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This chapter explores the integrationist preferences of what is perhaps the most important de novo institution created during the post-Maastricht period: the European Central Bank (ECB). Focusing on the period 1998–2013, it finds that the Bank did push for greater powers for itself in the regulatory domain while showing a reticence about increasing the EU’s powers in relation to stabilization and allocation and in relation to certain wider questions of European integration. This ambivalence is explained with reference to interests rather than identity. There is little evidence that those in the upper echelons of the ECB are negatively disposed towards the European project but the Bank has shown itself to be reluctant to support plans for ever closer union that have the potential to jeopardize price stability.

The Maastricht Treaty marked a step change towards closer European integration. Extension of the EU’s policy remit endowed the European Commission with a buoyant agenda for designing more ambitious policy solutions. Yet, two decades on, the Commission and EU have internalized far more modest ambitions than seemed likely in the early 1990s. This chapter develops two key arguments to explain why. First, Europe’s political appetite to delegate to the Commission has waned markedly post-Maastricht. Second, changes within the Commission may also have been a factor. The Commission, during the presidency of José Manuel Barroso, became more ‘intergovernmental’, with a College that mirrored the composition of the Council for the first time, but was also unprecedentedly presidential. Senior officials working within the Commission also appear to be more circumspect about the European project than existing theories of European integration tend to assume.

European integration in Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) since the Maastricht Treaty is often imagined as a process of communautarization. This chapter argues that in spite of this characterization, the governance of JHA shares many features with the new intergovernmentalism. Similarities involve the leadership role of the European Council, the development of new flexible modes of governance as well as the rise of informality in co-decision. Much of what passes as closer integration in JHA is aimed at coordinating increasingly national resources around a set of elite and practitioner-driven networks. Furthermore, in spite of the increased polarization and politicization fostered by the European Parliament, the concern of JHA agencies as de novo institutions is overwhelmingly with that of ‘operationalization’, with the effect of de-politicizing issues that remain contentious at the national level.