Trajectories of European Politics: An Introduction

Abstract

This article introduces a specially commissioned issue of West European Politics marking the journal's 30th anniversary. It highlights profound changes in the European political landscape over the last three decades, including the fall of Communism; progressive European integration; territorial restructuring; public sector reforms at European, national, regional and local levels; changes in democratic participation, protest, elections, political communication, political parties and party competition; and challenges to the welfare state. The special issue also discusses how political science has responded to these changes in terms of its substantive focus, concepts, methods and theories. Many of the 17 contributions included in the special issue identify important challenges for the future, including those challenges stemming from EU integration, the reduced electoral accountability of politicians, the problematic legitimation of party government and the sharpening of the edges of the state.

The first issue of West European Politics (WEP) was published in February 1978 under the joint editorship of Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright. The journal had been initially conceived when both editors were lecturing at the London School of Economics, where they were jointly responsible for a new MSc degree in West European politics. At that time, the range of journals dealing with comparative European politics was considerably more limited than is now the case. The standard national political science journals, including American Political Science Review and Political Studies, were well established, but usually included only a small number of comparative European papers. The same was true even for the more explicitly comparative journals, including the US-based Comparative Politics and Comparative Political Studies, both founded in 1968, and World Politics. Moreover, almost none of these journals paid much attention to the politics of the smaller European democracies, which was to become a particular concern of WEP. The smaller democracies also tended to be sidelined by the two leading journals in European politics at the time. The Journal of Common Market Studies, founded in 1963, was devoted almost exclusively to the study of European integration, while the European Journal of Political Research, launched in 1973 as the official journal of the newly-established European Consortium for Political Research, tended primarily towards quantitative and cross-national studies. For WEP, what mattered was a more conventional, case-oriented comparative politics that would cover the small as well as the large democracies – ranging across the whole of what was then Western Europe.

The range of papers included in the very first issue of the new journal reflected this basic approach. In addition to two reflective essays by Ralf Dahrendorf and Altiero Spinelli marking the launch of the journal – both were members of the first editorial advisory board – there were separate papers on politics in West Germany, Spain and France, a fourth paper on Britain's relations with the European Community and a fifth on Scandinavian social democracy. There was also a short report on a recent election in Norway, as well as a series of book reviews covering publications in comparative politics, national politics, and European integration, including two books concerned with current politics in West Germany, and a third dealing with East Germany.

From one perspective that first issue might not seem very remote. Indeed, among the eight original contributors were scholars who continue to contribute to the journal today. John Madeley, the author of the Norwegian election report, recently co-edited a special issue of WEP dealing with ‘Church and State in Contemporary Europe’ (Madeley and Enyedi 2003), while Francis G. Castles, who contributed the paper on Scandinavian social democracy, is also contributing to this 30th anniversary issue. From another perspective, however, and particularly from the perspective of any young graduate students coming to comparative European politics for the first time, this was another Europe – a now foreign continent where things were done very differently. Take the recent special issue on church and state, for example. This was the second special issue on the theme of religion to be carried by WEP, the first being on ‘Religion in West European Politics’, edited by Suzanne Berger (1982). Berger's issue included three papers on religion and politics in France, her own particular interest, and one each on Italy, Spain, England and the Netherlands. John Madeley – again – contributed a paper on Protestant Europe, and a paper by Brian Smith dealt with the lessons that Western Europe might draw from experiences in Allende's Chile. This was, by any standard, a narrowly circumscribed world. By 2003, in contrast, the special issue on church and state included not only a number of chapters on the familiar West European cases, now expanded to include Ireland and Greece, but also chapters dealing with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. France, which had received the lion's share of attention in 1982, was now handled in the context of a single comparative contribution that also included Britain and Germany. By 2003, in other words, WEP, despite its name, was dealing with a new Europe.

To appreciate the extent to which the European political landscape has been recast during the past 30 years, it is worth recalling briefly how the main contours looked just three decades ago. Europe was divided sharply between the Western liberal democracies and the Communist bloc. Germany, Europe's largest nation, was also divided by the Cold War. In the West, Greece, Portugal and Spain were still very much in the process of post-authoritarian transition and consolidation. The EU had nine members, with the Southern enlargements of the 1980s still some years off, and with direct elections to the European Parliament due to begin in 1979. As regards the largest Western European states, the UK was yet to experience Thatcherism and France was yet to undergo the Socialist experiment of the first Mitterrand presidency and its subsequent policy reversals. In Germany, it would be a further four years before the beginning of the Kohl chancellorship, which was to last 16 years and witness German unification. In Italy, the Christian Democratic Party controlled the political system as it had done throughout the post-war period, but was now also having to deal with a powerful Communist party, and with the demands of the so-called historic compromise. This was the heyday of Eurocommunism, with the US State Department expressing particular concerns about possible Communist party involvement in the governments of NATO allies.

