Rethinking EU Governance: From ‘Old’ to ‘New’ Approaches to Who Steers Integration

EU scholars have long been divided on the main drivers of European integration. The original approaches were at odds on whether EU level intergovernmental actors or supranational actors were better able to exercise coercive or institutional power to pursue their interests, with Andrew Moravcsik's liberal intergovernmentalism serving as a baseline for one side of those debates. Newer approaches are similarly divided, but see power in terms of ideational innovation and consensus‐focused deliberation. The one thing old and new approaches have in common is that they ignore the parliamentarists, new and old. What all sides to the debates have failed to recognize is the reality of a ‘new’ EU governance of more politically charged dynamics among all three main EU actors exercising different kinds of power. This has roots not only in the national level's increasing ‘politics against policy’ and its bottom up effects on the EU level. It also stems from EU institutional interactions at the top, and its ‘policy with politics’.