The reorganization of European political economy since the mid 1980s has had to come to terms with two of the most fundamental issues of political life: the structuration of political authority and participation, and the scope of authoritative decision making in the economy. The European Union continues to serve as a means for achieving narrow collective goods, but these larger questions are never far from view. This paper argues that European political economy is being shaped by an intense debate which has mobilized leaders, political parties, interest groups, social movements and, on occasion, the wider public. This struggle is neither a random conflict of interests, nor a reflection of functional pressures. We hypothesize EU politics is structured along two dimensions: a left-right dimension ranging from social democracy to market liberalism; and a national-supranational dimension ranging from support for the restoration of national state autonomy to support for further European integration. Kurzfassung Die Reorganisation der politischen Okonomie Europas seit der Mitte der 80er Jahre muste mit zwei der fundamentalsten Themen des politischen Lebens zurandekommen: der Strukturierung politischer Macht und Beteiligung einerseits, sowie der Reichweite von staatlichen Entscheidungen in der Wirtschaft andererseits. Die Europaische Union dient zwar weiterhin als ein Mittel zur Bereitstellung bestimmter offentlicher Guter, doch diese groseren Fragestellungen bleiben nie ganz auser Betracht. Dieses Papier argumentiert, das die politische Okonomie Europas durch eine intensive Debatte gepragt ist, welche die Fuhrungspersonlichkeiten, politische Parteien, Interessensvertretungen, Burgerbewegungen und bisweilen die Offentlichkeit mobilisiert hat. Dieser Kampf ist weder ein zufalliger Interessenskonflikt noch die Widerspiegelung von funktionalen Zwangen. Wir stellen die Hypothese auf, das die Politik auf EU-Ebene entlang zweier Dimensionen strukturiert ist: eine Links-Rechts-Dimension, die von der Sozialdemokratie bis zum Marktliberalismus reicht, und eine nationalstaatlich-supranationale Dimension, die von der Unterstutzung der Restauration der nationalstaatlichen Autonomie bis zur Unterstutzung weitergehender europaischer Integration reicht.

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The Making of a Polity: The Struggle over European Integration

What kind of European Union do top Commission officials want? Should the European Union be supranational or intergovernmental? Should it promote market-liberalism or regulated capitalism? Should the Commission be Europe's government or its civil service? This 2002 book examines top officials' preferences on these questions through analysis of unique data from 137 interviews. Understanding the forces that shape human preferences is the subject of intense debate. Hooghe demonstrates that the Commission has difficulty shaping its employees' preferences in the fluid multi-institutional context of the European Union. Top officials' preferences are better explained by experiences outside rather than inside the Commission: political party, country, and prior work leave deeper imprints than directorate-general or cabinet. Preferences are also influenced more by internalized values than by self-interested career calculation. Hooghe's findings are surprising, and will challenge a number of common assumptions about the workings and motives of the European Commission.

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The European Commission and the Integration of Europe: Images of Governance

How should we understand the politics of security today? This article addresses this question from one particular perspective, that of 'biosecurity'. It examines contemporary strategies for managing biorisks in three European states: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. We suggest that the framing of threat and response differs, even within Europe, and that one can identify three different configurations: contingency planning, protection and resilience. Each of these embodies a significantly different way of reconciling fundamental imperatives for those who would govern a liberal society today - the imperative of freedom and the imperative of security.

Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection, resilience

This article compares preferences for Europeanizing 13 policies among European elites, national elites, and public opinion. Elites are more willing to cede national authority in sovereignty areas, ...

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Europe Divided? Elites vs. Public Opinion on European Integration

The last decades have seen a fundamental upheaval in the organisation of modern life, and the university as an institution has been as widely affected by these changes as business, governments, and civil society groups. Higher education has been confronted with increasing marketisation of the State and aggressive re-regulation of the public sector. Internationalisation has created new potential markets for students, alongside increasing access to research collaborators, but it opened universities up to competition with and comparison against institutions in other countries. The growing importance of knowledge production and innovation for economic life has created new potential roles for universities and challenged the traditional societal privileges and monopolies which they have long enjoyed. But these changes have come at the same time as an evolution in the process of change: a growing role for the State in creating and regulating markets in public services has come with a greater role for the State in guiding this reform process.

Clisthène

Papers

Our Europe: The Community and National Development