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This Routledge Focus aims to investigate and analyse the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Communities (EC) and the European Union (EU). Since joining the EC in 1973, the UK has had a fraught relationship with the organization, declining closer economic union in the eurozone and, often, arguing against closer political union. While some 67% of the UK’s voters opted to remain in the EC in a referendum held in 1975, by June 2016 a narrow majority favoured leaving the EU. This volume evaluates the UK’s journey into the Union, and examines how the country’s voters came to decide on Brexit, and where the UK’s departure from the EU may lead it. Julie Smith is Director of the European Centre, POLIS Department, Cambridge University, and Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. She is also a member of the United Kingdom House of Lords. 1. Introduction 2. The Origins of European Integration: Emerging Lines of (Dis-)engagement 3. Winning and Losing: money, power and the politics of treaty reform 4. Leaving the People Behind 5. Seeking to reconcile Conservatives and Coalition 6. Cameron’s Three Rs: Reform, renegotiation, referendum 7. Where do we go from here? Postscript References Index

This book poses two pertinent questions: First, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we empirically see it? Second, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we explain everyday decision‐making processes within it? The goal of this book is twofold: First, it identifies key institutional components of an emergent European Executive Order. The nucleus of this Order is the European Commission. The Commission, however, is increasingly supplemented by a mushrooming parallel administration of EU‐level agencies and EU committees. This book provides fresh empirical survey and interview data on the everyday decision‐making behaviour, role perceptions, and identities among European civil servants who participate within these institutions. In addition, this book reveals how an emergent European Executive Order profoundly penetrates the domestic branch of executive government. Secondly, this book claims and empirically substantiates that an emergent European Executive Order is a compound executive order balancing a limited set of key decision‐making dynamics. One message of this book is that an emergent European Executive Order consists of a compound set of supranational, departmental, epistemic, and intergovernmental decision‐making dynamics. Arguably, a compound European Executive Order transforms the inherent Westphalian order to the extent that intergovernmentalism is transcended and supplemented by a multidimensional mix of supranational, departmental, and/or epistemic dynamics. This book also theoretically explores conditions under which these decision‐making dynamics gain prevalence. It is argued that the decision‐making dynamics evolving within an emergent European Executive Order is conditioned by the formal organization of its composite parts and by the social interaction patterns that emerge among the civil servants. Political processes and political systems can neither be adequately understood nor explained without including the organization dimension(s) of executive orders.

This handbook provides comprehensive and expert analysis of the impact of the Brexit process and the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union on existing and future EU-UK relations within the context of both EU and international law. Examining the wider international law implications, it additionally assesses the complex legal consequences of Brexit for both the EU and the UK in their dealings with third states and other international organizations. With contributions from renowned specialists in the field of EU external action, each chapter will analyse specific policy areas to address key challenges arising from the Brexit process for the EU and the UK and propose solutions to overcome these problems. The handbook aims to fill a gap in research by assessing the consequences of Brexit under EU external relations law and international law. As such, it is hoped it will set the research agenda for coming years on the international dimension of Brexit. The Routledge Handbook on the International Dimension of Brexit is an authoritative and essential reference text for scholars and students of international and European/EU law and policy, EU politics, and British politics and Brexit, as well as of key relevance to legal practitioners involved in Brexit, governments, policy-makers, civil society organizations, think tanks, practitioners, national parliaments and the Court of Justice.

The EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) was established to provide evidence-based policy advice to EU institutions and Member States. By blending social science research with traditional normative work, it aims to influence human rights policy processes through new ways of framing empirical realities. The contributors to this volume critically examine the experience of the Agency in its first decade, exploring FRA's historical, political and legal foundations and its evolving record across major strands of EU fundamental rights. Central themes arising from these chapters include consideration of how the Agency manages the tension between a mandate to advise and the more traditional approach of human rights bodies to 'monitor', and how its research impacts the delicate equilibrium between these two contesting roles. FRA's experience as the first 'embedded' human rights agency is also highlighted, suggesting a role for alternative and less oppositional orientations for human rights research. While authors observe the benefits of the technocratic approach to human rights research that is a hallmark of FRA's evidence-based policy advice, they also note its constraints. FRA's policy work requires a continued awareness of political realities in Brussels, Member States, and civil society. Consequently, the complex process of determining the Agency's research agenda reflects the strategic priorities of key actors. This is an important factor in the Agency's role in the EU human rights landscape. This pioneering position of the Agency should invite reflection on new forms of institutionalized human rights research for the future.

