European integration and supranational governance revisited: rejoinder to Branch and Ohrgaard

Abstract

We published 'European integration and supranational governance' (Stone Sweet and Sandholtz 1997) knowing that the piece could not stand entirely on its own. Being an abridged introduction to a forthcoming book and the product of intensive collaboration with a small group over several years, it suffers from its removal from the contextual richness of the greater project. Nonetheless, we did our best to survey the theoretical materials at play, and we tried to express the group's concerns for process, historical sequencing, and logics of institutionalization, and our collective distrust of deterministic explanations of the subject matter. Still, the article races across too much terrain, too fast, too abstractly . We have responded to Branch and Ohrgaard's criticisms, with some reservations. Given that the volume is now in print (Sandholtz and Stone Sweet 1998), readers may be better served by consulting the book directly . As it is, this exchange will likely remain trapped, not in the 'supranational-intergovernmental dichotomy' that our critics so fervently imagined, but in arid abstraction, again divorced from the empirical richness of our research. Further, in this reply our energies are too often devoted to correcting misrepresentations of our ideas. As Branch and Ohrgaard have fixed the priorities of this exchange, we address the main theoretical (I), measurement (II), and methodological (III) issues they have raised; and we conclude with a comment on the alleged 'mirror-image' of intergovernmentalism and our theory (IV). To save space and to avoid unnecessary repetition, we assume familiarity with our original article.