The EU

11 Key excerpts on "The EU"

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  The European Union and China

  • Thomas Christiansen, Emil Kirchner, Uwe Wissenbach(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  In practice, there may well be limits to the extent to which (especially smaller) member states can make use of their formal veto power on a regular basis, in particular in instances when the more powerful states push for a particular outcome. That is why the relative power of the member states, and the intensity of their preferences on a particular issue, is a key aspect of the intergovernmentalist perspective on EU politics, alongside the formal arrangements under which they take decisions (Moravcsik, 1993). However, while recognizing the importance of intergovernmental decision-making, especially when it comes to foreign policy-making, The EU cannot be understood without the recognition that there is a second logic at work in the organization, namely supranationalism. The supranational dimension describes those institutions and aspects of The EU that operate ‘above’ the level of the member states and are therefore somewhat inde-pendent of them (Stone Sweet and Sandholtz, 1997). The EU’s supranational institutions, such as The EUropean Commission and The EUropean Parlia-ment, are bound to uphold the common interest of the whole of the Union, EU Institutions and the Making of EU Foreign Policy 31 rather than the more narrow aggregate of the various national interests. Their capacity to act independently from the instructions of national governments is based on The EU founding treaties that set the limits but also provide the resources – legal authority, political legitimacy and financial means – to pur-sue policies in the common interest of The EUropean Union.

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  The Global Reach of EU Law

  • Elaine Fahey(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although it has ‘single legal personality’ – i.e. formal authority to act – The EU has a broad range of ‘statuses’ in international organisations. 18 Sometimes it acts alongside its member states, sometimes it does not. It faces the reality that international agreements cannot be easily renegotiated. And some international organisations cannot easily change their admission rules. While The EU treaties are no obstacle to EU participation in international organisations (e.g. Articles 220 TFEU, 221 TFEU), this contrasts sharply with its treaty-making activities. Yet each instance has its own particularities and history. The EU has been confined in its treaties to specific arrangements for the Food and Administration Organization (FAO), The EUropean Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), Codex Alimentarious and the Hague Conference of Private International law. It is not a member of the United Nations, International Labour Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund or Council of Europe for reasons of sovereignty of the member states as much as the rules of the organisations themselves. 19 And an ‘apprehensive’ approach towards EU membership within the UN system exists. 20 Even if it is neither coherent nor optimal, The EU and its member states continue to co-exist and function together, globally. The EU is often referred to as a ‘global actor’; such a view of its ‘actorness’ is not always shared across disciplines, vexed by the structure of The EU and its practices. 21 These challenges are not limited to The EU in the outside world. Internally, The EU comprises very powerful institutional components that sometimes appear more powerful than the sum of its parts. They are broadly understood as actors engaged in rule-making after the state

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  The SAGE Handbook of European Union Politics

  • Knud Erik Jørgensen, Mark Pollack, Ben Rosamond, Knud Erik Jørgensen, Mark Pollack, Ben Rosamond, Knud Erik Jorgensen(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION One of the eternal themes of the study of The EUropean Union consists in the issue of whether The EU is an N of 1. This debate is not about whether The EU has particular charac-teristics which make it unique in some holistic way. In that sense, nobody would deny that there is only one EU as there is only one United Nations, one US and one United Airlines. Events, decisions, policies, or institutions are always unique in this sense, but few scholars would deny that they can nevertheless be analysed scientifically. Despite much contro-versy in the philosophy of science, most social scientists attempt to explain something by relating it to more general laws. Thus, the real debate is not about whether The EU is unique and needs a special theory in order to explain it or whether important aspects of The EU can be explained by general theories. Instead, the debate is about which general theories are more powerful for explaining the most rele-vant aspects of The EUropean Union: theories of international relations or theories of domes-tic politics. For those who argued in favor of international relations, this analytical perspec-tive followed from the fact that The EU was not a state but a creation of independent states. For those who argued in favor of domestic politics, The EU was so untypical an international orga-nization that theories of international relations seemed inapplicable. This split goes back to the early days of integration theory. Both Haas (2004) and his counterpart Hoffmann (1966) have tried to explain The EUropean Union from the vantage point of international relations theory whereas Lindberg and Scheingold (1970) have instead written about ‘Europe’s Would-Be Polity’ from a domestic politics per-spective. Nowadays, Moravcsik (1998) takes sides with Haas and Hoffmann while further refining their approaches, whereas Hix (2005) has joined Lindberg and Scheingold in analysing the political system of The EU.

