Politics in the European Union examines the theory, history, institutions, and policies of the European Union (EU). The EU is a unique, complex, and ever-changing political entity, which continues to shape both international politics and the politics of its individual member states. The text provides a clear analysis of the organization and presents a well-rounded introduction to the subject. Complete and detailed in its coverage, including coverage of the eurozone, refugee crises, and Brexit, along with the latest theoretical developments, the text provides a comprehensive assessment of EU politics and policy at the start of the 2020s. The book is divided into four parts: Part One provides the student with a strong foundation in political theory and analysis; Part Two charts European integration from 1995 through to the 2010s; Part Three addresses the distinctive character of the EU institutions; and in Part Four, key EU policy areas, both internal and external, are covered.
Introduction The concept of assemblage plays a crucial role in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In a 1980 interview with Catherine Clément, Deleuze describes their invention of the concept of the assemblage as the “general logic” at work in A Thousand Plateaus. However, despite its thirty years of influence on political theory, this “general logic of the assemblage” still remains obscured by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari never formalized it as a theory per se, but largely used it ad hoc throughout their work. This fact continues to pose problems for theorists today who wish to deploy something like a theory of assemblages, but also admit, as Manuel DeLanda does, that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage “hardly amounts to a fully fledged theory” (DeLanda 3). This position allows DeLanda to relegate “Deleuzian hermeneutics” to the footnotes and focus on developing his own “neo-assemblage” theory, “not strictly speaking Deleuze’s own” (DeLanda 4). However, for those who want to know what Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory is, DeLanda’s answer is not quite satisfying. Thus in order to render Deleuze and Guattari’s general logic of assemblages more accessible for political theorists today as part of the current special issue of SubStance, this paper develops a formalization of their theory of assemblages invented in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? The thesis of this paper is that, contra DeLanda, Deleuze and Guattari do in fact have a fully fledged theory of assemblages. At present and to my knowledge, this is the first full-length journal article to focus exclusively on Deleuze and Guattari’s formal theory of assemblages. By concentrating on the structure of the theory apart from any specific kind of assemblage or application of assemblage theory such as linguistic, sociological, biological, or geological, this paper shows, in a relatively brief manner, the core formal operations shared by all kinds of assemblages and to clarify in what precise sense all assemblages are political. Elsewhere I have shown at length how this general logic of assemblages can be used as a method of concrete political analysis,1 but the focus of this paper is to show the theory behind the analysis. In short, this essay does for the concept of the assemblage what Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben did for Foucault in their essay “What is a Dispositif?”: it ex-
YouTube has today become the primary news source for many users, which raises concerns about the role its recommendation algorithm can play in the spread of misinformation and political polarization. Prior work in this area has mainly analyzed how recommendations evolve based on users' watch history within the platform. Nevertheless, recommendations can also depend on off-platform browsing activity that Google collects via trackers on news websites, a factor that has not been considered so far. To fill this gap, we propose a sock-puppet-based experimental framework that automatically interacts with news media articles and then collects YouTube recommendations to measure how cross-site tracking affects the political and misinformation content users see. Moreover, by running our audits in both tracking-permissive and tracking-restrictive browser environments, we assess whether common privacy-focused browsers can protect users from tracking-driven political and misinformation bubbles on YouTube.
In recent years, conservatism and reactionism have witnessed a renewed surge of interest in both popular and scholarly literature. Whether conservatism represents a distinct coherent political ideology or simply a reflexive stance remains a matter of ongoing debate, as does its relationship to reactionism. This paper aims to contribute to this discussion by confirming the ideological character of conservatism and framing reactionism as a typology within conservatism. For this, I examine the intellectual genealogy of reactionary thought as it crystallises in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus . I propose that Sartor serves as a foundational text for understanding the philosophical basis of reactionary political theory and its relationship to conservatism, offering an evaluative stance on the proper ordering of society that extends beyond nostalgia. By foregrounding the political nature of Carlyle's social vision and his critical stance towards the metaphysical premises of modernity, this paper also contributes to Carlyle scholarship by refining Carlyle's political categorisation and contesting the view that his later political writings represent a rupture with his earlier work, proposing instead that Sartor lays the philosophical foundations for his later reactionism.