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.

A fresh alternative to traditional state-centred analyses of the process of European integration is presented in this book. World-renowned scholars analyze the state in terms of its component parts and clearly show the interaction of subnational, national and supranational actors in the emerging European polity. This `multi-level politics′ approach offers a powerful lens through which to view the future course of European integration. The contributors′ empirical exploration of areas such as regional governance, social policy and social movements underpins their broad conceptual and theoretical framework providing significant new insight into European politics.

The European Union is the world’s most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to supranational actors such as the European Commission. This legalistic view, Mareike Kleine contends, is misleading. More often than not, governments and bureaucrats informally depart from the formal rules and thereby contradict their very purpose. Behind the EU’s front of formal rules lies a thick network of informal governance practices. If not the EU’s rules, what accounts for the high level of economic integration among its members? How does the EU really work? In answering these questions, Kleine proposes a new way of thinking about international organizations. Informal governance affords governments the flexibility to resolve conflicts that adherence to EU rules may generate at the domestic level. By dispersing the costs that integration may impose on individual groups, it allows governments to keep domestic interests aligned in favor of European integration. The combination of formal rules and informal governance therefore sustains a level of cooperation that neither regime alone permits, and it reduces the EU’s democratic deficit by including those interests into deliberations that are most immediately affected by its decisions. In illustrating informal norms and testing how they work, Kleine provides the first systematic analysis, based on new material from national and European archives and other primary data, of the parallel development of the formal rules and informal norms that have governed the EU from the 1958 Treaty of Rome until today.

This book approaches the notion of good governance from three different angles. First it establishes whether it is a meaningful notion at all by taking a closer look at the parameters of good governance. Secondly, the authors look at the institutional translation of the criteria of good governance. In a third dimension, the concept may be analysed in relation to a number of substantive issues.

The European Union and Global Governance: A Handbook aims to analyse contemporary debates in European Studies in order to provide lessons for the development, design and normative evaluation of global governance. It brings together scholars of European studies and international relations, where much of the literature on regional and global governance is located, thereby providing interdisciplinary lessons from the study of European Union and its governance that can be used to re-evaluate processes of global governance. Each chapter examines methodological, theoretical or empirical discussions within European studies in order to draw insights for current developments in global governance.

This book brings together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of European and American scholars to analyze the core theoretical features of the EU's new experimentalist governance architecture and explore its empirical development across a series of key policy domains.

Over the past five decades, the European Union (EU) has developed into the most legally and politically authoritative regional organization in the world, wielding significant influence across a wide range of issue areas. European Union and Environmental Governance focuses on the growing global role of EU environmental and sustainable development policies. Written in a concise and accessible manner, this book introduces and examines the major European and global environmental issues, debates, and policies and provides a critical, evidence-based evaluation of the achievements and shortcomings to date in EU environmental and sustainability governance. Providing both an historical overview and a discussion of the major future legal, political and economic challenges to the realization of EU goals related to better environmental governance, the authors offer a comprehensive introduction to this key issue. This book will be useful reading for students of global environmental politics, comparative environmental politics and policy, international organizations, European politics, and environmental studies.