Where does Europe begin and end? How have the European Union and its precursors decided which countries are eligible to join the community and which are not? Few issues are more hotly debated, more important for the course of European integration, or more consequential for individuals in and around the EU. As this book demonstrates, the limits of Europe are determined by the values shared at particular moments in time by the leaders of the community's member states, regardless of their particular policy preferences. These membership norms shape the community's decisions on enlargement by empowering certain political forces and disempowering others. And contrary to conventional wisdom, these norms have changed considerably over time. The Limits of Europe: Membership Norms and the Contestation of Regional Integration uses a novel combination of normative genealogy, statistical analysis and detailed tracing of EU decision-making on Greece, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine to demonstrate that changing membership norms have had a stronger impact on the community's enlargement since the 1950s than treaty rules, the location of the states seeking membership, or even the commercial or security interests of member states.

Over recent years, a series of challenges including Brexit and the rise of Euroscepticism, have manifested in landmark moments for European integration. First published as a special issue of Global Discourse, this edited collection investigates whether these crises are isolated phenomena or symptoms of a deeper malaise across the EU.

This comparative study harks back to the revolutionary year of 1989 and asks two critical questions about the resulting reconfiguration of Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of communism: Why did Central and East European states display such divergent outcomes of their socio-political transitions? Why did three of those states—Poland, Bulgaria, and Russia—differ so starkly in terms of the pace and extent of their integration into Europe? Rumena Filipova argues that Poland’s, Bulgaria’s, and Russia’s dominating conceptions of national identity have principally shaped these countries’ foreign policy behavior after 1989. Such an explanation of these three nations’ diverging degrees of Europeanization stands in contrast to institutionalist-rationalist, interest-based accounts of democratic transition and international integration in post-communist Europe. She thereby makes a case for the need to include ideational factors into the study of International Relations and demonstrates that identities are not easily malleable and may not be as fluid as often assumed. She proposes a theoretical “middle-ground” argument that calls for “qualified post-positivism” as an integrated perspective that combines positivist and post-positivist orientations in the study of IR.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK “...essential reading for anyone interested in the existence and exercise of EU powers in the field of criminal law. Öberg's critical examination of the constitutional constraints to EU action also raises many questions that are of great interest in other areas of EU competence. The book deserves a wide readership among scholars interested in the constitutional workings of the European Union.” Samuli Miettinen, University of Helsinki & Tallinn University "The main strength of this book lies in its comprehensiveness of dealing with the topical issue of EU regulatory criminal law from the fascinating perspective of limits to EU powers. Its particular contribution to existing scholarship in the field of EU criminal law concerns its focus on judicial checks on the exercise of competences as to which the book offers a convincing proposal for a stricter standard for judicial review in matters of regulatory criminal law and beyond." Professor Jannemieke Ouwerkerk, Leiden Law School "An excellent read on competence allocation in EU law and what it means in criminal law context. This book guides the reader through very complex questions of the contours of subsidiarity, national competences and the exact limits of EU powers. It also supplies up to date case studies of financial crimes and the need for the EU to act effectively and thereby increase confidence in the market and the challenges it may cause for national systems. A very timely contribution." Ester Herlin Karnell, VU University Amsterdam Pursuant to the precepts of EU law, EU policy-makers are bound to ensure that any EU legislation must fall within the remit of the EU's competences. This monograph looks at this highly contested issue, with particular reference to European Union criminal law. It looks at the powers enjoyed by the EU to impose criminal sanctions to suggest mechanisms by which legislative powers could be kept in check. The book argues that the main responsibility for providing checks against the exercise of EU power lies with the EU judiciary. It argues that the most effective form of review is procedural and through the case study of sanctions, provides the basis for such a review. Innovative, engaging and rigorous, this is an important publication both in the field of European criminal and constitutional law.

