This fully updated textbook provides a concise yet comprehensive overview on the EU’s polity and politics, offering an ideal balance between its history, institutions, and decision-making processes, while drawing connections between these dimensions throughout.

It helps students and scholars understand the EU’s evolution and organization, as well as its interactions with various global actors, presenting a highly readable analysis of how the EU works while recognizing the complexity of the European project.

Key features:

• Explores core questions of European integration such as democratic deficit, politicization, the role of member states, institutional crisis, and citizen involvement.
• Engages with fundamental and pressing issues in EU policy-making such as its evolutions, the EU’s legitimization, Brexit, Covid-19, the challenges of democratic backsliding, populism, and Euroscepticism, as well as the EU’s role in the world.
• Presents new in-text boxes focusing on major debates or evolutions such as the European Semester, and reflective end-of-chapter questions for further study.

At a time of multiple and continued challenges to the European Union and its legitimacy, this textbook is essential reading for students, scholars, and anyone seeking to understand EU politics today.

Nathalie Brack is Professor of Political Science at CEVIPOL, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Olivier Costa is Research Professor at the CNRS, CEVIPOF, Sciences Po, France.