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This text offers a concise and accessible introduction for students new to the study of the European Union. It offers an up-to-date guide to the major issues and areas of debate.

This book comprehensively reviews one of the most salient on-going debates at the heart of the EU today, democratic reform. It provides an evaluation of how democracy might best be defined in the transnational context of the EU and explores the key strategies that have been deployed to enhance the EU's democracy.

Understanding the institutions of the European Union is vital to understanding how it functions. This book provides students with an introduction to the main institutions and explains their different roles in a user friendly format.

This article argues that European Union Studies (EUS) provides a useful resource for scholars engaged in the rethinking of international relations in the era of an emerging global polity which has been neglected for reasons of what might be called discipline blindness. More precisely, my claim is that EUS can help IR scholars ask new and useful questions about the nature, development and functioning of the emerging global polity. This is because EUS has already drawn on, and adapted, comparative politics to produce a significant body of work which can act as a transmission belt for ideas, concepts and approaches between the study of 'domestic politics' and the study of 'international relations', and thus begin to show IR scholars how these tools can be adapted and used to study politics in post- and transnational contexts.

peer-reviewed ; Democratization has suddenly become a fashionable theme in both the practice and the study of European integration.1 Since the Treaty on European Union (TEU) of 1991, which both raised the profile of the integration process and substantially extended the scope of powers enjoyed by the European Union (EU; the Union), the Union has become far more controversial. Received wisdom dictates that it suffers from a (generally unspecified) 'democratic deficit', which was scarcely noticed beforehand. Paradoxically, however, in the last decade several attempts to render the EU more democratic have actually been made, a good example being the significant empowerment of the European Parliament (EP). Moreover, the TEU made member-state nationals EU citizens, an unprecedented step in world history, even if EU citizenship remains rather limited. Indeed, the EU is preparing for both further enlargement and the next round of Treaty reform (due in 2004) by launching a process of 'civil dialogue' and a quasi-constitutional convention. These are supposed to provide suggestions about increasing the legitimacy and democratic credentials of the Union system.

As a strategy for tackling the 'democratic deficit', attention is increasingly shifting towards the 'Europeanization' of civil society, the latter being traditionally viewed as a means both to limit state power and to promote intra‐citizenry solidarity. However, this attempted change requires in turn actors who are both able and willing to act as agents of political socialization in the context of EU policy‐making. This article examines the emphasis placed by both EU actors and the current academic literature on NGOs as such agents. Drawing on an analysis of similar claims made in development policy, I isolate the main indicators of NGOs' ability to foster the Europeanization of civil society via political socialization and put forward seven key tests of their ability to carry out this function in the EU context. These are then evaluated against the results of original empirical investigations. I argue that NGOs are currently unsuited to the task of Europeanizing civil society thanks to their inability to promote the political socialization of their supporters. As a consequence that task requires EU‐level institutional reform informed by iterated public dialogue, as well as change in the working practices of NGOs.