The Struggle to Maintain a Compound System: Creating and Contesting the Rules of the Game in European Integration

Abstract

Had he lived today, Tocqueville would probably have made the same remark about the EU. The precariousness of this political system is well known but nevertheless this chapter retells the story of integration, albeit in a brief and idiosyncratic way. While the broad narrative is a familiar one, it is less so when recounted as the contest over the rules of the game within the scope of maintaining a viable compound political system. Rather than furnish a new theoretical claim to explain why integration took place, therefore, the chapter describes the important steps on the road to ‘ever closer union’ in terms of how these moments challenge, reinterpret and reproduce the rules of the game of EU politics.

The Union is an accident, which will last only as long as circumstances favour it.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1994: 416)