The article explores the strategic and political parameters influencing the ways in which the main economic interest groups become involved in policy in contemporary Greece. The fact that social dialogue in Greece remains an exercise with a limited scope has been largely due to the fact that there is a difficult match between Greece's 'disjointed corporatism' and the EU's emerging 'competitive corporatism'. A number of European trade unions have agreed to a new 'competitive bargain', which is asymmetrical but which gives them the opportunity to get involved in 'competitive corporatism'. Greek responses to this trend have been inconclusive: while there are clearly pockets within union leaderships which would welcome the opportunity to approve the basic liberalising goals in exchange for guarantees for established workers and participation in the political framing of their implementation, the structural features of the Greek interest intermediation system work against such a possibility. Whether this leads to an evolving 'segmented pluralism' or another form remains to be seen -the extent of the synchronicity of developments with other EU states will depend in part on the outcome of this transition. In previous decades, the country's transition from asymmetric state corporatism to disjointed corporatism went through the contours of an embracing strategy of Europeanisation. It is an open question whether an equivalent strategy for the twenty-first century will be able to restructure the sociopolitical scene.

The article explores changes in the politics of business associability in Italy and Greece, focusing in particular on a set of comparable domestic and European developments that have played the roles of stimuli for the slow but unmistakable transformation of interest politics. Against a background of intense politicization, changes that are taking place since the 1980s suggest that organized interests become disentangled from the linkages which sustained party colonization and state dominance. Changes in interest politics were facilitated by the transition to a majoritarian system (in Italy) and party alternation (in Greece). The disentanglement we refer to would be difficult under conditions of sharing-out government; conversely, alternating governments facilitate changes in the relationships between interests, parties and policy-making. Apart from the domestic sources of change, the article argues that shifts in interest politics are the combined outcome of wider challenges and of the impact of Europeanization. On the basis of this analysis, we speculate that the disentanglement of interest politics may be conducive to national policy adjustment in two possible scenarios. Either by enabling intersectoral agreements over policy issues or by freeing national policymaking from the burden of oligopolistic coalitions -a social democratic and a neoliberal scenario respectively.

Abstract. The article examines EC competition policy from a political science perspective, analyzing the political and institutional considerations which inform the development of the Commission's controlling capacities in competition. It concentrates on policy towards small businesses in manufacturing. We argue that the Commission's general capacities in the formation and the administration of competition policy have been growing in both the merger‐controlling aspects and in the control of state subsidization. Against this background, the handling of state aid to small businesses presents us with a paradox: the more developed the enforcement system in competition, the less the Commission applied it to national subsidization of small‐scale production. The role of EC competition policy and particularly the subtle handling of state subsidies should be analyzed as part of the developing system of Community policy vis‐à‐vis small business, encompassing measures at the EC and national levels. Community policy has emerged as a result of an accommodation between different EC institutional and domestic political objectives, and to some extent this accommodation has been achieved at the expense of policy content. The article traces the development of Community policy in this area from the early 1970s to the adoption of the first‐ever detailed policy guidelines in 1992, and suggests an analytical scheme for explaining the emergence of small business promotion as an issue in EC institutional politics.

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This article explores the possibilities for a normative understanding of the politics of EU development from a republican perspective. It draws on current debates on republicanism, which combine republican, liberal and multicultural themes, and defends an approach to European citizenship and the design of European institutions in which the contemporary republican emphasis on freedom as non-domination is complemented with the multiculturalist concern with group rights that cut across national boundaries. It is argued that the combination of republican institutions and multicultural citizenship can provide a model for European construction.Early federalist approaches to the construction of a European polity were keen to encourage the conditions that would enable the adoption of a 'constitution for Europe'. The role for a new polity of the existence of the 'founders of a new order' (see Pocock, 1988) can be crucial, and the existence of a 'constitutional moment' in the case of the European polity would simultaneously facilitate stability and long-term predictability and provide the new order with elements of a political myth. Instead of a 'constitutional moment', Europe has been constructed in a process of gradual transformation and is likely to continue along the path of revisions, shifts and reconfigurations.Despite the lack of an unambiguous constitutional founding, developments at least since the Treaty on European Union (TEU) prompt us to view the EU as an emerging political system of a non-state type (see Quermonne,