Innovative Governance in the European Union: The Politics of Multilevel Policymaking. By Ingeborg Tommel, Amy Verdun. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009. 361 pp. $26.50 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-58826-614-9). Experimentalist Governance in the European Union: Towards a New Architecture. By Charles F. Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 368 pp. $95.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-199-57249-6). Research on European Union (EU) governance and policymaking has generated a lot of important findings in recent years. In terms of institutions, we now have a much better understanding of the influence and internal dynamics of the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council. Regarding individual policy areas, scholars have deepened our knowledge of the actual decision-making processes and the effect the policies have, particularly at the national level. During the past decade an increasing number of scholars have also paid attention to the shifting or changing nature of EU governance. Especially the introduction of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), and the extensive use of other “soft law” processes, has lead to an active political and scholarly debate about the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional “Community method” of producing supranational legislation and the softer, less hierarchical ways of policy coordination (see for example Peters and Borras 2010). Such scholarly debates obviously reflect reality—that is, the EU is using a broader range of policy processes for achieving its objectives. Or to express it differently, member states are making greater use of the EU to advance their own policy goals. National governments want, on the one hand, to achieve highly-valued policy objectives, such as reducing unemployment and making their economies more competitive, while on the other hand, they are increasingly reluctant to cede formal sovereignty to the Union. The Commission, or more broadly the EU, meanwhile often sees these new modes of governance as a way to expand the EU's competence in the face of resistance from the member states. At the same time the Commission is continuing to make active use of its right to initiate laws, with directives and other binding outputs hence retaining their place in European level politics. But how do these various modes or …