What Kind of Europe?

Abstract

This book examines the issues associated with the future of economic and political integration in Europe. It seeks answers to the question, “What kind of Europe do we want to build?”, with emphasis on the policy choices involved. The book is divided into two parts. Part I highlights the achievements of European integration to date, and the outstanding issues inherited from the past. Part 2 provides in-depth discussions of the main challenges facing the enlarged EU.

A Parliamentary Dimension for EU Soft Governance

“…EU soft law and other soft instruments of governance shed their influence through the proliferation of norms, they redefine frames and indirectly but substantially affect political actors' value orientations, behaviour and public policy at both the national and the European level (Zeitlin et al 2005). In so doing, they may indeed substantively affect the redistributive outcomes of policy making and therefore potential shifts in patterns of 'winners' and 'losers' (Tsoukalis 2003). The articulation and implementation of soft law and, more generally, the outcomes of processes where soft instruments of governance are used are therefore no less than formal rules appropriately the object of democratic scrutiny and debate (Borrás and Conzelmann 2006).…”

Transcultural Europe

“…Within the EU machinery, too, we find this tension, perhaps not named as such between Westphalians and cosmopolitans, but between a transnationalism marked by the desire for the greater interpenetration of societies, and a social integrationism which seeks to develop a stronger sense of European identity and citizenship (Tsoukalis, 2003;Shore, 2004). In the academic writing, Westphalians tend to think within the conceptual universe of the nation-state and interpret the evolving phenomena of Europe largely within the discursive framework of Benedict Anderson's 'imagined community'.…”

Social Europe and/or global Europe? Globalization and flexicurity as debates on the future of Europe

“…To meet this target the participating member states carried out a large politico-economic programme of market and capital account liberalization. This programme involved a far-reaching deregulation process at the national level, combined with a reregulation process at the EU level (Tsoukalis 2003). The single market project was then pushed forward with the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in the beginning of the 1990s.…”