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The path of European integration never has run smooth. Periodically waxing and waning, neither an intergovernmental entity nor an autonomous supranational polity, the European Union (EU, or the Union) manages in an unusual fashion to display features of both and, thus, defy easy analysis or classification. Research on the EU has been obliged to reflect the vicissitudinous developments of its case study, Analytically, academics divide over whether and in what ways the EU goes beyond the nation-state. Confusion over what the EU is lhas bred related ambiguities and divisions at a normative level as to the motivations of those involved and the shape Europe ought to take, For some, the EU is an example of super-enlightened state realism. For others, it is the product of post-war idealism. Communitarian-minded civic nationalists see it as a “union of peoples", cosmopolitans incline towards some form of …