Political Allegiance after European Integration

摘要

This latest volume in the Palgrave Studies in European Politics is a welcome addition to a distinguished and wide-ranging series of cutting-edge, research-driven monographs: post-graduate students of the EU and their supervisors will welcome both the style and the author's attempts to position his narrative skilfully within several debates in political theory and political sociology. The author's case is that over the last decade or so, scholars of the EU have increasingly been asking questions about the democratic basis of the Union; do we need a constitution and can there ever be such a thing as a European Society? Integration was seen largely as 'an elite-driven process' (p. vii) in which broader societal concerns played a limited role; but in the event non-elites were clearly liable to have a strong influence on the course of integration as various referenda results demonstrated only too clearly.