ABSTRACT
Understanding the European polity in federal terms seems rather matter-of-fact to many European policy-makers and scholars.! In contrast, when most American international relations (IR) scholars who were steeped in neo-realism and neoliberal institutionalism see the word 'federal', in reference to Europe, they are more apt to think of constitutional plans and prescriptive theories that have little to do with 'reality'. Owing to the dominance of the conceptual construct of international anarchy/domestic hierarchy and the state-centric theories it produces, IR scholars have generally tended to view federalism as a feature of domestic political organization in the prototypical mode of the modern federal state or as domestic political structures that are projected to the international level as blueprints for regional or global political integration - a hypothetical federal state writ large. From the standpoint of mainstream IR theory, federalism belongs to the field of comparative politics or to the musings of idealists who dream of European or world federations.
