European Union

This book brings together recent studies on marginalisation in the labour market with studies on policy initiatives aimed at reducing the risks of marginalisation. Labour market marginalisation centres on the processes that lead to people finding difficulty entering or re-entering employment. The chapters draw upon several large-scale, multi-country research projects funded by the European Union under the Fourth and Fifth Framework Programmes. The projects involved multidisciplinary research teams — mainly economists, jurists, social psychologists, and sociologists — which allowed similar issues to be viewed from different perspectives, thus contributing a wealth of knowledge.

This study focuses on the historical configuration of territorial borders and functional boundaries of the European nation states, and interprets integration as a process of transcendence, redefinition, and shift of those same boundaries that alters the nature of the nation states’ domestic political structures. The core of the argument concerns the relationship between the institutional design of the new Brussels centre, the boundary redefinitions that result from its political production, and the consequences of both these processes on the established national and emerging European political structures. The EU is interpreted through three key conceptual tools: ‘centre formation’, ‘system building’, and ‘political structuring’. The ‘centre formation’ — with limited administrative and fiscal capabilities and strong regulatory and judicial capabilities — is not accompanied by ‘system building’ in the field of cultural integration, social sharing institutions, and participation rights, that is, by institutions forcing its components to stay within it beyond the mere instrumental calculations. Given that for any new centre a balance must exist between its system building capacity and the scope and reach of its political production, the argument is that the ambitious political production of the EU is clearly out of balance with its weak system building capacity. As far as the ‘political structuring’ is concerned, this work argues that the institutional design of the Union and its weak system building militate to date against any stable form of political structuring for its representative actors, while its growing political production tends to undermine national mechanisms of political representation and legitimation. Under these conditions, any institutional democratization without political structuring may turn into facade electioneering, at best, or dangerous experiments, at worst. In the view of classical sociology — that takes the existence of a certain overlap between social identities, political boundaries, and social practices as a precondition for establishing political agency and a ‘rational’ political order — the EU is both a source of problems but also a possible solution to them. It can be seen as a project for regaining some degree of coherence between extended social practices, social identities, solidarity ties, and rules of deliberation at the European level. Most of the ideas expressed in this book show how problematic this project is believed to be.

Structuralist explanations have dominated attempts to explain the process of European integration. However, as the negotiation of Economic and Monetary Union shows, policy leadership has been critical in launching, shaping, and sustaining this process. This leadership goes beyond policy entrepreneurship in setting the agenda to include the management of institutional venues in the pursuit of particular objectives.

The Franco–German relationship emerges as a key venue that defines the scope and limitations of policy leadership and that was crucial in binding in the Bundesbank and EU central bankers to the process. At the domestic level, the political drive from Kohl and Mitterrand was decisive. Delors was a key driving force, at certain stages, both within the European Commission and as chair of the Delors Committee. Together, they acted as animateurs and ingénieurs of Economic and Monetary Union. The strategic aspect of leadership in the cases of Britain and Italy was altogether different. The Thatcher and Major governments repeatedly misjudged the commitment of their partners to proceed, and the inflexibility of their positions prevented them from building countervailing coalitions. For Italy, EMU was a test of external credibility: domestic weakness limited her overall influence on the progress of the initiative, whilst EMU was seized upon by a small leadership group as a new vincolo esterno (external constraint) to secure otherwise difficult domestic reforms. This latter strategy was replicated more widely as member states endeavored to meet the entry criteria for participation in the single currency.

The outcome of the Maastricht Treaty was an imperfect agreement that generates serious future challenges for policy leadership. These challenges include cognitive gaps in EMU, institutional innovation, and imperfect legitimation.

France and Germany have played a pivotal role in the history and politics of European integration. However, a study that systematically investigates the interrelated reality of Franco-German bilateralism and multilateral European integration has been conspicuously lacking. Formulating an approach we call “embedded bilateralism,” this book scrutinizes in empirical and historical detail the bilateral Franco-German order and France and Germany’s joint role in shaping Europe over the past half century. It addresses two key questions regarding France and Germany in Europe from the Elysée Treaty to the twenty-first century: Why have France and Germany continued to hang together in an especially tight relationship for over five decades amidst frequently dramatic domestic change, lasting differences, and fundamental international transformation? And why has the joint Franco-German impact on shaping Europe’s polity and policies, while fundamental, proved so uneven across political domains and time? Shaping Europe argues that the actions and practices of the Franco-German order—its regularized bilateral intergovernmentalism, symbolic acts and practices, and parapublic underpinnings—have rendered this bilateral connection historically resilient and politically adaptable. The book holds that different combinations of a limited number of factors located at the bilateral, domestic, regional European, and international levels explain central aspects of variation. These factors condition and modulate France and Germany’s joint impact on Europe. In pursuing its research questions, theoretical work, historical reconstructions, and empirical analyses, Shaping Europe fruitfully combines the study of European integration, EU politics and policy making, Franco-German affairs, and French and German politics with general theorizing and conceptual grounding in international relations and political science.

