The thesis examines British and French state action, that is to say both the characteristic practices of central governments and their underpinning, the working conceptions of public policymaking in technical, political and administrative circles. Taken together, practices and conceptions make up a `referential framework' of public action with distinctive, deep-seated and enduring features in each country. The British and French referential frameworks are deducted from two empirical, comparative case studies of passenger rail transport policy in Britain and France in the years 1965-1993. Use is made of published, archival and interview material, comprising both quantitative and qualitative data, relating to the British and French experiences in the research and development of high speed rolling stock technology (APT and TGV trains) and the planning of new high speed rail infrastructure (Paris-Lyon TGV line and Channel Tunnel Rail Link schemes). The case studies thus constitute windows into the realities of the British and French policy processes. The empirical findings of the case studies point to highly contrasted British and French referential frameworks, of which traditional models of state action cannot adequately take account. For instance, the dominance of often contradictory political and financial imperatives in the British case studies cannot be explained solely in terms of limited government intervention, whilst the prevailing technico-economic rationale in the French case studies does not fully accord with received ideas about the propensity of the French State to intervene in economic life.

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This thesis demonstrates the powerful relationship between ethnicity, culture, nation and state in the Basque Country and the Former Yugoslavia. In placing Basque and Yugoslav sub-state nationalism in comparative relief this study argues that political state or autonomy seeking behavior on the basis of an ethnically defined or imagined community continues to have powerful contemporary salience. Furthermore when situated within the literature on nationalism, these two cases suggest that the theoretical literature needs to be reworked beyond the positions of Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner. The endurance of cultural claims to a political state suggests that the connection between ethnicity and the nation is stronger then many contemporary observers have suggested. It is argued that the cultural, political and territorial rights of sub-state nations are likely to remain highly divisive sites of historical, cultural and political contestation. As a force, nationalism is by no means relegated to the past by cosmopolitanism or a ‘post-national’ shift as a number of high profile commentators in the contemporary social sciences have argued. Rather, it remains an active and powerful idea that will continue to shape the sociopolitical landscape of human societies into the twenty-first century as it has the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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This thesis maintains that the study and practice of European integration is hindered by an unquestioned and all-embracing conceptual foundation, derived from 17th/18th century political thought. By virtue of identity-related assumptions including 'nation-state', 'nationalism', and 'sovereignty', which rest on an exclusive binary distinction between "self" and "other", this foundation is inadequate and anachronistic as a theoretical lens through which to understand the dynamics of contemporary Europe. / Chapter 1 reveals the inadequacy of existing theories of European integration, and Chapter 2 traces this inadequacy to the issue of identity, tying it in with a modern identity crisis. It is argued that the theory and practice of European integration in the 1990's depends on a fundamental reconceptualisation of identity, to eliminate the conceptual rigidity of exclusive self/other binary distinction, and so to provide the basis for a new kind of European identity. In Chapter 3, the framework of a new "non-fixed", "non-essential" and pragmatic identity (and therefore European identity), beyond the self/other boundaries of contemporary thought, is elaborated through the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, and its effect on the study and practice of European integration is assessed.

What are the determinants of the formation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC)? This is the question around which this dissertation evolves. Simple it might be as a question, preoccupation with it aims at disclosing the substance and nature of contemporary subregional cooperation which takes place at the borderlands of Europe. This dissertation is above all a case study based on empirical research. The object of analysis is the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), a cooperative structure that emerged in Europe in the early 1990s. Here we do not claim to undertake an area research rather we aim at examining an international political economy phenomenon. The main conceptual element of this dissertation is that it brings forward the notion of subregionalism. To examine the formation of Black Sea subregionalism we embark on an eclectic theoretical approach and apply an analytical framework of five variables which come both from within the subregional level and outside of it: economic difficulties, transnational demands, leadership, security dilemma and the European Union. What this dissertation concludes is that BSEC is an intergovernmental mode of cooperation representing more a foreign policy tool and less an integration process. We show that the Black Sea has witnessed a structural or 'instrumental' subregionalism of intergovernmental nature which is shaped by the interplay of the above mentioned variables. The correlation between subregionalism (around the Black Sea) and regionalism (Europe-wide) is thus of great importance. Thus, BSEC is better understood not within the framework of the regionalization-globalization nexus but rather in the framework of the new European order. Furthermore we show how contemporary subregionalism, being a primarily political instrument, is of a flexible nature responding to different needs at different times.

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For a long time, the European Parliament (EP) was viewed as a lobbying sideshow mainly to be targeted if interest groups were unsuccessful at getting their demands included in the European Commission’s proposal. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have a reputation for being particularly open to diffuse interests who, due to their limited resources, use ‘friendly’ MEPs to put pressure on the European Commission and the Council. The notion of the EP representing diffuse interests conflicts with the broader political science literature on interest groups, which dwells on business bias. There are, however, good reasons to doubt the EP’s reputation as a defender of diffuse interests. Much of our current knowledge about the EP’s interest group politics stems from a time when the EP’s legislative powers were more limited. Within the last twenty years, the EP has evolved from a ‘multilingual talking shop’ to a genuine co-legislator with the Council. The increased powers of the EP raise the question of whether EP interest group politics has normalised, whereby the assumptions of the interest group literature would seem to reflect the reality of the EP. A common assumption in the interest group literature is that diffuse interests carry limited weight in decision-making because their resources and interests remain subordinate to that of business. However, business influence differs across policy fields depending on how the costs and benefits related to policies are distributed. The aim of my thesis is to investigate how the distribution of costs and benefits of legislative proposals influence interest groups’ likelihood of winning particular conflicts in the EP. This is done by examining four legislative dossiers in the areas of employment, consumer, and environmental policies. The thesis draws on the process-tracing of EU documents, and 144 interviews with MEPs, EP officials, and interest groups.