The Making of a Polity: The Struggle over European Integration

Abstract

European integration over the past decade has been a polity-creating as well as a market-deepening process. First, and most obviously, the Single European Act (1986) and the Maastricht Treaty (1993) are part of a process of market integration in which a wide variety of nontariff barriers have been reduced or eliminated. Second, perhaps less obviously, these institutional reforms have led to a single, though diverse, polity – a system of multilevel governance that encompasses a variety of authoritative institutions at supranational, national, and subnational levels of decision making.