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This introductory chapter provides a brief summary of the book's argument—the administrative, not constitutional character of supranational governance in the European Union (EU), and the convergence of European public law around the legitimating structures and normative principles of the postwar constitutional settlement. The chapter outlines several key distinctions and concepts on which the argument is based, including: representative government, democratic legitimacy, and their relationship to European integration; administrative governance and the distinction between control and legitimation of regulatory power; and the importance of national oversight, if not control, in the legitimation of Europeanized administrative governance. This chapter introduces the notion of ‘historically constituted bodies’ (legislative, executive, executive, or judicial) as the repositories of representative government and democratic and constitutional legitimacy in the European system. It then relates the process of European integration historiographically to the process of diffusion and fragmentation of regulatory power away from these bodies that has been the principle characteristic of modern administrative governance since the 19th century. The chapter argues that, even as regulatory power has diffused and fragmented (first nationally, then supranationally), it has remained dependent on historically constituted bodies of representative government on the national level for legitimation, if not control. This chapter also outlines the elements of the theory of institutional change that supports the entire analysis, operating along three interrelated dimensions—functional, political, and cultural. It argues that, for a durable constitutional settlement to occur, these various dimensions must be ‘reconciled.’ It further argues that the national legitimating mechanisms described in the remainder of the book have developed to do the work of reconciliation that this introductory chapter describes.

This chapter discusses the organizational forms central to European administrative governance. It sets out the central features of these forms, their rationale(s) and, wherever possible, offers an assessment of the issues which they raise in terms of legitimacy and accountability. Specifically, it considers comitology, European agencies, various forms of European networks for administrative governance, the Open Method of Coordination, and organizational forms in which private parties play a dominant role.

This chapter is based on the premise that marketisation extends beyond strategies such as privatisation or monetisation, but encroaches into our life-worlds more subtly. Based on the analysis of recent Irish youth justice policy reforms, it is suggested that softer aspects of marketisation become visible in the way that ‘problems’ or ‘solutions to problems’ are written and talked about. Importantly, this chapter traces how dominant discourses ‘travel’ from sites of administrative governance into the imaginations of front-line workers engaging with young people. It is further argued that the introduction of administrative governance is emblematic of neo-liberalism’s distinct mode of reason with the problematic effect of constructing young people and their families as responsible for their own self-improvement and self-realisation. Through its anti-political nature, administrative governance eschews important considerations relating to the wider contexts of youthful ‘offending’ and the professional field of ‘youth justice work’.