Thirty years later, this picture has been profoundly altered. The demise of Soviet Communism rendered obsolete the old West–East divide – hitherto a fundamental structuring principle of European politics; it also led directly to the emergence of a host of new or reborn European states, including, inter alia, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; the Czech and Slovak Republics; and the states that emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia. In the study of democratic transition and consolidation, the focus shifted, accordingly, from Southern Europe to Central and Eastern Europe. The European Union has grown from 9 to 27 members (as of 1 January 2007); it has experienced a massive extension of the acquis communautaire; and its membership has become immensely more diverse (see Mair and Zielonka 2002). Amongst the largest European states, the political system of the UK has been profoundly affected by Thatcherism and, since 1997, the New Labour government. France underwent 14 years of Socialist rule under President Mitterrand, massive nationalisations followed by privatisation, repeated attempts at overcoming its centralist state tradition, and saw the rise of a populist extreme right, culminating, in 2002, in a presidential election that saw the incumbent Jacques Chirac competing in a second-round run-of against the leader of the Front National. Germany was reunited during the Kohl chancellorship, and, in 1998, for the first time in the Federal Republic's history, a government of the left was formed that did not include one of the bourgeois parties. In Italy, both the right and the left were comprehensively transformed, prompting many commentators to speak of the birth of a second Italian republic, and leading to a process of alternation in government that was completely without precedent in Italian democratic history (Bull and Rhodes 2007). In all of these countries, as in the smaller European democracies, we have also seen the emergence of a new inter-communal tension between native and immigrant groups, as well as an increasingly conflictual divide between Christian and Muslim communities in particular.

These changes in both the political landscape and social structure of Europe continue to provide extremely rich material for scholars of European politics, as do the changes that have been wrought in some of the key dimensions of domestic political systems. Most of these changes have been charted and analysed in various ways and to varying extents in the pages of WEP. Among the topics which have been extensively covered during the past three decades have been the transformation of the European state through progressive European integration; the redrawing of the boundaries between public and private (nationalisation and, later, privatisation), as well as the readjustment of territorial boundaries through decentralisation, regionalisation and federalisation; changes in patterns of democratic participation, protest, elections and political communication; the changing character of political parties and changing patterns of party competition; the new challenges faced by European welfare states; and changes in the organisation and style of executive government.

At the same time as the building blocks of the traditional political systems have changed, new modes of enquiry have been initiated at the scholarly level, new overarching themes have emerged, and traditional concerns have waned or have sometimes been reinvigorated. One of the most important of the new themes is the study of Europeanisation, for which a special issue was organised (Goetz and Hix 2000), whilst interest in the more traditionally-focused study of territory, state and nation-building in Europe has been reawakened in the aftermath of the break-up of the Communist bloc. New perspectives have been opened up both in respect of comparison across space (e.g. comparative studies of democratisation in Southern and Central and Eastern Europe) and across time. This has also stimulated the search for broader comparative patterns (‘worlds’, ‘families’, ‘clusters’). Within the much expanded field of comparative policy analysis, new topics of inquiry have emerged and have attracted much attention in the pages of WEP in recent years, including, for example, new modes of regulation, and new approaches have been developed to look at more familiar questions, including discourse analysis.

Next to political events as key forces of change in what we study, disciplinary developments have affected how we study European politics. As expected, there has, of course, been innovation in concepts; in methods (notably through advances in quantitative and statistical techniques and novel combinations of quantitative and qualitative methods); and in terms of theoretical approaches – as Immergut and Anderson (2008) argue in this volume, the impact of the new institutionalism on the study of European politics deserves special attention. Improved access to quantitative data, drastically reduced costs of data analysis and, owing to the passage of time, the availability of longer time series have all helped to bolster the empirical bases of research. In this respect, comparative European politics has mirrored developments in contemporary empirical political science more generally. At least one further development specific to Europe-focused research should be mentioned, that is, the growing fusion between comparative politics approaches and international relations initially in the study of European integration and, increasingly, in analyses of the impact of integration on the member states.

