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This book illuminates the links between the currently dominant transnational discourse on what constitutes ‘modern’ social policy and contemporary concepts and practices of citizenship. Throughout Europe, we are witnessing a large-scale reshuffling of welfare economies based on the guiding principles of ‘activation’ and an ‘activating welfare state’. Moreover, the European Union has become a major driving force behind this transformation. What are the consequences of this fundamental reorientation for citizenship? How does it relate to patterns of exclusion and inequality inherent in each historical citizenship formation? What exactly is the EU’s role in this context? The book examines how such a powerful conceptual debate intervenes in the conditions of political membership in terms of rights and duties, participation, and access to societal resources. The detailed qualitative study focuses on the European Employment Strategy (EES) – and in particular its gender equality dimension – as a central process where the activation agenda is constructed and equipped with meanings. It traces how this European debate has unfolded, how it has been received and translated into shifting practices of citizenship in three EU member states – Germany, the UK, and Hungary. The book provides instructive insights in how the activation discourse reshapes the conceptual foundations of citizenship. Despite their indirect and intellectual nature, these changes significantly intervene in the contested development and the exclusionary elements of citizenship.

The introduction of the single European currency, the euro, draws attention to the institutional deficit of the European Union: the organizational structures and forms of governance within which central banks and other monetary authorities are embedded within individual states, are lacking at the European level. This gives unusual prominence to financial structures. While the contributors to this collection do not agree in their evaluation of this phenomenon, they agree on its importance, and analyse different aspects of it in depth.

This study investigates internationalism through the prism of a small European country. It explores an age in which many groups and communities – from socialists to scientists – organised themselves across national borders. Belgium was a major hub for transnational movements. By taking this small and yet significant European country as a focal point, the book critically examines major historical issues, including nationalism, colonial expansion, political activism and international relations. A main aim is to reveal the multifarious and sometimes contradictory nature of internationalism. The Belgian case shows how within one particular country, different forms of internationalism sometimes clashed and sometimes converged. The book is organised around political movements and intellectual currents that had a strong presence in Belgium. Each of the main chapters is dedicated to a key theme in European history: nationhood, empire, the relationship between church and state, political and social equality, peace, and universalism. The timeframe ranges from the fin de siècle to the interwar years. It thus covers the rise of international associations before the First World War, the impact of the conflagration of 1914, and the emergence of new actors such as the League of Nations. With its discussion of campaigns and activities that ranged beyond the nation-state, this study is instructive for anyone interested in transnational approaches to history.

The book examines key intellectuals who were directly and actively involved in the process of designing a European monetary union that would be sustainable. Their role was distinguishable from that of the political founders and drivers of this process and from that of expert advisers. They were embedded in the process of giving substance to monetary union and gained influence through their formidable resources of character and intellect. The selected architects include Raymond Barre, Jacques Delors, Roy Jenkins, Alexandre Lamfalussy, Robert Marjolin, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, Karl-Otto Pöhl, Hans Tietmeyer, Robert Triffin, and Pierre Werner. The book looks at their intellectual biographies, the ideas to which they became committed, their network-building skills, and their practical involvement in the issues of monetary integration and union. The principal emphasis is on their individual contributions, their legacies as seen from the vantage point of the Euro Area crisis, and the prescience and adequacy of their views about the appropriate foundations of EMU. The book considers the strengths and limits of intellectual biography and the thorny question of the roles of structure and agency in historical explanation. It also reflects on the question of the architects’ share of blame in the design flaws of European monetary union.

