Testing the limits of european integration; the European council and the politics of war and peace in 2003

The previous volume in this series ended on a note of triumph. At the meeting of the European Council in Copenhagen in December 2002, a new Europe was born. It was not an easy birth. It was nevertheless a moment of joy and hope. A few weeks later, the picture looked very different. Faced by the increasing likelihood of war in Iraq, the European Union appeared to fall apart at the seams. Ludlow's new book describes and analysis the European Union's response to the challenges that confronted it in 2003. The discussion is organized around relations between EU heads of state and government both within and outside the European Council. The Council itself met four times under the Greek presidency in the first half of the year and three times under the Italian presidency in the second half. Discussions and negotiations between its members went on throughout the year however along axes both old and new. The shadow of the Iraq war was all pervasive and the debate about how best to deal with Iraq is therefore a central feature of the book. It would nevertheless be profoundly misleading to suggest that the war was at the root of everything that happened at Europe's top table during this year.The limits of the European integration process were tested in other episodes too, including for example, the struggle to define the scope and character of the stability and growth pact, the practical adaptation of EU institutions to the challenge of enlargement, the drafting of and debate about Javier Solana's important paper on European Security Strategy and, by no means least, the constitutional negotiations in both the Convention and the IGC that followed it.