The years from 1956 to 1968 saw a profound cultural transformation in majority attitudes to religious minorities, and the latter’s engagement with Ireland. Israel’s victory in the wars of 1956 and 1967 changed the self-perception and public standing of the Jewish community. The disbanding of the British Empire in Africa, which was virtually completed by 1967, helped to detach Protestants from residual ‘West Briton’ nostalgia. In parallel with decolonisation, the beginning of the process of European integration created the prospect of a future political settlement within which minority status would be resolved in a pluralist definition of legitimate belonging. Finally, Vatican II (1962–5) was decisive in transforming the atmosphere of the country, but liberalisation was gradual, and at first often superficial. In 1966 – on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising – The Irish Times denounced the terrifying conditions of the country’s industrial and reformatory schools. That the minorities as a whole were unmoved by such revelations showed the extent to which – despite professions of liberalism – they were largely part of Ireland’s conservative consensus.

This chapter introduces and immerses readers in the ‘Brussels Bubble’, a term encapsulating both the geographic heart of the European Union’s political machinery and its distinctive social and professional ecosystem. Through the daily routine of Jack, a mid-level Irish diplomat, the chapter reveals the rhythms, rituals, and jargon that define life in the European Quarter – where EU institutions, diplomats, lobbyists, and journalists converge. The Bubble is a microcosm of multilingual, multinational exchange, shaped by its own language (‘Bubblespeak’), unwritten rules, and digital habits, from Politico’s influential newsletters to the relentless scroll of Twitter.

The chapter situates the Bubble within the EU’s evolution from a post-war coal and steel community to a unique polity, blending functionalist pragmatism with normative ideals. It introduces the book’s dual focus: first, to chronicle the everyday practices and lived experiences that make the Bubble a world unto itself; second, to explore how digital technologies – smartphones, social media, and virtual meetings – reshape diplomacy, governance, and social hierarchies within this space. By treating Brussels as an ethnographic ‘village’, the authors argue for a grounded, practice-based understanding of international politics, where the digital and the material are increasingly entangled, and where the EU’s future is negotiated not only in meeting rooms but also on screens and in real-time feeds.

This final chapter offers a reflective account of the ethnographic journey behind this study of the Brussels Bubble and its digital transformation. Beginning in 2018, the research combined immersive fieldwork – including over fifteen trips to Brussels – and remote engagement with EU communications, newsletters and local media. The authors employed interpretive, qualitative methods, conducting more than a hundred interviews with diplomats, officials, interpreters and journalists. Using techniques like ordinary language interviews and the ‘interview to the double’, they captured not just what participants said, but how they experienced their digital and diplomatic worlds.

Ethnographic observation was central, from casual café meetings to high-level Council sessions, with fieldnotes documenting settings, interactions and the omnipresence of digital devices. The unexpected onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 became a pivotal ‘tragic serendipity’, forcing both the Brussels Bubble and the researchers to adapt to a digital ‘new normal’. The resulting data – over 1,000 pages of fieldnotes and thousands of archived newsletters – were coded thematically, revealing patterns in how technology reshapes EU governance.

The chapter underscores the challenges of access, anonymisation and balancing immersion with critical distance. Ultimately, it presents the book as a snapshot of a moment in EU politics, inviting further ethnographic exploration of digitalisation’s impact on diplomacy and global governance.

Agriculture has been an unloved policy area in the history of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). Already lying at the intersection of interest-based constituency politics, party ideology, electioneering, fiscal and trade policy, economics, welfare, and government coalition-making, farm policy became even more complicated when the geopolitical question of European agricultural integration arose in the 1950s. Throughout, the SPD remained concerned that farmers could rise against democracy if their demands went unmet. The SPD’s policy preference was for economic rationalisation and low agricultural tariffs, mitigated by an active (but not excessive) welfare policy for farmers. Instead, government support for farmers and agricultural protectionism actually increased under SPD-led governments in the 1920s and again in 1969–1974. Political objectives to attract farm support and lessen rural antagonism towards social democracy ran against the party’s policy preferences. In the exercise of practical social democracy, choices have to be made. This chapter argues that, in the end, agricultural policy proved to be a second-order policy. Party leadership bartered the SPD’s preferred agricultural policy away to gain the political breathing space they needed to carry on in government and implement first-order priorities that lay closer to their hearts.

The study of European capitalism since 1945 has revealed three key findings. First, Europe’s governance of capitalism has been marked by four main periods: : 1) embedded liberalism (1945–73); 2) global attempts at mixed capitalism (1973–92); 3) high neoliberalism (1992–2016); and 4) the return of community capitalism since 2016. Second, Europeans have invented an original system to reach compromise between both states and the three types of capitalist governance, thereby offering choice, far from the image of a neoliberal technocratic dictatorship. The European Union is a mix between the influence of many countries, including Germany, France, and Britain, in addition to Italy and many others. Third, the trinity points to three alternatives that were – and still are – present: the neoliberal free-trade area, the socio-environmental alternative and the challenge of the return of community capitalism, between protectionist tensions, Fortress Europe and the possible hollowing out of the European Union from the pressure of growing nationalism.

Which form of capitalist governance best fosters peace, prosperity, social cohesion, and environmental protection? I argue that making sense of this complexity calls for revisiting the three different principles of capitalist governance: liberty (freeing the market to unleash growth), solidarity (reining in the free market to protect the weak and the environment), and community (safeguarding the group through protectionism and military might). I contend that studying the European Union helps provide insight into how a compromise between liberty, solidarity, and community capitalisms is struck, as the Union is in a constant process of negotiation among bickering members. Dealing with community capitalism, in particular with protectionism and nationalism, has been the most pressing challenge for Europe in the past, not just today. This book will focus on the interaction between capitalism and European integration between 1945 and 2025, drawing on studies from areas of scholarship that rarely enter into dialogue with one other (history, political science, comparative political economy, international relations), as well as through new archival research.

