Download or read book The European Union A Citizen s Guide written by Chris Bickerton and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essential Pelican introduction to the European Union - its history, its politics, and its role today For most of us today, 'Europe' refers to the European Union. At the centre of a seemingly never-ending crisis, the EU remains a black box, closed to public understanding. Is it a state? An empire? Is Europe ruled by Germany or by European bureaucrats? Does a single European economy exist after all these years of economic integration? And should the EU have been awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2012? Critics tell us the EU undermines democracy. Are they right? In this provocative volume, political scientist Chris Bickerton provides an answer to all these key questions and more at a time when understanding what the EU is and what it does is more important than ever before.

Download or read book Citizens of Nowhere written by Lorenzo Marsili and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe might appear like a continent pulling itself apart. Ten years of economic and political crises have pitted North versus South, East versus West, citizens versus institutions. And yet, these years have also shown a hidden vitality of Europeans acting across borders, with civil society and social movements showing that alternatives to the status quo already exist. This book is at once a narrative of the experience of activism and a manifesto for change. Through analysing the ways in which neoliberalism, nationalism and borders intertwine, Marsili and Milanese – co-founders of European Alternatives – argue that we are in the middle of a great global transformation, by which we have all become citizens of nowhere. Ultimately, they argue that only by organising in a new transnational political party will the citizens of nowhere be able to struggle effectively for the utopian agency to transform the world.

Download or read book Creating European Citizens written by Willem Maas and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring a key aspect of European integration, this clear and thoughtful book considers the remarkable experiment with common rights and citizenship in the EU. Governments around the world traditionally distinguish insiders (citizens) from outsiders (foreigners). Yet over the past half-century, an extensive set of supranational rights has been created in Europe that removes member governments' authority to privilege their own citizens, a hallmark of sovereignty. The culmination of supranational rights, European citizenship not only provides individuals with choices about where to live and work but also forces governments to respect those choices. Explaining this innovation--why states cede their sovereignty and eradicate or redefine the boundaries of the political community by including "foreigners"--Willem Maas analyzes the development of European citizenship within the larger context of the evolution of rights. Imagining more than simply a free trade market, the goal of building a "broader and deeper community among peoples" with a "destiny henceforward shared"--creating European citizens--has informed European integration since its origins. The author argues that its success or failure will not only determine the future of Europe but will also provide lessons for political integration elsewhere.

Download or read book Solidarity in Europe written by Christian Lahusen and published by Saint Philip Street Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access volume provides evidence-based knowledge on European solidarity and citizen responses in times of crisis. Does the crisis of European integration translate into a crisis of European solidarity, and if yes, what are the manifestations at the level of individual citizens? How strongly is solidarity rooted at the individual level, both in terms of attitudes and practices? And which driving factors and mechanisms contribute to the reproduction and/or corrosion of solidarity in times of crisis? Using findings from the EU Horizon 2020 funded research project "European paths to transnational solidarity at times of crisis: Conditions, forms, role-models and policy responses" (TransSOL), the books addresses these questions and provides cross-national comparisons of eight European countries - Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK. It will appeal to students, scholars and policymakers interested in the Eurocrisis, politics and sociology. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Download or read book Citizens of Europe written by M. Bruter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-08-11 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows empirically for the first time how a mass European identity has emerged across the EU member states between 1970 and the present day. Beyond this novel approach, it also offers a whole new theory of political identities, based on two 'civic' and 'cultural' components. Michael Bruter shows how multiple identities reinforce - rather than exclude - each other, and studies in depth the unsuspected impact of the media and political institutions on the emergence of new political identities.

Download or read book Enraged Citizens European Peace and Democratic Deficits written by Robert Menasse and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March 2010, Robert Menasse went to Brussels to begin researching a novel about the European Union. Instead of producing a work of fiction, however, his extended stay in Brussels resulted in The European Courier, a text in which he examines the European community from its beginnings in the transnational "Montanunion" (European Coal and Steel Community, 1951) to the current "financial crisis" of the European Union. In the course of his analysis, Menasse focuses on the institutional structures and forces that work to advance--or obstruct--the European project and its goal of a truly postnational European democracy. Given the internal tensions among the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council, Menasse argues that what is frequently misunderstood as a financial crisis is, in fact, a political one. As Menasse claims in The European Courier, "Either the Europe of nation-states will perish or the project of transcending the nation-states will."

Download or read book The Civic Citizens of Europe written by Moritz Jesse and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-10-05 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Civic Citizens of Europe: The Legal Potential for Immigrant Integration in the EU, Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Moritz Jesse analyses the legal framework within which inclusion of immigrants into the receiving societies can take place. The inclusion of immigrants cannot be enforced by law. However, legislation must provide the room within which integration can take place legally. By studying residence titles, procedures, rights to family migration, permanent residence, and integration measures in a comparative and critical way, Jesse wants to discover whether the legal potential for integration in the EU and the three Member States is sufficient for the inclusion of immigrants.

