Changing tools to catch the beast: Why the EU studies should take policy seriously, and how this shift could help to understand integration

摘要

While the EU is still enlarging its membership and range of actions, the current stalemate of the integration project is pushing the ‘ontological’ question about the nature of the common Europe again at the top of both the political and the research agendas. This paper aims to contribute the debate and display the possibilities of enhancing the comprehension of the ‘supranational beast’ from a policy perspective. The focus hence is shifted on implementation and policy frameworks, and the field of analysis widened to cover the institutional transformations occurred within the administrative dimension both at the national and supranational levels in the last decades. From this perspective, previous findings are revisited to account for the new meaning of the common Europe after the Single European Act, the complexity of the current institutional architecture, and the reasons beneath the stalemate. Finally, the approach is translated into research hypotheses about integration and viable strategies for sustaining it beneath and beyond the usual ‘hard’ institutional re-engineering.