European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) 3rd Edition

Used the book in European Geography class, it's a quick read, concise and down to the point. Good for anybody wanting to have a quick guide on the European Union, institutions and brief history. Nothing too elaborate, but a good starting point.

Fantastic education on the European Union! I read this prior to Brexit and as a result ordered several more books in the series and they were very well done

Good analysis

If you are looking for a very technical history of the EU this book is for you.

Very happy

Helped me a lot

I was pretty disappointed with this book. It was boring, as if written by a bureaucrat. I am interested in the topic but I was swimming in acronyms and bureaucratese. The European Union is an exciting subject, one of the most important of our age. This book just made it seem dull. Still, glad I read it, kind of like doing required reading for a required course. It did have information.

I read 1/5 of the book and couldn't understand very well how the system works. Wikipedia explained much better. Sentences are long with too many general phrases like: 'increasingly significant', 'remain much more important', 'EU has to find its place'. I expected this book to be straight to the point explanation and not some general thoughts. If you are looking for an overview, search web.

This was a fantastic read. Hits the mark perfectly. Concise, informative, up-to-date and well balanced. Very good mix of history, technical detail, commentary and discussion of the larger context and implications. I’ve read many books from this series and this is without doubt one of the better written titles. My thanks to the authors.

The book by aim and definition is concise but meticulously written, comprehensive in its treatment, and scholarly. It is written with rigor and density and after you read it you will obtain a serious insight into the aims, structure and evolution of the EU, its institutions and functions as well as its relation with the rest of the world. This third Edition published in 2013 has undergone a radical revision brought by changes since the second Edition in 2007 such as the Lisbon Treaty and the EU fiscal crisis.The scope of the book is encapsulated in the following excerpt from the preface: 'The concern of both of us (its two authors) has been to present the ideas in a way that will help to provide a context for reasonable people, whether they lean towards a federal or intergovernmental approach to evaluate the performance of the Union and judge in which direction it should go. And we have endeavored to be scrupulous.'Take the preceding at their face value. The book is a product of labor and the product of that labor is worthy.

This is a description of how the EU works through having a European Commission, Council of Ministers, European Parliament and so forth.It includes how the EU structure has been added to or amended over the years in order to deal with issues arising. It reads as if the structure and changes that have taken place as a matter of course meet the prooblems they were intended to solve. There is no real assessment of whether or not the structure is working properly and there seems to be evidence that it is not.In brief, as a factual description of structure then it is satisfactory. What is absent is an assessment of how well the structure is working in practice.

I brought this to understand the EU from an everyday perspective. All I wanted was to find out the damn thing works so that I can vote on it in July.However this book really feels like its written for students in their first year of politics, explaining the different political theories used to analyse the EU and its growth more than the EU itself.

This ia the first very short introduction book I have purchased, but I feel it will be the first of many.All of the negative news regarding the EU in Britain currently prompted me to do a bit of research to truly understand what I was hearing, and this book has provided me with that. Although some parts can be difficult to understand, I feel this book as a whole explains the EU in as simple terms as possible. I would particularly recommend the chapter on the EU budget and how it is spent, explained brilliantly and dispels some of the myths surrounding this sensitive topic.