Contemporary political science assumes that ‘institutions matter’. But the governing institutions of the European Union are widely presumed to matter more than most. A commonplace assumption about the EU is that those working within European institutions are subject to a pervasive tendency to become socialised into progressively more pro-integration attitudes and behaviours. This assumption has been integral to many accounts of European integration, and is also central to how scholars study individual EU institutions. However, the theoretical and empirical adequacy of this assumption has never been properly investigated. This study examines this question in the context of an increasingly important EU institution, the European Parliament. The book integrates new theoretical arguments with a substantial amount of original empirical research. It develops a coherent understanding, based on simple rationalist principles, of when and why institutional socialisation is effective. This theoretical argument explains the main empirical findings of the book. Drawing on several sources of evidence on MEPs’ attitudes and behaviour, and deploying advanced empirical techniques, the empirical analysis shows the commonplace assumption about EU institutions to be false. European Parliamentarians do not become more pro-integration as they are socialised into the institution. The findings of the study generate some highly important conclusions. They indicate that institutional socialisation of political elites should be given a much more limited and conditional role in understanding European integration than it is accorded in many accounts. They suggest that MEPs remain largely national politicians in their attitudes, loyalties and much of their activities, and that traditional classifications of the European Parliament as a ‘supra-national’ institution are misleading. Finally, the study offers broader lessons about the circumstances in which institutions effectively socialise those working within them.

A key component of democratic accountability is that citizens understand ’who is to blame’. Nonetheless, little is known about how citizens attribute responsibility in the European Union, or how those perceptions of responsibility matter. This book presents the first comprehensive account of how citizens assign blame to the EU, how politicians and the media attempt to shift blame, and finally, how it matters for electoral democracy. Based on rich and unique data sources, Blaming Europe? sheds light on all three aspects of responsibility in the EU. First, it shows that while institutional differences between countries shape citizen judgements of EU responsibility, those judgements are also highly determined by pre-existing attitudes towards the EU. Second, it demonstrates that neither politicians nor the media assign much blame to the EU. Third, it establishes that, regardless of whether voters are capable of accurately assigning responsibility, they are not able to hold their EU representatives to account via the ballot box in European elections due to the lack of an identifiable ’European government’ to reward or punish. As a consequence, when citizens hold the EU responsible for poor performance, but are unable to sanction an EU incumbent, they lose trust in the EU as a whole instead. In conclusion, this book argues that this ’accountability deficit’ has significant implications for the future of the European Union.

This book is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing in the Bosnian wars from 1990 to the present. The book combines a bird's-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and later the return of refugees. Through the lens of critical geopolitics, which highlights the power of both geopolitical discourse and spatial strategies, the book focuses on the two attempts to remake the ethnic structure of Bosnia since 1991. The first attempt was by ascendant ethnonationalist forces that tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic structures of Bosnia's towns, villages and communities. While these forces destroyed tens of thousands of homes and lives, they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. The second attempt followed the war. The international community, in league with Bosnian officials, tried to undo the demographic consequences of ethnic cleansing. This latter effort has moved in fits and starts, but as the book shows, it has re-made Bosnia, producing a country that has moved beyond the stark segregationist geography created by ethnic cleansing.

Social exclusion of marginalized populations is an intractable problem of global relevance. Breaking the Exclusion Cycle develops a theory of how individual behaviors contribute to its persistence, and presents a possible solution. The book introduces the “exclusion cycle,” which consists of four parts. Antiminority culture gives rise to discrimination by members of the majority. Members of the minority anticipate maltreatment and develop survival strategies. Members of the majority often disapprove of minority’s survival strategies, ethnicize them, and attribute them to the minority as such, and not the discrimination. Such attribution errors feed the existing anti-minority culture and the cycle repeats. The empirical portion of the book is centered on the social exclusion of Roma (derogatively known as “Gypsies”) in Slovenia, which the book uses to illustrate the theory and to offer evidence that the vicious cycle can be broken. Specifically, the findings in the book suggest that Roma-led, NGO-promoted dialogue and intergroup contact strategies can help reduce non-Roma discrimination against the Roma. The empirics in the book rest on original evidence collected over twelve months of fieldwork. The centerpieces are two lab-infield experiments, one involving a trust game and one involving the public goods game administered via original videogame. The experiments capture discriminatory behavior by non-Roma and survival strategies by Roma, and are supplemented by interviews, field observations, and surveys. While the empirics focus on Roma and non-Roma, the theory as well as the implications of the findings apply to other cases of marginalized populations.

