The volume presents seven contributions which analyse two different progressive complex developments of European law: the legal challenges of adherence to the internal market without membership in the European Union in a comparative view of Norway (EEA) and Switzerland ("Bilateral Agreements"), and the legal answers to the financial and/or budgetary crisis and challenges in Europe. The common denominator of both subjects is the raising complexity of European law.--

The contributors to this book are all members of EuropEos, a multidisciplinary group of jurists, economists, political scientists, and journalists in an ongoing forum discussing European institutional issues. The essays analyze emerging shifts in common policies, institutional settings, and legitimization, sketching out possible scenarios for the European Union of the 21st century. They are grouped into three sections, devoted to economics and consensus, international projection of the Union, and the institutional framework. Even after the major organizational reforms introduced to the EU by the new Treaty of Lisbon, which came into force in December 2009, Europe appears to remain an entity in flux, in search of its ultimate destiny. In line with the very essence of EuropEos, the views collected in this volume are sometimes at odds in their specific conclusions, but they stem from a common commitment to the European construction.

Based on their work in the application of principal-agent theory to questions of regulation, Laffont and Tirole develop a synthetic approach to this field, focusing on the regulation of natural monopolies such as military contractors, utility companies and transportation authorities.

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.

The EU is a supranational organization, whose reach and influence extends well beyond its member states, especially to the many states that have signed various forms of association agreement with it. This book asks whether qualifying states who have eschewed EU membership experience negative effects on their legal and political self-governing abilities, or whether they manage their independence with few such effects. It explores the idea that the closer the affiliation a non-member state has with the EU, the more susceptible to hegemony the relationship appears to be. In addition, the book provides an overview of the total range of agreements the EU has with non-member states. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of in EU/European studies, Scandinavian studies, European and comparative politics, international relations, and democratization studies.

The OECD’s New Approaches to Economic Challenges initiative invited experts from inside and outside the Organisation to discuss complexity theory as a means to better understand the interconnected nature of the trends and influences shaping our socio-economic environment. Their contributions, brought together here, examine the assumptions, strengths and shortcomings of traditional models, and propose a way to build new ones that would take into account factors such as psychology, history and culture neglected by these models. The authors concentrate on the discipline of economics as such; the financial system; and applications of complexity theory to policy making and governance. They argue that a new narrative is needed to integrate the hopes, values, attitudes and behaviours of people into economics along with the facts and data economists are more used to dealing with.

This book provides fresh perspectives in the legal study of the Court of Justice of the European Union. In the context of European studies, the Court has mainly been analysed in light of its central role in the process of continental integration. Moreover, the Court has traditionally been studied by specialists for its important role as an agent of comparative law. This book studies the evolution of the Court itself, rather than that of the EU legal order in its judge-made dimension, and addresses several institutional aspects of its structure and organization, selected and constructed as a complete range of symptomatic figures of judicial institutionalisation. In doing so, the author seeks to showcase how the development and the institutional evolution of the CJEU happened through a selective internalization of comparative influences.