Comparative National Responses to International Economic Challenges: A Review of Some Recent American Literature

-

"Fighting the last war? or Energy and/or ecology in the European Community: Reflections on the form and content of European integration"

[From the Introduction]. European Community studies have been much more preoccupied with the process of regional integration than with its content, more with policy convergence than with politics. This is partly due to the widespread currency of a relatively unexamined premise which posits a national statelike entity as the expected terminus of the EC system. I believe that this implicit metatheoretical expectation has been powerfully reinforced by academic and policy-making constituencies supportive of the integrative enterprise. Unfortunately, and speaking as a supporter of European integration, this stance is increasingly problematic on both normative and analytical grounds. This paper attempts to make the case for redirecting the focus of EC studies to take account systematically of the role of politics, ideology and the content of integrative schemes

"The EC and the Global Environment: Dimensions, Trends, and Prospects"

[From the Introduction]. This may initially strike one as a strange question. After all, the environment has become a virtually universal concern of politics and policy-making. Nevertheless, the question deserves to be posed because what is and is not included in the term, environment, cannot be taken for granted. For the sake of simplicity, one can imagine two ways of considering "the environmental." One way draws lines around anthropogenically traceable degradations of the biosphere, taking as the baseline extant social institutions and cultural orientations. This approach is, broadly speaking, not only anthropocentric, but in a way, ethnocentric as well. Interest in the environment comes from and is pretty much limited by "fixing" (as in abating) undesirable transformations of our natural surroundings. Methodologically, this approach is Cartesian, in the sense that it instinctively proceeds by isolating effects prior to engineering responses to them. Such an approach does not question the parameters of human action. A more holistic approach can be defined in contrast which dares to judge our productive and consumptive practices by the character of our relationship to our "natural" surroundings itself

ECSA Review 12/4, Fall 1999. Special Report. The European Union in 1999: Finances, Institutions, and War

Four ECSA members analyze key events during 1999 in the European Union. [Includes introduction by Mark A. Pollack, series editor]