The literature on European integration has its own business cycles. In the 2000s, the
common wisdom was that the Maastricht Treaty had ushered the EU into a stable constitutional
equilibrium that was unlikely to be upset soon (Hix 2007: 143–44; Moravcsik
2005: 349). In the 2010s, by contrast, the common wisdom holds that Maastricht has
unleashed new dynamics of change that transform the institutional architecture of the
EU in significant ways. Some scholars diagnose the rise of a ‘new intergovernmentalism’
that allegedly overlays and partly displaces the supranational actors and institutions of
the traditional community method (Bickerton et al. 2014; Puetter 2014). Others note
the creeping territorial differentiation of EU integration: national opt‐outs from common
policies become an increasingly normal feature of EU policy‐making (Leuffen et al.
2013). Yet others are concerned with the politicization of EU policies and institutions.
They observe an increasing spill‐over of EU issues from technocratic elite arenas into the
public sphere, a gradual dislocation of the traditional permissive consensus by a constraining
dissensus and the emergence of salient domestic cleavages over EU issues
(Hooghe and Marks 2009; Kriesi et al. 2012; Zürn et al. 2012: 72)
