ABSTRACT
At the start of the twenty-first century it seems unthinkable that any two EU member states would enter into an armed conflict. This ‘unbroken peace’ (Nugent 2006: 8) is remarkable, as it was achieved in only a few decades, following the two most destructive global wars that humanity had ever known. This chapter briefly outlines the historical context for the creation of the EU and presents the key theoretical concepts developed to analyse the rationale and nature of European integration and the complex, multi-level political system of governance that has arisen as a result. For several reasons it is no easy task to define what kind of political organisation the EU is: EU leaders have not sought to define the EU as a clear project with a defined ‘end’; the EU has always been in constant transition, evolving in an incremental way; and it is a complex, multi-faceted and altogether unique system (Nugent 2006: 546-7) that combines some of the features of two radically different models of political integration between nations, often referred to as the ‘supranational’ and the ‘intergovernmental’ models.