The study of social mobility is concerned with the relationship between the class position an individual occupies and the class into which he or she was born. This book analyses social mobility in 11 European countries–Britain, France, Ireland, West Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Hungary, and Israel–over the last 30 years of the twentieth century. We find that, during this period, countries converged in the shape of their class structure and in their patterns of social mobility. But as far as inequalities between people from different class origins in their access to better class positions are concerned, we could see no trends towards international convergence or divergence. We did, however, find a general decline in the strength of these inequalities in several countries, most notably in France and the Netherlands. Britain, however, along with Germany, proved to be an exception: here inequalities seem to have changed little, if at all, during the last years of the twentieth century. We discuss the implications of these findings for policy, for the future study of intergenerational inequality, and for the main theories that have hitherto guided mobility research.

Are social movement organizations euro-skeptical, euro-pragmatic or euro-opportunist? Or do they accept the EU as a new level of governance to place pressure on? Do they provide a critical capital, necessary for the political structuring of the EU, or do they disrupt the process of EU integration? These questions are addressed on the basis different sources and methods, with a comparison among different countries as well as an analysis of the historical evolution of the Europeanization of social movements in the last twenty years. The empirical basis includes surveys of activists at international protest events targeting the European Union (for a total of about 5,000 interviews); a discourse analysis of documents and transcripts of debates on European politics and policies conducted during the four European social forums hold between 2002 and 2006 and involving hundreds of social movement organizations and ten thousands of activists from all European countries; about 320 interviews with representatives of civil society organizations in six EU countries (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy); and one non-EU-member state (Switzerland), as well as at EU level; and a systematic claims analysis of the daily press in selected years between 1990 and 2003. The empirical research allows for the observation of different paths of Europeanizations by social movements and civil society organizations. Moreover, it confirms that issues related to the degree and forms of participation of social movement organizations in European politics (and their support toward Europe) emerge as particularly central in the process of creation, together with a European polity, of a democratic polis.

The result of a four-year long comparative research study centred at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and financed by the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme, this book presents the first full-length theoretical and comparative empirical study of new social pacts in Europe. Its aim is to bring the level of sophistication achieved in an earlier literature on neo-corporatism to the more contemporary phenomenon of ‘social pacting’. The book brings a wide range of complementary theories to bear on the emergence, evolution, and institutionalization of pacts, compares systematically a wide range of cases across Europe, and provides in-depth studies of Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. The book contributes to the scholarly debate on economic adjustment and institutional change in European capitalism by focusing on three inter-related questions: (a) what explains national variation in reliance on social pacts? (b) what determines the outcomes of individual pact negotiations? and (c) under what conditions are pacts repeated and become regular features of socio-economic governance? The book’s theoretical innovations include a novel application of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA) to help explain national differences in social pact adoption, the application of a game theoretic approach to explain social pact emergence, and a reinterpretation of traditional neo-corporatist and new institutionalist theory to help understand social pact consolidation and institutionalization.

This book represents the relaunching of the State of the European Union series sponsored by the European Community Studies Association. It features 19 papers on the ‘four Rs’ that embody the EU experience: risk, reform, resistance and revival. Risk is defined in terms of the stakes attached to the European project. Reform is the attempt to shape and reshape the European project in its pursuit of efficiency, effectiveness, and avoidance of the risk of non-reform. Resistance refers to the forces that oppose reform. Revival refers to the breakthroughs precipitated by shifts in the balance between risk, reform, and resistance.

Since 1945, two major projects have dominated European worldviews: the transatlantic partnership and “integration” in the European Union. Neither is fundamentally at risk today, but both have entered uncharted territory. President Bush has asked bluntly if Europeans are “with us or against us,” and most lean toward the latter. The EU’s original road map for integration culminated in monetary union, and its future agenda is vague. This introduction and the book that follows chart the many trends of change that carried Europe to this crossroads. It aims for accessibility for European and American students, avoiding theoretical jargon and mapping European trends in comparison to American policies and institutions.