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  EU Law and Governance

  • Mark Dawson, Floris de Witte(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 The EU as a Political Union The EUropean Union as we know it today was born in 1992. In that year, the Treaty of Maastricht was signed, which signalled a change in the direction and pace of the project of European integration; moving away from being (primarily) an economic community, towards being (also) a political union. Indeed, the central question in The EU for the past decades has been to what extent, and how, The EU can be (more) democratic. Article 10 TEU highlights that ‘the functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democ- racy’. The institutional translation of this commitment, however, is far from obvious. What does representative democracy mean in a polity like The EU? This is a question asked by The EU institutions themselves – ever on the lookout to bolster their legitimacy and authority. How can we reconfigure The EU’s institutional arrangements so that its decisions are more authoritative, democratic and made ‘more closely’ to the citizen? It is also, however, a question asked in more sceptical tones by national publics and political parties, who are suspicious of the democratic quality of The EU. This scepticism comes in two flavours: while some argue that The EU should be more democratic in order legitimately to discharge its obligations; others argue against The EU’s exercise of power in important areas exactly because it is inherently less democratic than its Member States. The EU has taken this concern seriously and has undertaken significant institutional renovations over the course of the past decades, attempting to address this critique. The EU has, for example, enhanced the role of national parliaments, created a citizens’ initiative and tried to tie the elections for The EUropean Parliament (EP) to the election of the Commission President, mimicking the way in which elections typically work on the national level.

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  The EU in UN Politics

  Actors, Processes and Performances

  • Spyros Blavoukos, Dimitrios Bourantonis, Spyros Blavoukos, Dimitrios Bourantonis(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The threat of collapse of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the huge destabilising economic and political reper- cussions of this development consumed all political energy and capital of EU leaders. After all, despite its structural deficiencies and dysfunctional features, EMU is a cornerstone of The EUropean integration process. Avoiding its collapse emerged as the overwhelming political priority that condemned all other issues to the margins. In this context, it would be unrealistic to expect The EU to make full use of the Lisbon Treaty provi- sions and establish itself as a protagonist in global affairs, as the ESS and the official EU rhetoric in the pre-crisis, rosy days had aspired to. Instead, what we have experienced is a kaleidoscope of EU international activities with a mixed record of impact in different thematic areas, within or outside the UN system. Third, and a much more recent development, the prevalence of ‘Brexit’ in the British referendum on EU membership sets fire on all aspects of The EU political order. Without knowing the exact framework of the future relationship and the timeline of this development it is impossible to make any concrete predictions about how it will affect The EU international presence. However, only by casting a glimpse at the economic, political, military and diplomatic contribution of the UK to The EU diplomacy it is easy to conclude that the ‘Brexit’ will constitute a mega-shock for the international role of The EU. Fourth, the much awaited thorough revision of the ESS was discussed and endorsed by The EUropean Council only a few days after the British referendum. The new ‘Global Strategy’ of The EU reinstates emphatically already in its title the shared vision of EU member-states on global affairs The EU IN UN POLITICS: ANALYTICAL AND EMPIRICAL CHALLENGES 5 that will lead to a stronger and more influential EU. According to the HR, Federica Mogherini, the fragile world we live in ‘ .

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  The European Union in International Organisations and Global Governance

  Recent Developments

  • Christine Kaddous(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  According to Article 21(2) TEU, the Union shall work for a high degree of cooperation in all fields of inter-national relations in order to promote an ‘international system based on stronger multilateral cooperation and good global governance’. Given these various elements, The EU has become an active member on the international scene, not only as far as international representation is concerned, but also in the conclusion of international agreements and in its participation in multiple international fora. The EU is a full member of a large number of international organisations. The best known are the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Food and Agricul-ture Organization (FAO). Apart from these two famous examples the Union is a member of organisations active in diverse fields, such as Eurocontrol, The EUro-pean Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Codex Alimenta-rius Commission (CAC), the Hague Conference on Private International Law, the Energy Community, the Intergovernmental Organisation for International Carriage by Rail (OTIF) as well as of regional fisheries organisations. 4 However, The EU is not a member of the United Nations (UN) or of any of the major UN organisations (except the FAO). It is not, for example, a member of the Interna-tional Labour Organization (ILO), nor of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank. 5 Therefore, it participates in many international organisations through an observer status, the precise design of which depends on the text of the constituent charter of the organisation. For example, it enjoys ‘observer status’ at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 3 ECJ, Case 22/70 Commission v Council [1971] ECR 263; ECJ, Joined Cases 3, 4 and 6/76 Kramer [1976], ECR 1279; Opinion 1/76 [1977] ECR 741, and the subsequent case law.

