ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the innovative potential of research on the European Union (EU) once combined with policy studies in the field of comparative politics and international relations theory. It argues that time is a crucial factor in the policy process and builds on contributions to the examination of meaning based on discursive practices. The chapter elaborates an approach which is best termed "socio-historical institutionalist" because it is focused on examining institutional changes as socio-historically contingent. It provides a brief introduction to the organs of the Euro-polity; and addresses time and contextualized discourse as two crucial factors for the analysis of policy as a process. The chapter promotes a model of the acquis communautaire as that institution which entails informal and formal resources of a given EU policy area at any time. It demonstrates, the Treaty of European Union as the Euro-polity's quasi-constitutional framework does provide a way of locating such informal resources of policy making by defining the acquis communautaire.
