Trapped in the supranational-intergovernmental dichotomy : a response to Stone Sweet and Sandholtz
By: BRANCH, Ann P
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Contributor(s): OHRGAARD, Jakob C.
Material type: 
ArticlePublisher: London : Routledge, March 1999Journal of European Public Policy 6, 1, p. 123-143Abstract: This article is a critical response to an article by Alec Stone Sweet and Wayne Sandholtz in the September 1997 issue of this journal in which they put forward a theory of European integration focused on supranational governance. We argue that this theory fails to address the key problem in current theorizing, namely the persistence of a supranational-intergovernmental dichotomy which dictates that integration is driven by either supranational institutions or national governments. As a result, we argue that supranational governance is essentially a mirror image of the liberal intergovernmentalist theory which it criticizes, and demonstrate that, by reducing integration to a particular form of governance, it fails to allow for different forms of integration in different policy domains. Instead, we propose that the focus of current theorizing on European integration be shifted away from institutional characteristics and toward processes of interaction and policy characteristics.
This article is a critical response to an article by Alec Stone Sweet and Wayne Sandholtz in the September 1997 issue of this journal in which they put forward a theory of European integration focused on supranational governance. We argue that this theory fails to address the key problem in current theorizing, namely the persistence of a supranational-intergovernmental dichotomy which dictates that integration is driven by either supranational institutions or national governments. As a result, we argue that supranational governance is essentially a mirror image of the liberal intergovernmentalist theory which it criticizes, and demonstrate that, by reducing integration to a particular form of governance, it fails to allow for different forms of integration in different policy domains. Instead, we propose that the focus of current theorizing on European integration be shifted away from institutional characteristics and toward processes of interaction and policy characteristics.
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