU accountable.

This book is the first detailed analysis of how the EU responded to Brexit. It is an important reference point for future studies of the Brexit negotiations. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with key institutional players in Brussels and in several member states to document how the EU handled the first-ever exit of one of its members. The Brexit shock came at a time when the EU had barely recovered from the Euro crisis and was struggling to manage an unprecedented inflow of refugees. The immediate fear was that Brexit might be the final straw that broke the camel ’s back.

Eurosceptics were jubilant, and Europhiles were distraught. In reality, the EU reacted to Brexit with resolve and a determination to protect the polity. The book argues that getting the process right was crucial. The EU mobilised its collective capacity to negotiate effectively and with one voice.

This book examines and compares government narratives of the EU. It thereby addresses a topical issue of major political importance. Bringing together leading specialists from across Europe, it takes a first step in filling a gap in the scholarly literature where attention has focused mainly on narrative-making at the EU level or societal understandings of ‘Europe’. At a time when crises, the rise of Eurosceptic populism and the UK’s departure have revealed significant differences in how states view the purpose of the European Union and the significance and value of EU membership, it asks: How do governments explain and justify their relationship with the EU? How do these narratives change over time? What do these visions imply for the EU’s future?

This book addresses one of the most profound transformations in international governance: the proliferation of regime complexity. Regime complexes can be found wherever state interests clash. Thus, even in one of the most constitutionalized of institutional environments, the European Union (EU), regime complexity features prominently – especially in European defence cooperation, where states have created competing institutions overlapping in their mandates to organize armaments cooperation or defence planning. The tense relationship between the institutions of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and those of NATO is well-known. Yet inter-institutional conflict is not limited to this dichotomy. It extends to institutions beyond these two frameworks, such as those of the former Western European Union and regional defence cooperation frameworks such as the Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO), or OCCAR – a minilateral armaments agency. All these institutions have partially overlapping membership structures and mandates and therefore rival authority claims in the field of European defence. This book uncovers the hidden regularities of the ongoing battle for institutional authority among EU member states.

This book delves into the topic of the European climate diplomacy and the ways it is performed, both internally in terms of constructing a negotiating position, and externally in regards to how the European Union (EU) as a whole exports this position at the international level. To do that, the analytical framework is built around two major pillars: first, the literature on European public policy, specifically regarding policymaking, and second, the Normative Power Europe approach. Aiming to test whether European climate diplomacy actually works, the book utilizes two examples/case studies, namely the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The selection of these examples is based on an array of rationales, but the main reason is that both international organizations (IOs) do not contribute (at least their fair share) in the global efforts of tackling climate change. The book thus showcases the strategically driven efforts of the EU as whole to export its climate norm to these two IOs. It argues that, if it weren’t for the EU, these two organizations would not have been active in negotiating on climate change issues to such extent.

The book offers explanations for the striking variation in the outcomes of European integration crises. It analyzes eight major cases over the entire integration process, starting from the early 1950s and lasting until very recently. All cases went beyond a single policy field or member state but affected key features, principles, and objectives of European integration. As such, they qualify as “constitutional crises”. My cases comprise the crisis of the European Defence Community (1952-54); the empty chair crisis (1965-66); the oil crisis (1973-74); the budgetary rebate crisis (1979-84); the end of the Cold War crisis (1989-92); the Constitutional Treaty crisis (2004-07); the Euro crisis (2009-12); and the migration crisis (2015-16). Taking a historical-comparative perspective, the book shows that crises have been an integral part of the European integration process since its beginning. European integration, after all, started with a major setback when member states in 1954 failedto realize plans for a European army through the European Defense Community.

The Council of the EU is a powerful institution whose centrality has been challenged by the Treaty of Lisbon. More than ten years after this major institutional revision, this book examines its role within the EU political regime and its interactions with other institutions. It explores how the Council Presidency has navigated major crises over the past decade and addressed internal challenges. The various chapters discuss key timely questions: How has the relationship between the Council and the European Council evolved over time? To what extent have the recent crises reshaped the relationship between the Council and the European Parliament, as well as its interactions with the Commission? Is the Council Presidency still a powerful mediator? What are its internal challenges? What are the prospects for the rotating presidency system? 

