This book explores the impact of parliamentary administrations on EU policy-making post-Lisbon Treaty. It examines whether increased parliamentary powers fostered political debate or led to bureaucratization. Through empirical analysis, it highlights the challenges faced by parliaments and their administrations, emphasizing interparliamentary cooperation and multi-level dynamics.
This book is the first to systematically introduce and apply a social constructivist perspective to the study of European integration. Social constructivism is carefully located in terms of its philosophical and methodological origins. The wider debates and contribution of constructivist approaches to international relations are reviewed, and the insights that might then be afforded to European studies fully explored. Highlights include: new theoretical contributions to the debate by Ernst B. Haas, Andrew Moravcsik and Steve Smith; research on key aspects of European integration and EU governance applying a variety of constructivist approaches. The Social Construction of Europe provides new and important in
This book represents a fresh look at cohesion, the point of departure being Halliday and Hasan’s seminal Cohesion in English, which is examined in depth as are other notable approaches to cohesion such as Hoey’s Patterns of Lexis in Text. It also compares different studies of relevance to cohesion from other areas of linguistics, such as: generative grammar, Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), and corpus linguistics. In this way, this work extends discussion of cohesion beyond the realms of systemic linguistics to include a broader spectrum of approaches including research into languages other than English. The main focus, however, is on varieties of English and on general and specialised discourse types. Rather than limiting itself to the text as product, the manifestation of a discourse, this book looks at cohesion from the wider perspective of discourse, seen as an interactive process. Consequently, different sociolinguistic and cultural factors are also taken into consideration: How far is cohesion a constitutive feature of text? What is the precise link between cohesion and coherence? What specific role does discourse have in phenomena such as anaphora? Do such things as cohesive universals exist across languages? How far do socio-cultural, or discourse-specific, conventions contribute to the type and degree of cohesion present in a text?