The post-Maastricht period is marked by an integration paradox. While the basic constitutional features of the European Union have remained stable, EU activity has expanded to an unprecedented degree. This form of integration without supranationalism is no exception or temporary deviation from traditional forms of European integration. Rather, it is a distinct phase of European integration, what is called 'the new intergovernmentalism' in this article. This approach to postMaastricht integration challenges theories that associate integration with transfers of competences from national capitals to supranational institutions and those that reduce integration to traditional socioeconomic or security-driven interests. This article explains the integration paradox in terms of transformations in Europe's political economy, changes in preference formation and the decline of the 'permissive consensus'. It presents a set of six hypotheses that develop further the main claims of the new intergovernmentalism and that can be used as a basis for future research.

Whilst populism and technocracy are increasingly appearing as the two organizing poles of contemporary politics in western democracies, the exact nature of their relationship has not been the focus of systematic attention. In this paper, we argue that whilst these two terms-and the political realities they refer to-are usually as assumed to be irreducibly opposed to one another, there is also an important element of complementarity between them. This complementarity consists in the fact that both populism and technocracy are predicated on an implicit critique of a specific political form, which we refer to here as "party democracy", defining it as a political regime based on two key features: the mediation of political conflicts through the institution of political parties; and a procedural conception of political legitimacy according to which political outcomes are legitimate just to the extent that they are the product of a set of democratic procedures revolving around the principles of parliamentary deliberation and electoral competition. In order to advance this argument, we rely on a close analysis of works by Ernesto Laclau and Pierre Rosanvallon as exemplary manifestations of the contemporary cases for populism and technocracy respectively.

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* This paper is a reworked version of a chapter of a doctoral thesis exploring the ways in which the EU legitimizes its foreign policy. 1 Smith, M. 2006. Comment: Crossroads or cul-de-sac? Reassessing European Foreign Policy. Journal of European Public Policy. 13(2): 322-327. p326, my italics. 2 These five are the EU as self-binding, as a vanishing mediator, as deliberation, as reflexivity and as inclusion. Manners, I. (2007). European Union, normative power and ethical foreign policy. In D. Chandler, and V. Heins (Eds.), Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, possibilities and paradoxes. Abingdon: Routledge. p119. 3 On the connection between legitimacy and normative power, Nicolaïdis writes in a book on the EU's Mediterranean policies that "one may read a number of contributions in this volume as supporting the assumption that taking the EU as a 'normative power' provides a response to the effectiveness/legitimacy dilemma, making the EU's assertion of its influence more palatable and legitimate, and distinct from that of the United States" Nicolaidis, K., and Nicolaidis, D. (2006). The EuroMed beyond Civilizational Paradigms. In E. Adler, B. Crawford, F. Bicchi, and R.D. Sarto (Eds.), The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. p8. This project on Europe in a Non-European World is part of the EU-funded Garnet project on global governance, regionalization and regulation. Information on Garnet can be obtained via its website: http://www.garnet-eu.org/ 4 Nicolaidis, K. (2007). The 'Clash of Universalisms' (Or Why Europe Needs a Genuine Post-Colonial Ethos). Paper presented at Faculty Seminar in Oxford. pp5-6.

This chapter studies populism’s relationship to another phenomenon central to contemporary political life, technocracy. Populism and technocracy are generally understood as opposite trends, one a reaction against the other. The chapter contests this view, arguing that populism and technocracy have a complementary relationship insofar as they share an opposition to two key features of party democracy: political mediation and procedural legitimacy. Having identified shared hostility to party democracy as a point of complementarity between populism and technocracy, the chapter turns to explanations for the rise of populism and technocracy. The chapter finds these explanations in long-term structural transformations in modern party democracy, namely the cartelization of the party political system. The conclusion takes up the policy implications of this analysis. Far from being useful correctives to one another, populism and technocracy should be tackled together as parallel expressions of the same underlying crisis of party democracy.

This article argues that the study of EU foreign and security policy has been hampered by its conceptualization of the sovereign state. Realist and constructivist scholars share Stanley Hoffmann's formulation of states as either 'obstinate or obsolete'. EU foreign and security policy is puzzling in this respect as it corresponds to neither. Drawing on two examples -the EC's role in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in 1973-75 and the contemporary workings of the Political and Security Committee (PSC) -this article suggests that we think of EU foreign and security policy as driven not by the obstinacy or the obsolescence of the nation-state but rather by its transformation. In line with this claim, the article proposes a social theory of EU foreign and security policy with democracy and bureaucracy as two competing political forms within the framework of the modern state. It is the changing balance between these two political forms that drives forward closer foreign and security co-operation in Europe.

This article looks at the legacy of ‘Berlusconism’ for Italian politics. On the right, we identify a process of fragmentation. As a result of the personalised leadership of Silvio Berlusconi, where loyalties and ties were to il cavaliere as an individual rather than to a party or a political tradition, there is little by way of legacy on the right. Surprisingly, we find that Berlusconi's greatest legacy lies on the left of Italian politics, in the figure of Matteo Renzi. In his savvy manipulation of the media and in the careful construction of his own image, accompanied by a non‐ideological set of political slogans, Renzi has gone even further than Berlusconi. As a result, he may be the one to final bury Italian ‘party government’ and all its associated traditions and ideals.