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Thesis advisor: James Cronin / In 1957, the Treaty of Rome was signed by six West European states to create the European Economic Community (EEC). Designed to foster a common internal market for a limited amount of industrial goods and to define a customs union within the Six, it did not at the time particularly stand out among contemporary international organizations. However, by 1992, within the space of a single generation, this initially limited trade zone had been dramatically expanded into the world's largest trade bloc and had pooled substantial sovereignty among its member states on a range of core state responsibilities. Most remarkably, this transformation resulted from a thoroughly novel political experiment that combined traditional interstate cooperation among its growing membership with an unprecedented transfer of sovereignty to centralized institutions. Though still lacking the traditional institutions and legitimacy of a fully-fledged state, in many policy areas, the European Union (EU) that emerged in 1992 was nonetheless collectively a global force. My dissertation argues that the organization's unprecedented transfer of national sovereignty challenged the very definition of the modern European state and its function. In structure and ambition, it represented far more than just a regional trade bloc among independent states: it became a unique political entity that effectively remodelled the fundamental blueprint of the conventional European state structure familiar to scholars for generations. How did such a dramatic transformation happen so quickly? I argue that three forces in particular were at play: the external pressures of globalization, the search for a new Western European and German identity within the Cold War world and the often unintended consequences of the interaction between member state governments and the Community's supranational institutions. In particular, I examine the history of the EEC's monetary union, common foreign policy, common social policy and the single market to explain the impact of the above forces of change on the EEC's rapid transformation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

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This is a comparative study which asked the central research question of whether domestic conditions or the European Union's policy approach best explained whether the EU was able to engage with potential new member states. Three cases of post-Communist states in the EU's immediate neighbourhood were studied: Poland, Croatia and Ukraine, over the time period 1990 to 2013. The interplay between external and domestic factors was studied in terms of the policy approach employed by the EU, the receptiveness of political elites to EU influence, and the level of pro-EU civil society activity. The evidence from this study seems to suggest that the EU policy approach was successful with potential member states in Central and Eastern Europe, such as Poland, although the problem of democratic backsliding post-accession later emerged, to which the EU had no immediate policy approach. The EU's policy approach in the Western Balkans appears to have had some success, seen in the case of Croatia, but it is unclear whether this success will be replicated in the more problematic cases, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. The EU's policy approach through its European Neighbourhood Policy has not been successful in the East, exemplified in the case of Ukraine. Domestic factors, and in particular the receptivity of the political elite to EU influence, appear to remain the most important in explaining whether the EU is able to engage with potential new member states. The EU's policy approach to engaging with pro-EU civil society does not appear to be successful, at least in the short to medium term. It is argued that the EU needs to develop a more flexible policy approach in order to be better able to take advantage of ‘windows of opportunity' that arise. In addition, the EU should enhance its policy approach to co-ordinate its efforts more closely with other relevant external actors.

European national party systems have reflected in different ways the major influence of the Eurozone crisis on individual countries. The focus of my project concerns this exact diversity and the main research question is formed as follows: How have European national party systems responded to the Eurozone crisis? In particular, I looked at the degree of party system fragmentation and polarisation, the degree of salience of the EU issue, and government composition in four European countries: Germany, the UK, Ireland, and Greece, during the years 2008-early 2016. Although the main causal condition of the project is the Eurozone crisis (economic conditions), several cross-case and country-specific intervening factors were examined in order to identify possible reasons behind the responses of national party systems to the crisis. Data were gathered through expert surveys and interviews with experts and political actors. The results showed the new era of the national party systems in Europe, which started in 2008 and transformed massively national politics by revealing the power of combined long-term trends and a sudden turmoil. The changes were of different degrees at the various systems depending on their structural characteristics. Old and new minor parties gained ground in all the four cases by promoting their anti-mainstream profile and by activating a pro-/anti-establishment divide. The results revealed some intriguing patterns in the party system response, among mostly diverse cases and confirmed how domestic conditions and issues had the lead over international events, even if the latter are as significant as the Eurozone crisis. The Eurozone crisis played a massive role in party system structures. Although that was the case mainly with the countries with poor economic performance during the recession years, the crisis had a significant impact on the way parties related and competed in all of the cases, as it exposed underlying transformations and simmering issues in the national party systems. This showed that we need to link short- and long-term transitions with national political structures and international events in order to understand party system change. An underlying establishment/anti-establishment cleavage, which found a channel of expression during the crisis, cut across traditional lines of competition and appeared likely to determine future developments in the national party systems. Finally, the EU issue was operationalised in different ways in each system and by each party, but in any case it needed to be highlighted through the discussions over salient domestic issues.

One of the most striking aspects of the eurozone crisis is its asymmetric impact. Detrimental economic and political consequences have resonated across Europe, but peripheral countries have been most severely affected. Individual peripheral countries have followed dramatically different paths to crisis, making it difficult to speak of the crisis as a single phenomenon. Bringing literature from Comparative Political Economy (CPE) on capitalist diversity into dialogue with scholarship on Europeanisation, this thesis develops the concept of modernisation via Europeanisation in order to explore the much overlooked ways in which the negotiation of European integration has been generative of divergence of the European periphery. To capture this asymmetry, I investigate the origins of the eurozone crisis across three cases – Greece, Portugal and Ireland. I study the active attempt by these countries to negotiate and adapt to a ‘one-size-fits-all' model of European integration. This approach sheds light on how adaptation to Europe inadvertently resulted in the generation of fragile, hybrid, models of growth in each of the three countries. These findings have significant implications for how we understand the origins of the crisis. They suggest that it has been the European periphery's attempt to ‘follow the rules' of European Integration, rather than their failure or inability to do so, that explains their current difficulties. This novel reading of the origins of the eurozone crisis directly challenges settled common-senses in existing literature. The eurozone crisis cannot be explained by narratives which stress the ‘immaturity' of the countries of the European Periphery. Neither can it be explained by more critical narratives which understand the periphery as a victim of German ‘economic domination'. Instead, the relative severity of the crisis in the periphery can be explained by the EU's obstinate promotion of a single model of convergence which has generated a variety of different European economic trajectories.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 307-323). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): David S. Yost. Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-45). Also available online.

Bibliography: leaves 310-347. / ix, 347 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Concerned with linkages between domestic and foreign policy formation in Germany, France and the UK, and with relations among the three states. Argues that either there must be an acquiesence on the part of the EU member states and societies resistant to genuine supranationalism, or the perpetuation of nation-states in Europe with result in a less European, and more national, reunited Germany. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Philosophy, 1997