How we study the politics of Europe has also been decisively influenced by changes in the organisational capacities of European political science. As Klingemann (2008) shows in his evaluation of developments in the discipline, the political science communities in Europe are now much more closely integrated and internationalised than three decades ago, as witnessed, for example, by the ever-expanding scope of the European Consortium of Political Research; the systematic promotion of Europe-wide networking notably through the EU Framework programmes; the proliferation of new Europe-focused political science journals; the growing geographical mobility of European scholars; the standardisation of training and curricula, now reaching down to the undergraduate level through the Bologna process; and, finally, by the growing acceptability of English as the principal language of scholarly communication. Equally, links between European and North American scholars have gained in intensity, not least in the context of professional associations such as the European Community Studies Association (now European Union Studies Association), founded in the US in 1988. There has also been a rapid process of ‘professionalisation’ associated with an ever-growing number of PhD and post-doctoral programmes, on the one hand, most of which are international in character, and an increased level of specialisation, on the other hand, facilitated by the growing number of scholars in the field and by the rise of specialised journals.

It is not difficult to detect the trajectories of change in the study of European politics; but it is a more demanding undertaking to identify their precise effects on the intellectual pursuit of political analysis. It is this question that lies at the heart of this anniversary issue of WEP. Indeed, with this special anniversary collection we intend to address the developments which emerge from the intersection of two distinct processes: the new comparative politics of the new Europe, on the one hand, the main contours of which have been already sketched above, and the new ways of studying this new comparative European politics, on the other. As Martin Shapiro (1995: 3) has suggested in an assessment of American political science, ‘there is often some confusion between changes in the real world and changes in the political science learning about it’. In other words, and as Michael Keating (2008) emphasises in his evaluation of territorial politics, we need to know how much of what we see as new developments in the real world is genuinely new, and how much is new because we have learned to ask new questions, or because we have applied new skills.

The first answer we get is clearly unequivocal in this regard, in that Colin Crouch (2008) charts the marked shift that has been experienced in the past 30 years in terms of social trends in Europe, with a clear and quite pervasive decline in traditional industrial and agricultural employment, and with the emergence of a new post-industrial occupational structure. For Crouch, the weight of the traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century social order has become substantially diminished, with the office replacing the factory as the new paradigmatic organizational form, extending across different sectors and across the public/private divide, producing a hierarchy of managers and professionals and a large junior administrative and clerical workforce. These multiple gradations have not yet produced cleavages resembling those between manual workers and managers that helped frame twentieth-century politics, except, as he notes, for the tendency ‘for lower levels of office hierarchies to be heavily female, upper levels male, producing a gender rather than a class division. It is therefore relevant that gender has become more important than class in many political debates in recent times’.

A second key change that has taken place both in Europe and further afield is the victory of democracy. Just a few years prior to the launch of WEP, as Leonardo Morlino (2008) recalls in his contribution, the third wave of democracy began in Portugal, and by now it has embraced most of the European continent. This shift in real world politics has also had major implications for the empirical theory of democracy, as Morlino argues, both in terms of the efforts to understand the so-called ‘hybrid regimes’, or the ‘electoral’ or ‘illiberal’ democracies, and in terms of our understanding of the democratisation process itself. The global shift towards democracy has also placed the issue of the quality of democracy on the research agenda, and the question of how quality might be measured with quantifiable and finite indicators.

For Michael Keating (2008), the issue of territory in European politics is less a newly discovered theme and more a revival of earlier concerns. During the 1960s and early 1970s, as he notes in his essay, territorial politics tended to be neglected by comparative political science scholarship on the grounds that it was giving way to function as a principle of social and political organization. Since the mid-1970s, by contrast, territorial political movements have been making a substantial impact in European politics, and this has led to renewed attention within the discipline. The incorporation of East-Central Europe into the democratic world has also encouraged the revival of scholarly attention to territorial politics, and with this has come the realisation that it is differences in the manner in which states have evolved that provides the key to understanding the new spatial tensions.