This volume, published in honor of historian Geoffrey Parker, explores the working of European empires in a global perspective, focusing on one of the most important themes of Parker’s work: the limits of empire, which is to say, the centrifugal forces - sacral, dynastic, military, diplomatic, geographical, informational - that plagued imperial formations in the early modern period (1500-1800). During this time of wrenching technological, demographic, climatic, and economic change, empires had to struggle with new religious movements, incipient nationalisms, new sea routes, new military technologies, and an evolving state system with complex new rules of diplomacy. Engaging with a host of current debates, the chapters in this book break away from conventional historical conceptions of empire as an essentially western phenomenon with clear demarcation lines between the colonizer and the colonized. These are replaced here by much more fluid and subtle conceptions that highlight complex interplays between coalitions of rulers and ruled. In so doing, the volume builds upon recent work that increasingly suggests that empires simply could not exist without the consent of their imperial subjects, or at least significant groups of them. This was as true for the British Raj as it was for imperial China or Russia. Whilst the thirteen chapters in this book focus on a number of geographic regions and adopt different approaches, each shares a focus on, and interest in, the working of empires and the ways that imperial formations dealt with - or failed to deal with - the challenges that beset them. Taken together, they reflect a new phase in the evolving historiography of empire. They also reflect the scholarly contributions of the dedicatee, Geoffrey Parker, whose life and work are discussed in the introductory chapters and, we’re proud to say, in a delightful chapter by Parker himself, an autobiographical reflection that closes the book.

The European Court of Justice is widely acknowledged to have played a fundamental role in developing the constitutional law of the EU, having been the first to establish such key doctrines as direct effect, supremacy and parallelism in external relations. Traditionally, EU scholarship has praised the role of the ECJ, with more critical perspectives being given little voice in mainstream EU studies. From the standpoint of legal reasoning, Gerard Conway offers the first sustained critical assessment of how the ECJ engages in its function and offers a new argument as to how it should engage in legal reasoning. He also explains how different approaches to legal reasoning can fundamentally change the outcome of case law and how the constitutional values of the EU justify a different approach to the dominant method of the ECJ.

The increase in the European Union's executive powers in the areas of economic and financial governance has thrown into sharp relief the challenges of EU law in constituting, framing, and constraining the decision-making processes and political choices that have hitherto supported European integration. The constitutional implications of crisis-induced transformations have been much debated but have largely overlooked the tension between law and discretion that the post-2010 reforms have brought to the fore. This book focuses on this tension and explores the ways in which legal norms may (or may not) constrain and structure the discretion of the EU executive. The developments in the EU's post-crisis financial and economic governance act as a reference point from which to analyze the normative problems pertaining to the law's relationship to the exercise of discretion. Structured in three parts, the book starts by analyzing the challenges to the maxim that the law both grounds and constrains EU executive and administrative discretion, setting out the concepts, problems and approaches to the relation between law and discretion both in general public law and in EU law. It progresses to analyze how these problems and approaches have unfolded in EU's financial, economic and monetary governance. Finally, it moves on from these specific developments to assess how existing legal principles and means of judicial review contribute to ensuring the rationality and legality of EU's discretionary powers.

This is the first monograph providing a comprehensive legal analysis of the criminalisation of migration in Europe. The book puts forward a definition of the criminalisation of migration as the three-fold process whereby migration management takes place via the adoption of substantive criminal law, via recourse to traditional criminal law enforcement mechanisms including surveillance and detention, and via the development of mechanisms of prevention and pre-emption. The book provides a typology of criminalisation of migration, structured on the basis of the three stages of the migrant experience: criminalisation before entry (examining criminalisation in the context of extraterritorial immigration control, delegation and privatisation in immigration control and the securitisation of migration); criminalisation during stay (examining how substantive criminal law is used to regulate migration in the territory); and criminalisation after entry and towards removal (examining efforts to exclude and remove migrants from the territory and jurisdiction of EU Member States and criminalisation through detention). The analysis focuses on the impact of the criminalisation of migration on human rights and the rule of law, and it highlights how European Union law (through the application of both the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and general principles of EU law) and ECHR law may contribute towards achieving decriminalisation of migration in Europe.