Government management of fisheries has been little short of disastrous. In many regions, valuable fish stocks have collapsed as a result of overfishing. Ill-conceived regulation also means that every year millions of tons of edible fish are thrown back dead into the sea. While an absence of established property rights means that wild fish are vulnerable to overfishing, the problem is greatly exacerbated by large subsidies. State intervention has created significant overcapacity in the industry and undermined the economic feedback mechanisms that help to protect stocks. This short book sets out a range of policy options to improve outcomes. As well as ending counterproductive subsidies, these include community-based management of coastal zones and the introduction of individual transferable quotas. The analysis is particularly relevant to the UK as it begins the process of withdrawal from the European Union. After decades of mismanagement under the Common Fisheries Policy, Brexit represents a major opportunity to adopt an economically rational approach that benefits the fishing industry, taxpayers and consumers.

Over half of the European landscape is under agricultural management and has been for millennia. Many species and ecosystems of conservation concern in Europe depend on agricultural management and are showing ongoing declines. Agri‐environment schemes (AES) are designed partly to address this. They are a major source of nature conservation funding within the European Union (EU) and the highest conservation expenditure in Europe. We reviewed the structure of current AES across Europe. Since a 2003 review questioned the overall effectiveness of AES for biodiversity, there has been a plethora of case studies and meta‐analyses examining their effectiveness. Most syntheses demonstrate general increases in farmland biodiversity in response to AES, with the size of the effect depending on the structure and management of the surrounding landscape. This is important in the light of successive EU enlargement and ongoing reforms of AES. We examined the change in effect size over time by merging the data sets of 3 recent meta‐analyses and found that schemes implemented after revision of the EU's agri‐environmental programs in 2007 were not more effective than schemes implemented before revision. Furthermore, schemes aimed at areas out of production (such as field margins and hedgerows) are more effective at enhancing species richness than those aimed at productive areas (such as arable crops or grasslands). Outstanding research questions include whether AES enhance ecosystem services, whether they are more effective in agriculturally marginal areas than in intensively farmed areas, whether they are more or less cost‐effective for farmland biodiversity than protected areas, and how much their effectiveness is influenced by farmer training and advice? The general lesson from the European experience is that AES can be effective for conserving wildlife on farmland, but they are expensive and need to be carefully designed and targeted.

Recensión del libro de Karin Geuijen, Paul ’t Hart, Sebastiaan Princen y Kutsal Yesilkagit, The New Eurocrats. National Civil Servants in EU Policy-making, Amsterdam University Press, 2008, 176 pp.

