European Union

The entire European Union is a left-wing dream

is composed of people who hate our guts. It is the continent where Moveon.org-style lunatics are the friendly, pro-American types and the rest are crazy Muslims.

The "European Union" happens to be composed of people who hate our guts. It is the continent where Moveon.org-style lunatics are the friendly, pro-American types and the rest are crazy Muslims.

is an entity whose underlying driver is a kind of rational, economic regional integration in a process that unites nations in ever more international structures.

is an entity whose underlying driver should be understood as macro-regional integration operating as a larger-scale version of the dynamics that had built nation-states in an earlier era.

is, (by analogy to its forerunner), best understood as an integrating entity whose underlying driver is the idea that international institutions might socialize bureaucrats and policy actors such that they engage in building cooperation and policy instruments across an ever-expanding range of policy areas beyond the nation-state.

is an entity that allowed EU institutions to perhaps become laboratories of social engineering, in which actors are internationalized and therefore promote further internationalization in their own self-image.

is an entity of European integration which has ultimately been driven by the broad wishes and support of the European middle classes: the same median populations that have determined national political outcomes in the post-war period, ensured the maintenance of the welfare state and pastoral national institutions, and represent the social core of European national societies.

is, (by analogy to its forerunner), best understood as an integrating entity whose underlying driver is a functional mechanism called spillover, whereby supranational integration in one policy area creates incentives for integration in others, and in the process national policy actors come to identify with the European level and hence supranational forms of governance as a more effective way of regulating matters that would normally be left to national law or politics.		

european union, n.All

european union