European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0847685012 ISBN 13: 9780847685011

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997

Synopsis

Exploring the social dimensions of state formation and European integration, a respected interdisciplinary group of European and North American scholars takes a novel approach to the historical processes of integration. Rather than being led by EU institutions and intergovernmental policy, the contributors argue that integration is primarily influenced by non-state actors: unions, businesspeople, elites, and immigrants. Exploring the historical roots of integration, they trace contemporary integration efforts back to nineteenth-century social action in response to capitalist development. As today, it was a time when internationalism_both that of workers and of capitalists_sustained international cooperation and attempts to define universal standards for welfare and a social dimension to economic development. The reemergence of an integrated Europe as an alternative to the system of states produced by the settlements of 1918 and 1945 has provided a new opening for internationalism. The contributors view this as a positive trend, especially as a counterbalance to intensifying conflicts over growth, the distribution of wealth, welfare, and global access to markets and jobs.

About this title

About the Author:

Jytte Klausen is associate professor of comparative politics at Brandeis University and a fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and at the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies, Harvard University. Louise A. Tilly is Michael E. Gellert Professor of History and Sociology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.

Review:

The authors provide lucid perspectives often lacking in books on the travails of the EU. (Foreign Affairs)

An ambitious volume. Its broad substantive and temporal scope as well as its interdisciplinary foundations open up new perspectives on integration in Europe. This book represents a successful and original attempt to move beyond the narrow academic debates surrounding the integration initiatives of the past decade. (Jeffrey Anderson, Brown University)

...the editors do provide some insightful overviews in their brief introductions to each of the main sections, and bring out the links between these diverse strands. (Stephen George, University of Sheffield English Historical Review, Nov.1999)

Individual contributions to European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective are important, perceptive, and often fascinating. ...A valuable contribution to contemporary debates on the European Union and similar pursuits. ...Students of the European Union and the relationship between sociopolitical actors and political institutions, as well as comparative-historical researcherswill benefit from the numerous contributions made by European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective. (Contemporary Sociology)

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0847685012
• ISBN 13: 9780847685011
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356
• Editor: Klausen Jytte, Tilly Louise A.