Books by "Philip D. Curtin"
2 books found
Informal Decision Making in the European Community under the Luxembourg Compromise
by Philip Bajon
2025 · Bloomsbury Publishing
This book analyses the informal decision making process in the EU against the background of a gradually emerging European legal order. Based on extensive multi-archival research in the UK, France, Germany, the Benelux countries and in Community institutions, the book explores the resistance against majority rule under the so-called Luxembourg Compromise of 1966, a European 'soft law' that allowed Member States to invoke 'vital national interests' and to veto legislation. This 'gentlemen's agreement' was never sanctioned or codified. However, as a 'rule of the game' it had a significant impact on the operations of the EU for several decades and became an integral part of the EU's 'consensus' approach. Its underlying rationale is still alive in the present-day EU. Presenting a deeply revisionist account of European law and politics, the book demonstrates how the Luxembourg arrangement served as a compromise between the Treaty text and political reality, as a counterweight to technocratic ideas, and as a bridge between irreconcilable divides over European unification. It includes case studies from 1965 - 2000, such as the 'Eurosclerosis' of the 1970s, British exceptionalism as an EU member, the European revival of the mid-1980s, and intergovernmentalism on the verge of negotiating the Maastricht Treaty. Highly original in its interdisciplinary, comprehensive and archivally-rooted method, the book interrogates the most important and controversial debates about the past, present and future of the European Union.
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks—their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.