Abstract
The former French President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, once stated that the European Union was an “unidentified political object”. This phrase highlights the complexity of the EU polity, which various theories have tried to capture and which has sparked controversy among the students of European integration. Among those theories, two models emerged between the late eighties and the early nineties, focusing on the relationship between supranational, national and subnational institutions, drawing opposite conclusions on the role of these actors in EU policy making. The term “multi-level governance” was coined by authors such as Gary Marks and Liesbet Hooghe, to describe European integration as “a polity creating process in which authority and policy-making influence are shared across multiple levels of government – subnational, national and supranational”. This model points at the dilution of national sovereignty and at the autonomous role of the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European Court of Justice.
