ABSTRACT
In the slipstream of the ‘acquis communautaire’ of rules and legislation, within EU studies, the ‘acquis académique’ (Wessels 1997, 268) developed. 1 This chapter and the following aim to explore this academic heritage, in order to look for insights into the role and shaping capacity of national governments. This chapter starts out by reviewing relevant insights from the two ‘classical’, macro-level theoretical accounts of integration, endlessly reformulated since their emergence in the 1950s and 1960s: ‘supranationalism’ and ‘intergovernmentalism’. Both schools focus on the two ‘why’-questions: why integration, and why now? (Van Ham 2001, 2), both have a strong normative dimension underlying their academic base and both have always easily used empirical developments as evidence for their respective claims (see Haas 1958, Hoffmann 1966 and 1999, Moravcik 1999). But where neofunctionalism sees the EU slowly but gradually developing into an autonomous source of political authority, separate and ‘above’ that of the member states, which are weakened and diluted as a result, intergovernmentalism argues how unitary governments rationally determine the course of integration.
