Making History: European Integration and Institutional Change at Fifty (The State of the European Union, 8)

Fifty years ago, the leaders of six European states signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community and launching the process of European integration. From that starting point evolved today's European Union (EU), the most successful example of institutionalized political cooperation in history. The EU now encompasses a much broader array of responsibilities than originally planned, its membership has widened to 25 countries, and its legislation and jurisprudence has come to supersede national law. Contestation has accompanied success, however, and the intense debate in many European countries over the EU Constitution throughout the course of 2005 revealed deep divisions between and within European countries around issues such as EU institutions, the elusive European identity, a European economic malaise, and the role of the EU as a world power. Was the constitutional crisis a turning point for European integration?

This volume argues that the EU today may be at a crossroads--not because of the failed referenda but rather because of the unresolved tensions in European governance not banished with the referenda's defeat. Meunier and McNamara's collection is the first to comprehensively examine these challenging issues using the tools of historical institutionalism to analyze the past and future political and institutional trajectory of the European Union across a wide variety of policy areas. Together, the volume's authors provide a remarkably coherent theoretical approach to the key questions facing Europe, drawing a portrait of the EU today that reveals a robust, but not invulnerable, set of institutions and practices.

Sophie Meunier is a Research Scholar in Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She is the author of Trading Voices: The European Union in International Commercial Negotiations http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8084.html (Princeton University Press, August 2005) and The French Challenge: Adapting to Globalization http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/press/books/french_challenge .htm (with Philip Gordon, Brookings Institution Press, December 2001), winner of the 2002 France-Ameriques book award http://www.france-ameriques.org/. Meunier has published many articles on the European Union, the politics of international trade, globalization, and French politics. Her current research focuses on anti-Americanism in France, the complex links between Europeanization and globalization, and the nesting/overlapping of international institutions.
Kathleen McNamara is Associate Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University. She is the author of The Currency of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union (Cornell University Press, 1998) and articles on the social embeddedness of the economy, central banking, and globalization. Her current research compares the creation of political authority in the European Union to the historical experience of nation-states. Dr. McNamara previously taught at Princeton University, has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a German Marshall Fund Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow, and a Visiting Professor at Sciences Po (Paris).