Binding: Paperback
Description: Representing Europeans takes a fresh and quizzical look at the problems facing the European Union. Bringing decades of experience to bear on the deep structural problems currently facing the EU Richard Rose spells out why it can no longer carry on with integration by stealth. Extraordinary challenges such as saving the Eurozone and maintaining the free movement of peoples now impose high - profile economic and political costs. These create huge political strains which EU institutions struggle to cope with. Rose shows the ways in which Europe's institutions do and do not represent its citizens sometimes equally and sometimes unequally. This threatens worse crises of EU authority because people retain the power as national citizens to protest against their government making commitments in Brussels that they do not accept. The book's pragmatic approach rejects the assumption that more European integration is the solution for all of Europes problems. Likewise it rejects UK withdrawal from the European Union because Britain cannot stop the world and get off. Instead it suggests a pragmatic approach that asks about proposals emanating from Brussels: What problem does it address? How will this policy work? What are its visible costs and benefits? Instead of 'one size fits all policies being imposed on 27 diverse countries Rose recommends that enhanced European cooperation should be based on coalitions of the willing. Moreover the active use of pan - European referendums on major reforms can test popular commitment to EU treaties that permanently advance European integration. Both European federalists and diehard Eurosceptics will alternately agree and disagree with the argument of this book. But they cannot ignore the challenge it raises to pay more attention to the concerns of the half a billion Europeans whom they claim to represent. The paperback edition contains a substantial new Preface.
Title: Representing Europeans A Pragmatic Approach
Author(s): Rose Richard (Professor Of Politics University Of Strathclyde Glasgow)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Barcode: 9780198744344
Pages: 190 Pages
Publication Date: 11/10/2015
Category: Political Economy