Download or read book How to Democratize the European Union and why Bother written by Philippe C. Schmitter and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contradictory creation indeed, the European Union has most of the institutions of a modern democracy, yet it does not function as one. Moreover, its growing scope of activity and supranational decision making processes are undermining the legitimacy of democracy in its member states. Much has been written about this double "democratic deficit," but surprisingly little thought has been given to what to do about it--short of drafting and ratifying a new federal constitution. In this provocative book, Philippe C. Schmitter explores both the possibility and the desirability of democratizing the EU. He argues that as a "non-state" and a "non nation" it will have to invent new forms of citizenship, representation, and decisionmaking if it is ever to democratize itself. The author also contends that the timing and political context work against a full-scale constitutionalization of the process. He proposes a number of modest (and some less modest) reforms that could improve the situation in the near future and eventually lead to a genuine Euro-democracy.
Download or read book Democratizing the European Union written by Catherine Hoskyns and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The European Union's "democratic deficit" and ways that might be found to resolve it are hot issues in both academic debate and practical politics. Democratizing the European Union offers a fresh approach to this subject by bringing together a diverse range of authors who have been actively involved either in analyzing the activities of the European Union or participating in them.The contributors go beyond a primarily institutional approach by highlighting issues having to do with values, participation, and exclusion. Collectively this volume also transcends the limitations of abstract theory. Embracing a range of perspectives, and including discussions of major contemporary challenges, such as enlargement and economic and monetary union, this book contains a detailed analysis of the response of New Labour to the democratization debate. The contributions include: Sue Cohen, "Social Solidarity in the Delors Period"; Sverker Gustavsson, "Reconciling Suprastatism and Accountability: A View from Sweden"; Stefano Fella, "A Europe of the Peoples? New Labour and Democratizing the EU"; John Lambert and Catherine Hoskyns, "How Democratic is the European Parliament?"; Valerio Lintner, "Controlling Monetary Union"; Mary Kaldor, "Eastern Enlargement and Democracy"; Richard Kuper, "Democratization: A Constitutionalizing Process"; and Catherine Hoskyns, "Democratizing the EU: Evidence and Argument."Democratizing the European Union is essential reading for all those with an interest in the EU and broader questions of democracy. It is also particularly useful for students of European Studies and practitioners involved in EU policymaking and lobbying.
Download or read book How to Democratize Europe written by Stéphanie Hennette and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An all-star cast of scholars and politicians from Europe and America propose and debate the creation of a new European parliament with substantial budgetary and legislative power to solve the crisis of governance in the Eurozone and promote social and fiscal justice and public investment. The European Union is struggling. The rise of Euroskeptic parties in member states, economic distress in the south, the migrant crisis, and Brexit top the news. But deeper structural problems may be a greater long-term peril. Not least is the economic management of the Eurozone, the nineteen countries that use the Euro. How can this be accomplished in a way generally acceptable to members, given a political system whose structures are routinely decried for a lack of democratic accountability? How can the EU promote fiscal and social justice while initiating the long-term public investments that Europe needs to overcome stagnation? These are the problems a distinguished group of European and American scholars set out to solve in this short but valuable book. Among many longstanding grievances is the charge that Eurozone policies serve large and wealthy countries at the expense of poorer nations. It is also unclear who decides economic policy, how the interests of diverse member states are balanced, and to whom the decision-makers are accountable. The four lead authors—Stéphanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacriste, and Antoine Vauchez—describe these and other problems, and respond with a draft treaty establishing a parliament for economic policy, its members drawn from national parliaments. We then hear from invited critics, who express support, objections, or alternative ideas. How to Democratize Europe offers a chance to observe how major thinkers view some of the Continent’s most pressing issues and attempt to connect democratic reform with concrete changes in economic and social policies.
Download or read book Democratic Empowerment in the European Union written by David Levi-Faur and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at democratic empowerment via institutional designs that extend the political rights of European citizens. It focuses on three themes: first, the positive and negative effects of the European Union institutional design on the political rights of its citizens; second, challenges for democratic regimes across the world in the 21st century in the context of regionalism and globalization; third, the constraints of neoliberalism and capitalist markets on the ability of citizens to effectively achieve their political rights within the Union.
Download or read book Democracy in the European Union written by Alex Warleigh and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2003-04-21 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book comprehensively reviews one of the most salient, ongoing debates at the heart of the European Union (EU) today: democratic reform.
