The European Union's foreign policy and its international role are increasingly being contested both globally and at home. At the global level, a growing number of states are now challenging the Western-led liberal order defended by the EU. Large as well as smaller states are vying for more leeway to act out their own communitarian principles on and approaches to sovereignty, security and economic development. At the European level, a similar battle has begun over principles, values and institutions. The most vocal critics have been anti-globalization movements, developmental NGOs, and populist political parties at both extremes of the left-right political spectrum. This book, based on ten case studies, explores some of the most important current challenges to EU foreign policy norms, whether at the global, glocal or intra-EU level. The case studies cover contestation of the EU's fundamental norms, organizing principles and standardized procedures in relation to the abolition of the death penalty, climate, Responsibility to Protect, peacebuilding, natural resource governance, the International Criminal Court, lethal autonomous weapons systems, trade, the security-development nexus and the use of consensus on foreign policy matters in the European Parliament. The book also theorizes the current norm contestation in terms of the extent to, and conditions under which, the EU foreign policy is being put to the test.

The European Parliament in the Contested Union provides a systematic assessment of the real influence of the European Parliament (EP) in policy-making. Ten years after the coming into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, which significantly empowered Europe’s only directly elected institution, the contributions collected in this volume analyse whether, and under what conditions, the EP has been able to use its new powers and shape decisions. Going beyond formal or normative descriptions of the EP’s powers, this book provides an up-to-date and timely empirical assessment of the role of the EP in the European Union, focusing on key cases such as the reforms of the EU’s economic governance and asylum policy, the Brexit negotiations and the budget. The book challenges and qualifies the conventional view that the EP has become more influential after Lisbon. It shows that the influence of the EP is conditional on the salience of the negotiated policy for the Member States. When EU legislation touches upon ‘core state powers’, as well as when national financial resources are at stake, the role of the EP – notwithstanding its formal powers – is more constrained and its influence more limited. This book provides fresh light on the impact of the EP and its role in a more contested and politicised European Union. Bringing together an international team of top scholars in the field and analysing a wealth of new evidence, The European Parliament in the Contested Union challenges conventional explanations on the role of the EP, tracking down empirically its impact on key policies and processes. It will be of great interest to scholars of the European Union, European politics and policy-making. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

This book describes the emergence of research policy as a key competence of the European Union (EU). It shows how the European Community (EC, the predecessor of the EU), which initially had very limited legal competence in the field, progressively developed a solid policy framework presenting science and research as indispensable tools for European economic competitiveness and growth. In the late 20th century Western Europe, hungry for growth, concerned about the American technological lead, and keen to compete in the increasingly open international markets, the argument for a joint European effort in science and technology seemed plausible. However, the EC was building its new functions in an already crowded field of European research collaboration and in a shifting political context marked by austerity, national rivalries, new societal and environmental challenges, and emerging ambivalence about science. This book conveys the contested history of one of the EU’s most successful policies. It is a story of struggle and frustration but also of a great institutional and intellectual continuity. The ideational edifice for the EC/EU research policy that was put in place during the 1960s and 1970s years proved remarkably robust. Its durability enabled the rapid takeoff of the European Commission’s initiatives in the more favorable political atmosphere of the early 1980s and the subsequent expansion of the EU research funding instruments and programs that permanently transformed the European research landscape.

Since the Maastricht ratification debate of the early 1990s, the legitimacy of the European Union has become a subject of controversy. With unprecedented force, Europeans have begun to question the need for deeper integration. Some fear threats to established national identities, while others perceive the emergence of a distant but powerful Brussels, beyond the reach of democratic control. Legitimacy and the European Union breaks with established approaches to the problem of the legitimacy of the European Union by focusing on the recent trend towards reconceptualization of the EU not as a superstate or an organization of states, but as a multi-level, contested polity without precedent. The book examines the implications of this reconceptualization for the problem of legitimacy. Individual chapters focus on policy areas, institutions and identity politics. Taken together, they reach two main conclusions. While Europeans do not strongly identify with the EU, they increasingly recognize it as a framework for politics alongside existing national and subnational structures. And while the EU lacks central democratic institutions, the integration process has spawned significant informal and pluralist forms of representation. Rethinking recognition and representation ouside the context of the nation state points to important, if little understood, actual and potential sources of EU legitimacy.

This book provides a critical and updated analysis of the nature of the EU’s strategic partnership diplomacy, and of the partnerships themselves, in times of power shift and contestation. It links with key aspects of the EU’s Global Strategy; it brings together a strong list of experts who work within a clear framework for analysis; and it deals not only with the substance of the policy but also with the ways in which the policy as a whole has emerged, is conducted and might develop in the future. In offering an inclusive set of case studies and diverse perspectives, this book aims to advance both conceptualization and analysis of the implementation of the established EU partnerships. The book highlights the notion of strategic partnership as a foreign policy instrument to support EU external action in a context of multilevel change and crisis; its policy dimension as a gradually separated, but not separable policy within the Union’s external action; the institutional component given the emergence of SPs as a sort of self-preserving institutional platform allowing for denser and deeper cooperation in various policy areas; and the implications for the EU’s self-conception as an international actor with a global identity and role.

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.