Product Description

The European Union began in 1957 as a treaty among six nations but today constitutes a supranational polity - one that creates rules that are binding on its 15 member countries and their citizens. This majesterial study confronts some of the most enduring questions posed by the remarkable evolution of the EU: Why does policy-making sometimes migrate from the member states to the European Union? And why has integration proceeded more rapidly in some policy domains than in others? A distinguished team of scholars lead by Wayne Sandholtz and Alec Stone Sweet offers a fresh theory and clear propositions on the development of the EU. Combining broad data and probing case studies, the volume finds solid support for these propositions in a variety of policy domains. The coherent theoretical approach and extensive empirical analyses together constitute a significant challenge to approaches that see the EU as a straightforward product of member-state interests, power, and bargaining. This volume clearly demonstrates that a nascent transnational society and supranational institutions have played decisive roles in constructing the European Union.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #447739 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Customer Reviews

A Critical Evaluation of EU Supranational Governance
This book is a collection of papers which emerged from a collaborative project on supranational governance. The theoretical approach which is directing the way of the book from the beginning until the end is the institutionalism, which aims to interpret the deepening and broadening of the European Union (EU) within neo-functionalist terms. With regard to this, the book basically aims; to assess the remarkable transformation of the European Community from an interstate bargaining into a multi-dimensional, quasi federal polity (p.1) and also to prove that in explaining the integration process institutionalist approach is more powerful than the inter-governmentalist one, which is "incapable of capturing crucial temporal elements of European Integration" (p.4).

The main argument of the editors and almost all contributing authors of the book brings to mind Morten Egeberg's consideration for the European Commission, which is "evolving EU executive within the evolving system" (Morten Egeberg (2002), The European Commission - The Evolving EU Executive, Arena Working Papers WP 02/30), since according to their point of view, EU institutions, day to day, are getting closer to be the driving motors of the gradual EU integration through the changing balance of power in the EU multi-level governance. In other words, as Prakash and Hart put it, these institutions are taking on a life of their own and becoming political actors in their own right (Prakash A. & Hart J., Globalization and Governance (London, Routledge, 1999)). Moreover, in the book, the authors consider the evolving political governance of the EU as a multidimensional interaction between supranational institutions, which refer to the increasingly preferred problem-solving areas, and trans-national activity, which refer to the European society and also non-state actors who engage in transactions and communications across national borders. In this way, they use "transactions-based theory" in order not only to explain the determinants of the EU's internal policy domains, but also to show what kind of factors and who govern the direction to the EU's foreign policy domains. To illustrate, as I mentioned at beginning, since they prefer to interpret the European Union's internal and external relations according to the neo-functionalist terms, they establish a "cause-effect" relationship, or positive correlation, between the intensity of cross-national transactions and the need for supranational coordination and rules. Especially, in Chapter 5 Wayne Sandhlotz and in Chapter 6 Dolores O'Reilly and Alec Stone Sweet supported this view by giving relevant examples within the area of Competition policy and also by emphasizing the effectiveness of supranational policy coordination with compare to the weaknesses of intergovernmental bargaining. Additionally, in Chapter 10 and in Chapter 11, they interestingly attempted to clarify the interaction between the global forces and the EU supranational governance according to the transactional-cost approach. However, although they are true in their assumptions about the Globalisation and its influences over EU supranational governance, such as "the intensive cross-national transactions in the global economic policies and multilateral approaches to global problems create pressures for integration from above" (p.302), their approach is not clear enough to explain the changing internal dynamics of one of the intergovernmental pillars, that is Common Foreign Security Policy.

In the light of these remarks, this collection is a good resource for the understanding of the efficiency of the policy-making at the supranational level. However, it should be mentioned here that the existence of some weighted-arguments in the favour of institutionalism and the lack of detailed analysis of the interaction between EU supranational institutions and the global institutions, can make the reader to consider the EU integration from a narrow perspective.