Should a subset of member states of a federation be allowed to form a sub-union on some policy issue? When centralization is not politically feasible, allowing an enhanced cooperation agreement among a subset of countries permits the latter to gain benefits which would otherwise be lost....

At the end of the postwar period, the politically shaped configurations of normatively integrated European political economies differed greatly among "social-market" and "liberal market economies." Such differences persist even though the characteristic achievements of social market economies...

This chapter discusses whether and how 'new quantitative trade models' (NQTMs) can be fruitfully applied to quantify the welfare effects of trade liberalization, thus shedding light on the trade-related effects of further European integration. On the one hand, it argues that NQTMs have indeed...

Historiography on European integration before 1914 has acknowledged that the level of entanglements between the European nation-states was quite advanced. Indeed, historians were able to confirm a high level of cooperation on the legal, social, technical and even political level. And yet, the...

The legacy of colonialism in Northern Ireland has created an ideological divide between Irish nationalism and British unionism through which many questions of political economy are sorted, including questions of conflict, peace and European integration. This paper examines and considers how...