Brian Shaev – författare

This history of the Socialist Group in the early European Parliament covers its role in six policy areas that formed the core of postwar European integration: foreign policy, democracy and institutions, social policy, agriculture, migration and free movement, and cartel and competition policy.By the early 1960s, Socialist Group members had laboriously constructed an alternative path for European unity intended to reconcile trade liberalization with macroeconomic programming and social welfare. As their ambitions grew, they clashed with other party groups, turning the European Parliament into a venue for political battles. However, disappointments, generational turnover and European enlargement delivered mighty blows to the group’s culture of transnational cooperation in the late 1960s–1970s. For readers interested in why many socialists supported European integration after WWII—the influence they had and how they grappled with the policy side of European unity—this book presents a penetratingly deep glimpse into the Socialist Group’s concrete vision for a Socialist Europe in the postwar era.This volume will appeal to scholars and students interested in social democracy, European Studies and European Union Studies, parliamentary democracy, and modern European political and economic history.

This book considers a central issue of our time: the relationship between the macroeconomic objectives of political parties in democratic countries and the legal framework of market economies. The impressive panel of contributors examines social-democratic policies on cartels, market concentration and competition in different European countries, spanning a hundred-year period (specifically the interwar period, the initial postwar period, the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, and the 2000s).This thought-provoking volume challenges the dominant belief that the EU’s economic system and competition policy were mainly influenced by neoliberal economic thinking, instead showing that Keynesian and social-democratic positions played a major role in the emergence of this system.It will be valuable reading for advanced students, researchers and policymakers interested in modern economic history, industrial organization, political economy, European legal history and political science.