This book analyses the EU rule of law instruments from the perspective of the academic, inter- and intra-institutional dissensus at the EU level. The angle of analysis proposed by this book allows to detect the sources of dissensus inherent in the design of the EU rule of law toolbox and in their enforcement. The proliferation of the instruments, without any major efforts of systematization, seems to be part of the problem, with a series of overlaps. At the same time, especially in the post-pandemic context, the procedures implementing the various EU rule of law tools have become more and more intertwined, so that it becomes difficult to disentangle one from the other in terms of effects. The book thus feed the debate on the strengths and deficiencies of the EU rule of law toolbox ten years after the first ad hoc measures were adopted, also offering some recommendations on how to turn dissensus into constructive mechanisms to improve the management of the rule of law in the EU.

This volume explains the behavior of the European Union (EU) towards Central Asia. In so doing, the responses of regional actors which impact the EU’s regional conduct, and the effects of competing external governance providers (particularly Russia and China), are considered. The current literature – often from an interdisciplinary, descriptive area studies angle – reveals some research gaps. Scholars chiefly explore the impacts of the EU on Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, while action of the EU itself with its decision-making, preferences, and underlying drivers, remains underspecified. Focusing more explicitly on the EU, chapters in the book are systematically organized along a set of shared, overarching questions. Ultimately, the authors depict and explain EU action and assess how successful the organization has been in achieving its stated regional objectives in a number of policy fields: Economic Development and Trade; Security; Democratizationand Human Rights; Water; and Education.

This book offers the first comprehensive analysis and comparison of all the EU High Representatives / Vice Presidents of the Commission (HRVPs) until 2024. The book explores how three incumbents with very different backgrounds, ways of working and personalities took up the challenge of formulating the EU’s answers to brewing international crises, regional instabilities, humanitarian disasters and, eventually, war. Applying role theory, the research provides deep insights into foreign policy leadership during a period when the EU needed to adapt to a rapidly changing international environment. Based on a large set of expert interviews, the book makes the case that the leadership and role performance of the HRVP matter and can have a positive impact on the EU’s international activities. As geopolitics stages a revival, future HRVPs need to engage powerful member states and key actors in Brussels to unleash the full potential of the EU’s economic, political and military weight.

This interdisciplinary book takes stock of Ukraine’s thorny European integration path in the last two decades. Engaging many Ukrainian academics and practitioners, the book seeks to offer a first-hand insight into how Ukraine moves towards EU membership, while in war with Russia, and which ‘stumbling blocks’ it encounters. 

This book’s aim is to determine empirically whether Europeans see their multiple security needs best advanced by a consistent reliance on the EU’s security policies or by differentiating allies according to their capacity to deal with different types of security threats, economic, military, and climate change. It uses original survey data to test whether people see their country facing multiple threats to their security. If they see a threat, do they want their national government to seek help from the EU, the United Nations or NATO or have their national government look after national security on its own? Given substantial differences in public opinion, we test whether this is due to individual differences in their political attitudes and social characteristics; national context; or differences in the capacity of multi-national institutions. The results have important implications for the public policies of national governments and the EU and for theories of European integration.

The questions at the core of this volume are the following: What are the ethics and integrity rules for the EU? How do they score compared to the integrity frameworks existing at the Member States’ level and in other democracies? How do we design these rules and ensure their enforcement in the EU? How do we improve the enforcement of EU integrity standards? Can an EU ethics system contribute to preventing or mitigating unethical conduct within the Union thus improving its democratic legitimacy? In addressing these questions, this edited volume provides a critical analysis of the existing 'EU ethical framework' while contextualising it within the unique transnational setting that characterises the EU public administration and its various institutions.