Today’s Europe is marked by an amazing pace of integration. The European Union now consists of twenty five member states, however there is confusion and disagreement about its future design. Making The European Polity investigates how the European Union should develop and organize itself and offers a reflexive approach to integration based on the theory of communicative action. It conceives of the EU as a law based supranational polity lacking the identity of a people as well as the coercive means of a state and argues that it is a polity with an organized capacity to act, but no sole apex of authority. Making an important contribution to the theoretical discussions on the EU, these contributors explore a range of issues including legitimacy, post-national democracy and integration and provide in-depth analyses of social and tax policy, foreign policy, identity formation, the reform process and the constitutional effects of enlargement. This book will appeal to all political scientists and particularly to students and researchers of European Politics.

This book is the first comprehensive study of how and why the European Union has enlarged to become northern Europe’s leading power. Pami Aalto presents a new approach to the under-theorized field of EU foreign policy studies, showing how, since 1990, the EU has enlarged to include Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and also incorporated the former East Germany. He also examines how this northern expansion has led the EU to reflect on relations with Russia and its north-western regions. This unique study includes: a fresh approach to the under-theorized field of EU foreign policy key empirical material, including hundreds of documents, interviews and field experiments in-depth case studies of relations between the EU, Nordic states, Baltic states and Russia with its north-western regions. This is essential reading for all students of European politics, Russian studies and international relations.

Foundations of European Politics: A Comparative Approach offers an accessible introduction to European politics using a coherent comparative and analytical framework. It presents students with the basic theoretical and empirical toolkit of social scientific researchers, and explains how ananalytic approach can be used to understand both domestic and EU-level policy-making in Europe.The book draws on cutting edge research from all areas of European politics - from national and EU institutions, to political behaviour and policy-making - and uses case studies and examples throughout to help students compare different electoral systems, parties and governments across Europe.The book is structured thematically in five parts, beginning with theoretical foundations; moving on to examine citizens and voters, elections and parties, governments and policy; and finally covering the rule of law, democracy and backsliding.Digital formats and resourcesFoundations of European Politics: A Comparative Approach is available for students and institutions to purchase in a variety of formats, and is supported by online resources.DT The e-book offers a mobile experience and convenient access along with functionality tools, navigation features and links that offer extra learning support: www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/ebooks http://www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/ebooksDT Online resources for students include: multiple choice questions, web links, essay questions, and data descriptions and data exercises.DT Online resources for lecturers include: adaptable PowerPoint slides, test bank questions, figures and tables from the book.

Over the last twenty years, processes of pluralization, differentiation and trans-nationalization in the European Union have arguably challenged the centrality of law to European integration. Yet these developments also present opportunities to investigate new understandings of law triggered by European integration. The contributors to this book revisit one of the first academic projects to conceptualise and study European legal integration - the early 'Integration through Law' School. On this basis, they consider continuities and discontinuities in the underlying social and political landscape which the law is to integrate (the 'object' of integration), the forms and capacities of the law itself (the 'agent' of integration), and the way these two dimensions reflect on each other. Displaying different normative concerns and varied theoretical starting points, all contributors maintain that 'integration through law' remains of enduring significance to the European integration process. The volume provides a valuable reference for scholars in the field of European integration studies and European legal and political theory.

Contributors to this volume outline how societal actors have been closely involved in European integration from the founding of the EU to the Maastricht Treaty. Based on newly accessible sources, the authors discuss the participation of political parties, business groups and civil society organizations in European polity-building and policy-making.

How do political authorities build support for themselves and their rule? Doing so is key to accruing power, but it can be a complicated affair. The European Union, as a novel political entity, faces a particularly difficult set of challenges. The Politics of Everyday Europe argues that the legitimation of EU authority rests in part on a transformation in the symbols and practices of everyday life in Europe. The Single Market and the Euro, the legal category of European Citizen and policies promoting the free movement of people, EU public architecture, arts and popular entertainment, and EU diplomacy and foreign policy all generate symbols and practices that change peoples' day-to-day experiences naturalizing European governance.The modern nation-state has long used similar strategies of nationalism and 'imagined communities' to legitimize its political power. But the EU's cultural infrastructure is unique, as it navigates European national identities with a particularly banality, trying to make the EU seem complementary to, not in competition with, the nation-states. While this cultural legitimation has successfully underpinned the EU's surprising political development, Europe today is more often met with indifference by its citizens rather than affection. As economic and political crises have stretched European social solidarity to the breaking point, this book offers a clear theoretical framework for understanding how everyday culture matters fundamentally in the political life of the EU, and how the construction of meaning can be a potent power resource-albeit one open to contestation and subversion by the very citizens it calls into being.