ABSTRACT

Ever since the European Union has been studied, scholars have attempted to locate it in the classificatory table of political animals and species. For some the Union may even be a new kind of state (Ferry 2000; Schmidt 2004). For others, it is a non-state political system (Hix 2005). For still others it remains an international organization of a more (Magnette 2005) or less (Moravcsik 1993) original kind. Whilst, however, these contributions differ on the nature of the beast, they all

assume that the Union is just the one beast. Indeed, the beast metaphor began life in the singular when Donald Puchala (1972) famously teased scholars of European integration for confusing the whole with their own narrow research preoccupations in the same way as blind men in a legend mistook an elephant for the ‘hoof, trunk, tail and ear’ they happened to touch. Puchala did not imagine that scholars might need to touch an elephant, a giraffe and a kangaroo to obtain a complete understanding of European integration. Of course, that was then. The pre-1992 European Community approximated

a single institutional order more closely than the post-1992 European Union.