Fifty years since the 1957 signing of the Treaty of Rome, the document establishing the foundations for the modern European Union (EU), Georgetown University Associate Professor
Kathleen McNamara and co-editor Sophie Meunier analyze European integration in their new book,
Making History: European Integration and Institutional Change at Fifty (Oxford University Press, 2007). They gather leading scholars to consider policy issues from a broad historical perspective including citizenship, competitive policy, foreign policy and the stability of the EU as a political system.
“This volume presents not a snapshot of the state of the EU today, but rather a three-dimensional study that richly portrays the past and suggests the future of European integration,” write the co-editors.
The collection is the first to use 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. Contributing authors consider the founding and future of the EU itself as a governance system, the politics of markets and key issues in European political economy, the legal and social order progressively taking shape in Europe, and the debate over the development of the EU as a sovereign state in world politics. The volume argues that the EU today may be at a crossroads – not because of the recent failed constitutional referenda but rather because of the unresolved tensions in European governance not banished with the referenda’s defeat. Overall the authors find that the EU is a remarkably stable and robust political system, despite recent controversies.
In addition, Georgetown University Assistant Professor Abraham Newman offers a chapter on data privacy and the EU’s surprising success in creating a new regime more stringent and more widely emulated than that of the United States. He looks at the role of administrative feedbacks in producing a strong Commission effort in this area, essential to policy development.
Kathleen McNamara is associate professor in the Department of Government and Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University where she teaches courses on the politics of international economic relations, with a focus on the European Union, the Euro and the European Central Bank. She is author of
The Currency of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union and has published numerous essays on globalization, economic institutions and the role of norms and culture in policymaking. She has been a German Marshall Fund Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an executive board member of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.
