ABSTRACT
This chapter represents an attempt to make sense of the totality that has been achieved thus far, shifting the emphasis to the grand question of what the big picture might look like in the early twenty-first century. This shift ‘from process to product’ projects a general image of the whole as a reflection of a particular kind of reality linked to the transformations of state sovereignty and their impact on Europe’s composite polity. The new reality is captured by the term ‘organized synarchy’: a general system of shared rule among highly interdependent states and citizens that escapes the classical categories of political authority, resting instead on the dialectical fusion of segmental autonomy and collective polity formation. The chapter also argues the case for a post-statist reading of integration, turning its interest away from individual state behaviour or from specific policy theorizing and towards an emerging research interest in the study of the EU as a system of political co-determination based on mutually reinforcing norms of ‘co-governance’. Recent discourses on what the EU is have drawn a set of useful conclusions: (a) the regional entity forms a polyarchical type of ordering, not beyond, as in classical neofunctionalist writings, but alongside its component state structures, (b) the structural interdependencies that bind together the segments rest on extensive sovereignty-sharing within common institutions, and (c) the ‘polity’ of the EU signals a departure from a system of horizontally coordinated democracies – a union of equal and sovereign national polities – to a post-statist form of synarchy being constituted on the basis of co-determining state sovereignties.
