What stands between families and states? The conventional answer of modern political theory is civil society: the sphere of voluntary associations and relationships that provides individuals with a means of escape from both the confines of family life and the rigours of state politics. This can be either a descriptive or a normative claim. One of the distinguishing features of modern societies is the sheer scale and variety of civil associations for which they allow, whether in economic life, cultural life, communications, religion, sport or education. That is an observable fact, but it is also often held to be one of the major benefits of modern existence, and hence something to be celebrated and cultivated. We need civil society in order to avoid being trapped in the binary, pre-modern world of household and polis, in which the opportunities for human expression and experimentation are more limited.

Modern civil society is valuable because it helps to take us away from purely private concerns. It offers a route out from family life through to the wider perspectives of social and political justice. In Susan Moller Okin's terms, quoted by Paul Ginsborg in his chapter in this book, we need ‘a continuum of just associations’ in order to ‘enlarge [our] sympathies’. But civil society is also valuable because it can provide some respite from the relentless pressures of public life, organised by and for the state.

In his programmatic essay of 1995 Paul Ginsborg sets out a choice to be made by those studying the modern European family and its relationship to politics. The choice, he argued, is between a dichotomous model descending from Aristotle and a tripartite model deriving from Hegel. The Aristotelian model revolves around a set of binary divisions between oikos and polis, between household and political sphere, a set of distinctions that derive ultimately from Aristotle's dualistic description of man as a ‘political animal’, both political and animal, that is. This dualism, Ginsborg argues, is too simple to capture the complex position of the family in modernity. Instead, he prefers a Hegelian tripartite scheme, which distinguishes between family, civil society and state. The state is constituted by law, the family by a bond of love. The economy, relegated by Aristotle to the household, is assigned by Hegel to a third sphere of civil society. Ginsborg does not rest here. In keeping with modern usage he makes a further distinction. Whereas in Hegel the economy and associational life are intermingled in the sphere of civil society, Ginsborg removes the economy to its own sphere and defines civil society essentially as what Habermas has taught us to call the ‘public sphere’. As Ginsborg makes clear, what is at stake in these differing models are fundamental conceptions of the social order.

Introduction

In March 2009 David Cameron, the leader of the British Conservative Party, announced that the Conservatives would form a new political group in the European Parliament after the EP elections of June that year. In doing so, the Conservatives would break away from the Christian Democrat European People's Party (EPP), with which it had been allied in the EP for almost two decades.

The relationship between the Conservatives and the EPP had always been strained, as the Conservatives were much more Eurosceptical than the (traditionally strongly pro-EU) ‘continental’ conservative and Christian democratic parties assembled in the EPP. Before joining the EPP group, the Conservatives had cooperated with like-minded parties in the ‘European Democrats’ (ED) group. When the British Conservatives decided to join the EPP political group in 1992, they only did so as an ‘associated party’. In 1999, this associated status was made more visible by adding ‘ED’ to the name of the EPP group in Parliament. Still, the British Conservatives continued to disagree with the EPP ‘party line’ on many important issues and frequently threatened to withdraw from the EPP-ED group altogether to form their own political group.

Cameron's decision to set up a new political group attracted a lot of criticism within his own party. Several Conservative Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voiced their discontent with the move, fearing that the Conservatives would lose influence in the EP.

Introduction

Smoking may not be the first thing you come up with when thinking about the issues the European Union deals with. Yet, over the past two decades, the EU has built up a considerable amount of legislation relating to smoking and tobacco products. When you buy a pack of cigarettes (for educational purposes only, of course!), you can see EU policies at work. For instance, the EU has adopted Directives on the maximum levels of tar and nicotine in cigarettes. The price you pay for the pack of cigarettes largely consists of excise duties that governments levy; an EU Directive lays down the minimum amounts of these excise duties. You will probably also notice the large texts on the pack, warning you of the health risks of smoking. Not only have EU Directives made these warning texts mandatory throughout the EU, but they also specify how large they should be and what texts can be used. Finally, tobacco advertising has been banned both on television and in newspapers and magazines.

At the same time, the EU's role in this field is largely confined to adopting legislation and setting standards. The actual implementation of the policies is left to member state governments. Likewise, although the EU is very active in the field of regulatory policy (promulgating norms and standards), it is much less involved in distributive policies (financing facilities) and redistributive policies (affecting the distribution of income and wealth).

Introduction

When the crisis on the financial markets hit Europe in late 2008, this was generally seen as a grave test for the European Union. Would it be able to respond in the face of crisis? Would member state governments be able to overcome their longstanding differences of opinion on economic and financial policy in finding new solutions? And would the EU's institutional framework of budgetary and free-trade rules be able to withstand the flurry of national support measures and calls for economic protectionism that occurred throughout the member states? The situation became even more serious when the Euro itself came under attack from financial markets after fears had arisen that Greece, and possibly a number of other member states, would be forced to default on their (fast-rising) government debts.

As it turned out, the financial crisis proved a tremendous impetus for European cooperation. Even though member state governments took an unprecedented number of far-reaching measures (nationalizing banks, letting government debt rise in order to stimulate their economies), the lapse into protectionism and unilateralism did not occur. Instead, in most cases member state governments closely consulted on the steps to take and tried to find solutions that would keep up existing EU rules while taking account of the special circumstances.

One of the key features of Dutch society before and for two decades after the Second World War was its division into zuilen, religious or ideological groupings or ‘pillars’, a phenomenon known in Dutch as verzuiling, translated variously as ‘socio-political compartmentalisation’ or, more literally, ‘pillarisation’. What did pillarisation actually involve? Dutch society was sharply divided along religious and political lines, splitting the population into four ‘pillars’: Roman Catholics, Protestants, Socialists and Liberals. Each of these groups lived in a world that was largely separate from the others. What did those worlds consist of?

To begin with, they consisted of religious denominations and political parties. People belonging to the Catholic grouping virtually all voted for the Catholic People's Party. The Protestants voted for Protestant parties. The two non-denominational groups, the Socialists and the Liberals, also had their own political representatives and parties. But the phenomenon of ‘pillarisation’ went much further than religious or political affiliation. The trade union movement, for example, was also divided into Catholic, Protestant and general (Socialist) unions, and the same applied to organisations of employers and farmers. The press and other media, including radio and later television, were also divided largely along socio-political and religious lines. The education system was – and in a certain sense still is – a textbook example of compartmentalisation. It was not only primary schools that were strictly divided into religious and other ideological categories, but so were secondary schools and even tertiary educational institutions.

Why yet another textbook on EU politics? And why in a series on comparative politics? For us, the answers to these two questions are closely linked. Having taught EU politics for several years, both of us grew increasingly dissatisfied with the introductory texts on EU politics available on the market. Our dissatisfaction stemmed from two facts. First, existing textbooks on EU politics tend to be too descriptive for our liking. Vast parts of those texts are devoted to discussing the details of the EU's institutional set-up or the intricacies of EU decision-making procedures. By contrast, we are more interested in the political processes that take place within the EU. Knowledge of the EU's institutions and procedures is necessary in order to study those processes fruitfully, but our objective in teaching EU politics is to give students an understanding of how politics in the EU works, not of the EU's institutions and procedures per se. Second, most textbooks still look at the EU as a ‘one-of-a-kind’ system or, as it is commonly put in the EU studies literature, as an organization ‘sui generis’. The focus on the EU's uniqueness makes it difficult for students to relate their understanding of EU politics to what they know about other political systems. We believe that, increasingly, the EU can best be studied from a comparative politics perspective, and that this should form the leading premise of a textbook on EU politics.