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  The European Union

  What it is and how it works

  • Ingeborg Toemmel(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  309 Chapter 13 Conclusion: The Nature of The EUropean Union The EU as a political system 309 The dynamics of The EU’s evolution 320 Conclusion 331 Looking forward: external challenges and internal frictions 332 This final chapter seeks to infuse the observations of the book with a more theoretical perspective on The EUropean Union as an emergent political order beyond the nation state. Two questions are central to our investigation: How can we characterize the Union as a whole? How can we explain the dynamics of integration? These two questions have dominated theoretical debates on European integration since its inception in the 1950s, but without generating any commonly accepted answers (see Chapter 1). Against the background of these questions and the empirical material presented throughout this book, I consider in this chapter, first, the main characteristics of The EU as a political system; and, second, the forces that have propelled integra-tion and the evolution of a new political order beyond the nation state. I thus proceed from an attempt to classify and understand the nature of the Union as a whole to a theoretically informed explanation of the extraordinary dynamics that underlie and propel its evolution. The EU as a political system For some time, scholarly debate concerning the fundamental characte-ristics of The EU has centred on two opposing points of view. Is it more fruitful to compare the Union to a (federal) state, or to an international organization? More recently, a third point of view has come into vogue. According to this argument, The EU should be seen as a sui generis system (see e. g. Jachtenfuchs 1997). While this label does not actually delineate any specific characteristics of The EU, it does offer the chance to undertake a thorough discussion of these characteristics. In the

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  The European Union

  A Political Sociology

  • Chris Rumford(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The twin focus of European Union studies has been the changing role of the nation- state over the past 50 years, coupled with a consideration of the extent to which a supranational EU has come into existence. Euro- pean integration has been constituted by this field of study as being about the building of a Euro-polity. This is a significant point, as we shall see. The issues of European integration and supranationalism are virtually inseparable. It is almost impossible for us, now, today, studying The EUropean Union to think of integration in any way other than meaning the building of supranational authority in the economic or political sphere, or both. In short, integration equals the building of a Euro-state. Where dissent from this view exists it takes the form of a re-statement of the intergovernmentalist thesis that integration was and is the conscious choice of sovereign nation-states to further their own interests. This chapter (in keeping the rest of the book) aims to re-think the idea of integration and to move it away from the automatic assump- tion that it revolves around the extent to which The EU represents a new form of supranational authority or a super-state. In order to do so it is necessary to identify the resources in the field of EU studies which may be able to assist us in this regard. Rosamond (2000: 109) 58 THE QUESTION OF The EUROPEAN STATE draws attention to the shift of emphasis in EU scholarship from a focus on integration towards an understanding of governance. This is a positive step as it introduces the idea of a multiplicity of levels and centers in the exercise of power. More importantly perhaps, it speaks of a different object of study. Not state building or centralized supranational power but the exercise of rule and authority through- out The EUro-polity.

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  Convincing Political Stakeholders

  Successful Lobbying Through Process Competence in the Complex Decision-making System of the European Union

  • Klemens Joos(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-VCH

    (Publisher)
• The role of supranational institutions with the authority to drive forwards their own integrative agenda, i.e. which are able to produce, implement and interpret regulations.
• European legislative activity.178
The role ascribed to non-governmental actors in the integration process is of crucial importance to interest representation. In addition to European regulations and European institutions, the shift from intergovernmental to supranational governance is also determined by a “transnational society”: “(…) those non-governing neutral actors who engage in intra-EC exchange – social, economic, political – and thereby influence directly or indirectly, policy-making processes and outcomes at The EUropean level.”179 This means that the political decision-making processes in Europe are not determined solely by the member states and their governments, but are also extensively influenced by companies and associations, etc.
Supranational institutions in The EU include The EUropean Commission, which has the right of legislative initiative in the ordinary legislative procedure, The EUropean Parliament, with parliamentary members from all 27 member states, or also The EUropean Court of Justice, whose authority in structuring the primary law is generally recognised by the member states' law courts.

5.4.5 Multi-level governance

During its first few decades, EC/EU research concentrated primarily on the political integration of The EUropean states. Analyses were conducted into how and in which areas of policy the EC/EU member states gave up their sovereignty in part and how decision-making powers were transferred from the national to The EUropean level and the newly established supranational institutions.180

With the increasing supranational competence of the EC/EU and the related shift in political decisions to Brussels, research focus moved from issues concerning European integration and the emergence of European institutions to the question of how political decisions are made in Europe.181 In other words: government – governance182 – is the focus of analysis here. This paradigm shift – also called governance turn – was kicked off by theoretical, conceptual considerations183