Why have national governments of EU member states created and, over the past fifty years, successively endowed the European Parliament with supervisory, budgetary, and legislative powers? This book presents a three-staged argument to explain how the European Parliament acquired this power ‘trias’. First, it is argued that the construction of a supranational polity induces political elites in the member states to reflect on the implications posed by transfers of national sovereignty for domestic processes of democratic accountability and interest representation. It is shown empirically that there exists a strong correlation between national governments’ decisions to transfer sovereignty and political elites’ perception of a ‘democratic legitimacy deficit’ that triggers a search for institutional solutions for its remedy. In a second step, it is argued that political elites, first and foremost, domestic political parties, advance different proposals to alleviate the perceived ‘legitimacy deficit’. These proposals are derived from ‘legitimating beliefs’ that vary cross-nationally and across political parties. Consequently, the creation and empowerment of a supranational parliamentary institution plays a prominent but not exclusive role as potential remedy to the ‘democratic legitimacy deficit’. Third, the book illuminates the mechanisms through which ‘legitimating beliefs’ expressed by political elites and the behaviour of national governments who negotiate and decide on the creation and potential empowerment of the European Parliament are linked. What logic of action best captures national governments’ decisions to empower the European Parliament? The explanatory power of the theoretical argument will be explored by looking at three landmark cases in the European Parliament’s history: its creation as ‘Common Assembly’ of the ECSC Treaty and the concomitant acquisition of supervisory powers vis-à-vis the High Authority, the acquisition of budgetary powers (Treaty of Luxembourg of 1970) and of legislative powers (Single European Act signed in 1986). The developments ranging from the Maastricht Treaty to the adoption of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe will also be analysed in the light of the theory.

At a time when Europe and business stand at crossroads, this study provides a perspective into how business representation in the EU has evolved and valuable insights into how to organize lobbying strategies and influence policy-making. Uniquely, the study analyses business lobbying in Brussels by drawing on insights from political science, public management, and business studies. At the macro-level, we explore over thirty years of increasing business lobbying and explore the emergence of a distinct European business-government relations style. At the meso-level, we assess how the role of EU institutions, policy types, and the policy cycle shape the density and diversity of business activity. Finally, at the micro-level we seek to explore how firms organize their political affairs functions and mobilized strategic political responses. The study utilizes a variety of methods to analyse business-government relations drawing on unique company and policy-maker surveys; in-depth case studies and elite interviews; large statistical analysis of lobbying registers to examine business the density and diversity; and managerial career path and organizational analyses to assess corporate political capabilities. In doing so, this study contributes to discussions on corporate political strategy and interest groups activity. This monograph should be of interest to public policy scholars, policy-makers, and businesses managers seeking to understand EU government affair and political representation.

This book presents an institutional theory for career behaviour in the European Parliament (EP). By focusing on the professional ambition of members of the EP (MEPs), the study presents a rigorous analysis of the powerful multinational legislature from within—problematizing the link between institutional change and individual action, as evidenced in the career paths taken by MEPs. The dependent variable of the book—MEP career behaviour—is addressed in three different ways: (1) the incidence of MEPs who develop extended careers at the European level; (2) the incidence of MEPs who use their time in the EP in order to promote a broader career path elsewhere; and (3) the strategies used by MEPs to advance internally within the EP’s unique committee system. The book uses a major new source of quantitative data collected on the personal and professional backgrounds of all MEPs, 1979–2014. It also relies on extensive qualitative data, taken from over fifty interviews with legislators and other elites in Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Poland. The study has implications for the nexus of institutional change and the behaviour of the political elite, broadly, as well as the study of representative democracy in the EU, specifically. It should be seen as an important contribution to the fields of legislative studies, political sociology, and party politics.

