Book Review:Key Controversies in European Integration

This book is an interesting and accessible general textbook on European integration, which targets a wide audience of academics, practitioners and interested general readers. It aims to help readers engage with key controversies over the EU and develop their own arguments. The book maintains that European integration is a highly contested political project, as current events such as the failure of the Constitutional Treaty and the Eurozone crisis vividly illustrate. If the thesis is not quite astonishing, the format of the book is innovative. Zimmermann and Dür have selected fourteen pairs of authors and assigned each pair a research question surrounding a key controversy over European integration. Each chapter consists of an introduction by the editors followed by short contributions by two authors taking opposing positions. The editors use this method of coupling in order to guide readers to the heart of academic debates over the EU in a lively and dialectic way.

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