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This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to study the reform of the European Union, which has been regularly attempted since the mid-1980s with little success. Reform has become even more necessary due to enlargements that integrated twelve countries from Eastern and Southern Europe and brought the total number of EU countries to twenty-seven. The main reason for the slow rate of change was the opposition to far-reaching institutional reform from a minority of political leaders. Ultimately, reform was achieved by a lengthy and complex trial and error process. This book shows how political leaders pushing for reform were capable of controlling this process. The remainder of the chapter discusses the major obstacles to reform, the approach used in the present study, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This final chapter attempts to compare and contrast the rigid legal framework that the UK is practicing today and the emergence of the industrial action with the legal frameworks of unions in a selection of other EU countries. Unlike in the UK and with the exception of Greece, legal frameworks for business unions in other EU countries have not undergone changes in the past fifteen years. This chapter analyses the role of the state in national decision making while considering such factors as the country's constitution and the character and structure of the unions in the countries in question. Because the British Conservatives believe that the state needs to ‘protect’ the free market, and based on the discussion in this chapter, the book concludes that government ideology can best explain the political and economic changes in the UK.

This chapter first develops this book's understanding of the notions of ‘capital’ and ‘movement of capital’, two legal concepts that are heavily infused with economic content. Characterizing free movement of capital as an ‘object-related production factor freedom’ — hence it is the cross border movement of capital itself, not that of its holder, which is liberalized by virtue of Article 56 (1) EC — the chapter attends to the issue of how to localize capital and the related problem of construction of the cross border element in the ambit of the freedom of capital movement. Second, arriving at the ‘object of investigation’ of this study, this chapter builds up and forms a definition of the concepts of ‘direct investment’ and ‘foreign direct investment’; the latter referring to such ‘direct investment’ originating from or directed towards non EC countries.

This chapter compares European Union countries to the United Kingdom. It aims at ascertaining not so much whether a common core exists but how it is shaped and evolves, also in response to influences by supranational legal orders. EU countries do not adhere to one model. Administrative law is subject to rapid development, and even countries that share many structures and general features do not develop at the same speed or in the same direction. In the UK, there is no specialized administrative court jurisdiction. There is one general court system that deals with civil, criminal, and administrative cases; but there are many administrative tribunals and appeals tribunals. Nearly all the EU countries have a specialised administrative court system, and the majority has a constitutional court. The chapter considers the perceived divide between civil law countries and the common law in the UK, in the light of the relationship between national law and EU and European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) law. It also looks at the four main features of the legal systems selected for comparison: the constitutional relevance of judicial review; the limitations of judicial review; procedural errors or omissions; and annulment and damages.

This chapter is centred on the Capitalisation of Unemployment Benefits programme, which is the most important employment scheme in Spain. It explains that this programme allows the unemployed who are entitled to unemployment benefits to capitalise the total value of these benefits and invest it in a new or already-established social company. It details the specific characteristics of the scheme and how it differs from the mainstream of employment programmes in the EU countries. It also explores the experiences of participants in the scheme in terms of its contribution to inclusion and exclusion. It highlights that by capitalising unemployment benefits in a social economy, workers become co-owners of the company where they work, thus, promoting ‘entrepreneurial activation’. It explains that this scheme allows a limited role of the state and increases autonomy and responsibility at work, which elicits different reactions and is experienced in different ways by the participants.

Countries wanting to join a monetary union should display some commonalities of their economic indicators (inflation, public deficit, etc.) and show similarities in their business cycle fluctuations. Putting aside the political aspects, empirical studies on business cycle synchronizations are mainly based on either bivariate analyses (correlation, coherence, concordance of turning points, etc.) or factor models. This chapter lies between these two approaches. Indeed it studies the presence of business cycle synchronization for 24 countries belonging to the European Union using a common cyclical feature perspective. It goes beyond a set of bivariate results, however, and suggests a multivariate strategy for determining the existence of synchronous co-movements based on a general to specific approach applied to each single-equation model. Doing so, the study identifies the European core area as those $10$ countries that display a synchronous common cycle. Finally, it provides a composite coincident index for the core area.