8. EU Expansion and Wider Europe

This chapter focuses on the expansion of the European Union and the widening of Europe. Enlargement is often seen as the EU's most successful foreign policy. It has extended prosperity, stability, and good governance to neighbouring countries by means of its membership criteria. However, enlargement is much more than foreign policy: it is the process whereby the external becomes internal. It is about how non-member countries become members, and shape the development of the EU itself. The chapter first compares widening and deepening before discussing enlargement as soft power. It then explains how the EU has expanded and why countries want to join. It also looks at prospective member states: the Balkan countries, Turkey, Norway, Switzerland, and Iceland. Finally, it examines the European Neighbourhood Policy.

4. Member States

This chapter focuses on the member states of the European Union. It first considers six factors that determine how a state engages with the EU: the date of entry, size, wealth, state structure, economic ideology, and integration preference. It then examines how member states behave in the EU's institutions and seek to influence the outcome of negotiations in Brussels. It also discusses the informal and formal activities of the member states before concluding with an overview of the insights offered by theory in analysing the relationship between the EU and its member states. The chapter clarifies some key concepts and terms such as Europeanization, acquis communautaire, and flexible integration, and explains how the EU's Intergovernmental Conferences work.

6. How Policies Are Made

This chapter examines how European Union policies are made. Most EU legislation is now adopted according to the Ordinary Legislative Procedure, under which the Council and the European Parliament have equal powers. The basic policy-making rules laid down in the Treaties have been supplemented over the years by formal agreements and informal understandings between the main actors in the decision-making institutions. EU policy-making is open to criticism on grounds of democracy, transparency, and efficiency, but it continues to deliver an impressive amount and array of policy outcomes. The chapter considers the basic rules and principal actors involved in EU policy-making and how the policy-making process works in practice. It also asks whether the EU policy-making process is democratic, transparent, and efficient before concluding with an assessment of the theory and practice underlying the process.

3. The EU’s Institutions

This chapter examines five of the European Union's key institutions: the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European Council, the European Parliament, and the European Court of Justice. It draws analogies to these institutions' counterparts at the national level while also highlighting their distinct and unique features. It discusses the structures and formal powers of the five EU institutions and how they ‘squeeze’ influence out of their limited Treaty prerogatives. It concludes by explaining why these institutions matter in determining EU politics and policy more generally, focusing on three central themes: the extent to which the EU is an experiment in motion; the importance of power sharing and consensus; and the capacity of the EU structures to cope with the Union's expanding size and scope.

2. How Did We Get Here?

This chapter focuses on the historical development of the European Union. The history of the EU began when European governments responded to a series of domestic, regional, and global challenges after the Second World War by establishing new transnational institutions in order to accelerate political and economic integration. These challenges ranged from post-war reconstruction, to the Cold War, and then to globalization. Driven largely by mutually compatible national interests, Franco-German bargains, and American influence, politicians responded by establishing the European communities in the 1950s and the EU in the 1990s. The chapter examines the Schuman Plan, the European Defence Community, the European Community, the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), enlargement, constitution building, and the Eurozone crisis.

11. Conclusion

This chapter revisits the three key themes that guide understanding of the European Union: experimentation and change, power sharing and consensus, and scope and capacity. It also reconsiders some earlier discussed leading theoretical approaches to understanding the EU: international relations approaches, comparative politics approach, sociological/cultural approach, and public policy approach. Finally, it reflects on where the EU may evolve in the years to come and describes three models or visions of how the EU should work: the intergovernmental model, the federal model, and the functional model. Intergovernmentalism denotes both a school of theory in the study of European integration and a descriptive term to describe an EU that is dominated by its member states.

1. Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses the practical and analytical reasons for studying the European Union. It also considers some of the main conceptual approaches to understanding the EU: international relations approaches, the comparative politics approach, the sociological/cultural approach, and the public policy approach. Furthermore, it outlines three broad themes that help the reader make sense of the EU: experimentation and change, power sharing and consensus, and scope and capacity. Finally, it provides an overview of the chapters that follow, which cover topics ranging from an historical overview of the EU's development to the EU's relations with the wider world, EU enlargement, the EU's foray into security policy, and the EU's growing role as a global actor.

9. The EU as a Security Actor

This chapter focuses on the European Union's security policy. At fist glance, EU security policy seems limited by three powerful constraints. Firstly, it is exclusively concerned with ‘soft’ security issues, such as immigration, transnational crime, and drug traffiking. Secondly, policy-making is dominated by sovereignty-conscious EU member states and national capitals. Thirdly, security is not a major driver of European integration. The chapter challenges all three of these assumptions, arguing that firstly, the EU is now involved in ‘hard’ security, especially counterterrorism but also military operations. Secondly, security policy-making is increasingly Brussels-centred. Thirdly, while European integration has been driven primarily by economic cooperation, the safeguarding of Europe's (especially internal) security has emerged as a major raison d'être of the integration project. The chapter also considers the EU's role in international security, along with its Common Security and Defence Policy and internal security.

7. Democracy in the European Union

This chapter examines the democratic credentials of the European Union by asking whether it matches some key features common to many modern democratic systems: representation (whether legislation is adopted by representative assemblies); separation of powers; the executive's democratic accountability; respect for fundamental rights; and whether competing political parties offer voters genuine choice. The chapter also clarifies some key concepts and terms such as bicameralism, democratic deficit, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Furthermore, it considers an alternative to representative democracy: the organizing of referenda to settle issues. Finally, it discusses the EU's provisions for helping national parliaments scrutinize the participation of their government in EU institutions.

5. Key Policies

This chapter examines some of the most important areas of policy-making in the European Union. It first explains how EU policy-making differs from national policy-making before discussing the most important policies aimed at building the internal market and limiting its potentially negative impact on individuals, society, and the environment. The EU's ‘market-building’ policies include competition policy, trade policy, and the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), while ‘market-correcting’ and ‘cushioning’ policies include the common agricultural policy, the cohesion policy, and environmental and social regulation. The chapter shows how these policies are made and also why and how they matter. It also compares policy types in the EU.