Hooghe, Liesbet and Marks, Gary. (1997) "The making of a polity: The struggle over European integration". In: UNSPECIFIED, Seattle, Washington. (Unpublished)
Abstract
Our point of departure is that economic developments in Western Europe during the past two decades--internationalization of markets for goods and especially capital, decline of traditional industry and industrial employment, pressures toward flexible specialized production, decentralization of industrial relations, declining international competitiveness and high levels of long-term unemployment--have transformed authoritative decision making as well as economic policy and political-economic institutions. We argue that these big questions have generated a structure of contestation that cannot be reduced to differences among national states about distributing pareto benefits among themselves or lowering transaction costs or enforcing inter-state agreements. European integration, we believe, is an irreducibly political, as well as an economic, process.
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