Debates on European Integration. A Reader
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Debates on European Integration. A Reader Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni (ed.) Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2006, 511pp. ISBN: 1-4039-4104-1 Journal of International Relations and Development (2007) 10, 319–321. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jird.1800127 The rapid growth of European Studies degree programmes, modules and courses in Europe, North America and elsewhere over the last two decades has inevitably been accompanied by a flood of new textbooks. Indeed, with each year these volumes have grown longer and wordier. The recently published second edition of Ian Bache and Stephen George’s (2006) ‘Politics in the European Union’, one of the best textbooks covering European Union politics, contains 13 chapters dealing with just the historical development of the Union from the Second World War to the contemporary ‘crossroads’ that it currently finds itself in. While this rapid growth in the breadth and depth of textbook material is to be welcomed, it has made it increasingly difficult to motivate undergraduate and even graduate students to read the original theoretical literature on European integration. After all, most textbooks provide a condensed and professional analysis of the integration literature. Why should students ‘get their hands dirty’ by delving into dusty university bookshelves to search for the original writings of David Mitrany (1943), Karl Deutsch et al. (1957), Ernst Haas (1958) and other dinosaurs of European integration theory? This book not only provides a compelling argument for both students and scholars to read and re-read the original writings, but it also presents these original theoretical texts in a neat, tidy and affordable volume. The preface details the importance and relevance of theoretical texts to the study of European integration: ‘the role and function of specific institutions and actors can rarely be understood through purely empirical knowledge’, thus ‘a full understanding of European integration requires us to unmask and evaluate the underlying theoretical assumptions which inform descriptive accounts’ (p. xiii). To this end, the editor Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni has collected and analysed ‘a number of seminal theoretical works which have shaped the field of European integration studies and which continue to serve as bedrock for theoretical work on integration’ (p. xiii). In contrast to other European integration readers, such as the third edition of the volume edited by Brent F. Nielsen and Alexander Stubb (2003), Eilstrup-Sangiovanni focuses on purely theoretical developments and innovations. This means that readers of this volume will not benefit from the insights of politicians from Winston Churchill and Charles De Gaulle to Tony Blair and Joshka Fischer, or examine the opposing visions of Europe offered by Jacques Delors and Margaret Thatcher. However, this is no great loss. By focusing on the central theoretical works of European integration, readers are forced to consider exactly what has driven integration rather than competing prescriptive political visions of a unified o
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