Drawing from recent streams of scholarship, Democratizing Europe provides a renewed portrait of EU government that point at the enduring leading role of independent powers (the European Court, Commission and Central Bank). Vauchez suggests that we recognize this centrality and adjust our democratization strategies accordingly.

The hidden federal features of the European Union help explain the challenges of legitimacy, democracy and freedom that face an unfinished political community. Ideas about federalism and the reality of existing federal states cannot be sharply divided in an analysis of the EU’s multilevel political order, but so far, both scholars and major decision makers have shown interest only in the normal functioning of federal systems: ignoring the dilemma of the federation’s legitimate authority has resulted in an existential crisis for the EU which has become ever more manifest over recent years. This book employs a combination of political philosophy and political science, of federal philosophic ideas and their traces in real federal institutions, in order to achieve the task of understanding the federal features of the EU governance system. The first part of the work focuses on building an appropriate theoretical framework to explain the new meanings attached to familiar notions of democracy, legitimacy and citizenship in the context of a political community like the EU. In the second part the federal features of the EU’s political system are examined in comparison to other current and historical federal perspectives like the US, Switzerland, Yugoslavia and Germany. Through an analysis of the hidden federal aspects of the EU and the links between hidden federalism and the EU’s legitimacy crisis, this book reveals the patterns that should be avoided and gives us guidelines that should be followed if the EU is to become democratic and politically united without jeopardising the state character of its members.

In today's increasingly globalized environment, many economic fundamentals need to be reconsidered in order to regain stability in the global marketplace. One such consideration is the failing dynamics of the international tax infrastructure. Neoliberalism 2.0 brings a 21st century assessment of the Pigovian taxes, considering a completely new calibration of the international tax systems, inspired by the historically developed Pigovian tax model. The book considers the impact neoliberalism had and will have on regulatory infrastructure, democracy in an era of globalization and reduced legitimation of the national state. The Pigovian model brings home the often forgotten relationship between taxation (as a part of the regulatory sphere), macro-economics, and the political-philosophical context in which law and economics emerge. The model also takes into account the phenomena of globalization and financialization and is tested using the financial sector as an example. This book addresses the many challenges a Pigovian shift would imply for the sovereign and its national economies. Neoliberalism 2.0 demonstrates the ability to design a paradigm-changing alternative to the current tax infrastructure, while taking into account a low economic growth environment of the future, the implications of globalization and the changing relationship between citizens and their state.

This book presents a state-of-the art collection of original contributions on democracy, addressing three related themes: the complexity of modern democracies and their structural diversity; coping strategies of democracies in times of crises; and current and potential trajectories and transformations of democracy. The first part of the book maps the democratic landscape by revealing the diversity of democratic political systems, through either comparative analysis or case studies on the specific nature of political and administrative systems in interest intermediation and identity construction. The second part presents articles that investigate the response of democracies to times of crisis, with an emphasis on political economies and policy processes within the European Union. The third part offers studies on democracies that explore their adaptive potential in the context of globalization and in that of broader technical, institutional or cultural changes.

This book offers a critical assessment of the history of the euro, its crisis, and the rescue measures taken by the European Central Bank and the community of states. The euro induced huge capital flows from the northern to the southern countries of the Eurozone that triggered an inflationary credit bubble in the latter, deprived them of their competitiveness, and made them vulnerable to the financial crisis that spilled over from the US in 2007 and 2008. As private capital shied away from the southern countries, the ECB helped out by providing credit from the local money-printing presses. The ECB became heavily exposed to investment risks in the process, and subsequently had to be bailed out by intergovernmental rescue operations that provided replacement credit for the ECB credit, which itself had replaced the dwindling private credit. The interventions stretched the legal structures stipulated by the Maastricht Treaty which, in the absence of a European federal state, had granted the ECB a very limited mandate. These interventions created a path dependency that effectively made parliaments vicarious agents of the ECB's Governing Council. This book describes what the author considers to be a dangerous political process that undermines both the market economy and democracy, without solving southern Europe's competitiveness problem. It argues that the Eurozone has to rethink its rules of conduct by limiting the role of the ECB, exiting the regime of soft budget constraints and writing off public and bank debt to help the crisis countries breathe again. At the same time, the Eurosystem should become more flexible by offering its members the option of exiting and re-entering the euro - something between the dollar and the Bretton Woods system - until it eventually turns into a federation with a strong political power centre and a uniform currency like the dollar.

Contributions from prominent economists, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists go beyond short-term technical diagnoses in order to analyse the deeper causes of the European crisis and provide readers with a broad understanding of what goes on in the European Union.

Growth and Welfare in Advanced Capitalist Economies takes stock of the major economic challenges that advanced industrial democracies have faced since the early 1990s and the responses by governments to them. It has three goals: firstly, to further our understanding of how political economies have transformed over the past decades; secondly, to analyse the contribution of governments to these changes, by looking at their growth strategies and thirdly, to highlight and analyse the role of the reforms of welfare systems in this transformative change. In a nutshell, this book maps and provides general understanding of the evolution of growth regimes in advanced capitalist countries. It identifies five main growth regimes in contemporary advanced capitalist economies (three export-led and two domestic demand-led ones). To do so the book combines a supply side approach to economic growth as advocated by the Varieties of Capitalism Literature (OUP, 2001) with a demand side perspective as the recent discussion on growth models has exemplified. It argues that all political economies consist of growth regimes, which are based on a set of institutions that shape the supply side of the economy as well as on demand drivers such as government spending and private consumption. Both supply and demand are heavily shaped by the welfare state which provides for skills through education systems and stimulates demand through high social spending and private pension funds. The book focuses on the analysis of welfare reforms as growth strategies pursued by governments in an era characterised by financialization and the rise of the knowledge economy.