European Union: a book review and analysis

¶ … European Union

McCormick, John. The European Union: Politics and Policies. Westview Press; Fourth Edition (December 24, 2007)

Unarguably, the European Union is the most advanced form of political and economical integration between countries up to this day in history. The 27 European nations have found the appropriate mechanisms and instruments by which they could smooth their differences and solve the problems between them, create the appropriate institutions by which they could govern the relations between the member states and form a union that is becoming more and more one of the reliable poles of a multipolar world. All these helped the EU through its crisis and through a perpetual process of extension that included the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe in the European Union in the last two decades.

However, many of these mechanisms and institutions are extremely complicated in terms of functionality and one of the great merits of John McCormick's book on the European Union, its politics and policies, is exactly this capacity to shed light for even someone who hasn't had the slightest contact with the realities of the EU. On the other hand, the book is very well written to reach a higher level for those who are interested in deeper realities of the European Union. It is an introductory book, but the more one reads into it, the more one becomes more acquainted with the functionalities of the EU and can increase the level of profundity.

At the same time, especially since this is the fourth edition, the book is very well written to handle some of the developments in the European Union in the last decades, as well as some of the challenges that the EU faces in the future. One needs to understand that the period from 2000 to 2007 was equivalent with two waves of expansion for the EU, time in which 12 new countries were included in the union. The accession of these countries, many of them former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe was a cumbersome process and the actual integration of these countries remains a cumbersome process.

The book is structured, according to what has been previously mentioned, into three parts, so that the reader is gradually introduced and walked through some of the main aspects of the European Union. The first part deals with the European Union's history. This part is useful in understanding the EU's progress through its over fifty years of existence. The importance of the history part is essential, because John McCormick starts (with the second chapter, entitles Origins: The Postwar World) his entire presentation by showing the conditions in Europe and the end of the Second World War and how Germany and France found the diplomatic energy to put aside their differences and centuries of warmongering and rivalry in order to become the engine of what was to become later on the European Union.

The start of the European Union, as John McCormick shows, was fundamentally based on economic principles, namely the need to be able to support the economic reconstruction of Europe after the war. At the same time, the Cold War and the perpetual existence of the Soviet threat meant that the Western countries in Europe needed to put aside their differences and join in a united front against a common enemy. NATO provided the needed security umbrella, but the economic unity provided certainty that the Western countries could provide for themselves in the future.

The economic premises meant that the first step in the creation of the European Union was the creation of a coal and steel community, where the trade barriers for these two products would be removed between the member states. From that to the creation of a 6-member EU was only a small step. The rest of the first part deals with the subsequent waves of enlargement throughout the period from 1960 to 1986 (Enlargement: Looking North and South) and to some of the significant measures undertaken in the last two decades of existence, namely the adoption of the Euro and further expansion towards Eastern and Central Europe.

The second part of the book deals with the European Union's institutions. One of the phenomenal things about the European Union is its extraordinary capacity to be able to work both as a unified entity, in which all 27 voices act as one, and as a federation, in fact, of its member states. In order to be able to function in this manner, the European Union also needs functional institutions. John McCormick is keen in this part of the book to describe both how all these European institutions operate internally (the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the European Court of Justice and the European Council and Specialized Agencies) and, additionally, how they are able to work with one another in a functional manner. Each of these institutions is allocated a separate chapter, with generally the same structure that includes the institution's structure, its evolution, functionality and the way it works etc.

The final part of the book deals with policies. Policies, in fact, make institutions work and they manage to fix rules to which all countries members of the European Union must adhere by. Some of these are extremely complicated: the common agricultural policy, for example, dates almost to the very beginning of the European Union (back in the 1960s) and has evolved throughout time, despite remaining one of the fundamental pillars of the EU policies. Other policies, such as the cohesion policy, described in chapter 14, help new member states better integrate, from an economical and social perspective, into the union by allocating specific budgets for the development of certain regions.

The last two chapters, despite belonging to the same part on policies, have a forward looking perspective, trying to discuss the common foreign and security policies that the European Union is trying to put in place (chapter 15) and determine how the EU and the U.S. are likely to be working together in the next period of time, as well as the challenges that this relationship is likely to face.

In terms of the common foreign and security policy, the author is keen to emphasize the economic role of the European Union in the world and how that is likely to model the way that the EU is likely to act as a political and security actor on the international arena. At the same time, John McCormick shows the importance of the relations with Russia in the behavior of the EU, especially given the strong economic bonds that the EU has with Russia and, most notably, the energy dependency on Russian gas.