ABSTRACT
The themes examined in this chapter touch upon some of the issues that have been at the heart of EU scholarship for some time: the changing norms of state sovereignty, the role of consensual and majoritarian modes of decision-making, and the relationship between popular fragmentation and stable governance. Exploring these themes reflects a concern with consociational theory and its validity in portraying the larger unit as a system of consensus elite government in which the development of patterns of co-determination among the component state executives has preserved, and even augmented, the autonomy of their respective polities; albeit often at the expense of mainstream democratic practices. Before examining in greater detail what consociationalism contains for the study of European integration, let us trace its historical and conceptual evolution from Althusius’s political philosophy to the contemporary comparative politics literature.
