You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book provides a major empirical analysis of differing attitudes to European integration in three of Europe's most important countries: Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. From its beginnings, the European Union has resounded with debate over whether to move toward a federal or intergovernmental system. However, Juan Díez Medrano argues that empirical analyses of support for integration--by specialists in international relations, comparative politics, and survey research--have failed to explain why some countries lean toward federalism whereas others lean toward intergovernmentalism. By applying frame analysis to a unique set of primary sources (in-depth interviews, newspaper articl...
Inter-marriage both reflects and brings social change. This book draws on a unique survey of randomly selected samples of national and European binational couples to demonstrate that the latter are core cells of a future European society. Unrestricted freedom of movement has enabled a rise in the number of lower-class and middle-class binational couples among Europeans. Euro-couples fully integrate in their host cities but secure less support in solving everyday problems than do national ones, partly because of a relatively small network of relatives living close-by. Embeddedness in a dense international network and a cosmopolitan outlook also distinguish them from national couples. The book...
Nationalist movements in both the Basque Country and Catalonia are embedded in the context of Spanish rule, but they differ profoundly in their goals, strategies, constituencies, and success in marshaling public support. In a pathbreaking work of historical sociology, Juan Diez Medrano examines these differences for the first time. He provides not only a rich political history of the two cases but also a new explanation for why some nationalist movements adopt separatism or violence. Diez Medrano compares the formation of cultural identity in Catalonia and the Basque Country in an investigation that starts in the seventeenth century. For each region, he looks at patterns of industrialization...
An ambitious volume which asks why hopes are fading for a single European identity, despite decades of European integration.
Drawing on unique research and rich data on cross-border practices, this book offers an empirically-based view on Europeans’ interconnections in everyday life. It looks at the ways in which EU residents have been getting closer across national frontiers: in their everyday experiences of foreign countries – work, travel, personal networks – but also their knowledge, consumption of foreign products, and attitudes towards foreign culture. These evolving European dimensions have been enabled by the EU-backed legal opening to transnational economic and cultural transactions, while also differing according to national contexts. The book considers how people reconcile their increasing cross-border interconnections and a politically separating Europe of nation states and national interests.
How is the European Union framed in national intellectual debates? How is the evolving polity conceived? In answer to these questions, European Stories develops a comparison between intellectual narratives of European integration across twelve national cases in order to offer a wide range of contrasting intellectual contexts.
This book explores the normative foundations of ASEAN and the EU. It revives the history of the two organizations in an in-depth narrative of the protracted arguments surrounding their establishment, legal integration and enlargement. While political actors used norms to legitimize their ideas for institutional change, the complex and dynamic nature of these norms also provided the breeding ground for contestation and, sometimes, institutional sclerosis and failure. Recasting these processes in an innovative English School framework, the volume makes a crucial contribution to the literature of Comparative Regionalism that goes beyond Eurocentric perspectives.
A 2005 analysis of both the causes and consequences of the international expansion of Spanish multinational firms.
Claudia Hampton, a beautiful, famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But, as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work: �a history of the world � and in the process, my own�. Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There is Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt. Penelope Lively�s Booker Prize-winning novel weaves an exquisite mesh of memories, flashbacks and shifting voices, in a haunting story of loss and desire.
Children constitute a large part of the population of developing countries. This text considers issues such as education, child labour, street children, child soldiers, refugees, child slaves, and the impact of environmental change and hazards on children.