ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the way of legitimizing recent institutional steps in European integration by national political elites as a more structural instance of 'new populism', as integral part of the unfolding mode of asymmetrical regulation and multidimensional governance in the European Union (EU). Multidimensional governance refers to the more comprehensive process of building a new European polity or, more specifically, a novel form of bourgeois domination in the transnational heartland of European production and finance. From an institutional perspective, governance in the EU is much more complex, and hybrid, than the anti-federalist rhetoric of national politicians suggests. Indeed, European integration theory has clearly moved beyond the well-known debate between supranational and intergovernmental institutionalists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The architects of the post-Cold War completion of the Single Market and creation of the monetary union led us to believe that they could square the circle.