How do state parties react to the challenge of peripheral parties demanding political power to be devolved to their culturally distinct territories? Is devolution the best response to these demands? Why do governments implement devolution given the high risk that devolution will encourage peripheral parties to demand ever more devolved powers? The aim of this book is to answer these questions through a comparative analysis of devolution in four European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The book argues that electoral competition between state and peripheral parties pushes some state parties to prefer devolution when their state-wide majorities or pluralities are seriously at risk. Devolution is an electoral strategy adopted in order to make it more difficult in the long term for peripheral parties to increase their electoral support by claiming the monopoly of representation of the peripheral territory and the people in it. The strategy of devolution is preferred over short-term tactics of convergence towards the peripheral programmatic agenda because the pro-periphery tactics of state parties in unitary centralized states are not credible in the eyes of voters. The price that state parties pay for making their electoral tactics credible is the ‘entrenchment’ of the devolution programmatic agenda in the electoral arena. The final implication of this argument is that in democratic systems devolution is not a decision to protect the state from the secessionist threat. It is, instead, a decision by state parties to protect their needed electoral majorities

With each legislative issue, legislators have to decide whether to delegate decision-making to the executive and/or to expert bodies in order to flesh out the details of this legislation, or, alternatively, to spell out all aspects of this decision in legislation proper. The reasons why to delegate have been of prime interest to political science. The debate has concentrated on principal-agent theory to explain why politicians delegate decision-making to bureaucrats, to independent regulatory agencies and to others actors and how to control these agents. By contrast, our research focuses on the question: Which actors are empowered by delegation? Are executive actors empowered over legislative actors? How do legislative actors react to the loss of power? What opportunities are there to change the institutional rules governing delegation in order to (re)gain institutional power and, with it influence over policy outcomes. We analyze the conditions and processes of change of the rules that delegate decision-making power to the Commission’s implementing powers under comitology. We focus on the role of the European Parliament and explain why the Commission, the Council, and increasingly the Parliament, delegated decision-making to the Commission. If they chose delegation, they still have to determine under which institutional rule comitology should operate. These rules, too, distribute power unequally among actors and therefore raise the question of how they came about in the first place and whether and how the “losers” of a rule change seek to alter the rules at a later point in time.

This book offers a timely exploration of the nature and scale of the emergent EU human rights regime by critically examining how and why EU intervention in human rights matters (with a key focus on child protection in Romania) as part of Eastern enlargement, has had feedback effects on the EU’s own institutional and policy structures. By drawing on the human rights conditionality (particularly in relation to children’s rights) as applied to Romania, this book demonstrates that the feedback effects regarding children’s rights have transformed the EU institutions’ role and scope in this policy area both in EU internal and external human rights dimensions. The process-tracing dimension illustrates why policy issues emerge on EU political agenda, which is in line with agenda-setting processes, and why they persist over time, which reflects historical institutionalist accounts. It is also shown that Eastern enlargement has raised the profile of Roma protection, international adoptions, the disabled and mental health at the EU level. The impact of these developments has been further reinforced by the constitutional and legal provisions included in the Lisbon Treaty. It is argued that Eastern enlargement along with the post-Lisbon constitutional changes have generated the emergence of a more robust and well-defined EU human rights regime in terms of its constitutional, legal and institutional clout.

This book provides a broad overview of the main trends in mass attitudes towards domestic politics and European integration from the 1970s until today. Particularly in the last two decades, the ‘end of the permissive consensus’ around European integration has forced analysts to place public opinion at the centre of their concerns. The book faces this challenge head on, and the overview it provides goes well beyond the most commonly used indicators. On the one hand, it shows how integration's deepening and enlargement involved polities and societies whose fundamental traits in terms of political culture — regime support, political engagement, ideological polarization — have remained anything but static or homogeneous. On the other hand, it addresses systematically what Scharpf (1999) has long identified as the main sources of the democratic deficits of the EU: the lack of a sense of collective identity, the lack of a Europe-wide structure for political accountability, and the lack of recognition of the EU as a legitimate political authority. In other words, it focuses on the fundamental dimensions of how Europeans relate to the EU: identity (the sense of an ‘European political community’; representation (the perception that European elites and institutions articulate citizens' interests and are responsive to them); and policy scope (the legitimacy awarded to the EU as a proper locus of policy-making). It does so by employing a cohesive theoretical framework derived from the entire IntUne project, survey and macro-social data encompassing all EU member countries, and state-of-the-art methods.

