The European Union (EU) poses quite profound questions for scholars and students of the social and political sciences. This benchmark Handbook is designed to provide an authoritative state-of-the art guide to the scope of the field suitable for both established scholars and students of the EU; reflect and contribute to the debates about the nature of the field of EU studies and EU politics in particular; and explore in detail the development of the many approaches to the study of EU politics. Divided into four sections, the Handbook focuses on theorizing European integration; the EU as polity; politics and policy making in the EU; and the EU and the international system.

Bringing Federalism Back in

Bringing Federalism Back in

Bringing federalism back in

Introduction

In the past decade, comparative federalism has moved from the periphery of scholarship on the European Union to the mainstream. While pioneering scholars (see for instance Friedrich 1969; Forsyth 1981; Cappelletti et al. 1986; Scharpf 1988; Weiler 1991; Dehousse 1992; Sbragia 1992) have long applied insights from comparative federalism (or confederalism) to describe and explain the dynamics of European integration, the dominant theoretical perspectives on European integration rejected the relevance of federal comparisons. Intergovernmentalists had clear reasons to do so. From the intergovernmentalist perspective, European integration is driven by the same forces that explain the development of other international regimes (Moravcsik 1998), forces which differ in fundamental ways from the forces at work in domestic settings. From this ...

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