ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that it is analytically useful to think of the European Union (EU) as a 'regulatory state'. Rather than proposing a new definition of the EU or discussing whether the sui generis system meets some minimal requirements of statehood, the chapter analyses the Union in terms familiar to students of the role of the state in advanced market economies. Two factors explain the strikingly different development of public policy in Europe and the US. First, the early US regulatory state was a minimal state, a 'state of parties and judges' with a highly-developed party democracy that presumed the absence of a strong arm of national administration. The second important factor is ideological. While in Europe broad popular support of the market economy developed only after the crisis of the welfare Keynesian state, in America the value of the market as an engine of economic and social progress has never been seriously challenged, except by politically-unimportant intellectual minorities.