Coalition government is the most frequent form of government in Western Europe, but there is relatively little systematic knowledge about how this form of government has developed in recent decades. This volume analyses governments that have formed in the Western European countries since the Second World War and covers the full life cycle of coalition governments from the formation of party alliances before elections to coalition formation after elections, governing and policy-making when parties work together in office, and the stages that eventually lead to governments terminating. Since the early 1990s, many coalition governments form in a context of increased fragmentation of party systems, increased polarization, and the rise of populist parties. The volume captures these changes and examines their implications for the different stages of the coalition life cycle. A particular emphasis of the volume is on the study of how coalitions govern together even when they have different agendas. Do individual ministers decide, or the prime minister, or are the policy outputs of a government a result of a process of coalition compromise? Focusing on the coalition governance stage, we analyse the variation in the use of various control mechanisms across countries, for example showing that many coalition governments draft extensive contracts to control their partners in cabinet. The volume covers 16 West European countries and introduces the case of Croatia. Systematic cross-national data is available in an online appendix.

This book offers a close study of the rapidly evolving politics of LGBT rights in postcommunist Europe, where social attitudes have historically marginalized the issue and where the legacy of weak civil society has handicapped activism in general. What happens in societies such as these when increased exposure to transnational institutions such as the European Union and the minority-rights norms that they promote brings new visibility to LGBT issues? Is activism boosted by the infusion of resources from transnational networks? Or does transnational pressure bring backlash, inflaming antigay attitudes and driving activism underground? This study uncovers and explains the surprising divergence in the organization of LGBT activism in postcommunist Europe, focusing on Poland and the Czech Republic from the late 1980s through 2012. Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania form additional case studies. It argues that domestic backlash against transnational rights norms has been a primary catalyst for organizational development in the region’s most robust LGBT movements. It offers a comparative framework of broader relevance describing the conditions under which transnational pressure and domestic politics may interact to build robust activism, or not. This theorization offers resolution for a striking puzzle of LGBT politics in the countries examined: Why is the most organized and influential activism often found in societies where attitudes toward homosexuality are least tolerant? The book uses a multimethod research design drawing on field interviews, original sources, and participant observation to process trace how the framing of homosexuality and the organization of LGBT activism change in historical time.

This book provides a comprehensive account of national parliaments’ adaptation to European integration. Advancing an explanation based on political parties’ constitutional preferences, it investigates the nature and variation of parliamentary rights in European Union affairs across countries and levels of governance. In some member states, parliaments have traditionally been strong and parties hold intergovernmental visions of European integration. In these countries, strong parliamentary rights emerge in the context of parties’ efforts to realize their preferred constitutional design for the European polity. Parliamentary rights remain weakly developed where federally oriented parties prevail, and where parliaments have long been marginal arenas in domestic politics. Moreover, divergent constitutional preferences underlie inter-parliamentary disagreement on national parliaments’ collective rights at the European level. Constitutional preferences are key to understanding why a ‘Senate’ of national parliaments never enjoyed support and why the alternatives subsequently put into place have stayed clear of committing national parliaments to any common policies. This study calls into question existing explanations that focus on strategic partisan incentives arising from minority and coalition government. It, furthermore, rejects the exclusive attribution of parliamentary ‘deficits’ to the structural constraints created by European integration and, instead, restores a sense of accountability for parliamentary rights to political parties and their ideas for the European Union’s constitutional design.