Europe plurielle/Multiple Europes – serie

Successive enlargements of the EU have constituted major events in the history of European integration. They affect the Union’s institutions, policies and policy-making processes and, because of the impact of these changes, enlargements have often been controversial. The major enlargement in 2004, which took the EU from 15 to 25 member countries, was followed by Romanian and Bulgarian membership in 2007 and Croatian membership in 2013.It is often argued that there is now enlargement fatigue, and progress towards the next step seems slow. However, a number of countries, especially in the Western Balkans, are eager to join, and Turkey has been an official candidate since 1999. Major challenges lie ahead for the candidates as well as the EU. Will the candidates be able to carry out the required reforms to fulfil the membership conditions, and will the EU be able – politically and institutionally – to widen its membership further? These decisions are of strategic importance for the future of Europe.This book analyses the issues involved, exploring the status of the ongoing enlargement process and the political games associated with it.

Focusing on European cultural and intellectual history in first half of the twentieth century, The Space of Crisis investigates how notions of crisis and changing perceptions of space influenced the way Europeans imagined themselves, their past and their future. The book is an attempt to reassess some of the main assumptions of historians and political theorists about the way intellectuals, artists, legal theorists and historians interpreted Europe’s crisis during the 1920s and 1930s. By so doing, it investigates the intellectual foundations of the ensuing federalist and Europeanist movements, highlighting the importance of the writings of those years in understanding today’s Europe and its current predicaments.

To cut off time and seal away the past, to proclaim a new beginning in the present and project a better future onto tomorrow – and thus to make history – is a key signature of modern social, political and cultural discourses. In this book, this practice is represented through the metaphor of the Zero Hour, which alludes to the wish to rebuild the past in the face of a crisis-ridden present characterised by growing conceptual insecurity, hoping for a more stable future. Indeed, the ever-new construction of our past, sequenced and ordered in explanatory narratives, bears witness to a future that ‘ought to be’. As the case studies in this volume show, this is a global phenomenon. Against the backdrop of a confluence of experiences which unsettled conceptual norms after the First World War, this volume presents a novel approach to global history as it examines ways of breaking with the past and the way in which societies, as well as transnational historical actors, employ key concepts to compose arguments for a better tomorrow.

Estonians for Europe provides a unique insight into nearly eighty years of the history surrounding European unification. Concentrating on Estonian aspirations for an integrative organization in international relations, the book illustrates a number of parallels and differences between commonly held narratives of twentieth-century European history.

An accepted narrative within European integration history is that the issue in which city to locate European Community headquarters was decided on the intergovernmental level between the member states. In the present volume, this view is expanded with the example of Strasbourg by arguing that activity at the local level is an important factor as well.A set of highly active political and associational local agents used different strategies to consolidate the city’s position against competing cities and the European Communities. This study finds that a highly specialised group of municipal politicians and civil servants were an important factor for bringing the European institutions to the city.