The Political Economy of European Integration

This book applies various theories and conceptual frameworks from international political economy in order to study a number of issues related to European integration.
The study of European integration produced much scholarly debate in the 1950s and 1960s. The following two decades saw few works on European integration that included more elaborate discussions of theory and methodology; most studies in that period were fairly descriptive. In recent years there has been renewed theoretical interest in European integration. This book, however, is one of the first to discuss and apply various political-economy approaches explicitly to integration ­ these include classical integration theory and modern public-choice theories. Areas covered include common policies and decision-making as well as the external relations of the European Union. The influence of the European Parliament, the concept of subsidiarity, trade policy, Economic and Monetary Union, reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, relations with EFTA and Eastern European countries as well as enlargement are all discussed. The book should be of interest to both scholars and policy-makers concerned with these issues.