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This chapter presents a theoretical framework to analyse the interaction between ‘history-making’ and ‘everyday’ practices of integration in the EU. The framework, based on liberal intergovernmentalism and institutionalised international governance, was applied to the Amsterdam Treaty as a plausibility test. The framework provided insights on how future politics of ‘everyday integration’ may interact with the ‘grand bargain’ of the Treaty, including the consequences of the 2000 intergovernmental conference.

The chapter gives an evaluation of the inconsistencies in the conservatives' approach to Northern Ireland under Prime ministers Thatcher and Major. It applauds the Conservatives eventual recognition that intergovernmental cooperation with Dublin was essential to the successful management of the conflict - even if it took some ministers nearly two decades to relearn what Conservative prime minister Heath had appreciated in 1973.

The evolution of the European Community (EC) towards a supranational constitution is charted by combining three different perspectives. First, an examination is made of the major features of the integration process since 1959, which argues that the European market and polity developed symbiotically, as the activities of economic actors, organized interests, litigators and judges, and the EC's legislative and regulatory organs became linked, to create a self‐sustaining, dynamic system. Second, the ‘constitutionalization’ of the treaty system is investigated, and the activities of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) surveyed; among other things, constitutionalization secured property rights for transnational market actors, expanded the discretionary powers of national judges, and reduced the EC's intergovernmental character. Third, the relationship between the ECJ and the national courts is considered, focusing on how intra‐judicial conflict and cooperation have shaped the production of specific constitutional doctrines; through these ‘constitutional dialogues’, the supremacy of EC law was gradually achieved, rendering it judicially enforceable. Overall, the chapter situates the development of the European legal system within the overall process of European integration.

Stephen George considers the application of multi‐level governance to developments in the European Union. While multi‐level governance developed from and has been most often applied to studies of the European Union, its capacity to explain developments remains strongly contested. This chapter outlines the main applications of the concept in a number of policy areas and evaluates the position of multi‐level governance alongside competing approaches in the current ‘state of the debate’ on the European Union.

EU membership and parliamentary sovereignty. The Schuman Plan and supranationalism. The United Kingdom's early attempts to join. The 1972 debates. The 1975 referendum. The Single European Act and its incorporation into domestic law. Factortame and the destruction of parliamentary sovereignty.

Expectations of the Commission's ability to provide leadership derived from its treaty functions, the cultivated spillover from them, and the Hallstein and Delors presidencies. Its functions of agenda-setting and policy initiation have given it political influence. President Santer sought to do less in this area and concentrate on the Commission's neglected administrative role. This low-profile, introverted focus on managerial reform left the preparation of enlargement and the Euro to others. Santer's enforced resignation was followed by President Prodi's completion of major East European enlargement and the changeover to the Euro. He was ineffective in enforcing the Stability and Growth Pact, and in his forlorn attempt at federalist treaty reform when the EU was moving increasingly towards intergovernmentalism. Increased intervention by the Council of Ministers and Parliament has confined the Commission to the management of policy networks rather than political leadership.

The transfer of competence in areas considered emblematic of national sovereignty, like immigration and citizenship, should be a litmus test of the ‘polity’ ambitions of the EU. As of the early 1980s, national officials in charge of migration sought to avoid judicial constraints and conflicting bureaucratic views that that were experiencing at the national level. They consequently moved to relocate some of their decision-making to a secretive intergovernmental forum at the EU level. This chapter develops this analysis of motives for cooperation at the EU level in terms of political ‘venue shopping’.

The institutional frictions between the Parliament and the Commission during the ‘mad cow’ crisis are emblematic of the dynamic, unfinished nature of the federal project for Europe. The EU still retains many of the qualities of an international organization, but has also developed a government-like institutional structure. This government is conventionally described as confederal because it is dominated by its member states, but in some respects, the EU is more federal than confederal. As the complexity of EU food safety regulation illustrates, this amalgam of intergovernmental, confederal, and federal features gives the EU its distinctive character.

Presents a transaction‐based theory of European integration and contrasts it with alternative theories of neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism. It defines key concepts of the theory, discusses causal relationships between variables, and derives some hypotheses about how European integration proceeds. It then sketches out the structure of the entire book and how the contributory chapters fit together. A concluding section clarifies the differences between the transaction‐based theory and intergovernmentalist theories of integration.