Download or read book European Citizenship after Brexit written by Patricia Mindus and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This Open Access book investigates European citizenship after Brexit, in light of the functionalist theory of citizenship. No matter its shape, Brexit will impact significantly on what has been labelled as one of the major achievements of EU integration: Citizenship of the Union. For the first time an automatic and collective lapse of status is observed. It is a form of involuntary loss of citizenship en masse, imposed by the automatic workings of the law on EU citizens of exclusively British nationality. It does not however create statelessness and it is likely to be tolerated under international law. This loss of citizenship is connected to a reduction of rights, affecting not solely the former Union citizens but also second country nationals in the United Kingdom and their family members. The status of European citizenship and connected rights are first presented. Chapter Two focuses on the legal uncertainty that afflicts second country nationals in the United Kingdom as well as British citizens, turning from expats to post-European third country nationals. Chapter Three describes the functionalist theory and delineates three ways in which it applies to Brexit. These three directions of inquiry are developed in the following chapters. Chapter Four focuses on the intension of Union citizenship: Which rights can be frozen? Chapter Five determines the extension of Union citizenship: Who gets to withdraw the status? The key finding is that while Member states are in principle free to revoke the status of Union citizen, former Member states are not unbounded in stripping Union citizens of their acquired territorial rights. Conclusions are drawn and policy-suggestions summed up in the final chapter.

Download or read book Is Europe Listening to Us written by Raphaël Kies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can the European Union engage and connect with the people it aims to represent? What initiatives and schemes have been used to engage EU citizens? To what extent can such procedures be considered a move forward towards a more participative and democratic Europe? This collection of internationally recognised specialists in European integration and innovative democratic practices seek to answer these key questions, explore European citizens’ thoughts and opinions about the EU and evaluate the governing elite’s attempts to engage with the public. It offers critical analysis of EU justifications and strategies for implementing Deliberative Citizens Involvement Projects and focuses on some of the major participative experiences trialled and implemented by EU institutions. By comparing these different attempts to increase and bolster the participation of EU citizens and evaluating their impact the book offers valuable and original material on the civic involvement of EU citizens and the legitimacy of the EU decision making process.

Download or read book European Citizenship and Social Integration in the European Union written by Jürgen Gerhards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-22 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2008, the European Union has been affected by one of the most severe crises in the history of Europe. This book builds on the work of Jürgen Habermas to answer the key question: is Europe strong enough to overcome the recent crisis? Arguing that recovery can only take place if the citizens of Europe regard themselves as members of a socially integrated European society, this volume sets out three conditions for successful European social integration: European citizens mutually respect each other as equals, accepting that all EU citizens should have equal economic, political and social rights. Those citizens objecting to the idea of European equality should not constitute a minority with potential for mobilisation that could impede the ongoing process of European social integration. Europeans act upon their equality beliefs in everyday practice – without differentiating between nationals and EU migrants. Based on a survey carried out in Germany, Spain, Poland and Turkey, the authors argue that the requirements for a socially integrated Europe are largely in place already. Their findings allow for optimism regarding the future of the EU, as the cultural foundations for a democratisation of Europe are laid. This volume develops a theoretical framework of a socially integrated European community, and will be useful for students and scholars of sociology, citizenship studies, social policy, political science and European studies.

Download or read book Citizens and borderwork in contemporary Europe written by Chris Rumford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extent to which ordinary people can construct, shift, and dismantle borders is seriously neglected in the existing literature. The book explores the ability of citizens to participate in the making of borders, and the empowerment that can result from this bordering and debordering activity. ‘Borderwork’ is the name given to the ways in which ordinary people can make and unmake borders. Borderwork is no longer only the business of nation-states, it is also the business of citizens (and indeed non-citizens). This study of ‘borderwork’ extends the recent interest in forms of bordering which do not necessarily occur at the state’s external borders. However, the changing nature of borders cannot be reduced to a shift from the edges to the interior of a polity. To date little research has been conducted on the role of ordinary people in envisioning, constructing, maintaining, shifting, and erasing borders; creating borders which facilitate mobility for some while creating barriers to mobility for others; appropriating the political resources which bordering offers; contesting the legitimacy of or undermining the borders imposed by others. This book makes an original contribution to the literature and stands to set the agenda for a new dimension of border studies. This book was published as a special issue of Space and Polity.

