ABSTRACT
Writing in the 1990s in the wake of Europe’s grand bargains for a Single European Market (1986) and the Treaty on European Union (1991), Alec Stone Sweet, Wayne Sandholtz and others put forward the case that the EU was moving towards ‘supranational governance’ (Sandholtz and Zysman 1989; Stone 1994; Stone Sweet and Sandholtz 1998). Noting the end of the bipolar superpower balance of the Cold War, and the progress of the WTO and the International Criminal Court, some scholars went even further, suggesting that:
The doctrine of supranationalism has turned out to be the ideational, or the ideological, driving force behind . . . the progress of European integration. . . . Supranationalism is a relatively recent doctrine, or ideology . . . but supranationalism’s reach is likely to become globally encompassing: a further feature of the latest variant on the process of globalisation.
