European integration

""The European Monetary Union is characterized by a crisis of governance, this has become more evident with the crisis of the euro which has shown the weaknesses of the European institutions and stressed the heterogeneity of member countries.
The global financial crisis struck the euro area very severely because it coincided with the lack of appropriate policy tools to handle it and with a period of weak political leadership which have made crisis management even harder. Europe needs to build the institutions of its monetary union to avoid similar crises in the future. But it is necessary a greater European integration, with a central fiscal entity at European level which requires a transfer of sovereignty from the individual Member States. This contribution first discusses the issue concerning rules and discretion in the governance of the euro. In the following section it describes the euro crisis and examines the remedies put in place, noting that despite the statements and the efforts of the European authorities the confidence in the euro is diminishing. Thus the exit of Greece from the euro or even the breakdown of the single currency has become a hypothesis discussed more frequently among economists, politicians, central bankers and businessmen. The last section of the chapter focuses on what’s wrong in the governance of the euro and examines the institutional aspects and the economic policy issues suggesting that the European integration allows to ensure the European citizens independence and protect their historical freedom, but also to influence and thus affect the choices from which may depend the future prosperity of
European nations involved.""

In the face of continuing financial and economic crises, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has been criticized for being overly-conservative in its loans to Europe. Critics in particular have called on the EIB to vastly increase its investment in utilities as a counter-cyclical measure. To take stock and, in order to evaluate the role of the EIB in financing utilities over time, we compile and analyze an original database of all EIB utilities project loans from 1958 to 2004. We find the EIB started out by functioning as a regional development bank, prioritizing utilities finance in its members' poorer zones; however, energy crises in the 1970s marked a shift whereby the logic of EIB finance to utilities became more politically-oriented. By the 1980s, utilities projects supported by the EIB were intimately related to those required for the Single Market. The origins of the EIB's current conservative approach to utilities loans was born in the 1970s and fully consolidated by the 1990s.

La défense de la langue catalane se heurte aux principes de libre circulation des services au sein l’Union européenne. Le gouvernement de Catalogne doit retirer sa loi sur le cinéma imposant des quotas de films traduits ou sous-titrés en langue locale.

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    - Des enjeux politiques autour d’un protocole ambivalent et controversé
    - La Commission européenne, acteur international de la diversité culturelle ?
    - Réticences ou le protocole vu comme un moyen déstabilisateur de l’industrie culturelle européenne
    - Vers une reconsidération de la stratégie culturelle extérieure de l’Union européenne
    - Un nouveau droit international culturel inéluctable
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The creation of a European federation raises a number of philosophical questions, both in terms of whether European federalism can be justified, and how a European federation could be constructed. Corrado Morricone writes on the work of the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. He notes that while Mill recognised the dangers in eliminating differences between European states, he would also have viewed attempts to foster a common identity across Europe as a positive development.