2008, Volume 14, N°2 - Centre d'études et de recherches ...

Book reviews – Comptes rendus – Buchbesprechungen 195
role they attributed to supranational democracy or a collective European identity in
legitimating the EU’s existence and regime, constitute an interesting
empirical-historical complement to the conceptual-theoretical literature on EU
legitimacy.
The authors situates his interpretations, through brief introductions, in the
debates’ general historical background. He reflects throughout on events and
developments of European history at large as seen through the prism of the
analysed debates. Additionally, the book would perhaps benefit from a greater
contextualisation of these debates in their discursive contexts, in particular the
wider public and political debates in which they were embedded, and which shaped
what could meaningfully be said in parliament. Notwithstanding, the main
ambition, and central strength, of this book is the presentation of the author’s
exceptionally thorough, sensitive, and detailed source work. This imposes natural
limits on what can be said about the corpus’s context.
The book’s succinct synopses and summaries offer helpful guidance in
prioritising between its rich findings and interpretations. A more selective and
linear line of argument could have helped the reader even better to relate the book’s
individual findings to each other, and may have valorised the arguments made more
efficiently. Müller-Härlin’s analyses raise and address a series of important
questions that will continue to engage scholars of European integration, including
where the identified commonalities, differences, continuities, and changes came
from, and what they imply with regard to the study of integration as well as the
future of integration itself.
Claudia Schrag
University of Cambridge, Politics Department and Emmanuel College