Can we sidestep tedious climate policy negotiations and forge a coalition of the willing instead? Many international organizations and scholars hope to spur local climate action by orchestration, indirect and voluntary governance arrangements. Lena Bendlin looks beyond the apparent success of voluntary initiatives using the example of the Covenant of Mayors, often heralded as an exemplary multi-level EU initiative. Five in-depth case studies show why, how, and with what difficulties local governments engage in this voluntary commitment scheme. The analysis identifies durability, intensity, and causality as crucial building blocks for more cautious orchestration theorizing and derives recommendations for appropriate incentives and support at the regional, national, and international level.

Studie over de complexiteit van de Europese eenwording en de informele machtscircuits gebaseerd op ruim 400 interviews en het archief van de Confederation of British industry

Learning China's history lessons -- Orchestrating China's economic statecraft -- Never let a crisis go to waste : Beijing's economic statecraft across Western Europe -- Creating a region : China's economic statecraft in Central and Eastern Europe -- Engaging North Korea -- Crossing lines : China's economic statecraft in Myanmar.

The Chinese government has more control over more wealth than any other government in world history. With the Communist Party controlling the "commanding heights" of the world's second-largest economy, China appears ideally structured to pursue economic statecraft, using economic resources to advance its foreign policy goals. Yet as this book shows, domestic complications frequently constrain Chinese leaders. They have responded with a distinctive approach to economic statecraft: orchestration. Drawing upon extensive field research across Asia and Europe, Orchestration traces the origins, operations, and effectiveness of China's economic statecraft. In this book, James Reilly examines the ideas and institutions at the heart of China's approach to economic statecraft, and assesses Beijing's orchestration in four cases: Myanmar, North Korea, Western Europe, and Central/Eastern Europe. China's unique experience as a planned economy, and then a developmental state, all under a single Leninist party, left Chinese leaders with unchallenged authority over their economy. However, despite successfully mobilizing companies, banks, and local officials to rapidly expand trade and investment abroad, Chinese leaders largely failed to influence key policy decisions overseas. For countries around the world, economic engagement with China thus yields more benefits with fewer costs than generally assumed. Orchestration engages three central questions. First, why does China deploy economic statecraft in this particular fashion? Secondly, when is China's economic statecraft most effective? Finally, what can the China case tell us about economic statecraft more broadly? The findings show how China uses economic resources to exert influence abroad and identify when Beijing is most effective. By exploring the domestic drivers of China's economic statecraft, this book helps launch a new research field: the comparative study of economic statecraft.

This book examines the European Left's attempt to think and give shape to an alternative type of European integration-a 'social Europe'-during the long 1970s. Based on fresh archival material, it shows that the western European Left-in particular social democratic parties, trade unions, and to a lesser extent 'Eurocommunist' parties-formulated a project to turn 'capitalist Europe' into a 'workers' Europe'. This project favoured coordinated measures for wealth redistribution, market regulation, a democratisation of the economy and of European institutions, upward harmonisation of social and fiscal systems, more inclusive welfare regimes, guaranteed employment, economic and social planning with greater consideration for the environment, increased public spending to meet collective needs, greater control of capital flows and multinational corporations, a reduction in working time, and a fairer international economic order favouring the global south. During the pivotal years following 1968, deeply marked by labour militancy, new social movements, economic crisis, and the unmaking of the 'postwar compromise', a window of opportunity opened in which European integration could have taken different roads. The defeat of 'social Europe' was a result of a decade-long social conflict which ended with the affirmation of a neoliberal Europe. Investigating this forgotten struggle and the reasons of its defeat can be useful not just to scholars and students eager to understand the historical evolution of European integration, the European Left, and European capitalism, but also to anyone interested in building alternative European and global futures.

The European Commission is at the center of the European Union's political system. Within its five-year terms each Commission proposes up to 2000 binding legal acts and therefore crucially shapes EU policy, which in turn impacts on the daily lives of more than 500 million European citizens. However, despite the Commissions key role in setting the agenda for European decision making, little is known about its internal dynamics when preparing legislation. This book provides a problem-driven, theoretically-founded, and empirically rich treatment of the so far still understudied process of position-formation inside the European Commission. It reveals that various internal political positions prevail and that the role of power and conflict inside the European Commission is essential to understanding its policy proposals. Opening the 'black box' of the Commission, the book identifies three ideal types of internal position-formation. The Commission is motivated by technocratic problem-solving, by competence-seeking utility maximization or ideologically-motivated policyseeking. Specifying conditions that favor one logic over the others, the typology furthers understanding of how the EU system functions and provides novel explanations of EU policies with substantial societal implications.

The quasi-federal European Union stands out as the major exception in the thinly institutionalized world of international politics. Something has led Europeans—and only Europeans—beyond the nation-state to a fundamentally new political architecture. Craig Parsons argues in A Certain Idea of Europe that this "something" was a particular set of ideas generated in Western Europe after the Second World War. In Parsons's view, today's European Union reflects the ideological (and perhaps visionary) project of an elite minority. His book traces the progressive victory of this project in France, where the battle over European institutions erupted most divisively. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews with French policymakers, the author carefully traces a fifty-year conflict between radically different European plans. Only through aggressive leadership did the advocates of a supranational "community" Europe succeed at building the EU and binding their opponents within it. Parsons puts the causal impact of ideas, and their binding effects through institutions, at the center of his book. In so doing he presents a strong logic of "social construction"—a sharp departure from other accounts of EU history that downplay the role of ideas and ideology.