ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the theoretical endeavours to explain the dynamics of European integration and the process of developing common EU policies. The first three decades of the integrative experiment were studied from the standpoint of international relations with neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism posing as the dominant paradigms. The theoretical terrain became progressively more perplexing. These approaches were revised and new theoretical frameworks relying on different assumptions and advocating different images of the political phenomenon and policy arena under examination were introduced. Bearing in mind this huge array of explanations of how European policies are made, this is a search for the role that each concept envisages for the actionable factors. The critical review of 'traditional' and more recent accounts leads to the introduction of (historical) neoinstitutionalism as a theoretical framework for understanding the developments of the CMTP in the 1990s. This is followed by a presentation of the governmental and non-governmental actors participating in the contemporary CMTP policy-making game, and the general decision rules of the latter.