Member states are increasingly willing to commit themselves to common tasks, but wish to act outside the Community method. How credible are such commitments? It is easy to find cases where the national governments did not take their commitments seriously, but it is also the case that significant results have been achieved outside the traditional framework. There are in fact effective strategies of commitment that do not involve delegation of powers to third parties. In an information-rich environment, where national leaders are quite aware of the preferences and constraints of their colleagues, delegation to centralized institutions is less important than it was in the early stages of integration.

This chapter reviews international theories of integration and delegation, showing the added value of a liberal constructivist approach that brings contested, constructed norms into the equation. It outlines the distinction between constitutive and regulative norms at the international level, and shows how they may be built on corresponding national norms.

This chapter shows how member states collectively fought for a regime on company law that preserved their jurisdiction over companies despite rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that threatened it. This instituted a new normative set of agreements limiting EU powers.

This chapter first challenges the nexus between constitutionalism and nationhood, arguing that like the nation states, which are also the outcome of integration processes merging regions into states, the EU must accommodate difference and that until now she does so by veiling constitutionalism. It then argues that the current problems of the Union resulting from the rejection of treaty revisions stem from the citizens' lack of trust in organs of supranational and national representation, and that this wont is fuelled by the colliding systems of representation simultaneously based on supranationalism and on intergovernmentalism. It discusses the citizens' ambivalences regarding their trust in European institutions as they surface in public opinion polls, and interprets them as a misfit of expectations and results of European politics. Finally, it discusses the democratic potential offered by the Treaty of Lisbon to bridge the gap between representatives and represented through a combination of enhanced parliamentarism and citizens' involvement. Despite all the shortcomings and paradoxes created by the IGC, the ‘Treaty of Parliaments’, it is argued that it would indeed mark a significant turn in European constitutionalism.

This chapter examines the ongoing tensions between intergovernmentalism and communitarization in European policy-making, especially its external relations. It finds that there is an important third dimension to China–Europe relations — the role of civil society, business, and scholarship — but China predominantly finds itself having to negotiate in the uncertain waters that exist between the EU institutions and the national interests of member states. This is all the more the case because not all powers contribute equally to Europe's relations with China. The ‘Big Three’ — France, the United Kingdom (UK) and Germany — in particular view external relations in the context of their international roles, including in relation to the USA. As a result, though movement towards a communitarized China policy will continue, China would do well to pay most attention to the continued centrality of intergovernmentalism.

This chapter develops a constructivist-institutionalist model of national interest formation and foreign policy formulation. Focusing on variable constellations between the logic of institutionalization and construction at the interstate level on the one hand and domestic factors on the other, this model offers a number of general hypotheses about the potential, contingent, and uneven impact of institutionalized interstate relations on states' interests and policies. The chapter distinguishes among three main components of interstate institutionalization and construction: regularized intergovernmentalism, predominantly symbolic acts and practices, and parapublic underpinnings of interstate relations.

This concluding chapter refocuses on two sets of issues which highlight the competing approaches to European integration: the tension between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, and that between regulation and deregulation. These competing visions have resulted in a European Employment Strategy which is itself an uneven synthesis of rival, yet overlapping, policy discourses. That the attempted synthesis is uneven is evidenced by the dominance of economic policy discourses, which emphasise labour market efficiency and flexibility, over social policy discourses which have been traditionally concerned with employment protection and social protection. Furthermore, the Employment Strategy has exposed tensions between the adoption of minimal regulatory standards at EU level, permitting regulatory competition between Member States (negative integration), and centralised harmonisation through common European policies to shape the conditions under which markets operate (positive integration).

This chapter examines the EU's competences in matters of commercial policy, which formed the basis in the original EEC Treaty for external action. It analyzes turf battles, mostly between the Commission and the Council, and the case law and treaty amendments they gave rise to. This is done from a historical perspective, in the sense of discussing both internal and external events which throw light on how the law on trade policy powers developed. The chapter also shows the significant political dimension of these legal battles, so closely interwoven with the classic struggle between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism. In fact, they may be the epitome of this struggle, because of the potent mix of external relations, exclusive competences, and qualified majority voting — a threesome of political sensitivities.