How the EU Really Works

This fully updated textbook provides a concise yet comprehensive overview on the EU’s polity and politics, offering an ideal balance between its history, institutions, and decision-making processes, while drawing connections between these dimensions throughout.

It helps students and scholars understand the EU’s evolution and organization, as well as its interactions with various global actors, presenting a highly readable analysis of how the EU works while recognizing the complexity of the European project.

Key features: Explores core questions of European integration such as democratic deficit, politicization, the role of member states, institutional crisis, and citizen involvement. Engages with fundamental and pressing issues in EU policy-making such as its evolutions, the EU’s legitimization, Brexit, Covid-19, the challenges of democratic backsliding, populism, and Euroscepticism, as well as the EU’s role in the world. Presents new in-text boxes focusing on major debates or evolutions such as the European Semester, and reflective end-of-chapter questions for further study.

At a time of multiple and continued challenges to the European Union and its legitimacy, this textbook is essential reading for students, scholars, and anyone seeking to understand EU politics today.