For Maurizio Ferrera (2008), the last 30 years have witnessed a turbulent transition in welfare states from a ‘golden age’ of expansion to a more sober ‘silver age’ of permanent austerity, a shift that has resulted from external pressures and from the internal transformations of domestic economies and social structures. In common with a number of the essays in this volume, Ferrera contrasts the contemporary situation with the very distinctive situation that prevailed during the so-called trente glorieuses, a period which ran from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, and that was brought to a more or less abrupt end by the second oil shock and the ending of the Bretton Woods agreement. In retrospect, whether seen from the perspective of welfare states, as in the case of Ferrera's essay, or in terms of party government and the politics of organized interests, as in Mair's (2008) and Schmitter's (2008) essays, it is this moment which appears decisive, since it is from this point on that the partisan political management of more or less protected economies begins to fray. With the end of embedded liberalism, in short, there came a transformation in the trajectories of European politics. This conjuncture may also have served as one of the key stimuli in encouraging a robust scholarship in the field of welfare states in Europe. Indeed, Ferrera concludes his essay by arguing that comparative welfare state research has proved to be one of the liveliest fields of political economy – a field marked by important analytical and theoretical advances as well as by the accumulation of systematic empirical knowledge concerning some of the key institutions of the European political landscape.

Scholarship on the European Union was often less lively than this, particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2008) point out, WEP was launched at a moment in which the EU itself, as well as its scholarship, was in the doldrums, and both the institutions and the study were only to come to life again in the late 1980s. Indeed, by the end of the 1980s the field of EU research was attracting some of the very best scholarship in international relations and comparative politics. Hooghe and Marks offer a substantial and comprehensive analysis of how political science has treated the Union over the years, and chart the development of the institutions and their implication for politics, both domestic and transnational. Writing in the immediate wake of a period of ‘sustained politicization, of public debates, mobilization of populist parties, and referendums on Europe’, they emphasise how self-reflexive the process of European integration actually is, being one that is subject to various attempts at purposeful manipulation. They point out that political leaders who have suffered from referendums may well want to change the process, although it is also the case, as both the French and the Dutch experiences tells us, that these leaders might simply want to change the process of ratification. Let us keep integration, one can imagine them arguing, but let us change how it looks. This is perhaps one route to keeping their citizens on side.

Ronald Inglehart has been the dominant figure in the fields of political culture and value change for as long as WEP has existed. His early research was already well-known and cited widely in the early 1970s, and his path-breaking volume The Silent Revolution was published in 1977, the year prior to WEP's launch. In his contribution to this anniversary issue (2008) he revisits the hypotheses that he originally advanced in the early 1970s regarding intergenerational value change and looks at a variety of European and global data to see the extent to which these hypotheses have been borne out. His conclusion is confirmatory and convincing. Using cohort analysis, the comparison of value preferences in rich and poor countries, and the trends that can be derived from surveys conducted over the past 35 years, he emphasises how major cultural changes are occurring, and how they reflect a process of intergenerational change and increasing levels of existential security. Nor, as he concludes, is this a uniquely West European phenomenon, although it is particularly pronounced in this region. Rather, this process of culture change occurs whenever and wherever the formative experience of the younger generations are substantially different from those that shaped the older generations.

This is also a lesson that might be drawn from studying the changing patterns of political participation over the past decades, although Hanspeter Kriesi's analysis (2008) of these patterns uses quite different terms to those of Inglehart. Kriesi here emphasises the role of collective actors and political elites in determining patterns of individual political participation. His framework of analysis also underlines the changes in the political context which have taken place over the past 30 years and which have modified the conditions for both conventional and unconventional political participation. These include the increasing role of the media in politics and the decline of party command over voters. Other institutional changes reduce electoral accountability, with some far-reaching, if sometimes ambiguous, consequences. Here too, as with Ferrera and other contributors, there is the sense of a crucial watershed being passed some time after the end of the trente glorieuses, a shift which has consequences not only for the policy-making process, the concern of Ferrera (2008) and Lodge (2008) among others, but also, as is emphasised by Kriesi, for the way in which citizens can connect to the political system.

