European Integration 1950 2003 or Sustaining Abundance

European Integration, 1950-2003: Superstate or New Market Economy?

Author: John Gillingham

Integration is the most significant European historical development in the past fifty years, eclipsing in importance even the collapse of the USSR. This movement toward economic and political union has not only helped revive, transform and rejuvenate a battered civilization; it is opening the way to a promising future. Yet, until now, no satisfactory explanation is to be found in any single book as to why integration is significant, how it originated and has developed, how it has changed and continues to change Europe, and where it is headed. John Gillingham is a professor of history at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His fields of research include European economic and cultural history as well as the history of international organizations. His book Coal, Steel and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945-1955(Cambridge, 1991) was awarded the prestigious George Lewis Beer Prize by the American Historical Association. In addition to two edited volumes and approximately fifty published articles, Gillingham is the author of Industry and Politics in the Third Reich (Columbia, 1985) and Belgian Business in the Nazi New Order (Ghent, 1977). Gillingham has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and elsewhere.

Foreign Affairs

This monumental book is in many ways the opposite of Tsoukalis': twice as long, far less interested in security and diplomacy, and held together by a thesis. The least one can say is that it is original. Gillingham is a firm believer in economic liberalism, and he conceives of the history of European integration as a contest between the liberal vision and the interventionist one. It is therefore not surprising that he begins not with the French proposal for a coal and steel community in 1950 but with "the classic liberal solution to the German problem" after the Second World War. He regards Margaret Thatcher's actions and influence as a powerful push toward "the formation of the kind of large, minimally regulated, decentralized market-driven interstate federal union that might have met with the approval of Friedrick Hayek" and portrays Jacques Delors (a Christian Democrat turned Socialist) as the enemy of that dream. Gillingham believes that "a federal Europe can be created democratically, functionally, and through the market — or not at all." But would "a feeling of European nationhood" result from the institutional evolution of the community into "an efta-like mechanism" to "encourage the emergence of an enterprise society" and "erode pointless hierarchies"? Is it true that the EU has "accomplished little or nothing in the last ten years"? Or that "a political Europe" is needed only as a hedge against the contingency of a large-scale disaster that could threaten the values of European civilization? In any case, Gillingham's belief that these values can be saved only by the economics and politics of classical liberalism is more an ideological position than a well thought outprogram.

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Sustaining Abundance: Environmental Performance in Industrial Democracies

Author: Lyle Scruggs

Representing the first comprehensive study of its kind, this book evaluates the comparative performance of national environmental policies since the beginning of the modern environmental era. Unlike other comparative studies, it looks directly at the purpose of environmental policy: pollution reduction. Lyle Scruggs presents four major explanations of environmental performance which it evaluates through the comparative statistical analysis of data from seventeen affluent countries. The results often challenge conventional explanations of good performance.

Table of Contents:

	List of Figures and Tables
	Preface
1	Introduction	1
2	Measuring National Environmental Performance	19
3	Economic Development, Geographic Advantage, and Environmental Performance	55
4	Public Opinion, Environmental Mobilization, and Environmental Performance	78
5	Pluralism, Corporatism, and Environmental Performance	122
6	Political Institutions	162
7	Checking the Robustness of the Results	191
8	Conclusion	204
App. I	Estimated Measures of Environmental Performance	215
App. II	Institutions for Environmental Policy Making in Fourteen Countries	219
	References	229
	Index	245