The contributors of this thoughtful book explore the role and influence of political leadership through a rigorous comparative analysis of regional-level dynamics in Europe. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Do NGOs strengthen Turkey's efforts at Europeanization and democratization or do they use EU funding to serve other interests?This book offers a critical investigation of the relationship between Turkish NGOs and the European Union (EU) and a nuanced assessment of the opportunities and limitations to fashioning social change by funding NGOs.

The research presented in this book based on new primary data demonstrates that in terms of civil society actors adapting to the European political space the Europeanization process has an uneven development. This innovative book integrates top-down approaches for the study of relationships within the developing EU-multilevel system (i.e., the consequences of Europeanization for civil society at the local level) and bottom-up approaches (i.e., the consequences of civil society for the process of European integration and democracy in the EU). The contributors argue that exploration of these recursive linkages requires a rethinking of the relationships between (local, national, and trans-national) civil society on the one hand, and multi-level governance on the other. In analyzing the opportunities for civil society associations to contribute to European integration and decision-making from various perspectives, the following findings are presented, amongst others: engagement with and confidence in the EU (compared to national institutions) is relatively weak among associational members party elites play a key gatekeeper role in the European space the EU and interest groups have had limited success in stimulating the development of citizen engagement, civil society and social capital in various countries. In the rapidly expanding field of research on democratic decision-making in Europe, this book will be welcomed by academics and scholars alike at postgraduate levels and above. Experts working in the field of European decision-making (such as lawyers and lobbyists) who are looking for conclusions based on high-quality empirical research will also find much in this book to engage them.

The collapse of communism in 1989 paved the way for the reunification of the continent. This book analyzes the impact of the different dynamics of change since 1989 on public policy and on various economic and political sectors.

Trenz introduces a sociological perspective on European integration by looking at different accounts of Europeanization as society building. He observes how Europeanization unfolds in ongoing practices and discourses through which social relations among the Europeans are redefined and re-embedded. The chapters describe how the project of European integration has been powerfully launched in postwar Europe as a normative venture that comprises polity and society building, how this project became ingrained in every-day life histories and experiences of the Europeans, how this project became contested and confronted resistances and, ultimately, how it went through its most severe crisis. A sociology of European integration is thus outlined along four main themes or narratives: first, the elite processes of identity construction and the framework of norms and ideas that carries such a construction (together with notions of European identity, EU citizenship, etc.); second, the socialization of European citizens, processes of banal Europeanism, and social transnationalism through everyday cross-border exchanges; third, the mobilization of resistance and Euroskepticism as a fundamental and collectively mobilized opposition to processes of Europeanization; and fourth, the political sociology of crisis, linked not only to financial turmoil but also, more fundamentally, to a legitimation crisis that affects Europe and the democratic nation-state.

This anthology is based on a symposium which had as its key issue a critical discussion of different theories of modernisation from the perspective of people's activities in local manorial societies. Modernisation can be studied in terms of changing values, norms and social relationships. From a theoretical point of view the book makes use of the possibility to change main macro-conceptions of the modernisation process, using dichotomies such as feudal/capitalist and individual/collective, and it also tries to integrate tradition and continuity perspective.

This book examines the effects of Europeanization on two cross-border states, Italy and Slovenia, in the period between 1990 and 2012. It does so by means of an analysis of specific funding programmes such as Interreg and Phare. The book explores whether Europeanization, through cross-border cooperation, has promoted a post-national mode of governance and new relations between the national, the supra-national and the local-regional level. It discusses whether a link can be established between the activities of sub-national actors (municipalities, regions) and the recent development of legal instruments designed to enhance cross-border cooperation. Taking the perspective of citizenship and focusing on ethnic minority groups and cultural-social associations, the book addresses the question of whether a new notion of citizenship, multi-layered and multi-dimensional, has emerged in cross-border areas through cross-border cooperation. ​