Policies and research increasingly focus on the protection of ecosystem services (ESs) through priority-area conservation. Priority areas for ESs should be identified based on ES capacity and ES demand and account for the connections between areas of ES capacity and demand (flow) resulting in areas of unique demand-supply connections (flow zones). We tested ways to account for ES demand and flow zones to identify priority areas in the European Union. We mapped the capacity and demand of a global (carbon sequestration), a regional (flood regulation), and 3 local ESs (air quality, pollination, and urban leisure). We used Zonation software to identify priority areas for ESs based on 6 tests: with and without accounting for ES demand and 4 tests that accounted for the effect of ES flow zone. There was only 37.1% overlap between the 25% of priority areas that encompassed the most ESs with and without accounting for ES demand. The level of ESs maintained in the priority areas increased from 23.2% to 57.9% after accounting for ES demand, especially for ESs with a small flow zone. Accounting for flow zone had a small effect on the location of priority areas and level of ESs maintained but resulted in fewer flow zones without ES maintained relative to ignoring flow zones. Accounting for demand and flow zones enhanced representation and distribution of ESs with local to regional flow zones without large trade-offs relative to the global ES. We found that ignoring ES demand led to the identification of priority areas in remote regions where benefits from ES capacity to society were small. Incorporating ESs in conservation planning should therefore always account for ES demand to identify an effective priority network for ESs. Las políticas y las investigaciones cada vez más se enfocan en la protección de los servicios ambientales (SAs) por medio de la conservación de áreas prioritarias. Las áreas prioritarias para los SAs deberían ser identificadas con base en la capacidad de SAs y la demanda de SAs, y deberían representar las conexiones entre las áreas de capacidad de SAs y la demanda (flujo), resultando así en áreas de conexiones únicas de demanda y suministro (zonas de flujo). Probamos maneras para representar la demanda de SAs y las zonas de flujo para identificar las áreas prioritarias en la Unión Europea. Mapeamos la capacidad y la demanda de un SA global (secuestro de carbono), regional (regulación de inundación), y tres locales (calidad del aire, polinización, y tiempo libre urbano). Usamos el software Zonation para identificar las áreas prioritarias para los SAs con base en seis experimentos: con y sin representación de la demanda de los SAs, y cuatro experimentos que representaron el efecto de la zona de flujo de los SAs. Sólo hubo un traslape de 37.1 % entre el 25 % de las áreas prioritarias que englobaron la mayoría de los SAs con y sin representación de la demanda de SAs. El nivel de los SAs que se mantuvo en las áreas prioritarias incrementó de un 23.2 % a 57.9 % después de considerar la demanda de los SAs, especialmente para aquellos SAs con una zona de flujo reducida. Representar la zona de flujo tuvo un pequeño efecto sobre la ubicación de las áreas prioritarias y el nivel de SAs que se mantuvo, pero resultó en menos zonas de flujo sin SAs mantenidos en relación a ignorar las zonas de flujo. Representar la demanda y las zonas de flujo mejoró la representación y distribución de los SAs con zonas de flujo de regionales a locales sin compensaciones grandes en relación al SA global. Hallamos que ignorar la demanda de SAs llevó a la identificación de las áreas prioritarias en las regiones remotas en donde los beneficios de la capacidad de los SAs para la sociedad fueron pequeños. Incorporar los SAs a la planeación de la conservación por lo tanto debería siempre representar a la demanda de los SAs para identificar una red efectiva de prioridades para los SAs. reducida. Representar la zona de flujo tuvo un pequeño efecto sobre la ubicación de las áreas prioritarias y el nivel de SAs que se mantuvo, pero resultó en menos zonas de flujo sin SAs mantenidos en relación a ignorar las zonas de flujo. Representar la demanda y las zonas de flujo mejoró la representación y distribución de los SAs con zonas de flujo de regionales a locales sin compensaciones grandes en relación al SA global. Hallamos que ignorar la demanda de SAs llevó a la identificación de las áreas prioritarias en las regiones remotas en donde los beneficios de la capacidad de los SAs para la sociedad fueron pequeños. Incorporar los SAs a la planeación de la conservación por lo tanto debería siempre representar a la demanda de los SAs para identificar una red efectiva de prioridades para los SAs.

“Siempre he creído que Europa se construirá a través de las crisis y que será la suma de sus soluciones\", sostuvo Jean Monet, uno de los principales arquitectos de la integración europea. Es indudable que estas palabras conservan toda su validez en la actualidad, porque la Unión Europea ha atravesado la coyuntura más complicada de su historia y grandes nubarrones se ciernen aún en el horizonte (v. gr., el “Brexit\", la sostenibilidad de la moneda única, el renacer de los nacionalismos, las desigualdades sociales, entre otros). El libro que tiene el lector en sus manos es el resultado de una investigación que buscaba comprender los factores que han puesto en jaque el proyecto europeo, entre los cuales se destacan la “economización\" del proyecto integrador […]; el aumento del número de miembros anidó una gran diversidad de trayectorias históricas en el seno de la organización […]; la moneda única violentó las condiciones sociales y culturales de muchos de los países miembros y reforzó el poderío de la economía y del gobierno alemán sobre sus socios y el intergubernamentalismo condujo al predominio de los intereses de los estados más poderosos sobre los demás. La Unión Europea se encuentra ad portas de una refundación. Por el momento lo único cierto es que se requerirá de mucha imaginación, porque su destino no se juega en uno de esos dilemas sino en todos ellos.