A targeted European welfare state emerged between 1950 and 1992, one that was referred to in the late 1980s as the ‘social flank to the internal market’. This chapter will begin with a chronological overview, including a first section on the slow development of this European social policy between 1945 and 1985, and a second one its heights under Jacques Delors (1985–1995). It will then proceed with a topical exploration of European measures in this area (protecting the weak, environmental policy, regional solidarity), before concluding with an analysis of the two most important alternatives that were later abandoned: planning, and comprehensive social and fiscal harmonisation. This relative weakness of social Europe can be explained by its late development, by the sheer difficulty of organising a transnational social movement, as well as by divisions among its supporters. Besides, Thatcher was a formidable obstacle, one that Delors sought to circumvent through greater use of qualified majority voting. Other important actors were European trade unions, gender and environmental activists, as well as members of the European Parliament.

Britain’s constitutional evolution falls within the mainstream of European constitutional traditions, but the gulf between its governing practices and those adopted in the European mainstream has grown progressively wider. While most European nation-states have adopted written constitutions at critical moments of modern history, Britain continues to adhere to the traditional conception of a constitution as a set of laws, customs and practices that continuously evolve in response to social, economic and political change. This is one reason why Britain’s involvement in the venture of creating a European Union has always been rather awkward. In this chapter, I sketch the main constitutional tropes that have emerged in British thought and show how they express a constitutional identity antithetical to the assumptions driving the project of continuing European integration. I first introduce a series of constitutional stories through which the English have sought to explain themselves as a nation and a state and then consider how these accounts have evolved with the expansion of the English state into a British imperial state. Finally, I will indicate how these legacies ensured that Britain could never become an active participant in the European federal project.

This chapter intends to explore the roots of the Polish ‘constitutional crisis’ by utilising the concept of constitutional drift. While the Polish 1997 Constitution contains provisions that would enable interpreting it by using the lenses of Sciulli’s societal constitutionalism (which we call the ‘societal imaginary’), such opportunity was disregarded by more dominant liberal and communitarian imaginaries present in the political and constitutional discourse. The latter contributed to fostering a governance structure that strengthened the executive (the cabinet) at the expense of all social actors whose rights are strongly embedded within the Constitution – social partners, civil society and professional self-government organizations. Overall, the processes similar to those happening to the juridical power after 2015 in Poland, had been happening to other competitors to power prior to 2015 and constitutional crisis should be seen as a relatively late phase of the constitutional drift resulting from overlooking possibilities granted by societal imaginary.

This chapter aims to analyse the Polish ‘integration clause’: Article 90 of the Constitution as an element of the Polish constitutional imaginary. The notion of constitutional imaginary as formulated by Martin Loughlin will provide the theoretical framework for these considerations. Perceived through the lens of Louglin’s constitutional imaginary concept, Article 90 turns out to be the provision that shapes intricate relations of two big ineffable ideas: sovereignty and European integration. The latter has been perceived in the constitutional practice as both the ineffable aspiration and the object of serious concerns. Since Poland’s accession to the EU, for a long time, constitutional practice with regard to the EU was a syncretic collection of cautious friendliness towards EU law, emphasis on (formal) constitutional supremacy and narrowing down the interpretation of ‘the conferral of competences’. Nevertheless, until recently, the constitutional text had tended to be interpreted as facilitating rather than limiting Poland’s participation in European integration. Therefore, the recent Eurosceptic turn after 2015 was not justified either in the sphere of thought or in the constitutional text. It disturbed the existing balance between ideology and utopia.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Commission as a technology regulator, outlining the development of the EU’s technology policies and laws, from their beginnings in the late 1970s until the late 2000s. Reflecting on the limited interventions of the Commission during the period referred to as one of ‘Eurosclerosis’, and the beginnings of distinct technology policies and positive acts of integration around technology in the 1990s. It explores how during its development, EU technology policy was marked by a distinction between economically oriented developments, such as around intellectual property rights, and security-related ones as in the case of cybercrime and cybersecurity. However, in the period of the late 2000s/early 2010s and the EU ‘polycrisis’ of financial crisis, legitimacy crisis, and populism crisis, and concerns over the power of the private sector in technology governance, the groundwork was laid for seeing technology control in terms of interlinked economic and security goals, a growing distrust of ‘Big Tech’, and concerns about the need to externalise the EU’s rules and values, including through the Brussels effect.

The final decade of Sarah Wambaugh’s life would see her appointed technical advisor to the allied-run mission to observe the sensitive Greek elections of 1946, as well as to the soon abandoned plebiscite in Kashmir several years later. However, in Greece Wambaugh’s expertise now stood in contrast to new scientific sampling techniques, while she would keep silent about the fact that women were not allowed to vote, in a bid to support the anti-communists who won the election. Meanwhile her normative rules for the plebiscite would be dispensed with as not culturally relevant by those planning the vote in Kashmir. The chapter ends with an examination of the first UN plebiscite actually held, in British Togoland in 1956, and with the 1955 referendum on the proposal to turn the Saar into a Europeanised territory. Both operations eschewed many of the heavy normative principles which Wambaugh had developed for the plebiscite.