ABSTRACT
After more than fifty years, the politics of European integration still has the power to engross. The unique mixture of international organisation and transnational polity that is the European Union of today (EU, the Union) does not lend itself to easy classification in traditional academic categories. Moreover, the last two decades have seen an amazing rate of change in the structures, processes and competences of the EU. Indeed, since the Treaty on European Union (TEU) was signed at Maastricht in 1992 in the heady days of ‘euro-phoria’, four new Treaties on the workings of the Union have been agreed. One of them (the Constitutional Treaty) was rejected after negative referenda in France and the Netherlands in 2005, and, as this book is being written, the final Treaty in this flotilla, the Treaty of Lisbon, is going through the process of ratification in order to fill most of the gaps that were left by its stillborn predecessor.