One of the ways in which these connections have changed is that they have become more feminised, that is, they have changed in gender terms, an argument which lies at the core of the contribution by Joni Lovenduski (2008), and that also figures in the analyses by Crouch, Kriesi and others. Lovenduski looks at two related elements in this process. In the first place, she highlights the relative neglect and marginalisation of gender issues in the comparative European politics of the late 1970s and 1980s. But although, as she argues, the study of gender and politics has now become established in West European universities and although it is a thriving and varied subfield, it continues to be ignored by mainstream European political science. Even now, she concludes, ‘most European political scientists tolerate but do not engage the theories, concepts and research generated by feminist scholars’. In the second part of her paper she reports on a tight empirical analysis of the impact of the women's policy agencies on the policy process. Drawing on unique cross-national European data, she shows how these agencies have helped to make Western European democracies more democratic by fostering the participation of women's movement advocates in decision-making processes and by helping meet women's movement demands.

The connections between citizens and the state have also changed in many other ways, of course, and in a broad-ranging and speculative contribution, Philippe Schmitter (2008) offers an inventory of the full variety of ways in which these changes might have affected the organisation and mobilisation of interests. Distinguishing between political parties, associations and movements, he traces the potential challenges to each category of interest organisation as well as the potential explanations for these challenges. Echoing the points raised by Kriesi, he underlines the importance of individuation, on the one hand, and the loss of traditional party control, on the other. This is not to suggest that parties will necessarily fade away, however, or that they will be replaced by associations or movements. In the past, these three forms of representation have grown together and supported each other and hence nothing suggests that they cannot also decline together in the present. That said, there clearly has been a widespread loosening of the links between interests and organizations in contemporary Europe.

Peter Mair (2008) is also pessimistic about the position and role of parties. Tracing a shift in the status and capacities of party government since the end of the trente glorieuses, he reviews evidence of the changing pattern of party competition, the decline of partisanship in policy-making, and the convergence of parties in the various European polities into a mainstream consensus. He also reviews the evidence for declining partisanship within the electorate. The final section of his article looks at the way the literature has specified the conditions for party government, and argues that these have been undermined in such a way that it is now almost impossible to imagine party government in contemporary Europe either functioning effectively or sustaining complete legitimacy.

One of the symptoms of party government weakness can be seen, of course, in the ‘agencification’ and fragmentation of national governments, which is one of the key topics addressed by Morten Egeberg (2008) in his essay. Echoing Hooghe and Marks, Egeberg also shows how the development of the EU, due to its peculiar institutional architecture, takes quite another direction than traditional intergovernmental cooperation, and thus also comes to challenge governments in an unprecedented way. This also impacts on national agencies and governments, which become part of two administrations – the national as well as the Union administration. Egeberg concludes that the centrifugal forces present at the very heart of national governments in Europe are at least partly the result of the ‘emancipation’ of the European Commission as a new executive centre. The Commission itself has become more similar to national governments in terms of structure and functions and has at the same time become more independent of national governments. In this sense, he concludes, we might even speak of a kind of ‘pre-parliamentary system’ at the EU level.

Change of a different, and perhaps also more muted, order is discussed by Klaus Goetz (2008) in his contribution on governance and governability. During the 1970s, when WEP was being launched, analyses of state and government in Western Europe were preoccupied with crises of governability and legitimacy. By the end of the 1980s, and after the Mitterrand and Thatcher experiences, the notion of ‘governance’ came to be regarded as the dominant institutional response to problems of governability. This shift from government to governance may well have been overstated, however, and Goetz argues more sceptically that governance is actually less widespread and consequential in Europe than its proponents suggest. Viewed historically, governance does not indicate a shift from government but towards government, as the core institutions of the state build up capacity to deal authoritatively and hierarchically with new governing challenges.

One such capacity is regulatory capacity, the issue that Martin Lodge (2008) addresses in his contribution, reviewing a literature that usually takes its lead from a seminal article by Majone (1994), published in this journal. As Lodge suggests, Majone's argument was based on a diagnosis of two key trends, one being an overall shift towards the use of legal authority or regulation over the other tools of stabilisation and redistribution, and the other being the European Commission's expansionist role through the use of influence over policy content. Indeed, here too, as with Egeberg's analysis, we see a major, albeit sometimes indirect, effect of the European Commission on forms and styles of government at the national level. Since the mid-1990s, as Lodge goes on to argue, it has become commonplace to say we live in the age of the regulatory state, an age characterised by privatisation of public services, the establishment of quangos, and the formalisation of relationships within policy domains. Governance may not have replaced government, as Goetz insists, but an understanding of the new regulatory state is central to our broader understanding of how the state itself had changed, particularly in its relationship to business and its citizens, and in its distribution of coercive authority.

