Making The European Polity: Reflexive integration in the EU

Today's Europe is marked by an amazing pace of integration and major changes have taken place within a short period of the time. The European Union now consists of twenty-five member states, however, there is confusion and disagreement about the future design. The European Union Polity investigates how the European Union should develop and organize itself and offers a reflexive approach to integration based on the theory of communicative action. The book conceives of the EU as a law based on supranational polity lacking the identity of a people as well as the coercive means of a state and argues that it is a polity with an organized capacity to act, but no sole apex of authority. Making an important contribution to the theoretical discussions on the EU, the contributors explore a range of issues including legitimacy, post-natural democracy and integration and provide in-depth analysis of social and tax foreign policy, identity formation, the reform process and the constitutional effects ofenlargement. This book will appeal to political scientists and particularly to students and researchers of European politics.