Download or read book Democratisation against Democracy written by Andrea Teti and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains why the EU is not a ‘normative actor’ in the Southern Mediterranean, and how and why EU democracy promotion fails. Drawing on a combination of discourse analysis of EU policy documents and evidence from opinion polls showing ‘what the people want’, the book shows EU policy fails because the EU promotes a conception of democracy which people do not share. Likewise, the EU’s strategies for economic development are misconceived because they do not reflect the people’s preferences for greater social justice and reducing inequalities. This double failure highlights a paradox of EU democracy promotion: while nominally emancipatory, it de facto undermines the very transitions to democracy and inclusive development it aims to pursue.
Download or read book Democracy and the European Union written by Andreas Follesdal and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The European Union is a new subject for theories of legitimacy, posing fundamental questions to the established concepts and principles of democratic theory. General compliance and popular acceptance and respect for European law is at stake. The volume addresses the main challenges of the European Union to democratic theory. The legitimacy of such transnational institutions born by political integration has so far received some but scant attention. The mere existence of the Union proves that the sovereign state cannot remain the sole focus of normative reflection. Indeed, the very conception of sovereignty is at stake. The present volume combines political science and normative political theory to offer concepts, arguments and criteria that further these debates, addressing problems of principle.
Download or read book The European Union and Democratization written by Paul Kubicek and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The European Union has been a key actor in promoting democratisation and providing assistance to encourage political change. This book assesses the EU's contribution to democratisation by looking at the failures and states that offered resistance to EU pressure to reform, aiming to understand how the EU overcame or failed to overcome the numerous barriers blocking democratic progress. The book features studies on Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Turkey, Ukraine, Morocco and Latvia.
Download or read book The Democratisation of the European Union written by Jaap Hoeksma and published by . This book was released on 2023-01-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The democratisation of the EU is a fascinating process with an unforeseen outcome: the European Union is emerging as a new kind of international organisation with an equally innovative model of governance. Seventy years after the start of European integration, this book reveals that the determination to lay the foundations for an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe has not led to the creation of a federal state or a confederal association of states. Instead, the EU has evolved over the decades from a union of democratic states to a European democracy. At present, the EU can be characterised as a 'democratic union of democratic states', while it may be regarded from the global perspective as a 'democratic regional organisation'. The outcome of the EU's drive towards ever closer union is as consequential for the study of public law and the humanities as the replacement of the Ptolemaic world vision with the heliocentric view of Copernicus and Galilei has been for science. For the first time since the start of the Early Modern Era, states have broken the vicious circle of war by pooling sovereignty. While the European states learned the hard way in the 20th century that their continent had become too small for absolute sovereignty, the superpowers of the 21st century should perceive the global dangers of climate change, pandemics and nuclear proliferation as warning signals that the world has become too small for unrestrained exercise of absolute sovereignty too.
Download or read book Old foundations and New rules for an Enlarged European Union written by Philippe C. Schmitter and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Participatory Governance written by Jürgen Grote and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Während der Governance-Begriff wissenschaftlich als konsolidiert gelten dürfte, gibt es Probleme bei der praktischen Umsetzung der mit ihm verbundenen Idee. Das englischsprachige Buch misst einige der im "Whitebook on Governance" der EU-Kommission angesprochenen Problemfelder aus und trägt so zur Operationalisierung des Begriffes bei.
Download or read book The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy written by Robert Hazell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How much power does a monarch really have? How much autonomy do they enjoy? Who regulates the size of the royal family, their finances, the rules of succession? These are some of the questions considered in this edited collection on the monarchies of Europe. The book is written by experts from Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK. It considers the constitutional and political role of monarchy, its powers and functions, how it is defined and regulated, the laws of succession and royal finances, relations with the media, the popularity of the monarchy and why it endures. No new political theory on this topic has been developed since Bagehot wrote about the monarchy in The English Constitution (1867). The same is true of the other European monarchies. 150 years on, with their formal powers greatly reduced, how has this ancient, hereditary institution managed to survive and what is a modern monarch's role? What theory can be derived about the role of monarchy in advanced democracies, and what lessons can the different European monarchies learn from each other? The public look to the monarchy to represent continuity, stability and tradition, but also want it to be modern, to reflect modern values and be a focus for national identity. The whole institution is shot through with contradictions, myths and misunderstandings. This book should lead to a more realistic debate about our expectations of the monarchy, its role and its future. The contributors are leading experts from all over Europe: Rudy Andeweg, Ian Bradley, Paul Bovend'Eert, Axel Calissendorff, Frank Cranmer, Robert Hazell, Olivia Hepsworth, Luc Heuschling, Helle Krunke, Bob Morris, Roger Mortimore, Lennart Nilsson, Philip Murphy, Quentin Pironnet, Bart van Poelgeest, Frank Prochaska, Charles Powell, Jean Seaton, Eivind Smith.
