About the BookOrbie Lee Mays USN Retired was born and raised on a farm in the northwest corner of Alabama. His life is one of many hardships and setbacks, and the success he achieved in overcoming them. From the Beginning to Almost to the End shares his journey, from beginning his military career at seventeen to his final rank of E-9 master chief petty officer and his personal life after his thirty-year military career ended. With harrowing tales from his time during the Vietnam War...

Rosie the little pig is determined to learn how to ride a bike and see the world—no matter how many times she has to pick herself up and start over—in this whimsical story about following your dreams and never giving up.Rosie is a little pig who has everything she needs right on the farm: a mud bath to play in, plenty of food to eat, and a deliciously smelly pigpen. But then she sees a small, ugly animal with two feet and no tail riding a bicycle and she thinks “Th...

First published in 2008 and based on an innovative framework for analysing the EU's external politics, this paperback edition provides a historical overview of and theoretical conclusions about the EU's global role. Taking an original approach, the volume highlights the expanding political science literature on Europe's international role in a range of external policy domains. It focuses in particular on the 'soft' dimension of Europe's international action which has previously been much n...

The book investigates the substance of the European Union's (EU) democracy promotion policy. It focuses on elections, civil and political rights, horizontal accountability, effective power to govern, stateness, state administrative capacity, civil society, and socio-economic context as components of embedded liberal democracy.

Despite the growing academic interest in the development policy of the European Union (EU) and the booming literature on Europeanisation, the impact of Europe on national development policies has largely been overlooked. By exploring Member State interactions with and through the EU level across a number of different issues, this volume looks to herald a new research agenda. The picture emerging from the empirical evidence is that of modest degrees of Europeanisation. Resistance to Europe ...

This book examines the substance of European Union (EU) democracy promotion by comparing it with norms of governance that other international actors promote, among them the United Nations, the United States, the Central and East European EU member states, Russia, China and non-governmental organizations. It aims is to gain a better understanding of the EU’s democracy promotion agenda and to learn more about the (in)distinctiveness of the norms diffused by the EU. Building on a common conce...

This volume offers new perspectives on the evolution of the trade–development nexus in the European Union against dramatic changes in the international context. Without disregarding them, it seeks to go beyond the controversial and extensively researched Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). In particular, it focuses on the reform of the Generalised System of Preferences, the negotiation of various Preferential Trade Agreements, the application of trade sanctions, the allegedly ambitious...

The ‘Everything But Arms’ (EBA) regulation of the European Union (EU) has been hailed as a groundbreaking initiative for developing countries. Since 2001 EBA grants almost completely liberalized access to the European market for products from the least-developed countries (LDCs). It quickly became the most symbolic European trade initiative towards the Third World since the first Lomé Convention in the 1970s.Given its central position in EU discourse and its continuing relevance fo...

This volume provides a comprehensive account of the European Union’s social role in the world, assessing the EU’s ability to shape the social aspect of globalization from both law and political science perspectives.Focusing explicitly on the EU, the authors address the extent of coherence between the Union’s international social objectives compared with the activities of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and with other EU foreign policy goals. Various dimensions of Europe...

The Economic Partnership Agreements between the European Union and the Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries have drastically restructured Europe’s trade architecture towards the third world. This volume examines the consequences of EPAs for development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).Starting from the observation that the establishment of free trade as such will substantially impact upon economic development, the different contributions focus on the potential contribution of ...

The Oxford Handbook on the World Trade Organization provides an authoritative and cutting-edge account of the World Trade Organization. Its purpose is to provide a holistic understanding of what the WTO does, how it goes about fulfilling its tasks, its achievements and problems, and how it might contend with some critical challenges. The Handbook benefits from an interdisciplinary approach. The editorial team comprises a transatlantic partnership between a political scien...

This book explores the various ways in which citizens are represented in EU policy-making. Most accounts naturally focus on the European Parliament as the prime source of democratic representation. This collection focuses instead on four other channels that are as and often more important: namely, representation via governments, national parliaments, civil society organisations and directly, via referenda. Based on original research, the book combines democratic theory with detailed empiri...