Special Issue The Disparity Of European Integration

This new study revisits the work of the late Ernst Haas, assessing his relevance for contemporary European integration and its disparities. With his seminal book, The Uniting of Europe Haas laid the foundations for one of the most prominent paradigms of European integration – neofunctionalism. He engaged in inductive reasoning to theorize the dynamics of the European integration process that led from the Treaty of Paris in 1951 to the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The Treaty of Rome set the constitutional framework for a Common Market. Today, a second Treaty of Rome may lay the foundation for a European Constitution that embeds the Common Market in a European polity. Unfortunately, Haas will not be able to witness this path-breaking step in the development of a European political community, which he so aptly theorized almost five decades ago. This is all the more regrettable since students of European integration are more than ever challenged to tackle a major empirical puzzle: After 50 years of European integration, the member states managed to adopt a single currency and to develop common policies and institutions on justice and home affairs. The integration of foreign policy and defence, by contrast, is still lagging behind. This text delivers sharp insights into these issues. This book, previously published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy, will be of great interest to all students and scholars of international relations, the European Union, European politics and Public Policy.

The notion of Differentiated Integration is increasingly used in the literature on European integration. Often employed interchangeably with the notion of "flexible integration, diverging views on its nature have led to the emergence of various definitions and, to some extent, a semantic confusion. A lack of consensus characterizes the academic literature; some authors even avoid putting an explicit definition on the term. The main objective of this book is to seek answers for the following questions: How can one define Differentiated Integration in the European Union? Should Differentiated Integration be considered as a process, a concept, a system or a theory? Should it be seen as a temporary or a well-established phenomenon? How is this field of study likely to develop in the future? In order to do so, all chapters, written by leading experts in the field, offer a state-of-the-art analysis of the study of differentiated integration, from theoretical and practical perspectives. In addition, this book is not a collection of isolated papers: all chapters are interconnected and gravitate towards the aforementioned central questions, but approach these from different perspectives. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

The 2009 European sovereign debt crisis and the EU’s policy response to it have prompted scholars to re-think whether diverse national models of capitalism can thrive within the European Union (EU). Are some national economic systems better suited to adapt to European integration than others, and if so, why? Contributions within this volume provide a qualified yes to these questions raised, concluding that the EU favors export-led growth models while it penalizes and discourages domestic consumption-oriented growth paths, particularly those that are financed by debt-accumulation. The book questions whether the EU is capable of integrating these diverse capitalist regimes. This volume adds a comparative capitalism perspective to EU integration scholarship in order to demonstrate that ever-closer union is not capable of accommodating diversity in national economic institutions. Chapters in this volume provide an innovative framework for understanding what factors related to European integration impede the economic and political integration of diverse European market economies. While recent comparative capitalism literature highlights that European monetary integration has favored export-led growth regimes, contributions in this volume outline that the EU’s prioritization of export-led growth over domestic-demand led growth is present in other facets of integration, including EU accession, financial integration, the free movement of people, fiscal governance and the Europe 2020 growth strategy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of New Political Economy.