ABSTRACT
The European Union in the 1990s is a contested, open-ended polity. It regulates almost as many policy issues as nation-states and has been accepted by politicians, interest groups and many parts of the public as an appropriate framework for policy-making. Despite the increasing importance of the EU there is, however, no consensus about what the EU actually is, yet alone where it is heading. The ever-expanding agenda of integration in the 1990s has also led to considerable public scepticism towards the EU project. Indeed, legitimacy crisis and democratic deficit have become the codewords in the literature and practice of European integration in the 1990s.
