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The students of the European politics are intrigued by one riddle, albeit not the
only one. On the one hand, the states in Europe have been engaged in an unprecedented
degree of integration, which entails them to delegate their exclusive formal rights to make
authoritative decisions in a number of policy areas to a set of supranational and
intergovernmental institutions; on the other hand, they still retain a substantial capacity to
rule. Their extractive, coercive and administrative capacities are as strong as they have
ever been. This pattern raises questions about the changing nature of statehood in the
context of the European Integration. In this paper, I will attempt to put forward a thesis as
to how one can make sense of the riddle or in what terms the changes and continuities in
statehood in Europe could be framed.
Understanding the nature and extent of possible or actual changes and continuities
in statehood in Europe could shed lights on a number of other questions that the students
of the European Politics and the European Integration have been wrestling with. A
change in the nature of statehood implies a change in the conventional organization of the
politics, where the state has been taken as the main focal point. Some of these questions
are as follow: Is it still meaningful to talk about national or domestic politics or a make a
meaningful distinction between domestic and European? Has the EU moved to become a
polity, which the actors have shifted their allegiance and attention from their states to the
European level institutions and processes? Or what is the extent of the Europeanization of
the national politics?
Before moving any further, a brief discussion of the scope and limits of the
analysis in this paper is convenient. The scope of the analysis in this paper is macro in
that the main unit of the analysis is state with a set of institutions and interactions and
change and continuities in its structure. The purpose of the analysis is descriptive rather
than explanatory; the paper does not try to explain why the states are changing or not
changing, but aims at developing tools necessary to identify change in the first place.
Also, the purpose is modest in that it does not purport to spell out a theory of integration
or modern state, but provides a thesis as to how one can trace changes in the nature of
statehood in the context of the European Integration.
Convention