Volume 20, No. 3 Summer 2007 ceptance rate for papers was 57 percent, and for pan- From the Chair els 71 percent. More panels gave the conference greater depth and Liesbet Hooghe breadth. I think it is fair to say that EUSA is the most diverse, multidisciplinary intellectual gathering on EU EUSA Conference: Can big be beautiful? studies. One can get an idea of this by looking at the diversity of panels at the conference across twelve IT IS AN HONOR TO SERVE as Chair of the European Union themes (these are from the list that EUSA uses to ask Studies Association for the next two years. I am very you to describe your intellectual interests when you sign much aware that my predecessor, John Keeler has up as member). strengthened the association over the past two years. EUSA Montreal – panel distribution by topic He steered EUSA through successful negotiations with Democracy 7 the University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh houses our ad- Economics, political economy 13 ministrative office, and co-pays the salary of EUSA’s Enlargement 11 executive director, Joe Figliulo. Europeanization 6 Joe’s multifaceted talents came into their own at External Relations 2 0 the Montreal conference which he organized with hu- mor, grace and promptness. EUSA is also grateful to Governance 15 Institutions 12 the European Commission, which provided financial Law, courts 3 support for the conference. Parties, interest groups, lobbying 7 Thanks also to the three members of the executive Public policy 13 committee whose terms have just ended: Sophie Theories of Integration 8 Meunier, Virginie Giraudon, and Grainne de Burca. Each Voting, public opinion 3 brought considerable wit and conviction to the excom. *two unclassified teaching panels Amy Verdun, Frank Schimmelfennig, and I are now joined by Neil Fligstein (vice-Chair), Erik Jones, Dan This was the first conference where we asked you Kelemen, and Craig Parsons. Craig has agreed to be- to submit your paper online. This will cost our associa- come editor of the EUSA Newsletter Forum Section from tion $2000 in lost paper room sales, but makes access this Winter issue onward. Amy Verdun takes over as to the conference open to (younger) scholars who could Secretary, and Frank Schimmelfennig as Treasurer. not come to the meeting. We are grateful to the Net- Andy Smith continues as the book reviews editor of the work of European Union Centers of Excellence (EUCE), EUSA Newsletter. based at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, I am writing this letter when the tenth conference in for financing, uploading and maintaining the website: http:/ Montreal—the first one outside the United States—is /www.unc.edu/euce. The papers will remain accessible still fresh in memory. I would like to draw some (per- there until six months before the next conference, at sonal) lessons as well as look ahead to our next con- which point they will be transferred to the web archive at ference in 2009. the University of Pittsburgh. At the beginning of July, there The Montreal conference was the largest ever. Six were 268 papers online. hundred fifty individuals attended 120 panels with 500 It is still possible to upload the paper you pre- papers. The conference was one third larger than Aus- sented if you have not done so already or send a tin in 2005. This was driven by a steep increase in ap- revised version. Please send it to plications: 400 paper proposals compared to 250, [email protected], and make sure to mention and 105 panel proposals compared to 55 for Austin— number and title of the panel. The program is acces- about a doubling. To meet this demand, the program sible on the EUCE website. committee guided by its chair, Wade Jacoby, increased In the remainder of this letter, I would like to initiate a the number of simultaneous panels from eight to ten, conversation on the shape of future conferences. and placed at least four papers in each panel. The ac- (continued on page 24) EUSA Review Summer 2007 1 EUSA Review EUSA Review Forum Fritz Scharpf: 2007 Award for Lifetime The EUSA Review (ISSN 1535-7031) [formerly the ECSA Contribution to the Field of EU Studies Review] is published four times yearly by the European Union Studies Association, a membership association and FROM HIS EARLY WORK through his most recent articles non-profit organization (founded in 1988 as the European (e.g., “The European Social Model: Coping with the Community Studies Association) devoted to the exchange Challenges of Diversity” (JCMS, 2002), Scharpf has of information and ideas on the European Union. We arguably done more than any other scholar of his welcome the submission of scholarly manuscripts. generation to illuminate the implications of European Subscription to the EUSA Review is a benefit of integration for both democracy and social welfare. Association membership. And given that he has produced one book