ABSTRACT
For more than 40 years the role played by various actors in shaping the development of the European Union (EU) has been a source of fascination and dispute for scholars in Europe and beyond. The role played by interest groups is particularly contested. Until the 1980s rival versions of International Relations (IR) theory dominated much of the discourse and affected the way in which interest groups were perceived. Neofunctionalism held sway in the 1950s and 1960s but was displaced by intergovernmentalism in the 1970s. Whilst these two schools of thought were unable to agree about which actor (or actors) were responsible for European integration, they were broadly in agreement that it was a ‘bottom-up’ process (i.e., that national level factors and forces created or caused European integration). By the 1980s this IR-led debate had reached an impasse. In the early 1990s EU studies received fresh impetus as it drew in scholars of national and comparative politics. One of the novel research themes that subsequently emerged was the study of the impact of the EU on the member states, i.e. Europeanization.
