ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development of the European Union's (EU's) conception of the concept of 'governance' and explains how the European Commission has sought to define and clarify EU governance itself. It illustrates how references to 'good governance' are mainstreamed throughout EU policy-making, describing how and why the EU's view of the desirability of its own form of governance is deemed exportable. The immediate post-Second World War period witnessed the creation of a European governance discourse. A system of global governance is emerging, where authority is increasingly shared between several layers of international relations, with the regional level increasingly held to be a sig-nificant intermediate layer of governance between the nation-state and global level institutions. The original White Paper on European Governance formally committed the Commission to applying the principles of good governance to its global responsibilities and to upholding the objective of increasing the effectiveness and enforcement powers of international institutions.