Download or read book Boundaries of European Social Citizenship written by Anna Amelina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection contributes to studies of intra-EU migration and mobility, welfare, and European social citizenship by focusing on transnational labour movements from new to the old EU member states (Hungary–Austria, Bulgaria–Germany, Poland–UK and Estonia–Sweden). The volume provides a comparative analysis of formal organization and mobile individuals’ use of European social security coordination, which involves mobile Europeans' access to and portability of social security rights from the sending to the receiving country (and back). The book discloses the selectivity criteria of welfare provision in four areas (unemployment, family benefits, health insurance, and pensions) that lay at heart of European cross-border social security governance. It also identifies specific discourses of belonging (gendered, ethnicized/racialized and class-related images of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’) that frame the institutional selectivity by constructing images of mobile EUcitizens' ‘deserving’ or ‘non-deserving’ social membership. The collection offers a detailed examination of inequality experiences mobile EU citizens from the new EU countries encounter while accessing and porting social security rights across borders. It will be of interest to a wide range of social science and interdisciplinary researchers, students, and practitioners as well as those interested in intra-EU migration and mobility, social security, European social citizenship, and transnational studies.

Download or read book South North Migration of EU Citizens in Times of Crisis written by Jean-Michel Lafleur and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book looks at the migration of Southern European EU citizens (from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece) who move to Northern European Member States (Belgium, France, Germany, United Kingdom) in response to the global economic crisis. Its objective is twofold. First, it identifies the scale and nature of this new Southern European emigration and examines these migrants’ socio-economic integration in Northern European destination countries. This is achieved through an analysis of the most recent data on flows and profiles of this new labour force using sending-country and receiving-country databases. Second, it looks at the politics and policies of immigration, both from the perspective of the sending- and receiving-countries. Analysing the policies and debates about these new flows in the home and host countries’ this book shows how contentious the issue of intra-EU mobility has recently become in the context of the crisis when the right for EU citizens to move within the EU had previously not been questioned for decades. Overall, the strength of this edited volume is that it compiles in a systematic way quantitative and qualitative analysis of these renewed Southern European migration flows and draws the lessons from this changing climate on EU migration.

Download or read book Claiming Citizenship Rights in Europe written by Daniele Archibugi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the European integration project is facing new challenges, abandonments and criticism, it is often forgotten that there are powerful legal instruments that allow citizens to protect and extend their rights. These instruments and the actions taken to activate them are often overlooked and deliberately ignored in the mainstream debates. This book presents a selection of cases in which legal institutions, social movements, avant-gardes and minorities have tried, and often succeeded, to enhance the current state of human rights through traditional as well as innovative actions. The chapters of this book investigate some of the cases in which the gap between the conventionally recognized rights and those advocated is becoming wider and where traditionally disadvantaged groups raise new problems or new issues are emerging concerning individual freedom, transparency and accountability, which are not yet properly addressed in the current political and legal landscape. Can political institutions and courts without coercive power of last resort actually foster more progressive rights? This book suggests that the expansion of human rights might be a viable strategy to generate a proper European citizenship. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Studies, Politics and International Relations, Law and Society, Sociology and Migration Studies and more broadly to NGOs and policy advisers.

Download or read book Citizens Solidarity in Europe written by Christian Lahusen and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizens’ Solidarity in Europe systematically dissects the manifestations of solidarity buried beneath the official policies and measures of public authority in Europe. In this exciting and innovative book, contributors offer comprehensive and original data and highlight the detrimental factors that tend to inhibit or annihilate solidarity, and those that are beneficial for the nurturing of solidarity.

Download or read book Citizen Participation in Democratic Europe written by Alberto Alemanno and published by ECPR Press. This book was released on 2021-02-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the European Union undergoes a major, self-proclaimed democratic exercise the Conference on the Future of Europe and approaches Treaty change, this volume offers a new model of citizen participation to address Europe's long-standing democracy challenge, and respond to the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Proposed are a set of democratic innovations, ranging from citizens assemblies to regulatory gaming to citizens initiatives and lobbying, which are complementary, not antagonistic, to existing representative democracy across the European continent. These innovations are emerging bottom-up across the continent and getting traction at local, national and EU level in a new era powered by technology. This book brings together academics as well as practitioners to give a forward-looking, holistic view of the realities of EU citizen participation across the spectrum of participatory opportunities. They all converge in arguing that, after many years of proven experimentation, the EU must institutionalize supranational, participative and deliberative, democratic channels to complement representative democracy and each other, and ultimately improve the effectiveness of EU citizen participation. While this institutional approach will not magically treat the EU democratic malaise, it should make the system more intelligible, accessible, and ultimately responsive to citizen demand without necessarily undertaking Treaty reform. The attempt to harness citizen participation to help address the current EU crisis needs the type of multi-faceted approach presented in this book. One that recognises the potential of existing and new democratic mechanisms, and also, importantly, the links between different instruments of citizen participation to improve the overall quality of EU's democratic system.

Download or read book Citizens without Nations written by Maarten Prak and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how urban citizenship gave many people a real stake in their own communities, even before the rise of modern democracy.