Alpar Lošonc

English

Research Papers in Economics

PANOECONOMICUS, 2007, 1, str. 119-122                                                                Book Review 
  119
 
Susan Senior Nello: The European Union:  
Economics, Policies and History 
(The McGraw Hill Companies, Berkshire, 2005) 
 
Alpar Lošonc
∗ 
 
The level of scientific interest in matters of the European Union is now such that 
the study of the EU may well be identified as a distinct field of study in its own 
right. In other words, the EU, in its totality, represents a meaningful unit. As far 
as practicality is concerned, “Europe” (officially defined as a confederation of 
independent states, each “carrying with itself”, as it were, its own limits), and the 
European Union are, in principle, open to indefinite expansion without pre-
established limits. This fact explains the author's sense of caution in relation to a 
constantly evolving EU. The member-states are subjecting themselves voluntar-
ily to some supra-national authorities, while maintaining completely heterogene-
ous attitudes with respect to certain traditional “aspects” of sovereignty (mone-
tary policy, military integration and alliances, border control, etc.). The apparent 
displacement of focus from politics to the economy by structural coupling in the 
EU, however, has given a constitutionally privileged place to the market and its 
laws. From the perspective of constitutional theory, it is assured that the Euro-
pean treaties from Rome to Nice represent a constitution for the Union, and in 
accordance with this we could treat the law-based integration in EU as the eco-
nomic constitution. As in other areas of EU studies, scholarship on the political 
power of the EU is beginning to move fruitfully beyond the constricting strait-
jacket of the intergovernmentalist/supranationalist debate. 
  Susan Senior Nello belongs to the school of research that thinks we 
should be optimistic about the EU’s future. Far from demonstrating the failure 
and fragility of European integration, the collapse of the constitutional project in 
France and the Netherlands exhibits the EU’s stability and success. Contempo-
rary Europe rests upon a pragmatically effective, normatively attractive and po-
litically stable “European constitutional settlement,” embodied in the revised 
Treaties of Rome. This settlement is both popular and broadly consistent with 
the majority of European citizens’ expectations for the EU. 
  In this book we are provided with admirable, and possibly complemen-
tary, examples of how scholarly research might proceed to clarify the political 
contexts in which principles of EU (the European “project”) are formulated and 
                                                 