This is also the essence of the argument advanced by Vivien A. Schmidt (2008), who finds that there is much that has changed in European political economy over the past 30 years, both in terms of the political economic realities and the scholarly explanations of those realities. She argues that national economic policies and the policy-making process have undergone major transformations, largely in response to the twin pressures of globalization and Europeanization – two of the factors also emphasised by Schmitter. For Schmidt, these pressures have led to significant alterations in the role of the state, the importance of business, and the power of labour. Political economists, in their turn, have also changed their focus over time, first taking labour out of the equation, and then bringing the state back in, while later devaluing the state in the light of globalisation and Europeanisation and putting the firm to the centre. Only recently has attention come back to the state and to labour.

The substantive contributions to this anniversary issue of WEP are concluded by a reassessment by Francis G. Castles and Herbert Obinger (2008) of the continued validity of the notion of ‘worlds’ or ‘clusters’ of nations. When WEP was first launched, public policy analysts as well as students of political organisations and political behaviour frequently worked with the idea of families of polities – the Anglo-American democracies, the Low countries, the Nordic area, southern Europe, and so on. Indeed, many of the earlier contributions to the journal worked explicitly with such regional frames. Thirty years on, in an era of policy convergence and globalization, Castles and Obinger ask whether distinct worlds still persist, whether policy antecedents cluster in the same ways as policy outcomes, and whether the enlargement of the EU has led to an increase in the number of worlds constituting the wider European polity. Their conclusions are against expectations, in that they find that country clustering is now probably more pronounced than in the past, that it is, in large part, structurally determined, and that a quite distinct post-Communist family of nations has now joined the other, more traditional worlds.

One of the purposes of stock-taking exercise such as this is not only to look at changes in the real world, but also at changes in how scholars have approached that reality in their analyses. In other words, are newly discovered phenomena genuinely new, or only newly discovered? And what is the added value of the new modes of inquiry that have been applied in comparative European politics over the past three decades? Has there been an opening up and a greater pluralisation of approaches, or has there been a narrowing of theoretical perspectives in the study of European politics? In addressing these questions, this anniversary issue is rounded off with two pieces oriented more explicitly towards the patterns and capacities of scholarship in the field. Ellen M. Immergut and Karen M. Anderson (2008) emphasise the affinities between the traditional approaches to the study of West European politics, on the one hand, and the newly emergent, or newly branded, school of historical institutionalism, on the other. They suggest that there are four phases of scholarship that can be identified: the foundational ideas of the late 1970s and early 1980s; the evolution of these ideas from structuralism to institutionalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s; the more radical revision under the turbulent 1990s and early 2000s; and the emerging future patterns that can be seen at the end of the first decade of the 2000s.

In the final essay, Hans-Dieter Klingemann (2008) looks at the changing capacities of the discipline over this same period, beginning with the legacy of the political and social context in which European political science developed after World War II, and then going on to look at the degree of institutionalisation of political science as an academic discipline in Europe. He then offers an assessment of the professional organisation and communication structures of the discipline, before concluding with an evaluation of the capacity to represent the discipline's education and research interests in the wider European area.

Of course, no single publication, even one as voluminous as the present and written by such a distinguished set of authors, can possibly claim to chart the diverse pasts and contested presents of European politics comprehensively and in detail. But it can provide a map to help students of European politics – both novices and ‘old hands’– to understand ‘how we got here’ and to appreciate not just the immense breadth and depth of contemporary scholarship on European politics, but also to discern common trends and undercurrents, which can easily be masked by ever-increasing specialisation in the themes, methods and theoretical approaches of scholarly enquiry. Yet, for all the emphasis on path-dependencies in the evolution of European political systems, pasts and presents are likely to be unreliable guides to the futures of European politics, as sharp reversals in developmental trajectories over the past three decades have underlined. Many contributions to this volume contain troubling messages about the future, whether it concerns the EU integration project (Hooghe and Marks), the reduced electoral accountability of political decision-makers (Kriesi), the challenged legitimation of party government (Mair) or the sharpening of the edges of the state (Goetz). As yet, these developments do not appear sufficiently portentous to signal a ‘systemic crisis’ equivalent to the one which so preoccupied analysts some 30 years ago. But there is no reason to assume that changes in the politics of Europe over the coming the coming years should be any less profound, unexpected and, at times, traumatic, than they have been during the past three decades.