Download or read book Veto Power written by Jonathan Slapin and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a terrific book. The questions that Slapin asks about intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) in the European Union are extraordinarily important and ambitious, with implications for the EU and for international cooperation more generally. Furthermore, Slapin's theorizing of his core questions is rigorous, lucid, and accessible to scholarly readers without extensive formal modeling background . . . This book is a solid, serious contribution to the literature on EU studies." ---Mark Pollack, Temple University "An excellent example of the growing literature that brings modern political science to bear on the politics of the European Union." ---Michael Laver, New York University Veto rights can be a meaningful source of power only when leaving an organization is extremely unlikely. For example, small European states have periodically wielded their veto privileges to override the preferences of their larger, more economically and militarily powerful neighbors when negotiating European Union treaties, which require the unanimous consent of all EU members. Jonathan B. Slapin traces the historical development of the veto privilege in the EU and how a veto---or veto threat---has been employed in treaty negotiations of the past two decades. As he explains, the importance of veto power in treaty negotiations is one of the features that distinguishes the EU from other international organizations in which exit and expulsion threats play a greater role. At the same time, the prominence of veto power means that bargaining in the EU looks more like bargaining in a federal system. Slapin's findings have significant ramifications for the study of international negotiations, the design of international organizations, and European integration.
Download or read book The Unfinished Democratization of Europe written by Erik O. Eriksen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widening and deepening of the European Union have brought to the fore the question of democracy at the European level. The system of domination already in place at the European level requires and aspires to direct legitimation - from the citizens themselves and not merely indirect, derived from the Member Nation States. Such can only be achieved by making the EU into a democratic polity. But can democracy be disassociated from its putative nation-state foundation? A revised concept of democratic legitimacy based on discourse theory is developed. It is argued that post-national democracy requires a constitution but not necessarily a state. The Union amounts to less than a state but more than an international organisation and a system of transnational governance. In the political theory of the multilevel constellation that makes up the EU, it is conceived of as a regional subset of an emerging cosmopolitan order. The EU is a state-less government. As it is not premised on group identity, it is able to accommodate a high measure of variance with regard to territory and function. The book analyzes the reforms undertaken to bring the EU 'closer to the citizens'. It documents elements of democratization and reduction of arbitrary power. However, democracy requires that the citizens can approve or reject the laws they are subjected to. Since the institutional as well as the civic conditions under which a public justification process would be deemed legitimate are not in place, European post-national democracy remains an unaccomplished mission.
Download or read book How Democracies Die written by Steven Levitsky and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved. Praise for How Democracies Die “What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.”—The Washington Post “Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein, Vox “If you only read one book for the rest of the year, read How Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.”—Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter) “A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.”—Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Download or read book European Union Politics written by Michelle Cini and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its established authority and reputation, the new edition is an invaluable resource. Michelle Cini has brought together a team of international contributors, each specialising in a different field of EU politics. The book is divided into five parts and deals with the history of the European integration process, theories of European integration, the European institutions, a selectnumber of European policy areas, and issues of relevance to the study of EU politics. The second edition has been updated throughout to reflect recent developments, and there are four new chapters on the constitutional treaty, CFSP and ESDP, the single market, and public opinion. This books is supported by a cutting-edge Online Resource Centre. Student resources: Interactive timeline (BRAND NEW HE ONLINE RESOURCE) Interactive map of Europe with facts, key dates and web links for all the EU countries (BRAND NEW HE ONLINE RESOURCE) Maps Case studiesWeb links Information on key articles and books Flashcard glossary Multiple Choice Questions Lecturer resources: PowerPoint slides
Download or read book A Companion to European Union Law and International Law written by Dennis Patterson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring contributions from renowned scholars, A Companion to European Union Law and International Law presents a comprehensive and authoritative collection of essays that addresses all of the most important topics on European Union and international law. Integrates the fields of European Union law and international law, revealing both the similarities and differences Features contributions from renowned scholars in the fields of EU law and international law Covers a broad range of topical issues, including trade, institutional decision-making, the European Court of Justice, democracy, human rights, criminal law, the EMU, and many others
