ABSTRACT
In the recent past, the European political process has spawned several widely differing institutional concepts and political programmes for the organisational advancement of the European Union. These concepts prove yet again the early conclusion drawn by Ralf Dahrendorf that the European Union is a large-scale “institutional experiment” (Dahrendorf 1973, 212), a work-in-progress. The European Union indeed constitutes a laboratory for the institutional projects that are rooted in the foundations and memories of different European societies. For more than fifty years now, these projects have been tested diligently for their adequacy and compatibility with transnational cooperation between European national states. Indeed, of all things, the unremitting change of institutional forms appears to be the one constant factor in this development (Wallace 2003, 257; Knelangen 2005, 8).