and eleven articles since his “retirement” in 2003, scholars in Managing Editor our field can no doubt look forward to continued Joseph A. Figliulo groundbreaking work from Professor Scharpf. Be- Forum and Features Editor low we have reproduced the text of a lecture deliv- Amy Verdun (University of Victoria) ered at the EUSA Tenth Biennial International Con- Book Reviews Editor ference in Montreal, Canada (May 17-May 19, 2007). Andrew Smith (Sciences po Bordeaux ) Assistant Editor Irina Andriamanana Reflections on Multilevel Legitimacy 2007-2009 EUSA Executive Committee Fritz W. Scharpf Liesbet Hooghe, Chair (UNC Chapel Hill) Neil Fligstein, Vice-Chair THIS AWARD CAME as a totally unexpected surprise. But (University of California, Berkeley) since the news came a year and a half ago, I merci- Amy Verdun, Secretary (University of Victoria) fully had a bit of time to recover from the shock. I am Frank Schimmelfennig, Treasurer of course overawed by the honor of having been cho- (ETH-Zurich) sen, and I still have not been able to convince myself Erik Jones (Johns Hopkins University) that I deserve it. But then, I am also humble enough R. Daniel Kelemen (Rutgers University) to ask - who am I to say that this illustrious body has Craig Parsons (University of Oregon) chosen wrong? Alberta Sbragia (University of Pittsburgh) In any case, I am immensely grateful for the Ex Officio honor - and even more for its official designation. Getting a lifetime achievement award, whether justi- Immediate Past Chair (2005-2007) fied or not, conveys a clear message: It says, your John T.S. Keeler (University of Pittsburgh) work is over. Your achievements or failures have been European Union Studies Association ® recorded. You may now go playing - with your grand- 415 Bellefield Hall son, with your photography, or anything else. But as University of Pittsburgh far as serious scholarly work goes, you are done. As Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA you may imagine, I find this message enormously Web www.eustudies.org ® liberating. And I try to guard as best as I can against E-mail [email protected] the temptation to continue in the old tracks - to do Telephone 412.648.7635 what I did before, just less and less, from one year to the next. Democracy and Multilevel Polities Nevertheless, there is also this nagging sense of some unfinished business, or the unrealistic hope that some issues with which I have struggled so long 2 Summer 2007 EUSA Review might still be clarified a bit more by some kind of “con- lack of a European “demos” or of a “thick” collective cluding remarks”. Among these is the relationship be- identity, the lack of a common political space, the lack tween democratic legitimacy and multilevel government. of a common language and of Europe-wide media of I have worked on both, off and on, ever since I started political communication, the lack of a political infrastruc- out as a political scientist in the late 1960s. But I never ture of Europe-wide political parties, the absence of did focus systematically on the relationship between Europe-wide political competition, the low political sa- the two. lience of elections to the European Parliament, the lim- In my work on multilevel policy making in German its of EP competencies, and hence the lack of parlia- federalism, that relationship played only a marginal role mentary or electoral accountability for European acts - and I think for good reasons. In Germany, parliamen- of government. In short, the European democratic defi- tary democracy is institutionalized at both levels, na- cit exists and it cannot be repaired in the foreseeable tional and regional. But German politics is so much fo- future. cused on the national arena that Länder elections (which In the affirmative mood, by contrast, we will empha- directly shape the party-political profile of the federal size features where the EU compares favorably to a second chamber) have mostly become “second order more realistic view of political structures and processes national elections” - with the consequence of increas- in real-existing member states (e.g., Majone 1998; ing the pressures of democratic accountability on the Moravcsik 2002). Institutional checks and balances at national government. Political scientists, it is true, tend the European level are more elaborate and provide more to worry about the lack of political transparency under protection against potential abuses of governing pow- conditions of the “joint-decision trap”, since the respon- ers than is true in most member states. Moreover, many sibility for national policy choices is shared among the of the governing functions of the EU belong to a cat- federal majority and Länder prime ministers. But since egory which, even in the most democratic member dissatisfied voters are not obliged to be fair when they states, is exempted from direct political accountability.