∗ Professor, Faculty of Technical Sciences, Department for Social Sciences, Novi Sad:  
corna@EUnet.yu Book Review 
  120 
put into practice.  It is organised as a text-book and serves to contextualize the 
focus of the EU‘s frame of analysis within a broader account of the socioeco-
nomic production of and the different ways in which the institutions of EU are 
organised in response to this. It then outlines some mechanisms – pertaining to 
its internal and external linkage structures – that have enabled the EU to perform 
successfully in a geopolitical context where most of the main actors are states. A 
number of proposals that have come up in policy discussions over the last couple 
of years are reviewed. In fact, Susan Senior Nello has written an inspiring book 
on the economics, politics and history of the European Union. She provides an 
account that focuses on the different aspects of the story. It is an extremely well-
informed study, which is rich in detail and lengthy (462 pages and 20 chapters 
with scrupulously-written index). The book's narrative is without doubt ex-
tremely well-informed and authoritative account of the EU, its institutional in-
frastructure that lies behind it, that has been written to date. A great part of the 
book is devoted to describing the formal appearance and socio-economic impli-
cations of this project of Europeanisation of rational action as it is brought to 
bear upon a range of juridical and contractual settings. Its attractive narrative 
writing makes it an easy read. Its mixture of theory and empirical material gives 
the book a potential to be influential far beyond a narrow readership of those 
solely interested in the EU process. The book addresses mainly students of eco-
nomics, European studies, business and international relations, but to some ex-
tent will appeal to all in post-communist countries.  
  This book does not provide a theory and look for cases to sustain it. No 
theory seems all encompassing enough to capture the many aspects of the proc-
esses with which the book is concerned. This approach suggests that we are to be 
open-minded about questions and theories. Senior Nello's attempt to explain the 
complex historical processes of EU, from agenda-setting outcomes via the nego-
tiating process, leads us to use a variety of conceptual reference points. These 
alert us to different questions, helping us to avoid a one-dimensional account and 
to see the inter-connectedness of the EU. Thus, this book does not represent an 
all-inclusive theory of treaty negotiations etc.; it is rather theory-informed than 
theory-driven.  
  This book addresses different topics and makes assumptions regarding 
the practical application and specific explanatory power of its frame. In fact, all 
chapters display sensitivity and attention to most of these problems and offer 
solutions that merit further discussion. The various contributions of this book 
share in the understanding that European states are in the process of redefining 
notions of welfare provision, according to more austere benchmarks of economic 
efficiency. All of these concerns have, fortunately, begun to cross-fertilize and to 
engender better concepts, sharper analyses, bolder visions, and greater theoreti-
cal and methodological stringency. The book (written mainly from the perspec-
tive of economic theory) under review here illustrate this claim, trying as they do 
to make empirical sense of cross-national variations in policy-making, political Book Review 
  121 
attitudes and socio-economic structures by paying close attention to differences 
of history, cultural assumptions and institutional frameworks – but also to the 
transnational flow of ideas, values and the mutual inspiration between them. On 
this level of in-depth, probing analysis of a special policy arena in a specified 
time frame, it is a convincingly conducted and illuminating expose´ that com-
bines close attention to historical detail with a specific sense of framing that 
helps us to better understand national variations between countries which in 
other ways represent similar experiences. It is uncertain whether transnational 
challenges will undermine current institutional diversities and lead to downward 
convergence, or on the contrary, different types of market economies will be 
capable of maintaining their specific comparative advantage in increasingly 
competitive global market.   
This is a logical consequence of a number of new theoretical, methodo-
logical and empirical concerns in (and across) different social-science disciplines 
over the past years. Differences of empirical research topic notwithstanding, 
these works--which represent a variety of public attitudes to European integra-
tion--all highlight the significance of national frames for differences which are 
otherwise hard to fathom. This will require more dialectical and theoretical 
analysis which theorizes the novelties and potentialities of European culture for 
promoting progressive social change, as well as critique how it reproduces exist-
ing inequalities and oppression. It is the merit of Senior Nello’s book to put real-
ity directly into the agenda of current economic theory, and it is our challenge to 
take it further in theoretical conceptualisation and practical application. The 
study identifies a number of real or potential systemic weaknesses which pose 
new challenges to policy-makers.  
  The discussions in this book could usefully be linked to wider topical 
debates about EU. This book, nonetheless, provides a useful perspective and a 
clear impetus for further exploration of significant processes. Senior Nello is 
providing the reader with a broad framework, which she uses to identify the 
logic of various key events and tendencies. The last chapter of the book deals 
with the EU enlargement that is tremendously useful for members of post-
communist states. It includes, among other components, a brief chronology of 
the enlargement process (treating of the cooperation agreements) and analysis of 
topics such as EU policy towards South-Eastern Europe. A distinctive mecha-
nism through which the EU achieves adherence to the Acquis is its project of 
eastern enlargement, whereby the legal authority of the EU is inserted into states 
located on the EU’s immediate eastern and southeastern perimeter. A crucial 
precondition for application for full membership, and one key criterion accord-
ing to which the applicant states have repeatedly been evaluated, is the transposi-
tion and implementation of the EU’s Acquis. The final chapter reviews several 
existing developmental instruments for eastern countries: official development 
assistance, debt relief, trade measures, and promotion of foreign direct invest-
ment, of which draw many conclusions.  Book Review 
  122 
  This chapter has been written so that it can stand independently; the 
intention is to afford a text that can be consulted by researchers or policy-
makers. As we know, most commentators treat enlargement as a radical rupture 
in the history of the EU. At the same time, many criticize the EU for the lengthy 
enlargement process and burdensome conditions imposed on the candidates. 
This didactic framework underlies not only the traditional transitologist account, 
but also the new visions of regional cooperation. We should take into account 
that the emerging critiques of transitology stress the pivotal importance of exist-
ing institutions and social relationships in framing and enabling societal trans-
formations in East-Central Europe. These accounts rightly emphasize that post-
socialist transformations involve not a wholesale adoption of Western norms by 
the accession countries, but also a highly selective and strategic appropriation of 
some parts of Western ideas.  In its actuality, the EU enlargement is to be de-
scribed as a learning process, and it seems to me that this suggestion could be 
pointed out as an important lesson of this book. 
 

Book review: Susan Senior Nello: The European Union: Economics, Policies and History (The McGraw Hill Companies, Berkshire, 2005)

http://www.panoeconomicus.rs/casopis/petibroj/LOSONC%20The%20European%20Union.pdf

Book review: Susan Senior Nello: The European Union: Economics, Policies and History (The McGraw Hill Companies, Berkshire, 2005)

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