Conceptualizing European Governance

Abstract

The study of the changes of responsive and responsible governance in the European Union is of interest not only for those concerned with integration theory but equally for those dealing with international relations or with policy-making and governance within national states. This chapter claims that governance by and within the European Union is developing towards a model of political organization which cannot be adequately described anymore by the concept of the externally and internally sovereign state. In a first effort to understand these changes, it reviews some recent literature with the aim of arriving at a notion of governance which is not already conceptually linked to the territorial state. The development in question is caused by two independent trends in the development of modern societies which are general phenomena and thus by no means confined to the European Union alone. However, these developments find their strongest manifestation within Western Europe, and the European Union is the most sophisticated and novel institutional form to deal with them (Jachtenfuchs/Kohler-Koch, 1996a, 1996b).